For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War

For God and Globe

Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War

Michael G. Thompson

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

For Nikki, Evie, Willem, and Joey

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. Radical Christian Internationalism at The World Tomorrow

1. Anti-imperialism for Jesus

2.The World Tomorrow as a Foreign Policy Counterpublic

3. A Funeral and Two Legacies

PART II. Ecumenical Christian Internationalism at Oxford

4. All God’s Household

5. Race, Nation, and Globe at Oxford 1937

6. Oxford’s Atlantic Crossing

7. The Dulles Commission, the UN, and the Americanization of Christian Internationalism

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This book, like most, has been a communal project. Colleagues, friends, and family have all lent encouragement and support, given insights, or sparked changes of direction that I hope are as visible to them as they are to me. First, the project owes a great debt to the ever-buzzing and intellectually stimulating History Department at Sydney University—an extraordinary place to work on U.S. and international history. I must thank Neville Meaney for originally helping pique my interest in Reinhold Niebuhr and American nationalism years ago. For both her generosity as a mentor and her intellectual leadership in developing international and transnational history at Sydney, I am grateful to Glenda Sluga. Alison Bashford’s own suggestive and field-shaping approach to international history has always been matched by her sincere interest in others’ work and welfare, my own included. Clare Corbould’s encouragement and her welcome asking of hard questions have helped shape this project at vital points. Enormous thanks are due to Stephen Robertson, whose commitment to methodological rigor and innovation I aspire to. For his collegiality and support I owe Stephen far more gratitude than I can adequately communicate. And, Penny, Andrew, Frances, Mike, James, Cindy, Gab, and everyone else: What a pleasure to work alongside you these last years!

The United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney has provided much support and a hospitable environment in which to conduct research for this book. I thank CEO Bates Gill, Brendon O’Connor and Rebecca Sheehan in particular for their ongoing personal support, and I thank the Centre for its support in providing vital funding in the final stages of the work.

Several others beyond the sandstone confines of Sydney University have offered invaluable guidance. Prominent among these is Ian Tyrrell, whose far-reaching and diverse interests in U.S. history has left a deep impression on my thinking. I trust he knows also what his personal support means to me. Andrew Preston—whose own work has set the benchmark in this field—has been of similar encouragement, generously offering valuable direction in later stages. Mark T. Edwards’s collegiality and insight on all things mainline Protestant has also assisted me greatly. The Sydney EHA/CTE crowd, including Stuart Piggin, Geoff Treloar, Steve Chavura, Meredith Lake, and Robert Linder, has provided welcome friendship and a valuable hub for trialing ideas. I thank Michael McGandy at Cornell University Press for prescient criticism and sound advice, all of which, I trust, has made my writing sharper than it would otherwise have been. Finally, this book may not have materialized without Paul Kramer. Aside from the considerable impact of his own thinking in the field of the United States in the world scholarship, Paul’s generosity, friendship, and help have been unwavering.

Portions of the Introduction have been reproduced and adapted from my article, Sherwood Eddy, the missionary enterprise, and the rise of Christian internationalism in 1920s America, Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 1 (2015): 65–93. I thank Cambridge University Press for their permission to reproduce this material.

In the research process, I accrued several debts to librarians and archivists. Special thanks must be made to Ruth Tonkiss Cameron of Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary, for guidance and suggestions on the records of the Theological Discussion Group and Fellowship of Socialist Christians. Martha Smalley at Yale Divinity School Library provided a warm welcome to an Australian and untrammeled access to the excellent Special Collections held at Yale. Thanks also to Barbara Addison at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, who not only offered access to the Devere Allen Papers but also shared her own research into Allen’s work. Staff at the Library of Congress were outstandingly helpful in providing rapid and streamlined access to the Reinhold Niebuhr Papers. The Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton, and especially Jennie Cole, are to be thanked for their great patience in processing large volumes of copying for shipment to Australia.

