Woodrow Wilson: America's Post-Mill Presidency Part 2

[00:00:00] Do you wish for someone who understands you like no one else? Someone who can make your wishes come true and wants to experience the most beautiful adventure of your life with you? The Shopify commerce platform revolutionizes millions of companies worldwide.

[00:00:15] With Shopify, you can create your own online shop without programming or design knowledge. Thanks to the efficient set-up and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration, you can advertise and sell via Instagram, eBay and Co. Reaching new target groups has never been so easy.

[00:00:34] Shopify offers all the tools to set up your online business on a single, secure platform. Test for free and present your business to the world. Visit shopify.de//try Simply enter shopify.de//try and get started. Made for Germany. Powered by Shopify.

[00:01:14] Every episode we normally bring you a sermon from history, but Joel is currently traveling and doing some ministry work in the same country I'm in, in Indonesia. She's on my side of the world right now, but he was not able to join me for a normal revivedthoughts.

[00:01:25] So I wanted to do this project for a long time. It is an episode. It was meant to be originally just one episode talking about Woodrow Wilson. I knew that he was a post-millennial Calvinist president

[00:01:37] and it was really interesting to me that he's almost never mentioned by post-millennials and Calvinist and I could see why. I knew a lot about Woodrow Wilson's politics. So I could see why you'd avoid talking about him. This led me to doing a research deep dive,

[00:01:50] which led to so many hours of reading about Woodrow Wilson. You wouldn't even believe. And yet here we are on the other side of this. I were diving into part two. Now the first episode I wanted to I mentioned it,

[00:02:02] but I'm going to mention it again. The goal of this episode is not to attack post-millennials. I'm not looking to give somebody an eschatological trump card and the next time a post-millennial gives their opinions you go, Woodrow Wilson, boom, right? You don't have a say.

[00:02:15] The goal of this is just to give some warning, some caution, some encouragement to people who are on the post-millennial side. Hey, this is what one of the leaders a hundred years ago of your movement did. Be careful. These blind spots are there.

[00:02:27] And as I mentioned in the first episode, a lot of his eschatological beliefs really do mirror a lot of what I hear a lot of people say. And certainly he had a very personal faith walk.

[00:02:39] Now we talked about his relationship with a girl that he had on the side. I hear ya. I do. I know that's weird, right? But as far as everyone could tell, even with that scandal, he still looked like a Christian to the world.

[00:02:51] And one thing that is interesting is nobody ever actually thought it was a physical affair. Like yes, you could certainly say that their month in Bermuda seemed physical, but historians say they're questioning of it. They don't really necessarily aren't sure if he was actually Chianta's wife.

[00:03:07] He might have been. And he wouldn't have been the first, quote, quote, Christian president to cheat on his wife. And I certainly would say he was a hundred percent cheating on her emotionally, but physically it hasn't proven. And one of the things that historians kind of point to

[00:03:19] is why they don't think he maybe physically did cheat on her was because Wilson had these unwaveringly strong principles that he never deviated from. And so it seemed unlikely that he would have deviated even from that physical affair.

[00:03:33] And there was no evidence that he really told his wife that there was ever anything physical, his second wife, Ellen. So with all that in mind, we're diving back in, looking into the life of this man who I mentioned that he's like Ahab and Moby Dick.

[00:03:48] He just becomes obsessed with something. And the thing he becomes obsessed with is his role in World War I and the covenant of the League of Nations. He is convinced that he is put on Earth to create this thing and nothing will get in his way.

[00:04:05] Now, before we talk about that, let's just go back to his personal faith a minute. He is considered a Christian president. In fact, if you were to ask any historians, give me a list of Christian presidents, he would mention Woodrow Wilson probably

[00:04:15] as one of the most outwardly Christian presidents that we had, especially in the early 20th century. As president, he was mocked for this. In fact, one day there's a story of a general looking for him in the White House

[00:04:27] and was looking for him and found him on his knees praying. Now this story was actually circulated by enemies as an attack. Like look at him. He's so desperate. He's running to God because he has no other help. However, the United States being a fairly Christian place,

[00:04:39] thought that's so awesome. Our president doesn't think he's above getting on his knees to pray. Now many people don't think this story is true, but this is the kind of story you could pass around about him that the American people would believe.

