CHAPTER 2

The Coming War and the Pacifist-Realist Split

After his 1936 reelection, Franklin Delano Roosevelt began mobilizing religious groups against the looming threat of fascism.¹ As he explained in his 1939 State of the Union address, fascism threatened the three pillars of world peace. “The first is religion,” he told Congress and the American people. “It is the source of the other two—democracy and international good faith.”² The president called on religious people to mobilize against the evils of fascism, and ecumenical Protestants answered this call enthusiastically. Like Roosevelt, who transformed himself from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win the War,” American ecumenical Protestants shifted their attention from ending the Great Depression to combating what they called “world disorder.” During the brief moment of international crisis, from the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, ecumenical Protestants formulated a new political understanding of international affairs, which this book calls “Protestant globalism.” They abandoned the old imperial system and proposed new pillars of world order. The first pillar, they insisted, would be religion.

The effort to plan out a new world order was the most ambitious intellectual project among ecumenical Protestants in the years immediately before American entry into World War II. Ecumenical Protestant leaders articulated a new understanding of international affairs, one that treated the globe as an interconnected whole, which required a single political system to govern it. The interwar order of the League of Nations—of individual states that came together as sovereign units in a world parliament—had failed. As they watched Italy, Germany, and Japan go to war with their neighbors, ecumenical Protestants concluded that the unlimited sovereignty of nation-states created international anarchy and led to war.

Ecumenical Protestant leaders came to believe that a new international organization must stand over and above the nation-state. It must be a world government representing all the peoples in all the lands, with the capacity to coerce countries into behaving in accordance with Christian values. “This League-of-Nations-with-teeth,” as Time magazine called their proposal, would be “a duly constituted world government of delegated powers: an international legislative body, an international court with adequate jurisdiction, international administrative bodies with necessary powers, and adequate international police forces and provision for enforcing its worldwide economic authority.”³ The call for a new world government was the most tangible product of the new political ideology of Protestant globalism.

American ecumenical Protestants joined intellectuals across Europe and North America in experimenting with new ideas about world order in this moment of crisis.⁴ Ecumenical Protestant ideas about world government also opened up room to discuss economic reforms, racism, imperialism, and human rights. What made American ecumenical Protestants different from the myriad academic groups and think tanks delving into the same issues was their ecumenical theology and their emphasis on the interconnection between the foreign and domestic arenas. By imagining a more peaceful world, they also imagined a more democratic country that promoted justice for racial minorities and economic rights for workers. A world government, they came to believe, would also reinvigorate democracy at home.

But before they could advocate for a world government, American ecumenical Protestants had to put aside their differences about American involvement in World War II, which ran deep. As self-styled realists like Reinhold Niebuhr and Henry P. Van Dusen mobilized religious networks to get the United States to side with Great Britain, pacifists resisted tooth and nail. Realists and pacifists fought over food aid to Europe, embargoes of Japan, the role of the United States in the war, and the very meaning of Christianity. Protestant globalism emerged through heated debates about what it meant to be Christian in the face of fascism.

“The Demonic Influence of National Sovereignty”

In 1937 American ecumenical Protestants were confident that they had a special role to play in creating a new world out of the destruction they saw all around them. For nearly three decades they had labored to bind together their fellow Protestants into a global fellowship. In the spring of 1937, they boarded ships on their way to England, where they attended a conference on “Church, Community and State” at Oxford. At the conclusion of the meeting, delegates from over one hundred denominations from dozens of countries voted to merge the “Life and Work” movement with the “Faith and Order” movement, and to create the provisional World Council of Churches. “In a world in which every international structure and society has been rifted or shattered,” wrote American theologian Henry Pitney Van Dusen, “it is beginning to be realized that one world fellowship has been able to maintain its reality unbroken; indeed, has actually strengthened its cohesion and structure in the very days when every other international community has been disintegrating.”⁵ The creation of the World Council of Churches was a momentous triumph of Christian unity. As Union Theological Seminary president Henry Sloane Coffin put it, “It was in July in the year of our Lord 1054 that the Christian Church broke at what is called ‘the Great Schism’ into two hostile camps” of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. “Last July, 883 years later, one could not help recalling that bitter incident when representatives of all the non-Roman churches, East and West, and churches from parts of the world unknown in 1054, gathered together in the University town of Oxford and owned themselves one in the unity of the one body of Christ.”⁶ The creation of the World Council of Churches was a millennial moment, whose participants felt the course of the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation to be near its end.

The 1937 Oxford gathering projected Protestant unity at a moment of global disunity. That unity came about partly because few Orthodox Christians or Protestants from the Global South were present. American fundamentalists also stayed away. There was a definite tilt toward the concerns of Anglo-American Protestants in the proceedings. And differences were generally downplayed. For example, official publications ignored German Methodist Otto Melle’s praise of Adolf Hitler at the conference.⁷ Oxford represented something far less than Christian unity, but for American ecumenists it was more than enough. “At all times, in all places, let the Church be the Church—the body of Christ, an enduring, universal community in which His spirit may live and speak to the world and carry on its mighty work of individual and social redemption,” American pastor Ernest Fremont Tittle exclaimed. “What a vision! Yet it is not only a vision. To an amazing extent, even now, it is a reality.”⁸

The 1937 Oxford conference was a massive academic undertaking, involving research offices in Geneva, London, and New York and three years of meetings, position papers, dozens of books, and thousands of letters among theologians, economists, legal experts, and politicians. Debates raged about everything from the differing theological conceptions of the Kingdom of God to the relations of church and state (and a last-minute addition of “the Church and War”).⁹ Through these painstaking deliberations, ecumenical Protestants offered a new account of “world disorder.”

At the close of the Oxford conference, the Protestant and Orthodox representatives diagnosed the international situation. Modernity had torn the world apart, dissolving closely knit communities into masses of atomized individuals. Without adequate resistance from the churches, peoples across the world looked to the new gods of nation, race, and class to worship. “A false sacred, a false God,” announced British ecumenist and conference organizer Joseph Oldham, “prepares for mankind an even worse and wider conflict.”¹⁰ Only by restoring God to his rightful place above all material things could order be restored. It was time for the churches to wake up—“Let the Church be the Church,” declared Oldham—and fight these false gods.

Americans were well-represented at Oxford but they were very aware of their distance from their European colleagues. Union Theological Seminary professor William Adams Brown, the senior statesman of ecumenism, offered a warning to his fellow Americans about the anti-secularism they should expect to find in Europe. “As representatives of a country which for more than a century and a half has had no national establishment of religion while at the same time the attitude of the government has been friendly to Christianity, we have had the opportunity to explore more fully than the Christians of Europe the possibilities of a free church in a democratic state,” he wrote.¹¹ Indeed, the European ecumenical leaders were much more hostile to what they perceived as secular forces than were the Americans.¹² In some ways, American ecumenical Protestants held a more privileged place in public life than Europeans, who had been experiencing declining church attendance since the 1880s and had periodically clashed with governments. Americans did not share the siege mentality of their European coreligionists.¹³

American ecumenists also did not feel as threatened by the far-away Soviet Union, which loomed large over European politics in the 1930s. Many of the leading American ecumenists at Oxford, including Niebuhr and G. Bromley Oxnam, were interested in the Soviet experiment and were involved in the popular front movements of the 1930s. To them, fascism was the far bigger threat. As the American ecumenists took stock of international affairs in 1937, they carefully parsed differences in ideology. Following the sociologist Karl Mannheim, who was then working in England and was close to church groups there, American ecumenists saw the world as a battle between rival ideologies or “worldviews.” “Totalitarian states are essentially churches and can be met only by churches,” wrote American ecumenist John Mackay. “The new churches have become rivals of God and of the Christian Church.” European Christians worried in equal measure about fascism and communism, but American ecumenists fretted most about Nazism. “While Communism regards tyranny as a transitory phenomenon in the development of a world order, Fascism regards it as a permanent expression of political life,” Mackay explained. Communism offered a warped, materialist idea of the unity of mankind, but fascism rejected anything beyond the nation-state itself. For these reasons, he concluded, “The Fascist communal ideal is the most inimical to the Christian ideal of world community.”¹⁴

