Negotiating God’s Peace: The League of Nations and the Fracturing of the Protestant Establishment

One hundred years ago, three men faced off in an unprecedented election. Republican William Howard Taft, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and Progressive Theodore Roosevelt vied for the nation’s highest office.  Although the 1912 presidential election concentrated on their differences on domestic issues, they faced off once again in 1918 over international affairs. Their disagreements about America’s proper role in the world revealed the unsteady ground upon which American Protestantism rested.

In order to examine the relationship between religion and foreign policy in the early twentieth century, this paper draws attention to the religious foundations animating the establishment of a  post-World War I international order. In establishing a foreign policy based on liberal Protestant principles, Wilson divided the established mainstream Protestant order. William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt serve as significant Protestant alternatives to Wilsonianism. All three represent Protestant foundations to American foreign policy; yet none could agree on what kind of international order best reflected Christianity. This case serves an important counter-narrative to the conventional historiography of American culture, religion, and politics in the twentieth century. This paper asserts that the first battle between liberal and conservative evangelicals did not occur over a domestic issue, like science, evolution, or education; rather, evangelicals first divided over the proper approach to foreign policy: how best can America serve the world?