ABSTRACT
This essay aims to enrich the very limited scholarship on the pre-cold war history of Atlanticism by focusing on “Christian Atlanticism” in America, circa 1900-1950. This is an intellectual perspective that is often neglected, even by studies that acknowledge that the concept of an “Atlantic community” dates back to at least the late nineteenth century and cannot be reduced to an ideological by-product of the bipolar era following World War II.1 Christian Atlanticism refers, in essence, to a specifi c religious interpretation of American internationalism whereby the common Christian identity of Europeans and Americans offered the strongest rationale for transatlantic cooperation and the premise upon which to develop any refl ection on America’s role in the world during the twentieth century.2