In this antifascist context, ecumenical Protestants focused on what Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian and soon-to-be British ambassador to the United States, called “The Demonic Influence of National Sovereignty.” Kerr argued that nation-states create peace within their own boundaries by monopolizing violence and mediating disputes among rivals, but in the international arena they operate under anarchy. The League of Nations was “mankind’s first recognition of the need for a world government and for a reign of law among the nations,” he argued, “but because it is based upon the complete national sovereignty of its members it begins to be paralysed as soon as one or more powerful states resign membership or repudiate their obligations.” There is no solution to the problem of national sovereignty except in “a common sovereignty” represented by a “world federation—a state which, in its own sphere, will command the allegiance of mankind, will be able to legislate for, judge, and tax everybody.” Such an organization is the only remedy to world war. But, Kerr cautioned, “It is certainly not the duty of the Church … to advocate the creation of a federation of nations to-day.”¹⁵ Such an idea would be premature, destined to fall apart. He argued that it is better to spread a Christian ethos that subordinates the nation-state to God, and to lay the groundwork for a more united world in the distant future.

John Foster Dulles, the future secretary of state, was also on his way to Oxford in 1937. He agreed with Kerr about the problem of nationalism. But he was more optimistic about solutions. “It is easy to become discouraged as to the possibility of eliminating war,” he cautioned, but “discouragement is premature, our abandonment of an essential objective is unjustified,” Dulles warned.¹⁶ A new world government was possible.

Dulles’s call for a new international organization was personal. In 1919, when Dulles was only thirty-one years old, he had traveled to Versailles with his “uncle Bert,” Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Dulles was in Paris as the League of Nations was being negotiated. Two decades later, in 1937, he had come to Geneva to witness its demise. Dulles was now a famous corporate lawyer and he looked on as the league tried to stop the Japanese invasion of China that year, but with no success. He personally witnessed the league censure Italy for its invasion of Ethiopia and watched it stand by impotently as Italy withdrew from the organization. In 1937, it seemed as if the world Dulles had helped put together was falling apart. Dulles had every reason to be pessimistic, but as he arrived in Oxford directly from Geneva, the atmosphere of the ecumenical gathering gave him hope. “At Oxford, differences were obliterated” and “an amazing unity of thought and interpretation prevailed,” which Dulles credited to the “common denominator” of “a genuine belief in Christ’s life and teachings as the guide to human conduct.”¹⁷ Christianity offered unity, he thought, while the League of Nations was dissolving into irrelevance.

The vision Dulles brought to Oxford was of a dynamic, ever-changing world. War, he said, “is manifestation—a violent manifestation—of human energy.” “The achievement of peace involves the control of such energy.” He argued that too often, countries refuse to adapt to new conditions and, in damming up the flows of human energy, they encourage war or revolution. Both the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations were “an attempt to secure peace by piling up forces to make national boundaries more durable and impenetrable.” The league was a “rededication of the nations to the old principles of sovereignty,” of “unchanging and unchangeable compartments, the walls of which would continue as perpetual barriers to the interplay of dynamic forces.” He asserted that with sovereignty, travel and tourism are made more difficult, trade and immigration are cut off, and suspicion of all things foreign prevails. In order to create a peaceful world, “safety valves” had to “be cut through the barriers of boundaries so that human energy will diffuse itself peacefully.”¹⁸

Dulles believed that “the early history of the United States” could serve as a model for the world in 1937. At first, “the Union was formed by states originally exercising the same sovereign rights as any other nations.… Yet through the adoption of a multilateral treaty known as the Constitution, they have found an essential basis for peace in the renunciation by each of the right to interfere with the interstate movement of people, goods, and ideas.” According to Dulles, each state maintained sovereignty over “all social, educational, and religious matters”; they each had their “own courts” and their “own system of taxes”; and they varied quite drastically from one another but created “a single monetary unity” and unimpeded trade and travel. America’s history of political development was not a perfect model, Dulles admitted, but it provided a viable path forward for the world.¹⁹ At the World Council of Churches, new, radical ideas about national sovereignty and world government were being debated.

The Pacifist-Realist Split

Behind the facade of global unity, American Protestants were becoming increasingly divided over the question of American involvement in the turmoil in East Asia and Europe. Full-scale war between Japan and China broke out in 1937, and two years later Germany invaded Poland, igniting war in Europe. Debates about American involvement in the conflicts raged among Protestants, just as they did across the United States. Should the country treat all belligerent nations equally, as it had attempted during World War I? Should the United States embargo Japan and send aid to Britain? Should the United States itself wage war? No consensus emerged on any of these questions before Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II.

A new theological movement, known as Christian realism, gained wide attention during the late 1930s because it made a compelling argument on behalf of American involvement in a war against “totalitarianism.” Among the realist theologians, Henry Pitney Van Dusen was second only to Reinhold Niebuhr in his prominence at mid-century. Known as “Pit” to his friends, he was born in 1897, a scion of a Dutch New York family and a member of the tenth generation of Van Dusens, whose roots went back to the original settlers of colonial New Amsterdam. At a religious revival led by fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday, young Van Dusen was “twice-born.” The experience led him to pursue religious studies as an undergraduate at Princeton, where his youthful religious enthusiasm matured into a more cerebral faith. Inspired by the social gospel movement then en vogue among Christians on college campuses, he volunteered his time working with the poor. He graduated Princeton in 1919, earning the title (at once laudatory and insulting) of “the best all-around man outside athletics.” Van Dusen enrolled in Union Theological Seminary in 1922, where he began teaching systematic theology after graduating four years later. Like many of the young, ambitious religious figures of his generation he travelled abroad in his twenties, joining Sherwood Eddy, G. Bromley Oxnam, and Niebuhr on trips through Europe, Asia, and the Soviet Union. He later received his PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where he met his wife, Elizabeth Coghill Bartholomew. After World War II he succeeded Henry Sloane Coffin as head of Union Theological Seminary.²⁰

Van Dusen was ordained in the 1920s, during a heated moment among Protestants, whose “modernist” wing clashed with the “fundamentalists.” Like other wealthy and respectable Protestants, Van Dusen was committed to theological liberalism from an early age, shaped partly by his dislike of fundamentalists. He moved in the same theological direction as many Protestant seminaries were heading in the 1910s and 1920s: toward a rejection of biblical literalism, an interest in non-Christian religions, and openness to secular ideas and institutions. Van Dusen’s denomination, the Northern Presbyterians, who were formally known as the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, experienced some of the most embittered fighting over institutional control, as fundamentalists established a red line of theological absolutes they called orthodoxy. Was Jesus born to a virgin? No, said Van Dusen, knowing that saying so would result in a challenge to his ordination by conservatives. Van Dusen hired a fellow Presbyterian and a lawyer worthy of his social class—John Foster Dulles, who was then a young lawyer and layman. With Dulles’s help, Van Dusen prevailed in his heresy trial.²¹

Van Dusen moved toward Christian realism in the 1930s, when he joined a small group of intellectuals led by Niebuhr, called the Theological Discussion Group. Formed in 1933, they self-consciously moved away from what they now viewed as naive conceptions of liberal theology—especially modernism, popular at the Chicago School of Divinity, which they accused of a too-optimistic view of human nature. Recoiling from the rise of fascism, their theology was pessimistic, with more attention to sin, irony, and tragedy. Christianity did not offer easy solutions, they argued, but only a fighting spirit in a dangerous and broken world. Most pressing was the need for Christian unity across denominational and national boundaries into a global communion against materialist forces that threatened to tear the world apart. In order to do this, Van Dusen concluded, Protestant intellectuals must reexamine liberal theology and uproot all that is naive in their traditions. With this theological foundation, he set out across the world.²²

