Woodrow Wilson: Ruling Elder, Spiritual President by Barry Hankins (review)

Barry Hankins's new religious biography of Woodrow Wilson offers a carefully argued and compelling spiritual portrait of the twenty-eighth president. Drawing mostly from Wilson's edited papers and publications, along with a scattering of contemporary press coverage, Hankins's slim volume skillfully reconstructs Wilson's religious world while galloping through the familiar details of Wilson's life.

Woodrow Wilson: Ruling Elder, Spiritual President rests on a subtle argument: Wilson's religious beliefs manifested most often not as theological introspection or religious partisanship, but as both a broader faith in Americanstyle democracy and an active commitment to the fight for social justice—or at least a particular vision of social justice that accommodated his infamously retrograde racial politics—through economic, political, and social reform. "The faith Wilson inherited," Hankins concludes, "had been gutted of its content—spiritualized into an amorphous doing of good" (p. 213). Wilson's first published writings, for instance, which appeared pseudonymously in the North Carolina Presbyterian, argued that Christians could serve God by performing public service. Hankins writes that "the essays assured Wilson that a call into public life as a statesman or scholar was an authentic way to serve God" (p. 10). Thus assured, Wilson never felt compelled to confine himself to the narrow denominational world of Presbyterianism.

Hankins's greatest strength is perhaps his argumentative restraint. His is not a simple exercise in poring through official papers and dutifully isolating every reference to God or religion or the Bible or Christianity. Hankins instead lets Wilson's biography speak for itself, and long stretches of the book even seem to elide spiritual questions altogether. This approach not only allows Hankins's account to stand by itself as a coherent, self-contained biography but also allows for a nuanced examination of Wilson's religious world. The sheer weight of genealogy might have drowned Wilson in Presbyterian theology and practice—his father, his mother's father, and his mother's brother were all Presbyterian ministers—but Wilson was also, Hankins writes, "a thoroughgoing product of the era he lived in" (p. 51). The ensuing interplay between the Reformed Calvinism of Wilson's Presbyterian forebears and the Progressive ferment of the turn of the twentieth century animates Hankins's biography.

Authors of such purposefully slim volumes must inevitably make choices, however, and much of Wilson's religious world therefore remains unexplored. Wilson's actual religious beliefs, for instance, are left frustratingly opaque. Moreover, Hankins's preference for biographical detail at the expense of historical context leads to the inevitable privileging of Wilson's Presbyterian upbringing as an explanatory force in Wilson's life, an argument for which Hankins can, at times, rely too heavily on metaphor and conjecture. While it may be true that Wilson's predilection for political debate reflected a fondness for Presbyterian church polity, for instance, such explanations are not always convincingly supported.

Such minor reservations, however, in no way diminish the power of Hankins's expertly constructed work, and this brief but important introduction to the religious and spiritual world of Woodrow Wilson is destined to become an essential resource for understanding one of the twentieth century's most iconic historical figures.