Cara Lea Burnidge has provided an impressive, sophisticated exploration into the religious dimensions of Wilsonian internationalism. This is a superior work in every sense – well-documented and intensely engaged with recent scholarship in a number of contested fields, cogently argued, and multi-layered in the analysis that it offers, as well as beautifully written.
Many books have been written about Woodrow Wilson, including several excellent ones about his religious beliefs. Interrogation of ‘Wilsonianism’ as a US foreign policy tradition, too, was a well-established genre of scholarly production decades before the recent upsurge in studies of religion and US foreign policy. Burnidge shows a full command of all this previous scholarship and she navigates the differing, well-established interpretations well. She ends up contributing to each of these separate but interlinked fields of investigation.
Neither a traditional biography nor a church history, nor yet a study in foreign policy, we are offered here something much more than any one of these alone: a master narrative that expertly weaves together religion, race and gender to illuminate America's place in the world and the pivotal role that Christian faith communities played in making it what it has been in the twentieth century.
Burnidge starts by sketching the faith-based world view and politics of the progressive Protestants of the early 1900s whom she calls ‘social Christians’ and whom others have known also as Social Gospellers. Convincingly, she argues that their vision of the United States as a servant-nation to the rest of the world was rooted as much in the white supremacist male paternalism of Southerners such as Wilson, supporters of the Southern segregationist order, as it was in strictly Christian theologies. Even when reframed as the Social Gospel's ‘applied Christianity’, their supposedly liberal vision was still of a ‘white paternal social order’ (p. 30). It remained so once globalised, for its original proponents understood Wilsonianism as a form of ‘service to inferior others’ (p. 26) by the one nation that God had caused finally to fully understand his will and purpose in the tenets of the Social Gospel.
Were Burnidge to stop at this point, she would already have made a helpful and innovative contribution to our understanding of the Social Gospel movement's impact on US foreign policy. But in the following chapters she goes much further in showing how the vision of the Social Gospel churches was just as key to Wilson's policy of neutrality in the early part of the First World War as it was to his eventual decision to join the war, in the sacralisation of that war by the Social Gospel movement, and in Wilson's and that movement's joint pursuit of the League of Nations.
In the chapters that she devotes to these issues, Burnidge provides important new documentation about the close coordination of efforts that took place between the Wilson administration and the Federal Council of Churches of Christ. She is on firm ground also when she suggests that it was fundamental to the vision of both to have the Church supplanted by the State as the chief instrument of change. In their new theology, in other words, these Social Gospellers saw a strengthened central government, both in the US and abroad in the League of Nations (and later the United Nations), as the principal new instruments of the Christian mission.
In the least well documented chapter of all, Burnidge canvasses what she calls the ‘Tale of two exceptionalisms’ (p. 106), that is, the intense contestation over America's place in the world and over Christianity's true essence and proper status in America that unfolded between the Social Gospellers and the emerging fundamentalist movement during the League of Nations controversy of 1918–20. There is little in this chapter that others have not argued and documented before. The same goes for her discussion of the church womens’, the secular feminist and the African-American organisations that faulted the League for its failure to address their grievances. No new discoveries await us in these sections of the book, expertly though Burnidge guides us through these groups’ perspectives too.
In the last chapter, on the other hand, she once again furnishes us with a refreshingly insightful examination of the further development of Wilsonianism after 1920. What was originally a clearly Protestant Christian vision, she shows, was deliberately reformulated as an interfaith and finally fully secular one by Wilson's disciples in the interwar decades’ Democratic Party, the Federal Council of Churches, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Such is Burnidge's command of multiple, complex contexts that it comes as a somewhat jarring surprise that the one specialised agency of the League of Nations (and of the UN) that goes unexamined and unmentioned, is the one which Wilson himself called the most important of all – the International Labour Organisation. Many other Social Gospellers felt likewise about it, as did their European Socialist allies. One wonders all the more about the implications of this omission, given that Socialism both as a movement and as a world view has also been sanitised out of this account. The multiple linkages between the Social Gospellers and self-identified Socialists are well known and would seem to be somewhat relevant to the argument offered here, yet they have been read out of the story entirely.
One other blemish needs to be mentioned: Burnidge's claim that Protestant conservatives were using the term ‘fundamentalist’ as a self-description in 1919. Of course, the term was not even coined then. That aside, it is very difficult to restrain one's praise for this book, a model of its kind. Highly recommended.