Family tend to bear the brunt of projects such as these, but I could not possibly have asked for more supportive people around me. For helping at various stages with research, my sister Briar deserves special mention. My parents, Glenn and Roz, have remained not merely benignly interested but—perhaps supernaturally—positively supportive throughout the process. Pieter and Sue: Great thanks are due to you for all your warm and generous help expressed in innumerable ways. I thank Norma Hardy for support that has been vital to this project’s survival. To Evie, Will, and Joey, gifts who arrived during the course of writing: Your mischief and sense of fun cheer the soul! Most of all I must thank my dear wife, Nikki, my chief editor, fellow discussant, coach, critic, and best friend. I could not have done this without her.

Introduction

Missionaries, Mainliners, and the Making of a Movement

Writing in 1928 in The World Tomorrow, the New York-based magazine that he helped finance, Sherwood Eddy poured scorn on his earlier views of the missionary enterprise. Having been in the field since 1896, Eddy was still, in the 1920s, a YMCA missionary of extraordinary international standing—a celebrity evangelist to a generation of mainline, ecumenical Protestants. But what he confessed now, with embarrassment, was the way that back then, in the prewar days, we felt a divine call to go from our own favored ‘Christian’ nation to the backward ‘heathen’ nations; he cringed to think of the way he felt called to take up ‘the white man’s burden’ and go out from our ‘superior’ race to the backward peoples of the world.¹ Now, he noted, Christians would be better to adopt a posture of being deeply disturbed by the semi-pagan order at home. How could Americans claim to be of a superior race when we still lead the world in our record of lynching, in race and color prejudices? How could Anglo-Saxon democracies claim to be superior when their imperialism has conquered or exploited over half of Asia and all but one-thirtieth of Africa, and when together they spend more on naval armaments than the rest of the world combined?²

Not only did Eddy’s article exemplify the far-ranging blend of antiracism, anti-imperialism, and antimilitarism that characterized Christian internationalism in the interwar period, his expression highlighted that something striking had happened to the grammar of the typical missionary sentence. New qualifiers, quotation marks, and distancing devices pervaded articles, reports, and deliberations of missionaries like Eddy, all with the function of conveying missionaries’ self-conscious eschewal of a notion most of them had until recently taken for granted: namely, the idea that America and other Western countries were Christian nations. The same year, John R. Mott, a close confidant of Eddy’s in the YMCA, and still then arguably America’s most globally influential Protestant missionary and ecumenist, distanced himself from earlier language by referring to our so-called western Christian civilization and the so-called non-Christian world in his address to the landmark world conference of the International Missionary Council in Jerusalem.³ American Quaker theologian Rufus Jones, who wrote a major preparatory paper used at that same conference, was more direct: Delegates went to Jerusalem not as members of a Christian nation to convert other nations which are not Christian, but as Christians within a nation far too largely non-Christian.⁴ At a later Student Christian Movement (SCM) conference, Dutch theologian Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft—a figure close to Mott and a leader of the new ecumenism—reflected on the changed speech-rules. There was a time, and that not so very long ago, when the expression ‘The Christian West’ seemed no less natural and self-evident than platitudes like ‘The Sunny South.’ Now, he believed, people had to speak differently. In an address carefully billed The ‘Christian’ West, he remarked that if it were not for the inverted commas, our title would have been taken for a cynical joke.⁵

Ecumenists’ and missionaries’ rejection of the language of Christian nationhood was part of their attempted expression of a new Christian internationalist consciousness; it was the negative voicing of their positive argument for wider solidarities. Sherwood Eddy, for example, did not restrict himself to criticizing old nationalist notions, but set about deploying his missionary credentials to help create a new internationalist viewpoint in American Protestant life. He took the format of his traditional missionary report-letters and applied it to reporting on international affairs—letting readers of the Churchman, Christian Century, or New York Times know about nationalist reform efforts in China, the features of Japanese imperialism in Korea, or the hopes of the new Czechoslovakian government in the 1920s, for example.⁶ And, he used the wide contacts and facility with travel he had developed as a YMCA missionary to create a new innovation: his annual traveling seminar.

