The Religion of Democracy in Early Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

When President Woodrow Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Germany on 2 April 1917, he uttered his famous warning to Congress that world must be made safe for democracy.1 Two years later, when the secretary of the North ern Baptist Convention, Frederick Alfred Agar, published his book, Democracy and the Church, he cited the less famous but in some circles apparently commonplace corollary that must be made safe for the world.2 The safeness, as well as the meaning and future, of had come into question between the Wilson and Agar statements specifically because of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and its claim to represent the new forces of economic democracy. Even within its more traditional political sphere, however, had been under scrutiny for almost a generation, and especially since the nation's military suppression of the democratic spirit in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War.3 Some American ists responded to the fate of the Filipino insurrection by rethink ing Christianity's doctrines of the brotherhood of all persons and the Fatherhood of God. The result was a variety of the religion of democracy that was a prophetic faith in the spiritual oneness of Christianity and democracy, based on the democratic theology of Christianity and concerned primarily with the survival of Christianity in troubled modern democracies.4