[00:04:51] And if I were not, he once said, if I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad. But my faith in God holds me to the belief that he is in some way working out his plans through human perversities and mistakes. Wilson often gave religious speeches.

[00:05:04] He worked at Princeton and before that, he was oftentimes called to preach in the chapel. And some, especially if a speaker canceled last minute, he would show up and he would say, hey, look, I don't have a sermon prepared. Let's have a little talk.

[00:05:16] And many of the students said that they felt like the most spiritually uplifting speeches they ever heard were those little talks when he was just speaking from the heart. He would preach at the YMCA. He was leading devotionals. Again, he was an elder at his church.

[00:05:27] You would have really probably liked this guy, at least as a faith guy on paper. All these things mixed together when it came to World War I. Now, Wilson had originally campaigned in 1916 saying, I will keep us out of World War I.

[00:05:40] He used the slogan, his campaign used the slogan, he kept us out of war and America first. We're staying away from war. Let's do what's best for America. This was in reference to, by the way, not just the war in Europe,

[00:05:52] but he also kept them out of the war in Mexico that he almost started. Within one month, one month of being reelected though, he then said, by the way, we got to go to war just so you know.

[00:06:02] Now, he campaigned on not going to war, but he's going to go to war. Now, this is pretty sleazy because the other candidate he was up against, Hughes, had basically run on the campaign saying, hey, let's be honest. America might need to prepare for war.

[00:06:17] I'm not saying we're going to war, but let's at least start building up an army and be ready if we need to be. And the American people were terrified of going to war. They'd heard what the war was like. They didn't want any part of it.

[00:06:25] And so Wilson campaigning on, hey, we won't go to war, was encouraging to them. So what a betrayal when one month in, maybe the facts on the ground changed that much, but you can't help but think that he knew he was going to go to war,

[00:06:36] but had to win re-election first. Take of it what you will. Now, in 1910, the Presbyterian Church of America at the time had declared, and I'm quoting from them, the proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind, the promotion of social righteousness

[00:06:49] and the exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. And they based this on the verses, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. This is what is popular in the idea of the mind, the people at the time.

[00:07:00] We need to promote what is good for the people, the kingdom of heaven, bringing it to the earth. This will help also, and all of this mixed with promoting the salvation of people at the time. The church was kind of in an unusual circumstance. What do we do?

[00:07:13] The whole world is at war. And a lot of people didn't believe that this was going to be bad at first. They were post-millennialism, although Woodrow Wilson was the president that was post-millennial. It was a very popular belief. Now, post-millennialism was on the rise at the time.

[00:07:28] It was well on its way to becoming a big popular thing. People believed that the war was basically on its way to, was going to actually bring the kingdom down. They thought that each country that went into World War I

[00:07:42] thought that our country will win a quick victory and Christianity will reign supreme and the kingdom will come. But the problem was each country thought that, and when they went into the war, they were absolutely devastated. Post-millennialism was actually very popular in World War I,

[00:07:56] and many people said that after World War I they no longer believed God's kingdom was coming on Earth, and it actually shattered the faith of many people during that time. It was a really big deal when Wilson was very much the same thing.

[00:08:09] He believed what, you know, the Presbyterian church was putting out there, that they were supposed to be the kingdom on Earth, which we are as Christians. We are supposed to do that, and that we could see the, you know, proclamation of the gospel to the whole world,

[00:08:19] and that this war was an opportunity for that to come about, that somehow the church could play a role in all of this. And I have a poem for you. I'd like to read you a little poem. I'm going to give you this too.

