Today I discovered a really interesting book that I hope to buy that tells the story of how early in 20th Century America, pacifist progressive Christians had a conversion...and became strong interventionists, propelling America into the horrors and ditches of death wrought from WWI. The link and description is below. I invite our readers to notice similar overtones between the cattle calls then and now for war and the pursuit for "democracy and freedom" abroad.
SBW
http://www.isi.org/books/bookdetail.aspx?id=61e3f381-6b7d-410f-89aa-31bff2e246e9
The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation
By Richard M. Gamble
Publisher: ISI Books
"They died to save their country and they only saved the world."
This line, the final one in G. K. Chesterton's poem, "The English
Graves," serves for Richard M. Gamble as an interpretive key to a
peculiarly important moment in American history: the time of the First
World War, when progressive Christian leaders in America transformed
themselves from principled pacifists to crusading interventionists. The
consequence of this momentous shift, says Gamble was the triumph of the
idea that America has been destined by divine Providence to bring
salvation to the less enlightened nations of the world. In The War for Righteousness,
Gamble reconstructs the inner world of the social gospel clergy,
tracing the evolution of the clergy's interventionist ideology from its
roots in earlier efforts to promote a modern, activist Christianity. He
shows how these clergy eventually came to see their task as world
evangelization for the new creed of democracy and internationalism, and
ultimately for the redemption of civilization itself through the agency
of total war. World War I thus became a transcendent moment of
fulfillment. In the eyes of the progressive clergy, the years from 1914
to 1918 presented an unprecedented opportunity to achieve their vision
of a world transformed—the ancient dream of a universal and everlasting
kingdom of peace, justice, and righteousness. American sacrifice was
necessary not only to save the country, but to save the entire world.
Vividly narrating how the progressive clergy played a surprising role
in molding the public consensus in favor of total war, Gamble engages
the broader question of religion's role in shaping the modern American
mind and the development, at the deepest levels, of the logic of
messianic interventionism both at home and abroad. This timely book not
only fills a significant gap in our collective memory of the Great War,
it also helps demonstrate how and why that war heralded the advent of a
different American self-understanding.
Read and post comments on chapter 6 from The War for Righteousness in the ISI Forum. Click here.
What They're Saying...
"Richard
Gamble has made an enormously important contribution not only to
historical scholarship but also to our understanding of none of the
ideological strains that has played so influential a role in our
national life."
— American Conservative
"Gamble's
is a well-written, thoroughly researched, impassioned and yet detached
book, a most important contribution not only to the history of World
War I but also to the very intellectual history of the United States."
— John Lukacs, Los Angeles Times
“The War for Righteousness
is ‘relevant’ history in the best sense. Nobody can claim to understand
truly the role of the United States government in the world today
unless he has been over the ground that Gamble has covered. It is
impossible to over-estimate the contribution of this book to American
self-understanding.”
— Clyde N. Wilson, Professor of History, University of South Carolina
“Gamble’s
insight could scarcely be keener, nor his timing better. From Bunker
Hill to Baghdad, America’s wars have always been ‘holy’ because
Americans, from the Puritans of old to the secular liberals,
neo-conservatives, and evangelicals of today, imagine their country a
promised land with a calling to redeem the world ... if necessary, by
force. The War for Righteousness brilliantly parses the ‘progressive’ theology sustaining that mission.”
— Walter A. McDougall, University of Pennsylvania, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
"Gamble's
book . . . is essential reading for those wishing to understand the
rise and consolidation of liberal internationalism as America's
foreign-policy creed-one embraced across administrations since the late
1940s, by liberals and conservatives alike."
— Atlantic Monthly
How true it is. Looks like a good read.
Posted by: Faciamus | March 13, 2008 at 01:15 PM
Drug And Alcohol Treatment Amityville [url=http://www.sanddollarblues.com/]phentermine 37.5 no prescription[/url] Most people start to experience weight loss within the first couple of days and when these kind of results happen the individual doesnпїЅt want to stop the medication. http://www.sanddollarblues.com/ - buy cheap phentermine online
Posted by: QUEDANALA | August 21, 2011 at 02:01 AM