Woodrow Wilson’s Christian Internationalism and the Pursuit of a Just and Lasting Peace

From the beginning of the Great War through peace negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, US president Woodrow Wilson focused less on military strategy and more on establishing peace. Both early twentieth-century observers and twenty-first-century historians recognize how important Christianity was to Wilson; yet, the relationship between his internationalism and Christianity is often misunderstood. Even though Wilson's position on the war reflected widely held Christian values and norms—first, avoiding war through neutrality and, second, using just war theory to explain American entry into the war—his conception of the League of Nations demonstrated how he understood Christian internationalism.