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Conservative American Protestantism in the League of Nations Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Markku Ruotsila
Markku Ruotsila
Affiliation:
Markku Ruotsila is lecturer in American and British history at the University of Tampere, Finland.
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Extract

The emerging fundamentalist movement made its first foray into extra-ecclesiastical politics during the League of Nations controversy of 1919–20. Both of the two main wings of fundamentalism—dispensational premillennialists and conservative Calvinists—took part in this controversy because both of them regarded the proposed League as an important, inherently religious issue. Both kinds of fundamentalists opposed the League, and both used the ratification debate to articulate their own types of Christian anti-internationalism. In the process they lent much Christian rhetoric to the political opponents of the League, the “Irreconcilables,” who were interested in exploiting it for their ostensibly purely secular critiques. Despite the fundamentalists' success in preventing League ratification, the controversy made them acutely aware of the political power and appeal of their liberal Protestant rivals. These had exerted themselves on behalf of the League, imparted their own religious complexion to the pro-League argument, and, not least, had managed officially to enlist almost all denominations to their side.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , September 2003 , pp. 593 - 616
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2003

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References

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