A Just and Durable Peace? American Evangelicals and the Quest for Peace after WWII

Abstract

The force of evangelical activism is now a well-known story in American politics, but its unity, coherence, and perspective are often taken for granted, or under-analyzed, particularly on global issues. In this article, I investigate the question of evangelical influence and perspective on global peace after World War II, focused in this case around the United Nations. Surveying, first, the diversity of the movement called evangelicalism in the late war period, I argue that meaningful evangelical minorities existed, second, in both the neo-orthodox turn of Reinhold Niebuhr, third in the hugely successful though more mainline efforts of John Foster Dulles and the Federal Council of Churches, and, of course, finally in the majority report of conservative, evangelical anti-globalism, of both dispensational and presuppositional varieties. Far from monolithic, I argue that an evangelical perspective and influence on global peace must read each of these movements alongside one another, in part clarifying, in part unsettling, what is often counted as evangelical in both the history and present of global peace.

Keywords:

• evangelical
• Dulles
• Niebuhr
• United Nations
• NAE
• “just and durable peace”
• Christian realism

Notes

1. I am grateful to the British Bible Society for allowing parts of an article originally published as Joustra (2015).

2. The Federal Council of Churches is today The National Council of Churches. It continues to advocate and think about issues of international peace, including publications to that effect.

3. The same could, for example, be convincingly argued about conservative American evangelical activism around the Scopes-Monkey Trial of 1925. The WCFA, an opponent of the League, also fought this trial, and technically they won the trial, as the teaching of evolution continued to be banned in most American states. But what they won in court, they lost in the culture, and eventually in their own churches.

4. Evangelical activism against weapons of mass destruction, and nuclear weapons in particular, is now a well-recognized part of even conservative evangelicalism in the United States of America. See, for example, Karen Swallow Prior on “Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A conservative takes a second look at the morality of nuclear weapons” in Sojourners (August 2015) https://sojo.net/magazine/august-2015/nukes-and-pro-life-christian. Accessed March 6, 2019.

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Notes on contributors

Robert J. Joustra

Robert J. Joustra (PhD, University of Bath) is associate professor of Politics & International Studies at Redeemer University College, where he also serves as Director of the Centre for Christian Scholarship. He has written or edited several books, including The Religious Problem with Religious Freedom, and Modern Papal Diplomacy and Social Teaching in World Affairs. He is an Editorial Fellow at The Review of Faith & International Affairs.