Onward Christian Soldiers: Capturing the Nation and the World for Christ

The overt influence of conservative evangelical Protestants in American political and cultural life during the presidency of George W. Bush sent pundits and historians alike scurrying to discover the roots of the phenomenon. Some writers sounded the alarm about the imminent demise of pluralistic democracy and its replacement by an intolerant theocracy. Fortunately, those shrill voices have been balanced by the more temperate and informed analyses of a coterie of scholars who are helping reclaim the oft-neglected histories of individuals and institutions whose conservative or religious worldviews often rendered them as marginal figures in a largely secular-liberal historiography. Recent years have brought a bevy of books examining the development of twentieth-century conservatism, as well as a similar burst in creativity and sophistication in the study of American religion, including studies of missionaries and missions. The need to place current events in context has raised once-unfashionable subjects from the dust and helped us realize that they were present all along, shaping the world in ways that often went unacknowledged at the time.

Two fine products of this latest trend are Ian Tyrrell’s Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire and God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right by Daniel K. Williams. While superficially dissimilar in space and time—Tyrrell’s principal subjects are missionaries abroad and Protestant reformers from the 1880s through the 1920s, whereas Williams focuses on conservative Protestants within the U.S., primarily in the latter half of the twentieth century—together they provide an illuminating narrative about the persistent but often elusive power of evangelical Protestantism in American history. If the particular players and events are different, many of the same themes emerge: tensions between the contrasting internal logics of moral reform and state power; the creation and application of a sense of American exceptionalism, with its interplay of moral particularism and interventionism; the prevalence of gendered themes and women as foot soldiers in communities and discourses largely dominated by men; the complex relationship between religious and state actors each seeking legitimacy and influence from the other; the competing priorities among reformers torn between pragmatism and purity; and the complicated dialectics between Christian and American identities and between individual revival and public reform (or individual reform and public revival). While each author clearly has the George W. Bush presidency in the corner of his eye, neither allows it to affect the production of first-rate histories of their respective subjects, grounded in abundant primary source research and sound scholarly analysis.

In the 1880s, following two decades of war and reconstruction, a new generation of American Protestant reformers began to look outward for opportunities to spread moral uplift around the globe. According to these reformers, America’s newly extended power abroad would be built on the foundation of a Christian state, while the worldwide spread of Christianity through foreign missions would in turn enhance revival and reform at home. This process represented a “complicated dialectic between the national and the transnational” (p. 7) and produced a “growing allegiance between the state and moral reform” (p. 9). Reforming the World is concerned primarily with the transnational networks and organizations that constituted the infrastructure of an American moral empire.

The size of the international missionary and reform network was impressive; just one organization, Christian Endeavor, boasted over seventy thousand local societies with nearly four million members worldwide by 1909. The nature of foreign mission work, particularly in non-Christian societies, militated against relying on the American denominational model and its attendant internecine quarrels. What emerged instead was an early brand of nondenominationalism that emphasized “practical application of evangelism” over doctrinal and ecclesiastical disputes (p. 75). Many organizations, including the YMCA, traded their original...