Figure 3. Union Theological Seminary president Henry Pitney Van Dusen sits with Professors Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich circa 1952. Photo by Gjon Mili / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

In 1938, a year after he attended the World Council of Churches’ founding, Van Dusen circumnavigated the world on a six-month tour of missionary stations that included meetings with missionaries, visits to Christian colleges, and chats with American and foreign diplomats.²³ The journey culminated in a three-week conference at Madras Christian College, in Tambaram, India, under the auspices of the International Missionary Conference. The meeting, unlike the Oxford conference of the previous year, had representatives from the Global South in equal numbers to those from the North Atlantic West. It was slated to take place in Hangzhou, China, but had to be moved to India because of the Japanese invasion the previous year. The specter of war weighed on the minds of the participants.²⁴

In the same way G. Bromley Oxnam’s social gospel was reshaped by international travel, so too was Van Dusen’s realism. The journey revived Van Dusen’s confidence in the unity of Christianity. His trip reinforced his belief in the religion’s ability to resist “totalitarian” forces, and it furthered his drive to get the United States to oppose the fascist governments of Japan and Germany. In his travelogue of his 1938 trip, Van Dusen wrote that his confidence in Christian missions had been undermined by William Ernest Hocking’s 1932 report Re-thinking Missions, which had called on missionaries to do less preaching and provide more social services.²⁵ Van Dusen blamed Hocking for spreading the belief that missionaries were cultural imperialists who trampled on ancient and respected cultures. Van Dusen concluded in 1938 that Christian missions played a vital role in helping the world’s poor in the regions few other Westerners were willing to live in. Van Dusen gave an account of his trip that included areas of the world with “primitive” cultures, where missionaries were doing God’s work and were oftentimes the only ones providing education and charity. It was Van Dusen’s first time seeing missionaries in the field, and he was impressed with their work. Just as global war seemed imminent, Van Dusen revived his confidence in Christianity—and Christian missions—as a potent antifascist force.²⁶

Although he praised the missionary project, Van Dusen did not entirely abandon cultural pluralism, especially the idea that God is revealed in a variety of religious traditions. At Tambaram, however, others did. Dutch neoorthodox theologian Hendrick Kraemer declared that Christianity was unique and superior to other religions. Neoorthodoxy, a largely European movement in the 1930s, went much further in abandoning liberal Protestant principles than had realists. Neoorthodoxy was a battle cry against both “secularism” and against other religious traditions.

As Kraemer announced the exceptional genius of Christianity at Tambaram, Hocking defended religious pluralism. Hocking was joined by Indian and Chinese delegates, along with theological liberals from the United States, in making the case that Christians should recognize divinity even when it appears in the guise of Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam. As Kraemer and Hocking sparred, it was Van Dusen who mediated between the two sides. “Among the saints of all religions are those who clearly have been touched by God and have responded to his touch,” he wrote. And other world religions bear “the marks of God’s revelation.” “But these partial apprehensions of God,” he went on, “pale before the disclosure of God in Christ.”²⁷ As a result of his travel abroad, Van Dusen gained confidence in the political potential of his religion.

Shortly after his return to the United States in 1938, Van Dusen became the most vocal Protestant supporter of American entry into the European war. Van Dusen had long been sympathetic to Britain. He was married to a Scot and had spent years in Edinburgh. Like many Americans of a certain pedigree, he viewed Britain as a place of high culture and civilization. Writing to Joseph Oldham, shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Van Dusen explained that “present prevailing attitude regarding American assumption of her share of responsibility in this tragic business is discouraging. But it is my personal conviction that sooner or later the resources of this country will have to be cast in support of Britain and France to whatever extent that may be necessary.”²⁸ Van Dusen was ready to do his part.

Van Dusen’s links to both sides of the Atlantic made him an important intermediary in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. In the early days of World War II, transatlantic Protestant institutions suddenly became important avenues for the spread of British propaganda at a time when Congress remained skeptical of American aid to the Allies.²⁹ The Ministry of Information, a British wartime propaganda agency, decided in July 1940 that Van Dusen and his allies would be one of the primary conduits of British propaganda to the United States. Van Dusen agreed to the arrangement: He would sign his name to articles originating in the Ministry of Information. In addition, Britain sent religious figures to the United States to urge aid for Britain. Scottish theologian John Baille gave seventy-eight talks to large audiences during an American trip that lasted a month and a half.³⁰ The British wanted to use American ecumenical Protestantism to draw closer links between the two countries, which coincided with Van Dusen’s own desire for America to join the war effort. And the influence flowed both ways. In late 1940, when the British ambassador Philip Kerr was about to issue a statement defending the British blockade of Europe, Van Dusen asked him to postpone it. When the ambassador finally issued a statement on the matter, it closely resembled a draft written by Van Dusen.³¹

Van Dusen’s influence extended beyond his religious community to public opinion and government policy. In the immediate years before American entry into World War II, Van Dusen became an unofficial ambassador to England on behalf of an interventionist group of prominent religious leaders, businessmen, journalists, academics, lawyers, and diplomats who came to be known as the “Century Group.” Francis Pickens Miller brought this group together. Miller was the long-time leader of the World Student Christian Federation, and he was working in 1940 for the National Policy Council, a foreign policy think tank. After gathering a few people at his Virginia home in June that year, Miller and others put out a statement calling for American military intervention in the European war (at a time when 71 percent of Protestants said they would stay out of war, if given the choice).³² In 1940, several groups had called for more aid to the Allies, but Miller’s group stood out because it called for outright war against Germany. After the statement made headlines across the country, Van Dusen got in touch with Miller and urged his group to continue its efforts, which led to the creation of the pro-intervention Century Group. It launched a coordinated propaganda effort on behalf of American involvement in World War II.³³

Out of the Century Group emerged the idea of the “Bases for Destroyers” deal. The group advised Roosevelt to trade several dozen warships that Britain desperately needed in exchange for leases on British military bases in the Western Hemisphere. This approach had advantages for both cash-strapped Britain and for Roosevelt, who was prevented by Congress from selling these military supplies to belligerents. The Century Group worked in secret and convinced the weary Roosevelt administration to go along with the plan. The Century Group also reached out to Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and persuaded him not to attack Roosevelt over the terms of the deal during the 1940 election cycle. It also promoted the plan among voters, and they saw General John J. Pershing’s speech on behalf of the deal—which it helped write and orchestrate—as the turning point in public opinion.³⁴ During these efforts, it is likely that Van Dusen was actively cooperating with the British intelligence agency MI6 and receiving confidential information from the organization.³⁵

Roosevelt, too, was coordinating with the British, although in more public and more dramatic ways. By 1941, the United States was actively aiding Britain. The country had sent a large military aid package to Britain through the Lend-Lease Act and was fighting an undeclared war against German submarines in the Atlantic. When Roosevelt met Churchill “somewhere at sea” in August 1941, it was to justify this alliance. The Atlantic Charter, the joint declaration of war aims by Roosevelt and Churchill, was received with a mixture of bewilderment and excitement. It was bewildering because the document carried no legal force and this statement of war aims had been co-signed by a president whose country was not at war. But it also earned the attention of many, including ecumenical Protestants, because it gave “assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” Roosevelt and Churchill also agreed on “a wider and permanent system of general security” after the war and called on the nations of the world to abandon the use of force for “spiritual reasons,” a phrase Roosevelt added into the text.³⁶

Soon after the Atlantic Charter was issued, Van Dusen decided to visit Britain. On September 14, 1941, Van Dusen left for Scotland and England, where he spent four weeks conferring with government and church officials. According to Andrew Preston, “While some Europeans viewed the war as a larger and more violent version of previous wars,” Van Dusen and other Americans “perceived it in millennial terms, as ushering in a totally new epoch.”³⁷ And so Van Dusen’s initial impressions of Britain were positive, giving hope that the British were moving toward a new, more Christian way of life. He was especially surprised at the healthy appearance of the British people. This was due not only to better distribution of food, Van Dusen insisted, but also resulted from the common purpose given to British citizens. “Let no one say war may not also ennoble and redeem,” Van Dusen wrote to his friends. To him, the wartime temperament of the British people was a hopeful political and spiritual development. They were becoming more Christian because “community,” a Christian ideal, “has come to reality in wartime Britain.”³⁸

Van Dusen had a singular goal: to convince the British to plan for the millennium that would follow the war. Meetings and speeches took up most of Van Dusen’s time in Britain in the fall of 1941. He met with Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and Minister of Information Brendan Bracken, along with the Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, with whom he discussed the food blockade Britain had implemented. He also spoke with representatives of the Belgian and Norwegian governments-in-exile, whose countries were occupied by Germany. In every meeting he stressed the necessity of peace aims.

