New York City, Easter Sunday, April 8, 1917. It was a difficult day for every American, but it was particularly fraught for the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin. As the pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, one of the more prestigious pulpits in the nation and, as a professor at Union Theological Seminary, one of the leading centers of religious learning in the world, Coffin had used the authority of his positions to condemn the war raging in Europe, pray for peace, and dissuade his own country from joining the mindless slaughter. For nearly three years, Coffin railed against the folly and obsolescence of war, against the Europeans who had brought it upon themselves, and against the “preparedness” campaign in the United States to build up the military in case the war reached America’s shores. During a Christmas sermon in 1914, he told his congregation that the Europeans had proven themselves to be little better than “silly children” who petulantly, selfishly waged war with the very worst of motives: “with self-seeking patriotism, with nationalism based on brute might, with force as the arbitrament of justice.” In May 1916, at the height of preparedness hysteria, he lambasted the American militarists who would commit the nation to Europe’s folly. A boisterous, nationalistic ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue for Preparedness Day was, Coffin proclaimed, nothing but “a march into yesterday.” War was a betrayal of true patriotism and true religion, and totally unnecessary for such a rich, powerful nation far removed from the fighting. In words that a year later would be considered treasonous and that would echo half a century later as his nephew William protested against Vietnam, Coffin called on his listeners to “let us as American patriots and as loyal believers in Jesus Christ resist to the utmost this attempt to deamericanize our beloved America and dechristianize our Christianity.”1
But now that day had come, in the midst of Eastertide no less, and it placed Coffin in an awkward position. Less than a week earlier, on April 2, President Woodrow Wilson had addressed a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. Congress obliged, and war was officially pronounced on April 6, Good Friday. Across the United States, Coffin and thousands of other antiwar ministers knew they would have to address the war in their Easter sermons. And they also knew they had a difficult decision: either abandon their antiwar beliefs and support the war, or maintain their dissent and face the inevitably harsh consequences from both church and state. Presbyterians were not Quakers or Unitarians: there was no pacifist tradition in Coffin’s church to shield him. President Wilson himself was a devoted Presbyterian elder, and so to oppose the war was also to oppose not only the president, but also the church. Yet these considerations did not enter into Coffin’s thinking. He hated war, but he was no pacifist, and his stature in the church and at Union gave him considerable authority to withstand attacks upon his reputation. He would make up his own mind.
Coffin had actually been reconsidering his position on the war for some time. “Circumstances are certainly changing,” he confessed in a New Year’s sermon for 1917, “and we find ourselves facing new questions, fronting new outlooks, feeling new impulses. What fresh problems each year of this awful war has forced on our thinking!” By late March, in light of these changing circumstances—especially Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic, including against U.S. ships—he had decided to change course. War is “irrational,” he preached on March 25, as the nation anticipated Wilson’s war address, and “hellishly brutal.” Coffin had been “eager to go to great lengths to avoid it, to do nothing that would make it easy for us to enter it. And lo, it is waged upon us.” Just as Christ had done centuries earlier, it was now America’s turn to bear the world’s burden and unselfishly sacrifice for a greater good. The “cross is apparently forced on our nation,” he said. This war “is not ‘glorious war’; it is the senseless, hideous, butchery of brother by brother. It is everything we loathe; but so was the cross.” Above all, Coffin told his rapt congregation, Americans “must set forth unmistakably for what we are contending,” a cause that would be “worth the spilling of the blood of American citizens to achieve.” Americans “covet nothing for ourselves” except “a world so ordered that there can be no repetition of these frightful years” and “peace … goodwill and brotherhood among the nations.” Only for these noble goals “are we prepared to make what is to us scarcely less than a descent into hell.”2
Thus when he mounted the pulpit on Easter Sunday, Reverend Coffin had already resolved to support the war—specifically, Wilson’s call for a new world order to establish permanent peace. Wilson had tried to remain neutral, to keep America above the fray, but now war had been forced upon him. Coffin had come to believe that though all parties to the war had sinned, Germany’s sins in Belgium and on the high seas were much greater than those of Britain and France. While the British and French had imperfect democracies and ruled their global empires through the coercion of armed force, they were still democracies and much preferable to aggressive German dictatorship. Wilson’s notion of a disinterested United States, with no empire or alliances to maintain, fighting not for its own interests but those of the world, struck Coffin as the most Christian foreign policy possible. To the cynics who scoffed that war was endemic to human nature, or to the selfish isolationists and steadfast pacifists who refused to bear their share of the burden, Coffin replied that this war was different. It would be a truly progressive war, a war to end all wars. On Resurrection Sunday, Coffin could see the reformation of the world unfolding, with a millennium of permanent peace at its end. Easter, he rejoiced, “is taking us back to a grave where just such idealistic hopes as ours were once buried.” The world’s resurrection was now in America’s hands.3
Coffin fully converted to the cause. He joined one of the most important religious bodies participating in the war, the General War-Time Commission of the Churches, and supported the YMCA’s relief programs on the Western Front. And at war’s end, he was jubilant at the triumph of right over might. “Our consciences, so often puzzled by the seeming victories of iniquity and the tortures of good, find themselves exulting in a manifestly just universe,” he preached on November 10, 1918, a day before the official armistice. “The defeat of a sinister world-domination has been worth everything which has been paid for it.” Germany was powerful, and by many measurements should have won the war, but because its cause was unjust it lacked the favor of God. Americans had sacrificed, but it was God’s providence, his designs for a more peaceful world, which in the end prevailed. America was but God’s instrument, and better times lay in store for all. The Social Gospel was bringing about the kingdom of God in the United States, and Wilson was doing the same for the world. “It is a great thing,” Coffin beamed a week after the war had ended, “to be able to recognise the presence of the Christian God in the events of life.”4
Coffin’s conversion from advocate of peace to crusading warrior—from wielding the shield of faith to brandishing the sword of the spirit—had been personally difficult, confusing, at times painful. But it was not unusual. Throughout the United States, ministers, priests, and rabbis who had scorned war as immoral and evil in 1915 and 1916 hailed its power to cleanse and renew the nation, and the world, in 1917 and 1918. In New York alone, Coffin underwent his own conversion alongside many others.