[00:08:30] The coward boy upon the village green shrinks, whining back at each repeated blow. One formula he thinks enough to know, you dare not hit again, is his refrain. Then while the bullies jeer and hit again, of course yet to come he makes some show.

[00:08:45] Of courage now at hand and ready, no, whatever the need he flinches from, pain. America, are you the coward boy among the nations? Do you wince, stand, the bullies but the nation's common toy? The hustled smitten undefended land, for solely to honor, foully outraged, right?

[00:09:04] Always too proud, do you say too, cowardly to fight? I don't think I did as good a job. The language has changed or some thousand stuff. I didn't probably do as good a job. That poem is by B.B. Warfield. B.B. Warfield was writing poetry encouraging America

[00:09:20] to go to war in World War I and get the soldiers out there and fight. People, I mean, theologians. As Princeton Theological Seminary theologian, Warfield was out there saying, get the boys out there and fight in World War I. So there was a lot of people

[00:09:34] having different opinions back and forth and there were people who thought that fighting in World War I would be good for the church and good for the world. I never could find B.B. Warfield's views on Woodrow Wilson. By the way, I mentioned that in the first part

[00:09:46] of this two-part series. I looked for it but I could not find it. But I did find that poem. I thought that was kind of interesting. Now, you'd think then there was at least some agreement with him on this area.

[00:09:55] Yeah, there was some kind of agreement with them on that. Warfield and Wilson seemed to get along in that. But it's hard to tell about some of these other things. Now, all these countries were going into war thinking that this would be the one.

[00:10:04] This would be the one that made them great. But the problem is you can't all be great. And the Great War really wasn't a country, was actually not a war that made all those countries great. In fact, pretty much all those countries came out worse for it.

[00:10:15] Maybe with the exception of Britain, maybe. But even Britain, I think, wasn't a great time for them. Let's see, the Austro-Hungarian Empire just basically fizzled out. The Russian country, Tsar, completely falls apart. The Ottoman Turks completely fall apart. This was a war that devastated.

[00:10:38] The German country also fell apart and had it completely... It didn't dissolve, but it had a completely new government by the end of it. Which leads all of this directly to World War II. So this is not a war that made the countries better.

[00:10:49] This was a war that nearly crushed all the countries involved. However, they still thought the Christian Church and a lot of these post-millennial people at the time still thought we could turn this around. Like, this can be used for something.

[00:10:58] Because they thought maybe this was the last war. The Great War. The, quote, war to win end all wars. One of the popular theologians at the time said, Before the war, the social gospel dealt with social classes. But today, it is translated into international terms.

[00:11:12] So we're moving away from class warfare. Maybe now we can use our social justice, social gospel to reach the world. The same theologian also added later, All whose Christianity has not been ditched by the catastrophe All whose Christianity has not been ditched by the catastrophe

[00:11:26] are demanding a Christianizing of international relations for disarmament, permanent peace, for the rights of small nations against imperialistic and colonizing powers, for freedom of the seas and trade routes, for orderly settlements of grievances. This idea that Christians would now,

[00:11:42] you can see there's this idea now that Christians are going to break free from war. That this last terrible war will be what puts an end to war. When Woodrow Wilson goes to Congress asking them to declare war, he says, quote,

[00:11:54] The ultimate peace of the world and liberation of all its peoples, end quote, is in this war. In another address, he said, trying to encourage them for war, he said, The culminating and final war for human liberty. This is that war.

[00:12:06] Now you and I know World War I is World War I. And there's a World War II that comes after it. But they really thought that, hey, this war is bad because it's the last war.

[00:12:16] And we can learn from this war and Christianity can bring peace to the world after this war. By the way, in that same speech, he also praised Russia for falling to communism. He thought the Tsar gone, people in Russia would finally be free.