In an address carried throughout Britain, the Commonwealth, and colonies, Van Dusen stressed the need for a grand vision matching Woodrow Wilson’s idealism during World War I. The support of the American government for the British war effort was assured, Van Dusen told his listeners in 1941, but the American people continue to be divided. The problem, Van Dusen argued, was that aiding Britain or defeating the Nazis was not enough to win over everyday Americans. “We have been handicapped by lack of clear, positive and compelling objectives beyond the overthrow of Nazism,” he told his British listeners just months after Churchill and Roosevelt had issued the Atlantic Charter. “The lesson from the last war is clear,” Van Dusen insisted. “The American people did not believe themselves entering that war to save their own security, but to secure a great possibility for the whole world, including themselves. So, today.” Without bringing up Churchill’s deliberate policy of withholding peace aims, Van Dusen warned, “As things are now going, you will have our formal partnership in the struggle. You will not have the all-out enlistment of our people.”³⁹

Van Dusen believed making idealistic postwar plans would capture the imagination of the United States and that it would encourage the country to join the war effort. He was right that planning for a new world government, which had been proposed earlier by the World Council of Churches, would appeal to many Americans, and especially to ecumenical Protestants. But the links he drew between the postwar peace and American belligerence were met with resistance. His call for war was bound to provoke a fight with his fellow believers.

The Pacifist-Realist Food Fight

Van Dusen’s call for the United States to aid Britain, even if it led to war, put him on a collision course with Protestant pacifists, who counted thousands of individuals as members of their organizations and many adherents who were in positions of power in Protestant institutions. Whereas Van Dusen preached a renewed Wilsonian gospel, Protestant pacifists had formed their identity in response to Wilson’s failures.⁴⁰ The Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded during the Great War, but this pacifist group experienced its greatest growth in the years that followed. Figures like Niebuhr, who had supported the war effort in 1917, recoiled when the United States failed to join the League of Nations and the war unleashed a right-wing mobilization that ended in attacks against labor unions, socialists, African Americans, and immigrants. Niebuhr became a committed pacifist soon after World War I (only to dramatically break with the pacifists in the 1930s).

The growth of pacifism among ecumenical Protestants was one reason why Christian nationalism went into decline in this community. As American ecumenical Protestants became embarrassed by their vocal support for Wilson’s crusade during World War I, they began to distance the Christian religion from the state. During the 1920s leading pacifists and other leftists began attacking the idea that the United States was an elect nation destined to carry out God’s work in the world. Missionary evangelist Sherwood Eddy lamented in 1928 that only a few years before, “we felt a divine call to go from our own favored ‘Christian’ nation to the backward ‘heathen’ nations lost in darkness.” But he now recognized this Christian nationalism was “complacent, paternalistic, imperialistic.”⁴¹ The criticism of Christian nationalism had gone mainstream by the 1930s and rang out from pulpits, the press, and radio programs across the country. Many ecumenical Protestants viewed Protestant globalism as an alternative to Christian nationalism.

The memory of World War I sustained the pacifist movement and encouraged Protestants to abandon Christian nationalism. Popular novels like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, both published in 1929, dramatized the disillusionment with war that many Americans felt. In the political realm, the Nye Committee’s 1936 congressional report promoted a new understanding of the causes of World War I, casting greedy industrialists and munitions makers as the villains in the plot to go to war for the sake of their bottom lines.⁴²

In 1933, sociologist Ray Abrams wrote Preachers Present Arms, a careful study of the clergy’s involvement in American propaganda campaigns during World War I. It was also a condemnation of Christian nationalism. “The rise of modern Nationalism has become a religion with its sacred scriptures, dogmas, ritual propaganda, priests and devotees,” he lamented. Sadly, “the churches were consistent in the record of supporting all popular wars and proved, what had long been suspected, that Christianity has been becoming increasingly nationalistic, while the god of Nationalism is more powerful in his ability to command obedience and devotion unto death than is Jehovah himself.”⁴³ Abrams warned against a cozy relationship between church and state, about the mistaken reporting of German atrocities, and about preachers’ support for xenophobic and right-wing politics. Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the influential Christian Century, believed Ray Abrams’s exposé of Christian nationalism was so vital that he serialized the book in the Christian Century just after World War II broke out in Europe in September 1939.

With the memory of World War I very much alive, it is no wonder that the most bitter quarrels took place over a revival of Herbert Hoover’s food aid plan. Hoover, the engineer-hero of the Great War, had saved thousands of starving Belgians during World War I. The former US president, whose reputation was marred by his response to the Great Depression, proposed saving Europeans from starvation once again in 1940. Hoover had a plan, like the one he put into effect during World War I. The British were skeptical. They had organized a naval blockade of Europe and barred any goods from crossing that might potentially help Germany’s war effort.

Hoover, a Quaker and former vice president of the Federal Council of Churches, framed food aid as a strictly moral issue. And he believed that religious leaders were in the best position to promote this supposedly apolitical plan. Hoover asked Congregationalist minister Benjamin F. Wyland to organize religious support. The Hoover plan quickly gained widespread backing in Protestant circles as Hoover sought to arouse public opinion by mobilizing religious leaders, with the goal of pressuring the British into allowing the food aid through the blockade. Morrison and other pacifists joined the cause. So too did several Theological Discussion Group members, including Georgia Harkness and Walter Horton.⁴⁴ Hoover found an especially useful ally in one of the most popular and respected pacifists in the United States, Ernest Fremont Tittle. In November 1940, Tittle preached a sermon on behalf of Hoover’s plan, which was then printed in the Christian Century and the Methodist journal Zion’s Herald. Hoover’s committee mailed a copy of the article, accompanied by a cover letter written by Chicago Theological Seminary president Albert W. Palmer, to sixty thousand Protestant ministers.

Feeding the hungry, once seen as an unquestionably Christian endeavor, now stirred up immense controversy. Ministers across the country replied to Tittle’s article with accusations that the pacifist was aiding Hitler’s war effort. Tittle defended himself by arguing that opponents of food aid were undermining the very thing they claim to defend—civilization. Christian values are “terribly imperiled by the deliberate killing of innocent aged persons and women and children, even though the killing be done slowly with a food blockage and done in the name of ‘civilization,’ ” Tittle wrote.⁴⁵

Van Dusen rapidly emerged as the fiercest critic of Hoover’s food aid plan. For Van Dusen, moral actions were always intertwined with political problems that presented difficult choices. He argued that it would be impossible to design a plan that would deliver food to countries conquered by Germany without the possibility that the aid would wind up in Nazi hands. Even if Germany could be trusted—and he believed it could not—Van Dusen argued that feeding conquered nations would allow Germany to relocate its resources toward its war effort. A hungry Europe would become restive and more likely to rebel against the Nazis, and disease resulting from hunger might spread into Germany, thereby helping the British cause. Van Dusen believed that deliberately withholding food aid was necessary given the grave threat Nazism posed to the world.

