Did Holy War Receive Collateral Damage from World War I?

Like some of my colleagues who have beat me to it earlier this evening, I was left wondering exactly what it was about World War I that caused such "cautious patriotism" as described by Sittser.  After all the reading and research that I've done previously on the attack of Civil Liberties during the Great War, along with the American public's (and the Churches) sometimes almost joyous collusion with the government in bring that erosion about, I was surprised to learn that the mainline Churches did not go into World War II with quite as much excitement as they did during World War I. Also, knowing that Harry Emerson Fosdick had supported the Great War vehemently, I was amazed to learn that he became a pacifist after the war and remained so during World War II.

So what was it about the Great War that turned men like Fosdick and others off of war, to the point that some had to be dragged back to the fount? Was it because, as Fosdick says, that the "unanimous judgment seems to be that we, the democracies, are just as responsible for the rise of the dictators as the dictatorships themselves, and perhaps more so."?[1]  Was it due to the fact, as he quotes the President of Columbia University, that "that Great War., with all its terrible sacrifice of life... was futile."?[2]  Was it due to the fact, as Sittser suggests, that some worried that entrance into yet another World War would put those progressive social changes that were currently at work in the country at risk?[3] Or, as Sittser also suggests in the same paragraph, that people were worried about the collapse of Civil liberties in the same manner that they were run roughshod over during the Great War?[4]  Was it a combination of all of these things and much more?  The answer, it seems, is important not only to the is historian, but also to those in the church that would like to see cautiousness rule the day with regards to the next conflict American finds herself embroiled in.


[1] Harry Emerson Fosdick, “If America Is Drawn Into War,” The Christian Century, January 22, 1941, 116.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Gerald L. Sittser, A Cautious Patriotism: the American Churches and the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 58.
[4] Ibid.