Onward, Christian soldiers

Consider the following statements:

“The greatest human power for good, the most efficient earthly tool for the uplifting of nations, is without question the United States.”

The United States “must rise to the responsibilities of its position and put the commandments of God into action unilaterally, and then watch the effects on a startled world.”

“The power of organized evil in this world could be only challenged by the organizing forces of righteousness.”

“This country, strong and brave, generous and helpful, is called of God to be in its own way a Messianic nation.”

It is America’s “divine destiny” to reaffirm the nation’s special calling as a “city on the hill.” America “is the hope of all mankind.”

The last two statements are those of Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, respectively. Are the previous four those of the Christian right, evangelical fundamentalists, conservatives or Republicans? No, they belong to Progressives, Democrats, intellectuals and liberal Protestants before and during World War I. These include Gifford Pinchot, William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson. “There is a mighty task before us, and it welds us together,” Wilson said. “It is to make the United States a mighty Christian nation, and to Christianize the world.” It is America’s “duty and privilege ... to show the paths of freedom to all the world.... [T]he American flag has vindicated its right to be honored by all the nations of the world and feared by none who do righteousness.”

Such were the words of Wilson, whom Sen. Carter Glass, a Virginia Democrat, called “the greatest Christian statesman of all time.” Did he -- did they -- believe what they were saying? They did, alas; as did Reagan and Bush. (Was he the “greatest Christian statesman of all time”? There must be some who think so.) Many books have been written about the exaggerations of U.S. propaganda during World War I. Their authors, almost without exception, attributed those exaggerations to superpatriotism (not a good word) and/or to the influences of lobbies and profiteers. However, these are only half-truths, or, more precisely, insufficient explanations. The Crusading Spirit of that time was inseparable from the dominant power of American liberal Protestantism, of prestigious churchmen who, very tellingly, adopted Darwinism and the religion of progress well before the war. These men included Lyman Abbott, Walter Rauschenbusch, Herbert Willett and Harry Emerson Fosdick -- public men whose reputations lasted long after World War I.

“Their words,” writes Richard M. Gamble in “The War for Righteousness,” “help open the interior world of the progressive clergy and reassemble the ideas they used to explain the war to themselves, to the American public, and to the world.” Hence the great importance of this sober, convincing and grave book.

Gamble’s is not primarily an account of diplomacy and politics, although diplomats and politicians appear in these pages. In 1917-18, Protestant liberals pictured themselves living in a universe in which God’s moral law reigned inviolable, in which the U.S. prospered as the nearest approximation yet to God’s kingdom on Earth, and in which Germany struggled vainly as the last impediment to that kingdom, collapsing under its own repressive sins. The Federal Council of Churches declared that this war had “developed into a conflict between forces that make for the coming of the Kingdom of God and forces that oppose it.” Willett, a theologian, said “the conception of God as a monarch, all-powerful, remote, transcendent, and autocratic, is no longer suited to the needs or the comprehension of the modern mind.” Union Theological Seminary professor George Albert Coe, proposed that the phrase “democracy of God” should replace “ ‘kingdom of God’ as a more precise definition of Jesus’ ideal.”

And not only churchmen. There was the New Republic, launched in 1914, the flag-bearer of progressive liberalism, which in 1917 “proudly credited America’s entry into the Great War to the political leadership of a new class, ‘the intellectuals.’ ” They had done “effective and decisive work in behalf of war.” Consider that in those times, not one American politician or public spokesman dared to call himself a conservative. Now, perhaps, many Americans call themselves that, and “liberal” has become a curse word. That may be regrettable, but one must be honest enough to recognize how the wind (and the windbagging) we inherit was sown by liberals and progressives not so long ago. (George W. Bush in December 2001: “America must fight the enemies of progress.”)

History is full of irony. Or, rather, full of unintended consequences. Yes, we must see the fools of yesteryear for what they were and the consequences of their ideas and words. There is another, secondary question. The evidence in Gamble’s book will serve those people who believe that the United States should not have entered either World War I or World War II. Yet, had we not entered the war in 1917, it is more than probable that Imperial Germany would have won. Would the world have been better off then? Would we? I cannot tell.

In any event, Gamble’s is a well-written, thoroughly researched, impassioned and yet detached book, a most important contribution not only to the history of World War I but also to the very intellectual history of the United States, as valuable as the earlier works of historians such as Henry F. May or Richard Hofstadter. Indeed, many of Gamble’s insights are even more telling than were theirs.