Bridging the Gap between the Sacred and the Secular in the History of American Foreign Relations

Abstract

With the eruption of global hostilities between two universalistic, mutually exclusive ideologies, the president of the United States sought to rally Americans, and people around the world, to the cause of spreading freedom and democracy. What was most striking about his rhetoric was its explicit grounding in religious dogma and imagery. “The defense of mankind against these attacks,” the president told an audience at the onset of the crisis, “lies in the faith we profess—the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God.”“Democracy,” he proclaimed three years later in the midst of an increasingly unpopular, stalemated war, “is first and foremost a spiritual force.” At a subsequent occasion, he warned against complacency because “we are under tremendous attacks” and stressed that Americans must remain vigilant and “establish the fervor, the strength of our convictions, because fundamentally Democracy is nothing in the world but a spiritual conviction, a conviction that each of us is enormously valuable because of a certain standing before our own God.” Finally, later still, when it was clear that the global struggle would last years, if not decades, the president informed the American people that although he had “sworn before you and Almighty God the same oath our forebears prescribed” in the eighteenth century, “the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”