[00:12:28] Some people have called Wilson anti-communist at the very least. And maybe he was, but that's a pretty naive comment to make about Russia falling to communism. So it makes me question his anti-communism a bit there. You can see that he's really raising this war to be very dramatic

[00:12:44] and to big heights. This is going to be a changer of world. I mean, World War I was already very dramatic and huge heights, and it was a big, extremely big deal to the world. It's one of my favorite wars to read about.

[00:12:55] The conditions soldiers went through are unimaginable. But this isn't just this is a big, bad war. He's raising this now to when this war is over, there will be no more war because we will have solved war forever. Now, Wilson declared America would enter the war

[00:13:09] and that the goal would be that there would be no one victorious. Germany, France, Britain, no one would see themselves as a victor. But a treaty would be signed that made everyone happy.

[00:13:19] But Wilson kind of shot himself in the foot if he wanted there to be no victor because he then provided all his forces on the Allied side which gave the Allies the ability to beat the Germans, which mean there was a victor.

[00:13:31] So we're going to enter the war on the side of Britain and France and crush Germany because we don't want a victor. It's not a very convincing case. Now, Germany was wildly and strongly punished for her role in World War I.

[00:13:43] And many people believe this was what directly led to Germany in World War II. The reparations, the debts, the feeling of people in World War I that they got a raw end of the deal and were treated unfairly led to their rise of Nazism and things like that.

[00:13:55] Wilson had tried to actually, to be fair to him, to negotiate for Germany to get a better deal. But he was the one who provided the soldiers that caused Germany to be able to be beaten. So he didn't really do that.

[00:14:08] And Wilson, as much as he wanted to help Germany out a bit and keep this from happening, he predicted it would happen if they did this. He was more focused on his 14 points and especially one point in particular, the covenant of the League of Nations.

[00:14:20] Now, by the way, where did he get his 14 points? Well, in 1917, Wilson realized he'd be going to Europe to do some peace treaty stuff. And so he asked 150 academics to prepare some guiding principles he could live by. This will be what we live by.

[00:14:33] This is what the best academics in the world say we need to come up with to create a peace deal that will make everyone happy. And his committee came up with what they call are the 14 points. And honestly, some of the points are good.

[00:14:45] Return lands that were fought over more, help bring an end to colonization. Some of that stuff wasn't bad. And one of them was like don't make a really heavy fine on Germany and stuff like that, that makes them bitter. But most importantly, the really only point

[00:14:59] that Wilson truly cared about was the covenant of the League of Nations. Now, interesting use of the word covenant. That is a very biblical word and it's a very powerful word. And the word covenant comes up six different times in his 14 points.

[00:15:14] The word democracy, for example, comes up zero times in his 14 points. But he really saw what they were doing was a covenant. He believed that the people of God in Israel's day made a covenant, that they swore before God an oath to live for God

[00:15:29] and that they would live a righteous life and that that was what the people of God were supposed to do. And he thought that the nations should come together, especially after such a terrible war, and make a covenant to each other and to God

[00:15:40] that they would no longer do the things they used to do. They wouldn't make secret peace treaties. They wouldn't attack each other. They wouldn't harm each other in war. Everything would change. He truly believed this is what was going to happen.

[00:15:52] He called it a presbyter of the nations, for example. He wanted it headquartered in Geneva. Why? Because, and he never said, but it seems to be because of his deep love of John Calvin and what John Calvin started. He believed he was finishing,

[00:16:04] but where John Calvin was a great theologian statesman, he saw it as a worldwide way of doing this that would happen in his covenant of the League of Nations. He believed that all members of the League would respect one another's national interests

[00:16:17] and if they were in a covenant not to try to harm each other, they wouldn't encroach on each other's borders. They would work things out in a kind of representative way. They would vote on each other's issues. They would talk to each other,

[00:16:29] and if one of them went to war, they would condemn that person. The person would feel bad and stop. He argued it was an organized, and this is a quote from him, operate as an organized moral force of men throughout the world,