Eddy’s seminar—an iconic interwar Christian internationalist institution in its own right—was an annual study tour through Europe, led by Eddy, but with major British and European political and church leaders appearing as guest lecturers.⁷ By giving shapers of Protestant thought exposure to world conditions, the seminar was Eddy’s attempt, in his words, to create an avenue to international understanding and peace.⁸ Certainly participants saw its significance in such terms. Having freshly returned from Eddy’s 1927 tour, F. Ernest Johnson, director of the Department of Research and Education in the U.S. Federal Council of Churches, claimed, No other single factor has been more potent in securing recognition in America of an international viewpoint.⁹ The Christian Century, a key liberal Protestant magazine whose editor, Charles Clayton Morrison, was also an Eddy Seminar participant, wondered at the enormous significance of … American minds of many types who return to their homes bearing the inspiration of new international understanding.¹⁰ Aided by its selective enrollment policy—restricted to those who could exert wide influence on American public opinion—the seminar had a notable ripple effect in American public life.¹¹ A who’s who of Progressive leaders and thinkers were influenced by their time on Eddy’s steamship. The first tour in 1921 began with less than a dozen participants. By 1926 the tour consisted of 140 people. By 1927 the cumulative total of alumni was nearly one thousand.¹² Hubert Herring, head of the Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America, was inspired to start his own Latin American Seminar after his experience of Eddy’s seminar.¹³ Ben M. Cherrington, a YMCA figure, later International Relations scholar, and still later, the first head of the U.S. State Department’s Culture division, was also an early seminar traveller.¹⁴ And it was on a trip through the Ruhr with the Eddy Seminar in 1923 that Reinhold Niebuhr turned to pacifism, confessing in his journal that he was finally done with the war business—a position he later famously reversed.¹⁵

Both the negative and positive articulations of Eddy’s 1920s work—his critiques of nationalism, imperialism, and racism on one hand, and his efforts to promote internationally minded study and publicity via his seminars on the other—were representative of the wider movement of which he was a part. That movement, its ideas, enterprises, and legacies, is the subject of this book. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the following chapters show, Christian internationalism in the United States was characterized by three factors. First, as a movement of thought, it consisted in large part in the proliferation of new enterprises devoted to producing Christian reflection on the ethics of international relations—world conferences, traveling seminars like Eddy’s, new forms of print and periodical culture, ecumenical study commissions, and more. As socially concerned Protestants discovered international life as their newest sphere of reform, the number and scale of such activities mushroomed. Such a development dovetailed with the rapid development of secular international relations institutions—whether private groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations and Foreign Policy Association, or new International Relations university departments.¹⁶ But more than merely producing knowledge, Christian internationalists sought to deploy it to shape the engagement of fellow Protestants with the deliberations of the foreign policy public and, in fact, to crystallize new public formations altogether.

A second defining characteristic of Christian internationalism in the interwar period was its distinct structure of thinking that held Christian universalism to be a check against nationalism rather than a boon for it. This basic normative commitment—together with the fact that the very question of the relationship between Christianity and nationalism became an unprecedentedly conscious one in the 1920s and 1930s—helped set interwar Christian internationalism apart from that of other periods. Unlike liberal Protestant arguments justifying the Wilsonian war for righteousness in 1917, and counter to the crusading rhetoric offered by many mainline or evangelical Protestants in the early Cold War, Christian internationalists in the interwar decades rejected outright the notion that God’s universal cause could be seen as immanent within the nation’s cause. Such a claim was idolatrous. Rather, Christian universalism was to be a check against the tendencies of nationalism to make falsely religious claims. Nationalism represented, in the words of famed New York preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, a competing religion … the most dangerous rival of Christian principles on earth.¹⁷ Historians have found no shortage of material to illustrate the ways American Protestantism has offered a yes to the state—functioning as an ideological ancillary to expansionism and imperialism—but have taken comparatively little stock of movements and moments that were characterized by no.¹⁸ The Christian internationalism examined in this book was a movement animated by a no. Indeed, not only did its proponents answer in the negative, they often went further than recent scholars have in asking fellow American Christians whether they had mistaken for religion the cult of their own national sovereignty.¹⁹

