Cara Burnidge does not want to hear that Woodrow Wilson brought an idealistic foreign policy to Versailles in the aftermath of World War I. Rather, as she argues persuasively here, Wilsonian internationalism was nothing other than white mainline Protestant Christian principles applied internationally. Wilson “made the social gospel a matter of U.S. foreign relations” (3), as Burnidge aptly puts it, and his famous Fourteen Points “offered a mounting crescendo in the global application of the social gospel” (83). Wilsonian internationalism, in other words, was at its heart a Christian endeavor, not a merely idealistic enterprise emanating from a personally pious man. This sort of Christianity had a hierarchical, organic conception of culture which Wilson absorbed in his southern Presbyterian childhood. White liberal Protestants were the custodians of American culture at home with a paternalistic responsibility to help those under their care. And those same Protestant elites bore the responsibility for Christianizing the globe, which would essentially be the Americanizing of the world. In and of itself, American democracy was “the culmination of Christian progress” (79). The next essential step in the progressive march of righteousness was to internationalize Christian America.

Burnidge shows that, while Wilson had many vocal League of Nations supporters among social gospel Protestants, there existed another group of liberal white Protestants (perhaps two groups) who held competing visions of how America should fulfill its providential duty. The Irreconcilables (those who opposed any type of League) and the Reservationists (those who supported the League with reservations) shared with Wilson the view that America had a duty to advance democracy throughout the globe and keep the peace. They were progressives, too, but they disagreed with Wilson and his allies on how this would be accomplished. Wilson envisioned active American participation in international affairs—America participating with other enlightened Christian nations to arbitrate differences and adjudicate claims in an effort to avoid future wars. The Irreconcilables and Reservationists believed America best kept the peace by staying out of potential conflicts and serving as a model—a city on a hill.

Burnidge identifies a third group that did not share this teleological view. Those in this group were, of course, the evangelicals (and fundamentalists). Evangelical Protestants argued that the heart of the faith should be personal, individual conversion, and the work of God should be carried out by the church, not the nation. Moreover, evangelicals, as premillennialists (mostly), believed the world was in decline, not advancing progressively toward righteousness. This made talk of steady improvement toward an earthly millennium at best nonsense and at worst heresy. Burnidge shows, therefore, how the fundamentalist-modernist controversy played out in foreign policy. Her work here builds on Matthew Sutton's recent book American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

Burnidge's work also fits nicely in the conversation about secularization advanced by the likes of Martin Marty and George Marsden. After World War II, Wilson's Christian internationalism came to be known as “idealism,” devoid of Christian influence or content. Interpreters shoved Wilson's Christianity over into the harmless realm of personal piety. This secularization did not occur because of attacks on Wilsonian internationalism by forces hostile to its Christian foundation. Rather, over time Wilsonian internationalism gained the support of Catholic and Jewish elites, which meant it could no longer be conceived as a Protestant or even exclusively Christian endeavor. In other words, in order for Wilsonian internationalists to continue their custodianship over a tri-faith nation, the foundation of Wilsonian internationalism had to be broadened until it was no longer Protestant and then no longer Christian. Wilson emerged as either visionary, if one supported Wilsonian internationalism, or naively idealistic, if one opposed it. But either way, the Christian influences were pushed to the margins of Wilson's life and completely out of his foreign policy vision. Burnidge reclaims the place of white Protestant Christianity in Wilson's foreign policy.

Burnidge is in some ways at odds with international relations scholar Milan Babik, who has argued recently that from its very conception Wilsonian internationalism was a form of secularized eschatology. Babik sees a “dark underbelly” to Wilson's vision as it includes the assumption that Americans, and Wilson as their leader, possess a “unique knowledge or gnosis of the meaning of history.” This gnosis has led to “militarism, imperialism, unilateral interventionism and condescending attitudes toward existing rules and norms of international relations” (Salvation and Statecraft: Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism and Secularized Eschatology [Baylor University Press, 2013], 221). Burnidge shares with Babik the view that Wilson himself, as well as the supporters of his internationalism, held condescending attitudes toward just about everyone else, and especially toward non-whites. However, she sees race as the key influence here, where Babik sees secularized eschatology. Either way, one ends up with Wilson and his policies as elitist in the extreme.

Babik has America's invasion of Iraq in mind when he takes Wilsonian internationalism to task, and here Burnidge may have missed an opportunity. Like Wilson and his liberal Protestant supporters, George W. Bush and his neo-conservative and evangelical supporters believed America must lead the way in the advance of democracy throughout the world. The irony, of course, is that by the dawn of the twenty-first century conservatives, especially of the “neo” sort, rather than liberals supported this secularized version of Wilsonian internationalism. The evangelical heirs of those who resisted Wilson supported Bush, while the mainline heirs of those who supported Wilson resisted Bush's neo-conservative internationalism. What does one make of this?

Finally, while Burnidge appropriately keeps her focus on Wilson's internationalism, it is worth noting that his teleological belief that the progress of American democracy was in and of itself nothing other than the advancement of Christianity did not develop in his foreign policy. Rather, by the time he went on the faculty of Princeton University in the 1890s, he had traded the Reformed doctrine of his southern Presbyterian heritage for progressivism writ large. As Wilson himself once claimed, progressive reform was “the new coat of doctrine.” When America went to war in 1917, he merely applied this conception of Christianity internationally, as Burnidge shows. The irony was that war had replaced education and political reform as the instrument through which Christian progress would come, and so war itself was Christianized and likewise his international vision at Versailles. Burnidge gets it right: Wilsonian internationalism was the global application of the social gospel.