World War I disillusionment discredited militant Christian masculinity among mainstream Protestants

Evidence

When the war came to a close, no amount of patriotism could obscure the fact that it had been fought at great cost, and with little apparent gain. Roosevelt’s model of masculinity had been found wanting; the war, it seemed, had presented Americans with the horror of “having myths about blood and fire and mutilation and blindness come true.” For liberal Protestant internationalists, the disillusionment was especially keen. Sherwood Eddy, a leading liberal Protestant proponent of the war, expressed dismay at his prowar activism: “I believed that it was a war to end war, to protect womanhood, to destroy militarism and autocracy and to make a new world ‘fit for heroes to live in,’” he confessed. The carnage and horrors of warfare put an end to all that. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 46

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the linear-progress myth the whole book complicates; connects to the reader’s interest in whether militancy is a dominant or peripheral strand. — connects to: World War I’s disillusionment killed progressivism’s reform mood