Liberalism

On January 8, 1918—one hundred years ago—President Woodrow Wilson mounted the rostrum of the House of Representatives, America’s inner sanctum of democracy, to deliver one of the most consequential speeches in history.

From the ashes of both Bryan’s ignoble isolationism and Wilson’s utopian universalism rose the school of Christian realism advocated by Reinhold Niebuhr.

Born a hundred years ago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would write The Gulag Archipelago, a blistering account of the Gulag system under Stalin. George Kennan called this novel “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.”

In this article, originally published in Christianity and Crisis on April 19, 1943, F. Ernest Johnson illuminates the twin wartime concerns of brutality and cynicism. Johnson illustrates the importance of maintaining public morality; losing compassion for the enemy will scuttle the peace and instigate the next war, while ignoring social influence in determining personal ethics invariably corrodes society on a more insidious level. To paraphrase John 17: 14-19, we must be in the world, but not of it.

Are we, in fact, seeking through foreign policy to protect ourselves from a pre-millennial apocalypse—or, perhaps, to bring about a post-millennial one? The intellectual and spiritual resources of Protestant Christianity have a great deal to add to this debate. But up until now, I haven’t seen much evidence that these resources have yet been brought to bear on these questions.

Foretelling a time of cultivation, Isaiah prophesies, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” One cannot plow a field with a sword, nor prune a tree with a spear. In this article, originally published in Christianity and Crisis on March 8, 1943, John Knox contrasts the promotion of good with the destruction of evil, particularly in conflict. Promoting good is insufficient; the conduct of war and the creation of peace are distinct phenomena to be pursued with discrete tools.

Despite his errors and overstatements, Cavanaugh is helpful for thinking through the perils of nations and nationalism in an era when both seem to be enjoying a renaissance. He is best read as a theologian, not a historian, and a polemical theologian whose strident claims are best met with a healthy dose of skepticism.

This provocative article written by Donald H. Stewart in the heat of World War II calls on the American Church to guide America toward a responsible patriotism which jettisons hatred and self-righteous aggrandizement while remembering “judgment belongeth unto God.”

After the UK general election this month, reactions to a Tory minority government with DUP support and Tim Farron’s privately-held Christian beliefs reveal religious intolerance in British politics.