Savior Nation: Woodrow Wilson and the Gospel of Service.

• Author: Gamble, Richard M.

Augustine's City of God identifies pride and humility as the founding principles of the City of Man and the City of God. (1) Leaving no mystery as to the identity of the most recent embodiment of the arrogant City of Man in his own day, Augustine quotes two significant lines from Virgil's Aeneid. The famous passage from Virgil's epic concerns Rome's perfection of the "imperial arts" and its boast of its unique, divinely appointed mission to "beat down the proud." Throughout the Aeneid, Virgil reinforces Rome's historical mission. Father Jupiter himself had appointed Rome to found a universal, everlasting kingdom of peace, justice, and righteousness, leading history to its final destination, a new Age of Saturn in which the temple of war would be shut and law and order prevail throughout the inhabited world. (2) In The City of God, however, Augustine seeks to undermine these pretensions. Humbling the proud is God's prerogative, not Rome's. It is a mission that Rome has falsely" claimed as its own." (3) Such gr andiose aspirations made Rome nothing less than an impostor City of God, a sham Eternal City, appropriating to itself the mission that belongs exclusively to Christ's kingdom, whose founder is not Aeneas but God himself. To invest imperial Rome with the love and honor and worship due to God alone is, in Augustine's profound theological analysis, nothing less than idolatry.

Rome, of course, has not been the only nation to succumb to the idolatry of empire, nor is the idea of national mission unique to its successor empires in the West. Civilizations from the ancient world to the modern, whether European or Asian or American, Christian and non-Christian alike, have possessed a conviction of divine calling and destiny. Variations on this impulse have been evident in cultures as diverse as Confucian China, Hellenistic Greece, Augustan Rome, Ottoman Turkey, Romanov Russia, Victorian Britain, and Wilsonian America. America's own idea of mission is an amalgam of Roman, Puritan, Enlightenment, Romantic nationalist, social gospel, and modern imperialist elements, and the precise sources of its images, symbols, metaphors, and vocabulary are therefore often difficult to untangle. Moreover, it has been shaped not only by its own historical experience, theological roots, and political ideology, but also by the expectations of outsiders, like the radicals of the French and English Enlightenm ent who projected their hopes for universal redemption onto the emerging United States in the 1770s and 1780s. To the mind of Richard Price, for example, the American Revolution ranked second only to the incarnation of Christ and was perhaps "the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement." (4)

America has wrestled throughout its history with a particularly robust and complex sense of divine appointment and of "Manifest Destiny." From the holy community of New England Puritanism, to the exceptionalism of the Founders, to the outward-directed millennial fervor of Abolitionism before and during the Civil War, the American redemptive myth has been woven together out of many strands. This habit of mind has been examined by intellectual, literary, and diplomatic historians who have traced an ongoing sell-consciousness among Americans of being an Adam in a "New Eden" or a covenantal people in a "New Israel." (5) Drawing from Puritan, Enlightenment, and Romantic ideology, American literature and political discourse from Colonial times to the present has been permeated by themes of renewal and redemption, of covenantal duty, of deliverance from Europe and the past, of America as the embodiment of an "idea" more than as a place or a political community.

Not least among significant American leaders who inherited but also helped transform the the American ideal of mission and Manifest Destiny was Woodrow Wilson. He was transfixed by the notion of a national mission, and variations on this theme dominate his speeches. His sense of divine calling has generally been attributed to his Puritan and Calvinist upbringing, rich sources indeed for the idea of a chosen people and a national covenant. But his speeches also teem with principles, images, and language much closer to Revolutionary France, to nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism, and to the contemporary social gospel's fusion of the spheres of church and state and the realms of the City of God and the City of Man. There is in Wilson's vision of national destiny as much of Guiseppe Mazzini's millennial kingdom of world "association" as there is of John Winthrop's "City on a Hill." Indeed, while making his way to the Paris Peace Conference in January 1919, Wilson stopped in Genoa, Italy, to pay tribute to the Italian nationalist and champion of world "association." Inspired by the sight of a monument to Mazzini, Wilson remarked publicly that he felt he was "taking some small part in accomplishing the realization of the ideals to which his life and thought were devoted." When the mayor of Genoa presented Wilson with a bound set of Mazzini's works, the President acknowledged that he had "already derived guidance from the principles which Mazzini so eloquently expressed." (6) Armed with these and other potent revolutionary principles, Wilson moved America away from thinking of itself as simply a "New Eden" or a "New Israel" toward the Romantic, Progressive, social-gospel ideal of America as the "Christ-Nation."

To understand what difference this might make, it is important to distinguish between mission on the one hand as simply a nation's perception of itself as superior to others and as having been singled out by destiny, or history, or God for special blessing, and mission on the other hand as an outward-directed, salvific crusade, that leads a nation to conceive of itself as "the instrument for the redemption of the world." (7) In the first case, mission can actually look more to the past than to the future; it can be conservative, guided by a sense of duty to preserve principles and institutions rather than overturn them, animated by a conviction of being the guardian of a tradition. It can also be outwardly benign toward its neighbors (although domestically, of course, minority opinion or others on the "losing side" of a nation's history can suffer terribly). Such a nation may even boast of national glory, and destiny, and progress, and still not be willing to crusade to extend its mission beyond its borders. Both the United States in its first century as a nation (despite Manifest Destiny) and the Russian empire for much of its history fit into this first category. America was generally content to remain true to the wisdom of the Founders and to pursue a non-ideological, non-interventionist foreign policy to suit this conception of its place in the world, while Russia believed that it had been called to preserve intact for the future the Roman and Christian legacy of the Byzantine East (8) and the triple bequest of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Mother Russia.

It is possible for the second, outward-directed manifestation of mission also to be restrained and benign under certain circumstance, namely, if a nation believes it best achieves its redemptive mission through example alone. But more typically an "expansive" mission is predatory, universalist, and even revolutionary. It fulfills its mission by active engagement, by intervention, by outright conquest, or by the forced spread of its ideology and institutions. Historian Edward McNall Burns was correct to warn nearly fifty years ago that "if a people already feel that they have been endowed by God or by nature with talents surpassing those of their neighbors, they will almost inevitably conclude that it is their destiny to redeem or to dominate their inferior brethren." (9) To be sure, such national hubris (or racism) can lead to an aggressive foreign policy. But the key word in Burns's comment is almost. An interventionist foreign policy is not the inevitable result of a nation's consciousness of being a "New E den" or "New Israel." The habit of interventionism does, however, follow necessarily from a nation's consciousness of being the messianic "Christ-Nation" anointed for world redemption and eagerness to deny the same status to any other nation.

From the Founding through the nineteenth century, the American people wrestled with these two notions of mission, between the "New Eden" and the "New Israel," some would say, but really between both of these and the "Christ-nation." As Burns summarizes this tension in the American soul:

On the one hand, they have considered themselves a peculiar people, separated by thousands of miles from the homeland of their fathers, and hating the wicked and irrational ways of Europe. In accordance with this line of thinking, the Old World has been synonymous with oppression, tyranny, and crafty and cynical diplomacy. On the other hand, Americans have conceived of their Republic as the handmaid of Destiny, as a chosen nation with a mission to guide and instruct and even to rule "savage and servile" peoples. To accomplish such a mission it would be necessary for America to express her sympathy with the victims of repression, to intervene to assist them, and even to overthrow autocratic and militaristic regimes that stood as obstacles to the spread of liberty and civilization. (10)

By the end of the nineteenth century, the decision had largely been made in favor of America as the "Christ-Nation." Imperialists like Josiah Strong, Albert J. Beveridge, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, and many others combined themes of racial...