Monsignor Michael J. Lavelle, the venerable rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, had prayed for peace as fervently as Coffin and had enjoined the city’s Roman Catholics to follow suit. In 1915, he officiated a special mass for peace. “Americans have special reason for gratitude,” he prayed at the end of 1916, “because of the peace, prosperity and stability which have been ours, and which we hope will abide and increase with us forever.” Yet a year later, Father Lavelle could be found blessing a Service Flag for U.S. troops bound for Europe and calling on Congress to grant Wilson extraordinary powers to prosecute the war. Lavelle’s superior, James Cardinal Farley, the archbishop of New York, made a similar journey from dove to hawk.5
No less dramatic was the transformation of Rabbi Stephen Wise. A deeply committed social reformer, Wise founded the Free Synagogue of New York in 1907 to enable him to spread a progressive agenda free from Conservative or Orthodox interference. Progressivism brought him into the Democratic Party fold, which in turn made him a strong supporter of Woodrow Wilson. Though he sympathized with the British and French before 1917, Wise was desperate to keep the United States out of the war, and he mobilized Jewish sentiment behind Wilson’s policy of neutrality. To further this goal, he had been a founder of the Anti-Preparedness Committee and a spokesman for the antiwar group American Union Against Militarism. Indeed, before 1914 Wise had been a major advocate for international cooperation and predicted the eventual abolition of war. Wilson’s embrace of preparedness in late 1915 came as a shock to Wise that bordered on betrayal. The rabbi wrote Wilson “how deeply I deplore” the fact that the president was “accepting and advocating a preparedness program.” Yet by early 1917, Wise had come to believe that only the United States could impose a peace settlement, and in order to do that the country would have to enter the war. On that same fateful Sunday in April 1917, he delivered a prowar sermon that, like Coffin’s, threw support behind American intervention while continuing to abhor war in general. The break with his progressive, pacifist friends was bitter and painful, but Wise saw no other choice. It was also a complete break, and he was soon denouncing antiwar protesters for having “served the interests of Germany.” Like the vast majority of American clergy that weekend, he would only sanction a progressive war, hopefully for the last time in history. Wise, however, also had other motives: as a Zionist, he hoped the war would now hasten the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.6
The personal stories of Reverend Coffin, Monsignor Lavelle, and Rabbi Wise are representative of broader trends in the religious influence on American foreign relations, and in American life. As we shall discover, their motives were not always identical, or at times even similar, but mostly they addressed the world crisis in compatible and complementary ways. First, the fusion of Protestant-Catholic-Jew in American civil religion, now instantly familiar, was of course nothing new, but the Great War marked its period of maturation: for the first time, Catholic and Jew were becoming full partners in, rather than adjuncts to, an American Creed. These developments began in the World War I era and not, as is commonly assumed, World War II and the Cold War.
Second, Coffin, Lavelle, and Wise were indicative of religion’s importance in thinking about the morality, ethics, and ultimate meaning of the war. Americans were by no means alone in turning to faith for answers—religion played a central role in European and Canadian attitudes, as well—but clergy in the United States faced a different set of circumstances and pressures and responded to them differently.7
Third, these three religious leaders epitomized the American response to war, from outright opposition to enthusiastic support. Americans had been reluctant to intervene in Europe, for a variety of reasons. When they finally did, it would be not in the name of national interests but for the good of humanity. Religious leaders, and through them their congregations, invested America’s role in the war with transcendent meaning and millennial yearning. They provided the moral platform from which the United States would launch a new world order.