Van Dusen waged his campaign with the cooperation of the Century Group, but not all got on board. Henry Luce, a child of American missionaries in China and the owner of a media empire that included Time and Life magazines, broke with the Century Group over this issue, believing food aid to be an exception in an otherwise all-out effort on behalf of the British. Harvard president James Conant, another member of the Century Group, thought it was inappropriate for him to oppose the plan (while Yale president Charles Seymour, a historian of World War I, sided with Van Dusen). The Hoover food aid plan created tensions among interventionist groups.⁴⁶

Even Van Dusen privately lobbied the British to ease the blockade, pleading with them to allow some medical supplies to reach children in Europe. Van Dusen, Union Theological Seminary president Henry Sloan Coffin, and presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church Henry St. George Tucker had several dinners with the British ambassador to the United States, Philip Kerr, during which they pleaded for “the safeguarding from actual starvation of children.” But Van Dusen never pushed too hard and stressed that he and the Century Group would support the blockade “if in the considered judgment of your Government that is the only safe possibility.”⁴⁷ Van Dusen kept his hesitations private. In public, he remained a stalwart supporter of the British blockade.

Van Dusen’s absolutist position, the one he expressed publicly, meant that there would be no compromise with Hoover or the pacifists. In response, Morrison unleashed a barrage of editorials in the Christian Century in 1940.⁴⁸ The editorials became more withering after October 1940, when Van Dusen helped organize a statement denouncing Hoover’s plan. It was especially hurtful that Mary E. Woolley and Carrie Chapman Catt, Morrison’s allies in the interwar disarmament movement, disavowed the Hoover plan.⁴⁹

Morrison wondered whether any of the signatories had “ever heard a starving child cry for a piece of bread?” “Do American Christians still possess the capacity for compassion? Thirty million people in Europe want to know, for their lives depend upon the answer. Ten million of this number are children. Children die first in famine.” A later editorial said that politics are one consideration, but the “final word on this matter is uttered by Christian compassion. Is pity dead in the world? Have we forgotten the meaning of mercy? Do we, who have never learned to love our enemies, need now to be admonished not to slaughter our friends?”⁵⁰ Van Dusen’s opposition to feeding hungry children made him, according to his critics, care more about politics than about biblical commandments.

Such personal attacks led Van Dusen, Niebuhr, and other realists to launch a new journal, Christianity and Crisis, in February 1941. The magazine imitated the style and format of the Christian Century, but it was wholeheartedly dedicated to the interventionist cause.⁵¹ “Christianity & Crisis is a propaganda sheet used by Van Dusen and Niebuhr for English purposes,” Wyland complained.⁵² This small but influential journal strove, first and foremost, to turn Christian opinion against Nazism and to push Americans to aid the Allies. In later years, it would serve as the vehicle for the development of a Protestant just war theory, a tradition largely lacking in American Protestant theology.⁵³

Another prominent pacifist, John Haynes Holmes Jr., went after Van Dusen even more directly and more personally. Holmes’s impatience with the realists was first made public in his 1934 review of Niebuhr’s Reflections on the End of an Era. In that article he accused Niebuhr of sacrificing his Christianity for the sake of class war.⁵⁴ Now, in 1941, it seemed that Van Dusen was sacrificing Christianity for the sake of the British Empire. Holmes, in a letter to Van Dusen that was circulated to other Protestant leaders, accused Van Dusen of being “fixed in your determination to starve women and children in Europe.” Van Dusen’s determination was like Hitler’s, so complete that it is “impervious either to rational argument or spiritual appeal.” Holmes admitted his commitment to loving his enemies was strained with Hitler, but “it is even more strained in the case of a man like yourself, who, unlike the Nazis, has had the advantage of Christian training.” “I wonder if I can find in the Nazi record anything worse than your deliberate attempt to break down the Hoover plan and thus starve the struggling populations of Europe,” Holmes wrote in January 1941. He ended the letter even less generously: “In the light of this I dare to say that Jesus would blister you as he blistered the Pharisees, only a thousand times worse.”⁵⁵

Van Dusen countered that pacifists were so near-sighted that they were missing the bigger picture. “Men cry for freedom and are given bread,” Van Dusen retorted. And few people got more joy from attacking pacifists than Niebuhr, whose contempt for what he deemed naive idealism he summarized the following way: “If modern churches were to symbolize their true faith they would take the crucifix from their altars and substitute the three little monkeys who counsel men to ‘speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil.’ ”⁵⁶

In the absence of reliable polling data, the popular Christian press indicated that the views of churchgoers were mixed but tended to be more sympathetic with the attitudes of the pacifists about food aid. The Federal Council of Churches surveyed its membership and found broad support for Hoover’s plan.⁵⁷ But Van Dusen and the realists succeeded in making the subject controversial, and the popular Christian mobilization on behalf of food aid that Hoover prayed for never materialized. Amid the controversy, the Hoover plan went nowhere. The British refused to let food aid through to Europe, and the Roosevelt administration declined to pressure the British. Onetime allies—Holmes, Morrison, Van Dusen, and Niebuhr had all participated in interwar popular front movements—found themselves on the verge of tearing Protestantism apart over the war.

Divided by War, United by Peace

The fight over Hoover’s food aid plan dramatized just how badly the war had divided ecumenical Protestants. Because of these schisms, in the years 1940 and 1941 ecumenical Protestants refocused their attention onto something they could agree about: the postwar peace. It was a remarkable thing to look past the war that was engulfing the world, in the years when nothing seemed to stop Japanese and Nazi conquests, and to imagine a postwar peace. And yet, that is exactly what ecumenical Protestants did, and their decision would have important consequences.

Looking forward to the postwar settlement had the advantage of minimizing the clashes between pacifists and realists. The vast numbers of clergy and churchgoers who did not think of themselves as either pacifists or realists were drawn selectively to the ideas of both groups. By early 1941 an increasing number of Americans, including ecumenical Protestants, were in favor of aid to Britain and supportive of Roosevelt’s call for the United States to become an “Arsenal of Democracy.” The Congregationalists’ journal of record, The Advance, reported that many in the denomination were in favor of aid to Britain short of war. While Congregationalists were sympathetic to the realists’ pro-British politics, they were critical of their theology. “It has seemed to us that Professor [Reinhold] Niebuhr tends to make a matter of ideology out of what may be only a matter of necessity, or of unavoidability; and that this involves a sort of militarization of Christianity, which cannot be militarized without ceasing to be Christianity,” the editor wrote. Living in an “un-Christian world” requires “some adjustment,” he went on to say, but “it is a dangerous and disastrous thing” if “we use casuistry to reduce Christianity to the level of current life.”⁵⁸ To safeguard Christianity, nonaligned Protestants disassociated the war effort from Protestant theology. It was better to treat the war as a state of exception, divorced from Christian thought, then to leave the stamp of militarism permanently on Christian thinking. This begrudging interventionism, which combined realist politics with pacifist theology, became widespread by 1941. As a result, ecumenical Protestants who were neither realists nor pacifists were especially attracted to postwar planning as a convenient way of holding onto some of the treasured concepts of the pacifist version of Protestant Christianity. And they urged pacifists and realists to do the same.

The last great attempt by ecumenical Protestants to formulate a united policy on global affairs prior to American entry into World War II occurred in Philadelphia in 1940. The Federal Council of Churches brought together ecumenical leaders in the City of Brotherly Love to overcome growing divisions. The conference followed the basic model of international ecumenical meetings of the interwar era. It gathered prominent religious speakers and lay experts, invited broadly representative constituencies, created expert-led study groups that would work diligently to prepare position papers on controversial topics, discussed and amended the position papers over the course of a few days, and published a final conference statement that presented an official, usually unanimous, ecumenical Protestant position, and distributed it to churches across the country.

