Abstract
Christian nationalism in the United States has neither been singular nor stable. The country has seen several Christian nationalist ventures come and go throughout its history. Historians are currently busy documenting the plurality of Christian nationalisms, understanding them more as deliberate projects rather than as components of a suprahistorical secularization process. This essay joins in that work. Its focus is the World War II and early Cold War era, one of the heydays of Christian nationalist enthusiasm in America—and the one that shaped our ongoing culture wars between “evangelical” conservatives and “godless” liberals. One forgotten and admittedly paradoxical pathway to wartime Christian nationalism was the world ecumenical movement (“ecumenical” here meaning intra-Protestant). Protestant ecumenism curated the transformation of 1920s and 1930s Christian internationalism into wartime Christian Americanism. They involved many political and intellectual elites along the way. In pioneering many of the geopolitical concerns of Cold War evangelicals, ecumenical Protestants aided and abetted the Christian conservative ascendancy that wields power even into the present.
Highlights
Christian nationalism in the United States has neither been singular nor stable
Historians are currently busy documenting the plurality of Christian nationalisms, understanding (Handy 1984; Kruse 2015)
The world ecumenical movement that helped to renew Christian American nationalism was rooted in the missionary crusades of the nineteenth century
Summary
Christian nationalism in the United States has neither been singular nor stable. The country has seen several Christian nationalist ventures come and go throughout its history. The world ecumenical movement that helped to renew Christian American nationalism was rooted in the missionary crusades of the nineteenth century.
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