Building the Kingdom of God: Religious Discourse, National Identity, and the Good Neighbor Policy, 1930–1938

Abstract

This article argues that Protestant modernist discourse framed U.S. foreign relations during the 1930s. The good neighbor policy emerged as part of a rhetorically constructed national identity narrative that reinvigorated Americans' sense of manifest destiny in the face of Great Depression anxiety. U.S. policies ostensibly advocating nonintervention, disarmament, and international cooperation inscribed a religiously oriented national mission centered on international beneficence. These discursive frames altered the form rather than the substance of U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere while rendering the United States militarily inert amid rising tensions in Asia and Europe.