The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"They died to save their country and they only saved the world."

Product Description

In The War for Righteousness, Gamble reconstructs the inner world of the gospel clergy. Vividly narrating how the progressive clergy played a surprising role in molding the public consensuus in favor of total war, Gamble engages the broader question of religion's role in shaping the modern American mind an dthe development, at the deepest levels, of the logic of messianic interventionism both at home and abroad. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (December 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932236163
• ISBN-13: 978-1932236163
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #861,770 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mixing politics and religion, May 5, 2004

By	"southerncross1861" (Summers, Arkansas United States) - See all my reviews

One of my favorite topics to contemplate and discuss is how religion and politics cannot be separated. What you believe about your Creator--or don't believe about him--will affect how you view your world and what you think it should become. This book is a tremendous testimony to the truth that ideas have consequences and that religious ideas and politics do mix with profound consequences. I found the book incredibly interesting and well documented. Even though the author mainly dealt with the religious influences in America up to and during World War I, I found parallels to other periods of history in this country as well---even up to the very present crusade to "rid the world of evil."

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Language of 'Progressivism'?, January 15, 2006

By	James M. Boushay "Jim Boushay" (Metro Chicago) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation by Richard Gamble. The Social Gospel attitudes and actions of the progressive Christian clergy in 1910-1918 played a major role in drawing the U.S. into War World I. That situation sounds much like the attitudes and violent language of the fundamentalist right today. The complexities of Fundamentalism, then and now, seem often to draw upon concepts of "applied Christianity." Historically in our nation, says Gamble, applied Christianity uses the rhetoric of crusades, of a suffering Jesus as victim and disempowered, arather than as empowered enabler.

Gamble shows how the progressive, mainstream Protestant clergy in the late 19th Century and especially the first decade of the 20th Century provided the images and the language indispensable to waging the destruction that is war. Clearly there is more than this one compelling idea in the Gamble book. I found the idea compelling, especially because what today our culture frequently labels as conservative, fundamentalistic, absolutist, harsh, even unforgiving was in the early 20th Century the language of elite clergy and congregations identified with liberalism, progressivism, compassion, and reconciliation.

Jim Boushay of Resources Unlimited Foundation (Metro Chicago)

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The other reviewers are right. This book is BRILLIANT, November 6, 2003

By	Wilbur Jones Jr (Wellesley, VA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Hardcover)

The other reviewers are right. This book is BRILLIANT! It is one that should be on the shelves of every thinking historian and seminary professor in the USA, since its sheer depth of insight ought to make it mandatory reading in today's academy. Professor: make sure ALL your students have bought this book.