Niebuhr, Kuyper, and Foggy Bottom

Andrew Preston, a noted Cambridge historian and student of religion's influence on American foreign policy, recently wrote in Foreign Affairs about the "faith-based geopolitics" of President Obama. While critical of the frequent disconnect between his rhetoric and diplomacy, Preston notes that in his first term President Obama's most important foreign policy speeches often placed religion "front and center." Notably, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama referenced Reinhold Niebuhr's "theology of irony" to make the point that sometimes force is necessary to achieve peaceful ends. That was not the first time President Obama invoked Niebuhr. Shortly before his 2008 election, the President told editorialist David Brooks that Niebuhr was "one of my favorite philosophers" and explained that he was particularly influenced by Niebuhr's "compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world."

President Obama's faith-based geopolitical rhetoric is not likely to soothe the ears of secularists here and abroad, but religiously-grounded moral rhetoric in the service of America's foreign policy is as American as apple pie. Indeed, a religiously-infused worldview has shaped America's global engagement since its founding.

Certainly no president was more intentional about connecting Christianity to the conduct of foreign policy than our twenty-eighth, Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, Wilson's integration of faith and politics is striking given the extent to which matters of faith have been stripped from the public square over the intervening century. Wilson's faith-based approach to politics is engagingly discussed in Malcolm Magee's short but insightful book, What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy (Baylor U. Press, 2008).

It is well known that Woodrow Wilson was a foreign policy idealist and that his approach to it was moralistic. After all, it was Wilson who famously promised that America's participation in World War I would not be about selfish national interest—or realpolitik -- but about the altruism of making the world "safe for democracy." What is not well known about Wilson, and what Magee explains in fascinating detail, is how Wilson's personal and political worldview was profoundly shaped by Reformed Protestant theology. Challenging the prevailing historiography of Wilson that has all but ignored Wilson's theology, it is Magee's thesis that Wilson was a "Presbyterian in politics, a twentieth century John Knox, a Christian statesman whose overriding motivation was his determination to do God's work in a fallen world."

Born four years before the start of the Civil War, the "single-greatest influence" in Woodrow Wilson's life was that of father, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Staunton, Virginia. The elder Wilson graduated from Princeton Seminary where he was mentored by Charles Hodge, the great defender of traditional theological and Calvinist orthodoxy. According to Magee, Woodrow Wilson, like his father, was drawn to Hodge's "combination of intellectual strength and fidelity to the faith." As a Princeton undergraduate in the late 1870s, Woodrow Wilson's theology was further shaped in a campus orbit that included other great 19th-century Princeton theologians A. A. Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield. While Wilson never identified with the early 20th-century fundamentalists, religious historian D. G. Hart notes that Wilson was a friend of Warfield's fundamentalist colleague, J. Gresham Machen. Wilson visited the Machen home in Baltimore and Machen reciprocated in Princeton.

Though Wilson was not drawn to fundamentalism, his theological ideas had much in common with the transformational, neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper delivered his famous world-and-life-view-focused "Stone Lectures" at Princeton in 1898 where Woodrow Wilson was now a professor of jurisprudence and political economy. While Magee writes that there is no record of Wilson and Kuyper meeting, he observes that like Kuyper, "the distinction between secular and sacred . . . simply did not exist in Wilson's mind."

For Wilson, the calling of Christian believers is to serve as God's transformational agents in redeeming all spheres of creation. The vocation of politics is every bit a sacred task as that of pastoral ministry. Magee shows that Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion was hugely important to Woodrow Wilson's understanding of his earthly responsibilities and it became his textbook of politics, even to the point that Wilson's political philosophy teetered on the edges of theocracy, or what more recently has been called Reconstructionism. As a young Bryn Mawr professor, Wilson taught his students that John Calvin was the "great reforming Christian statesman." Summarizing Calvin's impact on Wilson, Magee argues that Wilson's understanding of the Christian statesman mandated the reconstruction of "his own society in covenantal patterns," along the lines of Calvin's Geneva. For Wilson, therefore, participation in politics was not an option, but a "necessary . . . outcome of this Calvinist faith."

