What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy

In What the World Should Be, Malcolm Magee demonstrates that Woodrow Wilson was immersed in a Presbyterian tradition that shaped his presidency. He argues that Wilson’s religious convictions shaped his concepts of effective leadership, the way he reasoned, and his use of language. In particular, Wilson’s religious beliefs accustomed him to the theological principle of antinomy: that two principles could both be right even when, considered only in the light of logic, they appear mutually contradictory. These convictions ultimately made Wilson believe he was providentially chosen to bring divinely ordered freedom to the nations and peoples of the earth.