Thirdly, interwar Christian internationalism consisted of a holistic, oppositional, and at times radical political orientation that in many enterprises actually united realists and pacifists, setting them apart from their legalist and institutionalist counterparts. As such, the movement’s shape, as examined in the case studies that follow, does not fit the reductive narrative strategies with which historians have tended to identify Protestant thinking in the 1920s to 1940s. For one, the interests of the movement ranged far beyond the issues of peace versus war, or pacifism versus realism. Christian internationalists of both pacifist and realist persuasions together sought to agitate against the influences of American capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, and racism in world affairs, against what Sherwood Eddy and others had called the white peril.²⁰ The movement’s wide-ranging character owed much to it roots in the missionary enterprise. These origins gave it an intellectual history related to, but distinct from, that of other internationalisms of the period. Like liberal internationalism, Christian internationalism was implicitly defined as an alternative to Communist internationalism. And, like liberal internationalism, Christian internationalism was suffused with a cosmopolitanism that, though unacknowledged, owed some debt to Kant’s vision of perpetual peace.²¹ But, unlike mainstream liberal internationalism, such missionary-rooted Christian internationalism was distinguished by its lack of focus on international law and international institutions. Its protagonists stressed instead cultural causality in international relations and the importance of nonstate, person-to-person international relations—emphases that reflected missionaries’ positioning as agents of cultural diplomacy and nonstate international relations by nature of their vocation. Retaining this orientation, interwar Christian internationalists insisted throughout the 1920s to 1940s that cultural relations—especially race relations—were constitutive of international relations, the domestic intertwined with the global. On this they were far from conservative internationalists in the international law tradition, for whom international relations meant regulating conduct between discretely defined nation-states.²²

By way of definition, it should be clarified that my use of the term Christian internationalist is not intended to imply a greater membership than this movement actually had. Used here, it refers to the substantive impulse of these particular subjects—using their language, and that of scholars since—rather than their demographic and denominational scope.²³ Christian internationalism was largely, but not entirely, liberal Protestant in its base, with a notable Quaker influence through related peace organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Notably absent from the following narrative are Catholic Christians and conservative evangelical Christians—or, in the parlance of the 1920s, fundamentalists. Further work could indeed be done on parallel efforts among American Catholic organizations. For instance, the Catholic Association for International Peace, founded around 1926, aimed to help Catholic Americans in ascertaining more fully the facts of international life.²⁴ Relative to the size and influence of Protestant groups at the time, however, such groups were marginal, and neither shared with Protestants the institutional basis in missionary agencies nor, at that point, the mixed blessing of constituting a de facto national establishment.²⁵

Conservative evangelicals, on the other hand, are not examined here as, on the whole, they less often engaged in such discourse. Across denominations, they were imbued with what Markku Ruotsila shows was a relatively consistent anti-internationalism.²⁶ The rising influence of premillennial dispensationalist teaching among fundamentalist churches—a belief that contemporary history as interpreted through biblical prophecy revealed the activity of the anti-Christ and the end of the world—lent itself to a fear of international conspiracy that did not sit naturally with the preference for international organization held by those examined here.²⁷ But it is not that interwar Christian internationalism was merely a fruit of liberalism and modernism in religion, nor that evangelical theology was incapable of producing similar kinds of antimilitarism and antinationalism, as David Swartz’s history of the 1970s evangelical Left has shown.²⁸ Indeed, as this book aims to show, Mott and Eddy’s style of YMCA-rooted liberal evangelicalism, which retained strands of Christocentrism, intense piety, and revivalistic preaching, was a major and shaping influence on interwar internationalism. Mott’s arguments for racial equality—like those of many of his ecumenical colleagues—were couched in the most evangelical of terms, focusing, in Pauline terms, on the reconciliation among races achieved by the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. Aside from Mott, the influence of other major ecumenical figures like Mott’s British missionary counterpart, Joseph Oldham, or Dutchman Willem Adolph Visser ’t Hooft, respectively the research director of the Oxford 1937 conference and the first general secretary of the World Council of Churches, should not be overlooked. These figures of enormous international influence were neither fundamentalist nor modernist, but presented a conciliatory and astute blend of neo-orthodoxy and traditional evangelicalism that arguably helped American mainline ecumenism transcend such dichotomies.