Doctrinal components of Reformed and Presbyterian theology, specifically those of c ovenant and antinomy— the Reformed belief that what might appear to be contradictory is in reality not so—also held "deep meaning" for Wilson and framed his understanding of presidential responsibilities. Most importantly, Magee argues that Wilson's foreign policy idealism flowed directly from the Reformed doctrine of covenant . To Wilson "bringing the world into a covenantal pattern was the purpose that directed all of human history."

Furthermore, Wilson saw the world as divided into two camps: those who served "the good purposes of God" and the "evil opposition" who sought to thwart God's purposes. Indeed, Wilson's explicit use of religious language is astonishing to our contemporary ears: "The field of battle is the world. From the abodes of righteousness advances the host of God's people under the leadership of Christ." Or these words: "There is a mighty task before us and . . . [it] is to make the United States a mighty Christian nation, and to Christianize the world." This unequivocal moral vision and sense of destiny goes a long way in helping to explain the uncompromising moralism that characterized Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy and proved so aggravating, even maddening, to Wilson's political contemporaries at home and abroad.

True to his theological commitment that Christianity is a full-orbed faith allowing no bifurcation between the secular and sacred or the personal and public, Magee writes that Wilson's 1913 Presidential inaugural address "spoke to the nation as a Presbyterian minister's sermon might speak to his congregation." Wilson's first foreign policy test came shortly after his inauguration when a destabilizing civil war in Mexico threatened American investments. Magee writes that the Mexican crisis "was a demonstration of how Wilson's application of antinomy to foreign policy decision making worked."

Specifically, "[he] developed his thinking about intervention in foreign countries in a manner consistent with the way he balanced historical contradictions the country had already faced in international politics." And, as would be the case after America entered World War I, Wilson was guided in his actions vis-à-vis Mexico by the belief—in Magee's characterization—that "a righteous cause would have unintended righteous, and providential, consequences."

Magee also emphasizes that Wilson's foreign policy was highly personalized. Wilson made no Niebuhrian distinction between "moral man" and "immoral society." Rather, Wilson tended to personalize all human problems, including those of international politics. To Wilson, the crisis in Mexico, like the First World War a short time later, "were just personal human problems writ large." While this logic made sense to Wilson, Magee goes on to point out that by personalizing foreign policy and cloaking it in the language of morality he generated "a greater hatred of his policies" than would have been the case had his foreign policy been grounded in more traditional considerations of national interest.

Following the traumatic loss of Wilson's wife, Ellen, in August 1914—the same month that saw the start of The Great War—Wilson's penchant to personalize the actions of nation states intensified, and he became, in Magee's words, "even more invested in his personal mission to create a better world." At the war's onset, Wilson believed that American neutrality was the best way to broker a just and peaceful world. Drawing upon his Reformed worldview, Wilson believed that the United States was divinely chosen, in his own words, to be the "mediating nation of the world." With the sinking of the Lusitania , and with it the loss of 128 American lives, Wilson's focus shifted from protecting American neutrality to direct participation in a righteous war. At stake, Magee writes, was "a final war, a new system, a better covenant between the nations. . . . The providential time had come to make a better world."

The rest of the story is well known. America entered the war in April of 1917 and nineteen months later an armistice was signed. Determined to transcend the balance of power politics that had defined nation-state relations for nearly three hundred years, Wilson seized the moment of victory and embraced his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations as the foundation for a new world order grounded in the principles of universal love and justice. He believed, Magee writes, that this would be the fulfillment of God's divine purpose for history. But it was not to be. Wilson ignored and alienated a Congressional leadership who turned against him and defeated the League treaty. At the same time, Wilson's political crusade took a terrible toll on his own body as he suffered several serious strokes and near mental collapse. Wilson left the White House in 1920 a man broken in mind as well as spirit.

Magee concludes that the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson "had more to do with Jerusalem than Athens. It was a tragedy of faith." And so it was. The lesson of Woodrow Wilson's presidency is not that Jerusalem has nothing to say to Athens in the realm of international politics; rather, it is that good intentions inspired by misguided theology can lead to disastrous foreign policy consequences.

The antidote to idealism of the Wilsonian sort is a deep knowledge of the contours of history, a keen understanding of the moral ambiguities that delimit human action in the "meanwhile" in which we live, and a commitment to honing the virtue of prudence in defining the purposes to which we direct national power. In short, Reinhold Niebuhr is not a bad place to start after all.