From a Christian World Community to a Christian America: Ecumenical Protestant Internationalism as a Source of Christian Nationalist Renewal

Abstract

Christian nationalism in the United States has neither been singular nor stable. The country has seen several Christian nationalist ventures come and go throughout its history. Historians are currently busy documenting the plurality of Christian nationalisms, understanding them more as deliberate projects rather than as components of a suprahistorical secularization process. This essay joins in that work. Its focus is the World War II and early Cold War era, one of the heydays of Christian nationalist enthusiasm in America—and the one that shaped our ongoing culture wars between “evangelical” conservatives and “godless” liberals. One forgotten and admittedly paradoxical pathway to wartime Christian nationalism was the world ecumenical movement (“ecumenical” here meaning intra-Protestant). Protestant ecumenism curated the transformation of 1920s and 1930s Christian internationalism into wartime Christian Americanism. They involved many political and intellectual elites along the way. In pioneering many of the geopolitical concerns of Cold War evangelicals, ecumenical Protestants aided and abetted the Christian conservative ascendancy that wields power even into the present.

“Velvet Steel” Ministers for God and America: Eleanor Lansing Dulles and the Nineteenth-Century Legacy of Christianity and Nationalism

“…As Mark Thomas Edwards argues, "Protestant ecumenism was a Christianizing force in geopolitics even as it itself was reshaped by the bipolar world climate" (Edwards 2019a). According to scholars, Foster's "journey" from Christian internationalism to Christian nationalism led to his use of Christian Americanism to form policies that addressed postwar Soviet expansion (Edwards 2019b;Cécile and Bardon 2017). This era brought "one of the heydays of Christian internationalist enthusiasm in America-and the one that shaped our ongoing culture wars between "evangelical" conservatives and "godless" liberals" (Edwards 2019b).…”

“…According to scholars, Foster's "journey" from Christian internationalism to Christian nationalism led to his use of Christian Americanism to form policies that addressed postwar Soviet expansion (Edwards 2019b;Cécile and Bardon 2017). This era brought "one of the heydays of Christian internationalist enthusiasm in America-and the one that shaped our ongoing culture wars between "evangelical" conservatives and "godless" liberals" (Edwards 2019b). As an officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, Foster "recognized the urgency for the US to acquire moral, religious, and intellectual leadership in the emerging Cold War context", and funded projects accordingly in the private sector (Preston 2012;Kirby 2003;Inboden 2008;Thompson 2015;Morie n.d.).…”