As for internationalism, scholars have, for good reason, been inconsistent in their definitions. Perhaps the best attempt to provide an essential definition of the term has come from international relations scholar Fred Halliday, who sees it containing an empirical observation—the world is interconnected—linked to a normative claim: people should better realize their interconnectedness. In its simplest terms, he suggests, internationalism is the idea that we both are and should be a part of a broader community than that of the nation or state.²⁹ Yet, as Halliday himself acknowledges, such a definition tells us little about the political behavior or outlook of internationalists, who might be engaged variously in revolutionary Marxist internationalism, classical liberal internationalism, or Islamic revolutionary internationalism. Positing an abstract and static meaning for the term is of little utility and even less validity. Glenda Sluga’s excellent recent work reminds us not to confuse or conflate the Enlightenment genealogy of Kant, Mazzini, and others with the mid-nineteenth-century class-based political imaginary, for which the name internationalism was first coined in French and English. The former saw an ongoing place for the nation in humanity’s apparent evolution toward increasingly wider planes of consciousness and solidarity—world community as a federation of nations. The latter was specifically opposed to nationalism, supporting instead transnational, non-state-bound class interests as the stepping-stone to radical economic egalitarianism.³⁰ The Christian internationalists examined here by and large stressed the federal vision of the Enlightenment strand, but also, in many important ways, in their critiques of nationalism, racism, and capitalism, echoed the radical class-based tradition. Internationalism is best understood, then, as Micheline Ishay argues, as "a process sui generis rather than a static concept, shaped and transformed by progressive thinkers and historical events."³¹ The definition of internationalism depends at least on the nature of the agent (whether individuals or organizations, state or non-state, etc.) and on a variety of relational and discursive contingencies, particularly who or what the internationalism was defined against.

One task of this book is to disentangle Christian internationalism from American internationalism. That is, it aims to show that historically they were in fact disentangled for much of the 1920s to 1930s, until in World War II the two became increasingly one. But, conceptually too, the need to distinguish Christian internationalism from state-based internationalism arises from the instability of the term in American politics. Almost all the major foreign policy debates of the early to mid-twentieth century had so-called internationalists on both sides. Not only Wilson, but also his chief opponent in the Senate, Henry Cabot Lodge, was, as noted by historian Manfred Jonas, an archetypal American internationalist.³² Both advocates of the Outlawry of War program, who often despised the League of Nations, and those who supported the League of Nations were internationalists—and their conflict, like others, was a struggle between rival internationalisms. Similarly, many pacifists who opposed American intervention in wars from 1939 to 1941 did not do so because they were isolationist in a nationalistic sense (as some of their allies on the far Right indeed were). Rather, they combined their internationalism with a strong opposition to war, which led them to believe neutralism represented the better way to achieve international peace. They and their political opponents both counted themselves internationalists—as did both Henry Wallace and President Truman in the late 1940s. With internationalists found on all sides of key, definitive debates in American foreign relations history, it becomes impossible to define the term by any one specific policy position.

