There is certainly no shortage of academic writing about the “The American Century,” the phrase that Time and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce used to describe his vision for the role the United States should play in the world in the twentieth century. Since that famous essay appeared in the pages of Life magazine in 1941, it has been the subject of widespread debate. What Mark Edwards offers in Faith and Foreign Affairs in the American Century is a distinct departure from much of the existing literature that considers “the American Century” as a concept or uses it as a frame for thinking about modern U.S. history and foreign relations. Edwards instead crafts a genealogy of “the American Century,” honing in on the Protestant secularism of the essay as well as the key institutions and individuals that helped create the vision Luce described and worked to embed it in public diplomacy and U.S. foreign policymaking. His approach is clever and layered, as he weaves together intellectual, religious, and diplomatic history with individual and institutional biography to demonstrate the inextricable connections between the Christian and secular discourses that undergirded U.S. internationalism in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

To ground this complex, engaging story, Edwards introduces readers to Francis and Helen Miller, a foreign policy power couple who advocated for U.S. global leadership, organized a network of public political discussion forums for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and influenced Luce deeply as he drafted “The American Century.” At the end of each chapter, Edwards explores the Millers’ work, intellectual influence, and political connections with well-known policymakers and opinion leaders. Doing so allows him to connect the major themes of the book while revealing the little-known couple that did so much to bring together Henry Luce, Henry Wallace, and the other midcentury “architects of American ascendancy” (6). As Edwards explains, the “intersectionality of Protestant Christianity and secularism” that the Millers personified was instrumental in shaping the contours and expansion of U.S. global power after World War II (11).

The Millers’ biography is thus essential to explaining the genesis of public diplomacy in “the American Century” from both a practical and a conceptual standpoint. Francis Miller had a strong Protestant orientation. The child of a Presbyterian minister, he worked with the British Student Christian Movement while studying at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, served as YMCA emissary to the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, and later led the World's Student Christian Federation. He demonstrated an enduring interest in politics and foreign relations, running for political office several times, directing the CFR's “Foreign Relations Committees” public diplomacy program, and eventually joining the State Department (84). Francis met Helen at Oxford and the two wed after she completed her doctorate in political science at the University of Chicago. They enjoyed an intellectually and politically productive partnership, writing a book about the Americanization of Western Europe after World War I and running the Foreign Relations Committees together. Unlike her husband, Helen embraced atheism.

Edwards draws on the contrast in their spiritual commitments, which influenced how each envisioned the proper role of the United States in the world, to illuminate the Tillichian concept of Protestant secularism that informs his core argument. To establish the Protestant foundation of modern U.S. foreign policy, Edwards offers an overview of nineteenth-century missionary work and explains how missionary diplomacy—with its embedded discourse of “civilization” and all of the racial, gender, religious, and economic hierarchies it entailed—promoted U.S. imperialism. Even as “secular” social-scientific approaches to diplomacy began to supersede missionary diplomacy in the twentieth century, the discourse of civilization remained, with its “roots in Protestant Christian imperialism” intact (39). Edwards uses the Council on Foreign Relations as an example, making clear that despite its rejection of missionary diplomacy in the 1920s, its members still called for U.S. engagement abroad to “civilize” “backwards” societies—a goal members continued to advocate for in the 1950s and 1960s using the language of “development” and “modernization.” In this way, Edwards argues, even “foreign policy secularists trafficked within the thought forms of America's resilient Protestant culture” (53). Surveying essays published in Foreign Affairs reveals the Protestant-secular orientation and discourse of civilization that permeated the CFR's policy positions and conception of public diplomacy. Edwards thus underscores the “Protestant origins of certain American secularisms” and the significance of Protestant-secularism in understanding the intellectual underpinnings of U.S. power and diplomacy (159).

Edwards argues that the return of Christian nationalism to foreign policy discourse during the Cold War represented a challenge to Protestant secularism and the Millers’ “interwar dream of participatory democracy” (124). Interestingly, Francis himself helped bring the era of Protestant secularism to its end. In essays advocating for U.S. intervention in World War II, Francis “conjoined Christianity and democracy,” laying the groundwork for the revival of Christian nationalism after the war (110). This linkage resonated with John Foster Dulles and other policymakers who embraced Christian nationalism. Furthermore, Edwards suggests that “the ongoing evolution of American government toward a national security state” in the early years of the Cold War meant that the “due process of policymaking” the Millers had sought to foster during the 1930s fell to the wayside (117). Despite this national shift, the Millers maintained their commitment to participatory democracy. According to Edwards, Francis Miller's (unsuccessful) efforts to unseat the Byrd machine and extend civil rights in Virginia reflected the Millers’ desire to bring participatory democracy to their home state as well as to staunch criticisms about U.S. hypocrisy in “preaching democracy” abroad while “practicing discrimination” at home (142). Ultimately, Edwards concludes that the long contest over American globalism “centered around the nature and scope of democracy,” yet entrenched racism ensured that “as much as the American century wanted to be something else, it remained entangled in its racial-religious roots of nineteenth-century missionary diplomacy” (147–148).

This is a lucidly-argued and compelling book. It is creative in its approach and capacious in vision. Although his story traces the intellectual, political, and religious preoccupations of a group of elites, Edwards engages deeply with gender, race, and class, particularly as those dynamics intersect with Protestantism and globalized notions of U.S. civilization and democracy. The argument that Edwards makes is multifaceted and intricate—more suited for scholarly conversation and graduate seminars than for undergraduates, though it is a wonderful example of how blending multiple methodological and analytic approaches enlivens and elucidates complex concepts. Scholars of modern U.S. religion, politics, foreign relations, and intellectual history stand to benefit greatly from engaging with the core argument about Protestant secularism that Edwards advances.