In 1940, ecumenical Protestant leaders did not see themselves as standing on either side of “internationalism” or “isolationism.” Instead, they focused on their mutual enemy: “power politics.” The Philadelphia conference-goers agreed that the United States needed “to renounce its political and economic isolation” and participate with other nations in the creation “of a world government.” “Only then will we be freed from the burden of power politics,” they concluded.⁵⁹ Years of veneration of national sovereignty and moral apathy had led countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan to pursue their selfish interests despite world opinion. Ecumenical Protestant leaders pointed to the economic causes of the European conflict and decried quotas, tariffs, and other barriers to world trade that encouraged winner-take-all contests between nations. As they saw it, each nation had become the judge of its own cause and ignored universal moral law in the quest for furthering its own self-interest. Echoing Dulles’s earlier ideas, ecumenical Protestants in Philadelphia announced that a “permanent peace involves some sort of world organization to which individual states must be willing to surrender certain aspects of sovereignty, such as was surrendered in the formulation of the United States,” they told America’s churches.⁶⁰

The creation of a postwar peace also required doing away with imperialism, ecumenical Protestant leaders argued. Power politics and economic competition was driven by imperial rivalries. “The principle of eventual freedom for all peoples is not only the recognition of an essential right,” ecumenical Protestants declared in Philadelphia, “but is also a prerequisite to the creation of that sense of justice and goodwill without which we cannot hope to rid the world of war.”⁶¹

There were some hints of a more domestically conscious global vision at the 1940 Philadelphia meeting that went largely unnoticed. “We … believe that it is impossible wholly to divorce foreign policy from domestic policy and that any comprehensive program for peace must contain a synthesis of both,” the conference-goers declared. “Moreover, we are convinced that a constructive, creative foreign policy can stem only from a domestic policy which is firmly rooted in democracy and which provides for adequate social security.” Ecumenical Protestants feared that the problem of unemployment was being solved through militarization and they deplored the growing influence of the army and the navy in American life. They also asked for “just and considerate treatment for members of religious, racial and political minorities,” especially more tolerant attitudes toward the Jews. But the only specific proposal endorsed at Philadelphia in 1940 was to pass antilynching legislation, something the Federal Council of Churches had advocated for years.⁶²

Despite all the talk of postwar planning, it was hard to keep the issue of war at bay. In 1940, ecumenical Protestants still held out hope for a negotiated peace. Until the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, few Protestant leaders believed that aid to the Allies meant that the United States would become a belligerent. Indeed, the Philadelphia meeting took place during a pause in European fighting after the German subjugation of Poland in September 1939 but before the invasion of France in May 1940, which led Senator William Borah to describe World War II as the “phoney war.” Without the benefit of hindsight, ecumenical Protestant leaders were not confronted with the many things that would later alarm them—the attacks on neutral Belgium and the Netherlands, the fall of France, the assault on Britain, and the bloodiness of the campaign on the Eastern front.

In this climate it seemed that a negotiated peace might still be possible. Tittle had called for a negotiated peace back in September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, and the pacifist did so again in 1940.⁶³ Ecumenical leaders agreed with Tittle, declaring that the United States ought to stay out of the war and calling for neutral nations to moderate between the belligerents. At Philadelphia in 1940, this position was approved without dissent.⁶⁴

Ecumenical Protestant endorsement of a negotiated peace took place against the backdrop of a national discussion about the meaning of American neutrality. The Hague Convention of 1907 codified the legal right of nations to trade with and travel to belligerent nations during wartime. But in the aftermath of World War I, Americans increasingly concluded that their country’s insistence on the legal form of neutrality was precisely what led the country into war in the first place. How to square the desire to remain “neutral” with the new, totalizing form of warfare became the dominant foreign policy challenge in the interwar era.⁶⁵

The question of neutrality also played out in debates about the Pacific, and whether to issue a “moral embargo” against Japan. It was a deeply contentious issue. A moral embargo meant that American corporations would voluntarily cease sending goods to Japan that aided the country in its ongoing war in China. President Roosevelt had first called for a moral embargo against Italy after that country’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and later for one against Japan. In 1940, ecumenical Protestants endorsed the plan by a divided vote. They also urged the Roosevelt administration to renegotiate economic treaties with Japan and attempt to ease friction with that country, while simultaneously offering loans to China. Should this plan fail to ease tensions between the United States and Japan, and should the moral embargo prove ineffective, the Philadelphia conference recommended—again by a divided vote—that the United States government mandate an embargo that sharply limited the amount of goods American firms could sell to Japan. This scenario, some ecumenical Protestants believed, “would effectively dissociate the United States from participation in Japan’s attack on China, while it would at the same time show Japan that our attitude towards her is friendly, and that our action is intended only to avoid injury to China with whom also we desire to be friendly.”⁶⁶ Ecumenical Protestants wanted to maintain neutrality while coercing Japan into ceasing its attack on China. It was a muddled policy.

Ecumenical Protestants largely repeated Wilsonian ideas about neutrality and offered few viable options for the United States in 1940 in regard to the war. Their calls for a world government were novel and ambitious, while the domestic implications of the new world order they were proposing remained unexamined. Recognizing that they were at an impasse, the Federal Council of Churches announced shortly after the Philadelphia conference that they had created a “Commission on the American Churches and the Peace and War Problem,” headed by John Foster Dulles. It would work independently of the group that had put on the Philadelphia conference and answer only to the highest officers of the Federal Council.⁶⁷ They hoped Dulles would put an end to Protestant infighting.

In 1940 and 1941, during the impasse over the role of the United States in the war, American ecumenical Protestants abandoned Wilsonian conceptions of “world order.” They abandoned internationalism—that is, a parliamentary system of individual, sovereign nation-states—and embraced instead a global conception of world order. In doing so, they drew on earlier ideas about the interconnectedness of the world, like Hocking’s “world culture,” but now imagined it as a political space that provided a meaningful defense against the “power politics” of nation-states.⁶⁸ Earlier, in the 1930s, Christianity was imagined as a counterforce to the disorder of the day. Ecumenical Protestants had believed their religion would help keep nation-states in check. Christianity was also held up as a form of unity independent of the nation-state system, with its own nonstate ways of relating people to one another. By the early 1940s, drawing on earlier ideas by Dulles, Kerr, and Hocking, American ecumenical Protestants began to seriously consider the globe as a sphere of governance and imagine in detail a world government.

The second leap among American ecumenical Protestants was to connect their emerging global political vision to national and local practices. Ecumenical Protestants reimagined the scale of politics, closely tying the global and the local. What happened on a global scale had a direct relationship to what was going on in communities across the United States in ways that were unmediated by the American government. If everyday Americans wanted to shape world events, swaying government officials was not their only option. They could also take part in global affairs in their communities. Fighting racial segregation or poverty in one’s hometown was not only an ethical imperative but also a way of creating the conditions under which a world government could emerge. By reimagining the scale of politics as a way out of their disagreements about food aid and moral embargoes, ecumenical Protestants finally cast away the ghosts of Woodrow Wilson and World War I. They invented a new global Christian politics premised on world government.

Methodists played a vital role in developing this conception of world order. Historians have associated the world order movement of the 1940s with a small group of realists led by Van Dusen and Niebuhr.⁶⁹ The pioneering role of Methodism has been largely ignored. The United Methodist Church was the largest American Protestant denomination in the 1940s, with about eight million members, and among them were some important thinkers on international affairs, including G. Bromley Oxnam, Georgia Harkness, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Walter W. Van Kirk, Thelma Stevens, Dorothy Tilly, Will W. Alexander, and Ernest Fremont Tittle. The denomination also devoted more resources and enthusiasm to reshaping international politics, and did so earlier, than other denominations. The commission led by Dulles, which would be the most important policy arm of American ecumenical Protestantism in the 1940s, got its start by attaching itself to the Methodist political initiatives orchestrated by Oxnam.

