2009/01/01 by Mark Edwards · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2008.00747.x
openalex publication_date 2009/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
“Only those who have no sense of the profundities of history would deny that various nations and classes, various social groups and races are at various times placed in such a position that a special measure of the divine mission in history falls to them. In that sense God has chosen us in this fateful period of world history.” One might suspect such a prayer for American exceptionalism to have emanated from the ranks of today's politically conservative evangelicals. The author of that statement, however, was a veteran of the old Protestant left, Reinhold Niebuhr (Figure 1). Niebuhr and associates had started a journal in 1941, Christianity and Crisis, to promote Anglo-American cooperation in the defeat of fascism and securing of a new world order. Other contributors reinforced Niebuhr's boast that Britain and the United States enjoyed a more favorable relationship to providence than “non-Christian” nations like the Soviet Union and China. Church leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, had been trying to recover the political viability of “Christendom,”“Christian civilization,” and “Christian society” rhetoric since the 1930s.1