2013/02/15 by Sarah Miller-Davenport · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jas648
openalex publication_date 2013/02/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
A year after Japan's surrender to the Allied powers, Luther J. Holcomb, a Texas-born Baptist minister, heralded a new era of American supremacy in both world affairs and Christian evangelism. Calling on Christians to seize the postwar moment to bring “the message of Christ, with its transforming power” to “those who are starving for the Bread of Life,” Holcomb, in an article in the popular evangelical magazine Moody Monthly, gave a religious cast to the widely circulating notion that Americans had an obligation to spread their way of life across the world. He stressed that “whatever faith other peoples have in our country must be attributed to the fact that we are a Christian nation and that the ideals for which we strive are those which are consonant with the principles of Christian living.” Holcomb thus imbued American foreign relations with divine purpose. He did not just want to spread the gospel: he wanted to spread an American version of the gospel.1