The United Methodist Church was also very sympathetic to pacifism. The influence of the long-standing and pacifist-leaning Methodist Commission for World Peace was felt in the uniting conference in 1939, when Northern and Southern Methodists jointly declared, “We believe that war is utterly destructive and is our greatest collective sin and a denial of the ideals of Christ. We stand upon this ground, that the Methodist Church as an Institution cannot endorse war nor support or participate in it.”⁷⁰ Whereas Van Dusen and the realists saw postwar planning as a means of bringing the United States into the war, Methodist leaders hoped to create a peace plan that would dissuade American belligerence.

When the Methodists met in Chicago in May 1941, the gathering served as a dry run for Dulles’s recently renamed Commission on a Just and Durable Peace.⁷¹ Founded in 1940 under the chairmanship of Presbyterian layman and future secretary of state Dulles, and usually referred to as the “Dulles Commission,” the group was organized to plan for the postwar peace on behalf of the Federal Council of Churches. Dulles himself addressed the Methodist meeting at Chicago and worked closely with Oxnam, who had convened the meeting. Oxnam’s goal was to hold Protestants together. “This Pacifist-Interventionist fight is likely to split many a church,” Oxnam told the audience in Chicago. “If we can center all of them upon a discussion of what are the bases of a just peace when at last the war is over we will do something constructive.”⁷² For this reason, he placed a gag order on the Chicago meeting. “Discussion on pacifism, aid to Britain, and America’s entry into the war are being omitted,” the conference invitation warned.⁷³ “All of the speakers held fast to the assignment,” Oxnam observed.⁷⁴

The war issue, of course, could not be completely ignored. While the speakers focused on the peace to come, pacifists addressed the present. The phoney war was now over, and the United States was waging an undeclared war against German submarines in the North Atlantic, which troubled many Methodists because it could draw the United States into the war officially. “We deplore administrative actions that, step by step, are involving us in a shooting war, though undeclared, without giving the National Congress a chance to exercise its constitutional right in this matter and without regard for the predominant sentiment of the nation,” the Methodists protested. Asking President Roosevelt “not to send our boys to war overseas,” they pleaded again for a negotiated peace. “We believe that our nation can best serve mankind by abstaining from belligerent participation in present wars, by employing its immense resources for the constructive ministry of healing and rehabilitation and by associating itself with other nations, at the earliest possible moment, in an earnest effort to rebuild the world on a foundation of justice and co-operation for the good of all.”⁷⁵

In the long term, however, it was not the Methodist opposition to American entry into World War II but their ideas about postwar planning that proved to be the most enduring legacy. “After the bomber comes the builder,” Oxnam told the Chicago audience. “But what kind of world will men build?”⁷⁶ Speakers asserted that the peoples of the world were becoming more and more connected. “The spiritual unity of mankind and the interrelatedness of peoples demand a political, economic, and cultural structure to encourage and sustain this emerging world consciousness,” argued Earl Craston, a Methodist and historian. Declaring “unlimited national sovereignty” to be “outmoded,” he contended that each country “must relinquish some of its authority and powers to the world organization” that would act “not only upon the member peoples or groups, but also, on occasion, upon individuals themselves.”⁷⁷ Craston was proposing something new in Protestant thought: a world government that would not only mediate problems between countries but also have a direct relationship with people living in those countries.

“That unlimited national sovereignty as now practiced is outmoded was taken for granted” at Chicago, according to the journal Methodist Woman, and a world government was deemed “ultimately inevitable.” The participants also contemplated regional federations, like “the United States of Europe,” as a stepping-stone to an “all-inclusive world body.” The “economic sovereignty” of each nation must be reduced in order to encourage “a free flow of goods between nations, equal access to necessary raw materials, [and] free access to markets.” A “World Economic Congress” was needed, Methodist Woman explained, along with “regional economic federations or customs unions” to ensure goods would flow across borders.⁷⁸

Linking the global to the local, the Methodists also called for big changes at home. “Within our own nation,” the conference delegates declared, “economic democracy is a necessary basis for political democracy.” This meant expanding the New Deal, promoting cooperatives, nationalizing key industries, and empowering labor unions. Like the Roosevelt administration, the Methodists emphasized the responsibility of the federal government to ensure full employment and economic stability and to enact unemployment insurance and compulsory health and accident insurance. Some areas of the economy, the conference report urged, ought to be placed under “social ownership,” including “coal, steel, and oil, and utilities such as power, light, water, and transportation.” Calling for the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the American Federation of Labor to merge, the Methodists believed that labor unions with “real social vision,” along with cooperatives, would be central to these economic transformations.⁷⁹

The Methodist leaders were repackaging and popularizing ideas that had achieved limited support in the previous decades by interweaving them with the one issue on everyone’s mind: how to achieve world peace. In these subtle connections were the beginnings of a social movement that pushed for domestic reforms within a global frame of reference. Taken together, these planks of the Methodist conference reflected the social gospel ideals of cooperation, appreciation for labor unions, and the use of the regulatory power of government. They also reflected the new ideas of the Christian socialist movement that had come to prominence in the preceding decade, which envisioned a greater role for the federal government and was more willing to side with labor in economic disputes. Now these reforms had clear global implications.

Methodist leaders also chastised their churches for their apathy. They called for “the same critical scrutiny” to be applied to church life as to foreign policy and economic reform. “Justice,” the Methodists declared, “must begin at home.” There was a noteworthy absence of any discussion of segregation in the Methodist Church, which was practiced from top to bottom in the denomination. Instead, the churches’ labor practices, real estate holdings, and funding sources were scrutinized. Methodist leaders advised local churches to form co-ops, credit unions, group medicine insurance schemes, and labor organizations. In these ways, they could contribute to world peace.⁸⁰

Dulles was inspired by the Methodist proposals and their strategy of talking peace, not war. The Dulles Commission was created to study postwar peace, but its real challenge was to settle the rift between the realists and pacifists.⁸¹ “Our task is a difficult and delicate one,” Dulles said at the first meeting of his new commission. “The first requirement of success is that we should develop and preserve unity among ourselves.”⁸² To everyone’s surprise, Dulles managed to do just that.

The Dulles Commission made plans for a great gathering of ecumenical Protestants in February 1942 in Delaware, Ohio, on the campus of the Ohio Wesleyan University, a Methodist school. Nobody predicted that the United States would be at war by the time the Delaware conference took place. When the nearly four hundred delegates met at Delaware, they showed surprising agreement on most issues, now that America’s relationship to the war was not on the agenda. A gag order, like the one at the earlier Methodist meeting, also helped. The delegates endorsed what the Christian Century called “The Church’s Thirteen Points,” a reference to Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points, two and a half decades earlier.⁸³ Under the guiding hand of Dulles, the Delaware conference-goers affirmed a belief that the world is undergirded by moral laws that all people must obey, and which the churches had a special duty to proclaim. They called for a spirit of cooperation, the end of unrestrained national sovereignty, economic security, autonomy for all subject peoples, and freedom for people of all races and religions.

Figure 4. John Foster Dulles, chairman of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, speaking at the Delaware conference in February 1942. Photo by William C. Shrout / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

Ecumenical Protestants also fleshed out their proposal for a world government. At Delaware, they urged the creation of an international organization with the power to reduce armaments, regulate international trade, and to mediate disputes between nations.⁸⁴ This world organization was to have a police force, a legislature, and a court, and would be able to apply economic sanctions against belligerent nations in times of crises. Earlier ideas about world government that had been deemed radical now gained widespread support.