[00:16:39] and that whenever wrong and aggression are planned or contemplated, the searching light of conscience will be turned on them. Now you may note there that the League of Nations wasn't going to send an army to stop you, but your conscience would prick you. That was the idea,

[00:16:52] and that the condemnation of the world would be enough to stop you. At the very least, you could argue that this is very naive and the 21st century and 20th century prove that that does not work at all, but it was his idea. He genuinely believed that people

[00:17:06] would be bound by their moral principles and that it would be enough to stop war. He was done with treaties. He believed Christian nations had for too long violated the rules of God by sealing selfishly and secretly with treaties and that World War I was a reckoning,

[00:17:21] a punishment for the way Europe had been doing things, and now it was time to swear an oath of peace before the world together. Now World War I had just ended. You're the leader of the country that basically saved the world from war,

[00:17:32] and you have this bold plan, 14 points, that means in your eyes the end to war all around the world. When you arrive to Europe, you're the first president of the United States to go to Europe, by the way, a while president, and you arrive in Europe,

[00:17:45] and what awaits you? Thunderous applause, parades. Everyone wants to meet you. Giant groups of people. Everyone, everywhere for weeks. They loved him. They were a huge fan. He was a hero, and rightfully so. In their mind, the war was over because of him.

[00:18:02] People in the administration that he worked for, his administration said, don't go to Europe. It's beneath the president to sit on a committee with a bunch of kings or whatever, and they said, don't do this. The president doesn't need to go, but he said he had to go.

[00:18:14] He's on a divine mission, and I quote, no one in America or in Europe knows my mind, and I am not willing to trust them to attempt or to interpret it. He had to go. He's the only person who could do this in his mind.

[00:18:28] No one else could do what he was gonna do and what he needed to do. Now, not every single person loved him. The French prime minister said, why does he need 14 points? God only gave 10 commandments, but at least at first, Wilson was a rock star.

[00:18:41] A poet wrote of him during this time and compared him to Christ. He said, of Wilson, not Christ. He stood on the Eastern gate. Behind him rose the pillory dome. His speech was the voice of man. His thoughts were the thoughts of the word of the living God.

[00:18:57] He then in this poem, it's a very, very long poem, he compared him to the rock, to David, a high priest, and a shepherd to the lost people. Now we actually have Wilson's response, and he didn't respond like, hey man,

[00:19:08] I appreciate the poem, but Jesus is those things. He said, and I quote, the poem touched me more than I know how to say. I read it aloud to Mrs. Wilson. I owe you, my dear fellow, a real debt of gratitude

[00:19:18] for the encouragement you have given to me. So on some level, Wilson seems to be appreciating this messianic complex, he's the savior to the world thing. I read one historian that was kind of like, no, he's too Presbyterian for that. He would never appreciate that.

[00:19:31] But I mean, he clearly did appreciate it on some level and he clearly did, he did like the crowds. He did like the poems, he did like the praise. He was enjoyable for him. Despite all the interviews and popularity and meetings,

[00:19:43] Wilson did still continue to go to church every Sunday while he could at the Paris Peace Conference. And according to his journals, everything we see is a diligent Bible reader and prayer through that time, and that he at least attributed those things to him coming through this okay.

[00:19:57] Over time though, Wilson's 14 points began to fall apart. His idealism of what he wanted Europe to be was not what Europe was, and it wasn't what Europe wanted. Europe wanted to punish Germany and they were going to do so.

[00:20:09] Wilson disagreed and thought this was gonna lead to problems and he was right, but he was so hung up on his League of Nations that he would pretty much give up all his other points if that one went through. Remember, he's on a divine mission to fix war.

