“Humanitarianism Between the World Wars,” 318-326 in eds. Cara Burnidge and Lauren Turek, The Routledge History of U.S. Religion and Politics, New York: Routledge, 2024.
Humanitarianism had long featured in studies of foreign policy, diplomacy, or Christian missions, but it was only in the early 2000s that historians began to examine the subject in its own right. Within a decade, historians pinpointed the interwar period as an especially transformative era of “overlapping” and “contested” change. One factor concerned the “moral roots” and shifting “Christian ethic” of humanitarian work. At the same time, historians of U.S. religion began to excavate Christian missionaries’ impact on diplomacy and empire-building with renewed vigor. Studies in this field had also long viewed the interwar period as transformative, since it marked a transition away from the heyday of mainline Protestant missions. What, then, is the character of this doubly transformative era? And how did emerging forms of humanitarianism interact with established missionary work?
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Humanitarianism had long featured in studies of foreign policy, diplomacy, or Christian missions, but it was only in the early 2000s that historians began to examine the subject in its own right. Within a decade, historians pinpointed the interwar period as an especially transformative era of “overlapping” and “contested” change. One factor concerned the “moral roots” and shifting “Christian ethic” of humanitarian work. At the same time, historians of U.S. religion began to excavate Christian missionaries’ impact on diplomacy and empire-building with renewed vigor. Studies in this field had also long viewed the interwar period as transformative, since it marked a transition away from the heyday of mainline Protestant missions. What, then, is the character of this doubly transformative era? And how did emerging forms of humanitarianism interact with established missionary work?
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