A united statement on the future of international relations would have been a remarkable accomplishment by itself. As impressive were the domestic reforms advocated at a meeting ostensibly focused on international affairs. Within this framework of Protestant globalism, the ecumenical leaders gathered at Delaware veered leftward on a number of domestic issues. William Paton, a British ecumenist and a relative of Elizabeth Van Dusen, told the Americans in attendance at Delaware that “collectivism is coming, whether we like it or not.”⁸⁵ The conference delegates agreed: a “new ordering of economic life” was inevitable. The only question was whether it would take place “within the framework of democracy or through explosive political revolution.” Delegates demanded an “industrial democracy” in the United States and experimentation with “various forms of ownership.”⁸⁶

The pacifist contingent, with agreement from the realists, had shepherded through the economic planks at Delaware. Pacifists also pushed through one of the most critical statements on racism produced by any predominantly white Protestant body to date. The task of preparing the statement on the “social bases for a just and durable peace” fell on pacifist A. J. Muste. The Dutch-born clergyman was a longtime leader in the labor movement, whose roles included general secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America, chairman of Brookwood Labor College, and leader of the American Workers Party. Muste ran in Marxist and Trotskyite circles in the 1920s and early 1930s, but a mystical experience in 1936 led him to a rededication to religious life and to pacifism.⁸⁷ He went on to head the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist Christian group best known for creating the Congress of Racial Equality.

For Muste, war and racism were intertwined, both rooted in a psychological tendency to stick to one’s own group and dominate others. America’s aggression toward nations in Latin America and in the Pacific occurred repeatedly “because we are not genuine democrats at home, but treat negroes, Orientals, ‘foreigners’ generally as ‘Inferiors’ here.” He argued that likewise, when the United States goes to war against nonwhite nations, “authoritarian practices tend to develop against minorities at home,” which carry over into the postwar settlement. He pointed to the Red-baiting and race riots that followed World War I. “I do not believe that the problems of peace within, and peace between nations can be isolated from each other,” Muste made clear.⁸⁸

By imagining the global sphere as a site of politics and insisting that the global and local were intertwined, ecumenical Protestants birthed new ideas at Delaware. The most important was a yet-undefined field of human rights. Whereas civil rights were the prerogatives of nation-states, human rights were a matter of God’s law and would be the province of the coming world government. Some of the impetus to articulate human rights came from Leo Pasvolsky, who represented the Roosevelt administration at the Delaware meeting. He privately circulated a fifty-two-page report of the National Resources Planning Board, which he headed, and which included a new economic bill of rights that Roosevelt would make famous in his 1944 State of the Union Address. Ecumenical Protestants drew inspiration from Roosevelt’s rights talk. They linked rights to the coming world government and applied them to Jim Crow, which the Roosevelt administration largely ignored. Indeed, the final proclamation of the Delaware conference only mentioned human rights in the context of anti-imperialism and antiracism. The Federal Council of Churches declared: “WE BELIEVE that the government which derives its just powers from the consent of the governed is the truest expression of the rights and dignity of man. This requires that we seek autonomy for all subject and colonial peoples.… WE BELIEVE that the right of all men to pursue work of their own choosing and to enjoy security from want and oppression is not limited by race, color or creed. The rights and liberties of racial and religious minorities in all lands should be recognized and safeguarded.”⁸⁹ Ecumenical Protestant ideas about human rights emerged in discussions of a world government and were interconnected with debates about racism and imperialism.⁹⁰

Linking world events to racism in America, ecumenical Protestants began to more seriously confront white supremacy. The Federal Council explained that “some local current outrages,” including a lynching in Missouri and rioting in Detroit over the Sojourner Truth Housing complex, “have national significance and therefore international effects in the attitudes of other peoples.” They also observed that Protestant churches remained segregated. It was important to make churches racially inclusive because “each local church will do much to create the mood out of which a just and durable peace can grow.”⁹¹ Ecumenical Protestants condemned unequal treatment of racial minorities in employment, education, business, housing, transportation, the justice system, and in elections. The conference applauded President Roosevelt for his use of executive powers to create the Fair Employment Practices Commission. This statement criticizing racism was the Federal Council’s first since 1931.

In addition to introducing new ideas about race, human rights, and world government, the 1942 Delaware conference also helped heal the pacifist-realist rift. Van Dusen, a realist, applauded calls for a new world government. And so did Charles Clayton Morrison.⁹² The pacifist editor wrote that ecumenists “discovered that the areas of agreement among American Christians are very large as to what is required if a just and durable peace is to be established.” For Morrison, the significance of the Delaware conference was the critical distance Christianity would maintain from the state, even in wartime. During World War I, Protestants had been duped by the government. This time, Morrison thought, the churches would lead the way. Van Dusen had a different take, emphasizing the abandonment of older, childlike liberalism. “Today [Protestantism] is as tough-minded as twenty-five years ago it was naïve,” he wrote.⁹³ Van Dusen and Morrison continued to disagree about many things, but they found common ground on the postwar peace.

Van Dusen and Morrison also agreed that the gag order on discussing the war at Delaware was a bad idea, but for different reasons. They butted heads over a plank Morrison proposed at the conference, which stated that “the Christian Church, as such, is not at war.” The statement explained that, while the state has certain necessary functions, “the church in its essential nature is an ecumenical supranational body, separate from and independent of all states, including our own national state.” The idea of Protestantism transcending state loyalty was an old one, but the existence of the recently created World Council of Churches gave new relevance to the notion of Christianity as a “supranational” body. Morrison emphasized that “the Church” was a set of ideals, and these ideals were best expressed by international organizations and religious communions, not countries.

But for Van Dusen, this was all too abstract. The Christian Church was composed of real people in real churches with real responsibilities to the state. Van Dusen’s realist ecclesiology—his views of the nature and structure of the Christian Church—matched his desire to mobilize American Christianity against Nazism. No nation could claim to be fully on God’s side, he concluded, but some nations were closer than others. Protestants were part of a transnational community, but they were Americans, too, and had a duty to help their country when it waged a just war. The question of ecclesiology, and therefore the question of the relationship between church and state, simmered in ecumenical Protestant circles. The Methodists, for example, did not jettison their formal opposition to the war until 1944. But debates about belligerency no longer dominated Protestant attention.⁹⁴ Instead, ecumenical Protestants devoted their energy to planning for peace.

The Eclipse of the Pacifist-Realist Rivalry and the Rise of Protestant Globalism

American entry into World War II did not entirely end the infighting among ecumenical Protestants, but it did change the terms of the debate. In refocusing their attention on global (rather than merely international) politics and by self-critically debating what changes needed to take place at the level of the nation, town, and church in light of new international standards, they began to banish the ghosts of World War I. They moved on to new, creative solutions to international problems. For Morrison and for Van Dusen, the ecumenical Protestant churches had changed dramatically between the two world wars, and they agreed it was a good thing. At Delaware in 1942, America’s leading Protestants pledged themselves to work for a world government and experimented with human rights. Clarifying these ideas and getting the United States government to take them seriously became one of the most important goals of American ecumenical Protestants during World War II.

In the 1920s, Protestants began viewing the world as an interconnected whole, tied ever closer together by the spread of modernity and the Christian gospel. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, they began to think through the political implications of this interconnectedness. In concert with their European coreligionists they organized a countermobilization to the forces of world disorder and, in an antifascist context, they sketched plans for a new world government. Their plan to bind nations to a world government and, by extension, to God’s moral order, was their solution to the problem of nationalism and “power politics.”

By imagining a world order premised on globalism, American ecumenical Protestants reinvigorated the quest for democracy at home. Ideas once relegated to the margins of Protestant life—obscure journals, socialist societies, and seminary discussion groups—enjoyed an unprecedented popularity during the debates about the postwar peace. Radical ideas about world government, economic reforms, and racial justice were repackaged by 1942 and spread to popular audiences under the guise of postwar peace planning and came, increasingly, under the new banner of human rights. In this way, ecumenical Protestants and their institutions helped popularize once-marginal ideas and made them safe for a predominantly Christian nation.⁹⁵

The global gospel of American Protestants during World War II also facilitated a massive wartime political mobilization on behalf of their new outlook. Despite its origins as an elite and largely Anglo-American project, the mobilization would invite women, African Americans, and others to take part in the debates over the new world order. These discussions would remake American liberalism.