Skip to Main Content

For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War

Online ISBN:
9781501701801
Print ISBN:
9780801452727
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War

Michael G. Thompson
Michael G. Thompson
University of Sydney
Find on
Published:
6 November 2015
Online ISBN:
9781501701801
Print ISBN:
9780801452727
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

This book recovers the history of an important yet largely forgotten intellectual movement in interwar America. It explores the way radical-left and ecumenical Protestant internationalists articulated new understandings of the ethics of international relations between the 1920s and the 1940s. Missionary leaders such as Sherwood Eddy and journalists such as Kirby Page, as well as realist theologians including Reinhold Niebuhr, developed new kinds of religious enterprises devoted to producing knowledge on international relations for public consumption. The book centers on the excavation of two such efforts—the leading left-wing Protestant interwar periodical, The World Tomorrow, and the landmark Oxford 1937 ecumenical world conference. It charts the simultaneous peak and decline of the movement in John Foster Dulles's ambitious efforts to link Christian internationalism to the cause of international organization after World War II. Concerned with far more than foreign policy, Christian internationalists developed critiques of racism, imperialism, and nationalism in world affairs. They rejected exceptionalist frameworks and eschewed the dominant “Christian nation” imaginary as a lens through which to view U.S. foreign relations. In the intellectual history of religion and American foreign relations, Protestantism most commonly appears as an ideological ancillary to expansionism and nationalism. The book challenges this account by recovering a movement that held Christian universalism to be a check against nationalism rather than a boon to it.

Contents
Close
This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

Close

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

View Article Abstract & Purchase Options

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Close