[00:20:21] He can't stop just to make sure Germany gets a little bit of a better deal. By the way, he wasn't the only one who wanted a League of Nations. France wanted her own League of Nations, but she didn't want a covenant of God-fearing nations

[00:20:31] protecting the earth and ending war forever. She wanted a victorious treaty of nations and neutrals coming together and ruling for their best interests in that group. If the League of Nations is the precursor to the United Nations, and it is, France is talking more about a NATO

[00:20:49] where countries that have similar interests are working together for their similar interests. That's what France wanted. They didn't want this covenant of League of Nations thing that Wilson wanted, but Wilson didn't want that. He said no, that's just another entangling alliance

[00:21:01] in Europe that the Americas would have to deal with, and that's just not what they want. He wanted Europe to stop doing the same old, same old. I mean, for 100 years, the Napoleonic Revolution, the French Revolution, the wars of Europe

[00:21:14] were just so common, and America was trying to say, no, we're not doing this anymore. We need to stop going to war all the time, Europe. Wilson began to become aloof while he was in Europe. His advisors thought he had kind of lost his confidence,

[00:21:28] maybe because he was standing before all these other world leaders, but his journals actually kind of indicate a different story, that Wilson hadn't lost his confidence, but that actually he didn't trust anybody. He thought his advisors were no longer on his side,

[00:21:40] that he was motivated by, quote, greater principles, quote, than anyone else could comprehend, and he could only rely on himself to do what needed to be done. The European leaders were realists. They wanted a peace treaty that harmed Germany,

[00:21:52] made up for their losses, and gave them more control over colonies and provisions to make up for the war. They wanted treaties that helped the Allies, that won the war, and made the losers pay. Wilson wanted something different. He had this great vision, and he saw himself

[00:22:04] as a moral superior to these European compatriots so focused on their material gains. Now, that's easy to say. Wilson's country didn't lose a million people, right? Like France and Britain and these other countries did. So it's easy to say, how can you be so interested

[00:22:17] in material gain when you got rich selling weapons to the side that won? People at the table began to realize that Wilson would give them a concession on anything as long as they threatened the League of Nations. So whenever they really wanted something like a colony

[00:22:30] or keep their navy or something, they would just say, hey, you know what? We're reconsidering our support of the League of Nations. And suddenly Wilson would be like, well, maybe we can work something out for you after all. Now, he realized that this was happening.

[00:22:41] So finally, Italy said, we want to control Austria and we walk on the League of Nations. And Wilson was like, fine, walk on the League of Nations. So Italy walked on the League of Nations because he didn't want to give Austria

[00:22:51] to the League of Nations, or to Italy, sorry. So he pulls out a typewriter and begins typing and he types this very long letter to Italy. And he calls it America's friend. And he says, you have to join in the sacred obligation, quote, to build a greater peace.

[00:23:04] And he sent that letter to Italy. And Italy published it. And Italy got very mad at the condescending tone of the American president. And basically overnight, almost single-handedly do this letter, European attitudes began to shift on Wilson. He suddenly went from the guy that saves him

[00:23:20] to the guy who's really pompous and condescending and thinks he's better than all of you. And you're so stupid for wanting reparations from the war that cost you your loved ones and ruined your businesses and blah, blah, blah, right? And it's interesting too because this is now

[00:23:34] the third nation that America will fight in World War II that Woodrow Wilson has managed to personally take off. In the first part we talked about how he made Japan mad by not accepting the idea that all races were equal in his covenant of nations talk about there.

[00:23:49] And now we see here he's made Italy mad and specifically made them very much hate him and kind of what America stands for. And he'll make Germany upset by not protecting them from reparations. So really all three nations that America goes to war with

[00:24:02] in World War II can trace a direct cause, maybe not the cause, there's many causes, but they can all direct a specific moment where they got mad at America and Woodrow Wilson specifically. So I'm not saying World War II was caused by Woodrow Wilson.

[00:24:17] I'm just saying it didn't help. He didn't help stop World War II. That's certainly true. At one meeting they were trying to figure out all the details of these reparations and Wilson was just so tired of this. He just has his ideals. He doesn't like compromising.

