God’s Marshall Plan explores the origins of Christian nationalism and Christian globalism—two competing theologies of global engagement—in the American Protestant encounter with twentieth-century Europe. It recovers the story of the American Protestants who crossed the Atlantic in an era of world war, tracked the rise of totalitarian dictators, mobilized against the Axis powers, and began to identify Europe as a continent in need of saving. In response, they launched far-reaching missions to spread their faith and democracy across the Atlantic. As they joined army platoons in occupying Germany, they singled out the defeated nation as the prime European territory for a new American-led, Christian and democratic world order that could thwart any totalitarian threat. Throughout these efforts, however, American Protestants realized they had come to dramatically different conclusions about how to rebuild Europe out of the ruins of war. Their diverging visions ultimately sparked a spiritual struggle for the continent and leadership of the postwar world. All the while, European Protestants began to sharply protest America’s spiritual advance. Faced by this challenge, a growing number of ecumenical Protestants rethought their efforts to build God’s kingdom through America’s global strength. Forsaking their wartime nationalism, they championed a new theology of global peace, reconciliation, and justice. A fresh wave of Protestant cold warriors surged forward, however, to retake their nation and promote a theology of liberty and anti-communism across the Atlantic. The spiritual struggle for Europe thus left American Protestants deeply divided and at odds over their global mission. It ultimately forged competing visions of global engagement that transformed the United States, diplomacy, and politics in the Cold War and beyond.
This chapter surveys how the American Protestant ecumenical leader Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., responded to the Nazi regime while serving as a pastor in Berlin from 1936 to 1941. Through an examination of Herman’s views of Hitler, the German Church Struggle, and Nazi persecution of the Jews, it weighs just how conflicted American Protestants, including leading Protestant ecumenists, proved on these matters. Based in the Nazi capital, Herman in particular captured the uncertain mind of American Protestants on German affairs. In Berlin, Herman expressed caution about Nazi totalitarianism, yet he still proved open to some of Hitler’s aims of national renewal and voiced his support of the German leader. He also hesitated to support the Confessing Church at first, fearing that the movement might cause enduring ecclesial schism. Finally, when Berlin’s Jews came to Herman seeking aid, anti-Judaism and Christian antisemitism led him and other Americans to be slow to offer their help. Overall, Herman’s interwar record illustrates how Protestant ecumenists were far from monolithic or fixed in their views of their era’s challenges. As their witness fractured, they struggled to meaningfully counteract Nazi fascism.
This chapter documents the mission of American ecumenist Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., in occupied Germany and surveys the American ecumenical effort to spiritually remake the defeated nation in America’s image. It argues that Herman and other leading American ecumenists sought to reform the German churches along American and ecumenical lines in order to establish a new Christian order across the Atlantic. It also shows that the occupation ultimately yielded a spiritual quagmire within the German Protestant church and the transatlantic ecumenical movement, one shaped by fierce historical divisions and animosities. A deep-seated suspicion toward American spiritual activism and imperialism likewise inspired fierce German opposition to American spiritual reforms. Nonetheless, American Protestants still drew inspiration from the occupation to launch much broader spiritual interventions across the entire European continent.
This chapter examines how ecumenical American Protestants sought to come to Europe’s “spiritual aid” through carrying out a “Marshall Plan for the Churches.” By the summer of 1947, these Protestant ecumenists were preparing to rebuild European churches, distribute material aid across the continent, and promote theological exchange across the Atlantic. All the while, they also sought to strengthen the standing of democracy and capitalism in Europe and, in particular, to bolster European spiritual defenses against communism. While German and European Protestants welcomed ecumenical aid, they also protested the Cold War interests of the United States. In particular, they challenged American ecumenists for contributing to the spread of what they deemed a new kind of American imperial order in the world. In response, a growing number of Europeans called on ecumenical Protestants across the North Atlantic to become a “third way” spiritual force between American democracy and Soviet communism.
This chapter examines the twentieth-century origins of Christian nationalism and Christian globalism in American Protestant missionary efforts and the First World War. It also asserts the prominence of American Protestant engagement with Germany in shaping both theological modes of engagement. Whether it was Germany’s autocratic ambitions or its liberal theology, a growing number of American Protestant ecumenists and evangelicals alike identified Germany as a major threat to their global mission. While ecumenists mobilized for war to build a new Wilsonian international order, evangelicals found inspiration in their premillennial apocalypticism to oppose Germany. The Great War and its aftermath then led both ecumenical and evangelical Protestants to see one another as rivals within their own nation. These events ultimately activated and refined competing forms of international engagement that would define America’s global mission in the decades to follow.
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