LAUSR

forces John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under President Dwight Eisenhower, into being a spiritual descendent of Jonathan Edwards, when in fact the diplomat had no ties with evangelicalism but was a liberal Protestant. Such mischaracterizations do not mean that DePriest is wrong to fault evangelical Protestantism for failures in American foreign policy. As much as mainline Protestantism did inform the nation’s self-understanding at least until 1970, since Ronald Reagan’s election, born-again Protestants have kept alive older white Protestant notions about American exceptionalism. DePriest’s desire to reveal the errors and dangers of Christian nationalism is wholesome. But it does position his book more as theological critique for believers than a monograph for scholars. The author’s lack of conceptual precision, combined with such a vast topic, results in a survey of American foreign policy and what Protestants thought about it, with moral exhortation mixed in. American Crusaders could be useful for pious beginners. But in the field of religion and U.S. foreign policy, it will not displace Andrew Preston’s Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (A. A. Knopf, 2012), Walter A. McDougall’s The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed National Interest (Yale University Press, 2016), and William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge University Press, 2008).