[00:24:31] He wants his principles and he just doesn't like all this technicality stuff. But he's at meetings to discuss technicality stuff like how much do we pay for per widow? How much do we pay for sons lost? And he just goes, I don't care.

[00:24:43] I don't care about all these technicalities. Or one person was quoted as he says, I don't give a dang, but he doesn't say dang about the details, but I know that we have children that listen in their cars and stuff.

[00:24:53] So I won't say everything, but he's very upset. He doesn't like this. He's so tired of this. And he just is so sick of these inner detailed, intricate, boring discussions. He's got 14 points for crying out loud. He's got something bigger going on.

[00:25:06] Now the minister of France found Wilson exhausting. He told one of the British leaders, you guys are practical, but talking to Wilson is like talking to Jesus. But he didn't mean that in a positive way. Like it's like, wow, talking to Jesus.

[00:25:18] More like this guy thinks he's Jesus and it's very difficult to talk to him. Another person that observed Wilson, Keynes of John Maynard Keynes of Keynesian economics said of Wilson, but in fact, the president had thought out nothing. When it came to practice, his ideas were nebulous.

[00:25:35] They were incomplete. He had no plan. He had no scheme. He had no constructive ideas, whatever clothing you would need to put to the flesh of the life of the commandments he so often thundered from the white house.

[00:25:45] He could have preached a sermon on anything he had said and addressed a stately prayer to the almighty for all of their fulfillment. But he could not actually explain in concrete application how they would apply to the state of Europe.

[00:25:58] Now, this is probably one of the most interesting things that I find about Wilson, that he has these great ideas. He has his great eschatology. He has this great theory on how to rule the world, but he can't explain to you how any of it

[00:26:13] actually applies to the real world. He doesn't care about the details. He doesn't actually care about running things. He just cares about his theories and his principles. I would say, and this may, you may not like this. And I said that again, from the very beginning

[00:26:27] that there was a committee that there would be a group of people yelling right now, don't say this next part, don't say it. But post-millennials, I do think you need to be careful that this might not become you. I hear and see a lot of people on Twitter

[00:26:41] and other places running with slogans of how they're going to make the world a Christian, you know, Christian nationalism, or they're gonna make the world Christian and have all the leaders become Christian. But I have never seen a step-by-step plan of what that looks like.

[00:26:57] I have never seen one of them explain to me what voting organizations they're assembling to do that. They say, we're gonna make all the laws Christian. And when we do this, that, and the other will happen. But what is your plan to do that?

[00:27:08] Who are you voting for? What fundraising are you doing? Whose doors are you knocking on? What is your plan? If you're gonna make the country Christian, that's your plan, well, explain it to me. And much like Woodrow Wilson,

[00:27:20] I see a lot of these guys have all of their talk, but they don't explain how to do it. They don't have a concrete application. I know that some people hearing that may, hopefully again, you don't take that as me attacking you,

[00:27:32] but I'm just warning you that you have to have a plan. If you wanna do this, you need to actually explain who you're voting for, what super PAC you're gonna create, what politicians you're gonna put into power, and what is your exact plan for doing these things

[00:27:46] outside of just sloganeering. Otherwise, you're not gonna sound that different than the 14 points. You have your 14 points, you have your philosophy, you have your principles, how it's supposed to work, but in the real world, they don't apply. And that's just a danger that I have seen

[00:28:01] in the past couple of years of people just sloganeering. And it can be true of all eschatology. All people can sloganeer, and it can be a real problem. Slogans are shallow, but all, you know, all clear water is shallow, but it's the deep water where things happen, right?

[00:28:15] That's not the exact quote. I definitely messed that up, but you get the idea. These slogans sound so great, but what do they actually mean when you're sitting across the table from somebody trying to explain to them, and they're like, what are you talking about? This doesn't work.

[00:28:28] That's what Woodrow Wilson is doing. He has all this philosophy, he has all this theology, he has all these answers of how it's godly and good for the world, but nobody even understands how to work with them. Keynes would later go on to add this other comment too.

