---

'War for Righteousness' Book Garners National Attention
Read a statement about America's moral duty "to show the paths of freedom to all the world" and you might think it was a quote taken from the day's newspapers. But that statement was made 90 years ago by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, three years before America became involved in World War I.

The similarities that modern-day war terminology has with that of World War I has drawn national attention to Dr. Richard M. Gamble's book, "The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation." ...

---

Onward, Christian Soldiers
...What Richard Gamble has done in this important study is to show that this violent tradition of liberal righteousness extends much further into the past. The War for Righteousness chronicles the story of “progressive” Christian clergy, whom we might expect to be faithful to the Prince of Peace, but who instead overwhelmingly favored U.S. involvement in World War I. German militarism, which they viewed as responsible for the war, was in their eyes a scourge upon civilization that had to be eradicated; otherwise the international order would not be redeemed and ultimately set on the path of righteousness.

That is an important piece of history in itself. But Gamble also shows how these clergymen, caught up in their conviction that the U.S. was at least in some sense the savior of the world, applied to America the same language that Christians had traditionally applied to Christ. The Christian categories and concepts that Social Gospel theologians had found malleable enough to make railroad regulation sound like a direct command of Christ were thus drafted into service in the conflict that had engulfed Europe. It thus became impossible for them to conceive of the war in measured, rational terms: to America they had assigned the righteousness of Christ, and there could be no compromise between Christ and Satan....

... These thinkers likewise criticized a transcendent view of the kingdom of God, suggesting instead that the kingdom of God would be achieved once “justice” had come to characterize human relations and social ills were at last eradicated. According to Rev. C. Arthur Lincoln, pastor of Buffalo’s First Congregational Church, the church’s goal was “not that men should become Christians and thus save their souls from hell but that men should become Christian and work hard to save the world from hell.” It was with such thoughts in mind that progressive Christians threw themselves into the holy cause of World War I.

It was once the conventional wisdom that World War I marked the end of progressivism in America. But as economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard showed, the war in fact represented the culmination of progressivism. The progressive mentality that was so anxious for Americans to shed Jeffersonian cautions about big government was gratified by the domestic consequences of the war. Progressives, who overwhelmingly supported U.S. entry, were delighted at the opportunity both to extend state power through the massive economic planning that Woodrow Wilson adopted during the war and to exploit wartime patriotism to promote collectivism and the idea of service to the state as American values.

And that is just how progressive Christianity saw things as well. Christian Century happily predicted that “the right of the State to commandeer its able-bodied citizens for service will survive the war and will be greatly strengthened by it.” Military training camps, they hoped, would become “permanent features of our national life,” though they would train men for social service rather than for war.

Christian Century likewise spoke of the increasing acknowledgment of “the social sin of the German nation as a whole.” Now that America understood the important progressive Christian concepts of social sin and guilt, it would “be incomparably easier to apply the principle of social sinning to groups and institutions within a single nation and to bring to bear upon them through the social gospel the super-personal forces of condemnation and destruction.” The war had thus facilitated the application of the social gospel both domestically and internationally.

According to Gamble, progressive Christians viewed the war in Manichaean terms rather than as the morally ambiguous clash of imperial rivals that it was. “For some of the clergy,” he explains, “the European War by 1916 had already assumed the character of a holy war.” He quotes a seminary professor as saying that “pacifism does not mean passivity” and “does not renounce physical force.” To remain neutral while Europe fought its own wars “may have been justifiable for our nation in its infancy; it is not now. The pacifists do not advocate any such peace policy as that. Their motive is not safety but service. They would have ours not a hermit nation but a humanitarian nation.”

Gamble cites a number of figures who actually feared that the conflict might end prematurely, before righteousness had had the opportunity to triumph. One progressive Christian told a meeting of the World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches, “We do not want the war stopped until peace can be established on the basis of justice. For myself I believe it must be fought out.”

When in December 1916 Woodrow Wilson invited the major powers to state their war aims (as a prelude to possible talks aimed at an end to hostilities), 60 prominent clergymen signed a letter of rebuke to the president. “We are apt to forget,” they wrote, “that there are conditions under which the mere stopping of warfare may bring a curse instead of a blessing. We need to be reminded that peace is the triumph of righteousness and not the mere sheathing of the sword.”

The idiom of the progressive Christian even made its way into the halls of Congress on the eve of war. More than one congressman compared Christ’s sacrifice for the sins of the world to the divine mission that the U.S. was about to undertake. A New York congressman declared that “Christ gave his life upon the cross that mankind might gain the Kingdom of Heaven, while to-night we shall solemnly decree the sublimest sacrifice ever made by a nation for the salvation of humanity, the institution of world-wide liberty and freedom.”

Gamble contends that in the name of bringing about perpetual peace, progressive clergy, through their crude application of Christian language and concepts to the war and its contending parties, helped to legitimize the 20th century’s first total war....

...In the progressive mindset, the war became the proving ground for Christians who possessed a social consciousness. Instead of focusing on the hereafter, the truly saved Christian was the one who offered himself here and now in service to his fellow man. “The best mark of a ‘saved’ man,” wrote Rev. William P. Merrill in his book Christian Internationalism, “is not that he wants to go to heaven, but that he is willing to go to China, or to the battle-field in France, or to the slums of the city, or to the last dollar of his resources, or to the limit of his energy, to set forward the Kingdom of God.” This is a particularly revealing remark, according to Gamble: “In Merrill’s expansive ideal, there was apparently no distinction between personal redemption, social service, and enlistment in the United States Army.”

Ecumenism is an inevitable byproduct when a pluralistic society goes to war, since it becomes urgent to emphasize that what unites the citizenry is more important than what divides them. Serving in the trenches alongside men of a variety of creeds and performing reciprocal acts of heroism can only have a similar effect.

Recognizing this, a New York Morning Telegraph editorial in 1918 observed that “loyalty to the flag swiftly is coming to be recognized as of equal or even greater virtue than fidelity to a church, a religious sect, or an ordained priesthood. … Soldiers of Moses, soldiers of Christ, and soldiers of Democracy have become unified in the one Grand Army of Liberty, which is giving the only meaning worth while to …‘The Church Militant.’” Thus was the United States made something sacred, higher than all other fidelities and obligations....