My use of the term internationalism in this book is much closer to the impulse of Sondra Herman’s classic work of decades ago, Eleven against War: Studies in American Internationalist Thought, 1898–1921.³³ Drawing on the theoretical groundwork of German thinker Ferdinand Tönnies (famous for making the distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellshaft), Herman distinguished between political and community approaches in internationalist thought. The former, usually propounded by figures close to the state such as Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler, stressed the development of a legal or institutional apparatus as the way to a peaceful, nonrevolutionary world order—a world order, incidentally, in which American interests and power might peacefully expand. Community internationalism was more often propounded by intellectuals and radicals such as Jane Addams, Thorstein Veblen, or Josiah Royce—intellectual heroes of The World Tomorrow magazine, the periodical that will be examined in part 1 of this book. Those intellectuals did not ignore the need for legal or institutional changes but saw such reform as insufficient for the prevention of war. What they felt was needed, explains Herman, was the development of a more organic world consciousness, a sense of international community among the peoples of different nations.³⁴ Herman’s approach, sensitive to the depth and breadth of her subjects’ own projects, is what set her work apart from classic policy-oriented (but still helpful) narratives like Robert Divine’s, or the relatively pragmatic and institutionalist approach offered by others, most notably, Warren Kuehl.³⁵ In key ways, this inquiry owes more to Herman’s impulse than Divine’s in that it takes internationalist thought as its subject, rather than policy influence, although the latter is definitely part of the story.

Organizing Logics

The problem of defining and locating internationalism is closely related to the methodological problem of narrating a movement. What organizational logics best allow historians to capture wider patterns? How, indeed, can empirical connections assist us in making intellectual connections? Existing scholarship on Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the figures discussed in this book, reveals the challenges of such a task. As one of the most significant intellectuals to emerge from interwar Christian internationalism, Niebuhr is a figure that has long drawn the attention of historians. One approach, exemplified by Richard Pells’s classic intellectual history of the 1930s, has been to place Niebuhr among other big thinkers who wrote big books and to paint a picture of an American intellectual struggle.³⁶ While helpful in many ways, such an approach tends to extract Niebuhr from the immediate milieu in which he wrote, placing him instead in an artificial context.³⁷ Another option has been the group biography. In Niebuhr’s case, this approach has tended to reinforce the dominance of the realism versus pacifism dyad in historiography. The terms of realists’ self-definition, which arose largely out of Niebuhr’s own polemical writings (and from contemporary historians such as E. H. Carr) were adopted as controlling categories for many historians.³⁸ For example, though he denied offering Niebuhr’s views as normative, Donald Meyer’s classic, The Protestant Search for Realism, held out Niebuhrian realism as the telos toward which American Protestantism was moving.³⁹ Various attempts by idealists to impose the ideal upon social and international questions met successive obstacles until the attempt was abandoned and the whole task was either transmuted into a realist frame, or the idealists opted for political irrelevance and irresponsibility (or thus went the narrative).⁴⁰ In the pages that follow, I suggest instead that realism be seen as a critique, a qualification, emerging from within Christian internationalism—not a neat secession, but a fraught and complex realignment. Realism as a category was more diffuse and less stable than often portrayed.

More recent group biographies such as those by Heather Warren and Mark Edwards have done much more to embed Niebuhr in the ecumenical networks of which he was a part, placing him as one among others like John C. Bennett, Francis P. Miller, Henry Pit Van Dusen, and Georgia Harkness.⁴¹ But a telling absence in Warren’s work—which follows these realists through the 1920s to the 1940s—is the milieu of New York-based radical Christian internationalism in which most of her subjects were enmeshed. Almost the entire cast of characters played a role in the shaping of The World Tomorrow magazine at the heart of that milieu: Niebuhr was employed as editor from 1928 to 1934 and was lead columnist from 1932; Van Dusen was treasurer in the 1930s; Bennett served as a contributing editor and wrote regularly on socialism and religion in the 1930s; and Miller, a contributor on foreign policy as early as 1926, was a foreign correspondent into the late 1920s. On this point in particular, Mark Edwards’s recent addition to the history of realism is welcome. By means of considerable archival research, Edwards re-members realists by casting them as they were—a network of scholar-activists who constituted an old Protestant left.⁴² Building on Edwards’s and Warren’s work, and incorporating the insights of several fine earlier histories of the peace movement, I offer here an account of Christian thinking in which pacifists and realists are situated alongside one another—which is, for much of the time, exactly where they were.⁴³ At the same time, by examining the broader project of Christian internationalism, of which pacifism and realism were subsets, and by centering on empirical sites that were neither definitively pacifist nor realist, I seek to loosen the hold of that very dichotomy.

