While many histories of the long Progressive Era acknowledge that faith mattered to President Woodrow Wilson, few seriously consider the crucial role religion played in shaping his foreign policy specifically and twentieth-century U.S. foreign relations more broadly. As a result, this dissertation examines the life and legacy of the twenty-eighth President of the United States in order to better understand the religious context informing the expansion of America's global responsibilities. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which assumes that the "sacred" and the "secular" are always separate, I assert that religion played a consistent and significant role in U.S. foreign relations during the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Wilson's childhood and the development of his unique relationship to Presbyterianism and ending with the so-called "resurrection" of Wilson's ideals during World War II, this project provides a more robust treatment of the role of religion and American foreign policy in the early twentieth century. Although Wilson spoke of "church" and "state" as separate entities, his lived experience in the White House demonstrates that there was no functional difference between his "religious" and "political" life. Accordingly, when President Wilson introduced the Covenant of the League of Nations to the American public in 1919 he revealed a vision for a new world order informed by current global affairs and, I assert, by his longstanding commitment to liberal Protestantism. Not merely a biography, this dissertation moves from Wilson to his opponents who also crafted their foreign policy position according to their ideological commitments. On the Senate floor and at public forums around the country, Wilson opponents criticized the League of Nations according to theological justifications for God's order, national sovereignty, and American exceptionalism. Histories of American religion often describe the early twentieth century as a time of a "two-party" system divided between "modernists" and "fundamentalists." I expand this conversation by connecting the discord among American Protestants about being "in" the world but not "of" it to public debates that pitted isolationists against internationalists. This bitter Protestant division during the post-war and interwar period had consequences in American foreign policy that have been too long neglected. World War I revealed the intensity of the Protestant establishment's competing notions of God's order and American exceptionalism. This disunity reached its breaking point when President Wilson unveiled his Covenant of the League of Nations to Congress and the American public. As Wilson tried to put his liberal, social Christian values to practice at the Paris Peace Conference, conservative Protestants renewed their convictions that the United States should be a white, Protestant nation. The Ku Klux Klan and other nativist organizations gained members just as Wilson sought to actualize a "brotherhood of man" under the "fatherhood of God" and the League of Nations. Public support for a liberal Protestant internationalism shifted under Wilson's feet and the Senate, influenced by Fundamentalist discourse, failed to ratify his chief foreign policy initiative. In the wake of nativist resurgences, liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews focused their energies on re-narrating American democracy and American exceptionalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Political figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt who served in the Wilson administration turned public discourse toward an Americanism that looked beyond the nation's borders and valued religion generally. Resurrected as "Wilsonianism," Wilson's internationalism received a makeover that reformulated Wilson's liberal Presbyterianism as "Judeo-Christian." This process causes diplomatic historians to characterize Wilson and his approach to foreign policy as generally "religious" or "moralistic," rather than connect Wilsonian internationalism to the distinctly liberal Protestant roots from which he developed his ideology. Sitting at the intersection of Religious Studies, American Studies, and International Relations, this dissertation engages in a cross disciplinary dialogue. With a more robust analysis of the role religion played in the Wilson administration, this dissertation connects changes in American religious life to public policy trends; corrects misperceptions about the nature of religion in the public sphere (especially those that assume a sharp separation between "the sacred" and "the secular") and contributes to the growing interest in religion and politics in the twentieth century by tracing the origins of popular Cold War trends. With a more sophisticated approach to "religion," this dissertation departs from diplomatic histories that evaluate personal religious sagas or religious lobbying only; in contrast, I narrate the ways in which several modes of religious thought and expression operate underneath the surface of "pragmatic" policy concerns to better understand the complexities that motivate power relations generally and U.S. international relations specifically. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2013. / May 21, 2013. / American History, American Religious History, evangelicalism, International
Affairs, Woodrow Wilson, World War I / Includes bibliographical references. / Amanda Porterfield, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Creswell, University Representative; John Corrigan, Committee Member; Sumner Twiss, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_253318 |
| Contributors | Burnidge, Cara L. (authoraut), Porterfield, Amanda (professor directing dissertation), Creswell, Michael (university representative), Corrigan, John (committee member), Twiss, Sumner (committee member), Department of Religion (degree granting department), Florida State University (degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Florida State University, Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text |
| Format | 1 online resource, computer, application/pdf |
| Rights | This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s). The copyright in theses and dissertations completed at Florida State University is held by the students who author them. |
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