Two Sites of Collective Deliberation

This inquiry has been designed around an intensive excavation of two enterprises in collective deliberation: a periodical and a world conference. Coherent enough to be considered a movement, Christian internationalism consisted of distinct but overlapping strands. While a legalist strand (to use Herman’s terms, a political strand) had long existed in Christian internationalism, arising before World War I and continuing well into World War II, the two strands most distinctive to the interwar period, and the two to have received least attention in extant literature, are the radical anti-imperialist internationalism of missionaries-turned-socialists like Sherwood Eddy and the ecumenical internationalism that flourished in the remarkable spate of world conferences in the 1920s and 1930s. The two sites of collective deliberation around which this study has been shaped have been chosen because they are representative of just these two strands. The World Tomorrow magazine was the preeminent voice of a kind of radical Christian internationalism that flourished in the decade after World War I. Edited between 1926 and 1934 by Kirby Page, Devere Allen, and Reinhold Niebuhr—and before that by old Left stalwarts Anna Rochester, Norman Thomas, and John Nevin Sayre—the now largely forgotten journal was home to a community of radicals who sought to develop Christian critiques of American nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Likewise, the Oxford 1937 world ecumenical conference—technically the Universal Christian Conference on Church, Community, and State—was, I argue, the most important event in the development of a new, distinct strand of internationalism that gave shape to ecumenical thought in America and abroad for decades.

In each case, the nature of the enterprise was related to the nature of the intellectual method. The World Tomorrow sought to create something of a foreign policy counterpublic: It offered an alternative reading of foreign policy and world affairs to the mainstream, and it sought to crystallize an antiwar, anti-imperialist, and antimilitarist minority of public opinion in the wider public square. Oxford 1937 had an altogether different nature. The world conference and all it encompassed was the enterprise in itself. More than just a formal series of speeches and panels spread over a fortnight, it included the practice of vast scholarly exchanges of papers over years in the lead-up, the experience of shared living and shared prayer, the exoticism and communitas of travel, and elaborate follow-up campaigns. World conferences such as Oxford 1937 were in themselves seen to be important expressions of supranational Christian solidarity in a world ridden by nationalisms.

The advantage of focusing on sites of collective deliberation is that they were indeed collectively constituted. By nature, such enterprises were creatures of a wider movement, and as such they enable historians to enter therein. Rather than coming to the enquiry with a category already in place such as pacifism, or rather than being committed in advance to the following of one group of individuals, following each site’s origins, conduct, and legacies means that new individuals emerge, new categories and unanticipated networks present themselves. The World Tomorrow, for example, cannot be approached with a single analytical category in mind. Participants and historians alike have found it near impossible to find a simple epithet with which to sum up The World Tomorrow’s project. As editors, Kirby Page, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Devere Allen resorted to various versions of the following phrase as their definition: A Journal Looking toward a Social Order Based on the Religion of Jesus. Kirby Page later reached for a two-part definition, labeling it a magazine of Christian pacifism and Christian socialism.⁴⁴ David Shannon, in his history of the Socialist Party of America, identified The World Tomorrow as the leading journal of liberal Christianity and Christian-motivated political radicalism.⁴⁵ Robert Moats Miller’s classic work dealing with interwar Christian periodicals, American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919–1939, resorted to describing the journal as representing the non-Stalinist left—true, but a negative definition at best.⁴⁶ Peace movement historians Charles Chatfield and Charles DeBenedetti called it the foremost exponent of the Social Gospel—also true in a limited sense.⁴⁷ Elsewhere, describing the magazine’s approach, Chatfield called it the pre-eminent voice of social critique.⁴⁸

One reason that finding a neat epithet is so difficult is that the journal, at its peak in the late 1920s and early 1930s, represented a vast coalition of organizations and interests—Christian socialists, Christian pacifists, advocates for third-party politics, black interracial activists from the NAACP and National Urban League, Quakers, YMCA and YWCA leaders, revisionist history professors, Women’s International League figures, Socialist Party leaders, modernist clergy, and