[00:28:42] He said, now is that what I have called his theological or Presbyterian temperament became dangerous. Although compromises were now necessary, he remained a man of principles and the 14 points of contract absolutely binding upon him. He would do nothing that was contrary to his great profession of faith.

[00:28:57] So without an abatement of the verbal inspiration of the 14 points, they became a document for gloss interpretation. The intellectual apparatus of self-deception by which the president's forefathers had persuaded themselves that the course they thought was necessary to take was consistent with every syllable of the Pentateuch.

[00:29:14] And what happened was Woodrow basically took his 14 points, made them as if they are the Bible itself and then ran with them as like, everything I'm doing is based on the Bible, so all these 14 points are super great and I can't break them.

[00:29:25] And that's what I think happens to us in eschatology. Post-millennials are not the only ones who do this. We all do this. We have certain eschatological beliefs that we think are true and we're gonna die by them or any kind of theological belief,

[00:29:38] but then we run into the real world where we start to make them the Bible and it crushes us and it makes us difficult to work with and it makes us not get the results that we want and we get frustrated at other people

[00:29:49] for not seeing what we're saying, but reality is us who are wrong. Now there are certain, of course, certain theologies we would never quite, the inerrancy of scripture is we're not shaking on that. Jesus Christ is God. We're not shaking on that, but there are definitely times

[00:30:02] where I think we need to be a little bit more humble and recognize that some of our theology and some of the things that we promote as if it's law, some of our stuff is not the Bible and that we can't be so bound

[00:30:14] to some of these theological systems, whether it's post-millennialism or something else that we don't, that we let it affect the, just not even play into reality anymore. Eventually Wilson gets it. He gets the League of Nations, signed at the Treaty of Versailles.

[00:30:29] He did have to give up the fact that Germany would have to pay those high reparations, though in Germany we'll remember that 20 years later, but he got the League of Nations. He saw this as the end of colonization. He saw this as a bright tomorrow.

[00:30:39] And by the way, don't get the wrong idea. You think, oh, so the end of colonization. So he liked the, no, he just basically wanted power dynamics to change. It wasn't that he thought that those races were better able to run themselves or something like that.

[00:30:52] Now he just had to bring it home for the Senate to approve and he did that. And he worked on his speech as he traveled back on a boat. And he said things in the speech, one of the quotes that he said was,

[00:31:02] again and again, the demon of war has been cast out of the house of the peoples and the house swept clean by a treaty of peace, only to create a time when he would enter in again with spirits worse than himself.

[00:31:11] This is like, if we don't get rid of this demon of war, a worse demon will come. Out of the treaty, he said, this is a covenant. This stage is set. The destiny is disclosed. It has come about by no plan of my conceiving

[00:31:21] or our conceiving, but by the hand of God, who has led us into this, we cannot turn back. We cannot, we can only go forward with lifted eyes and freshened spirit to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth.

[00:31:34] America shall in truth show the way, the light streams upon the path ahead and nowhere else. He further said that it would break the heart of the world not to sign this treaty. Well, sorry, covenant. And we didn't know was that this would be a tremendous fight.

[00:31:49] He never even thought about the idea that America wouldn't support this, but he gets back there and the Senate said, no. We see this as permanently engaging America in Europeans business. And George Washington said, don't get into entangling alliances with Europe.

[00:32:04] Back at the founding of America, we're not gonna, we've always been isolationist over here. We do our own thing. We're not getting involved in Europe. Wilson couldn't believe it. He thought for sure he'd worked so hard. He had dreamed for so long. He had done so much.

[00:32:19] How could they possibly not want to do this? When asked about it, he basically saw as the work of Satan. He became absolutely inflexible and stubborn. His fight to keep it together, he tried to actually, he was so stubborn and so inflexible

[00:32:31] that he actually pushed people away from him. And the Senate, they started switching to the other side away from him. One of his advisors who had helped him create this treaty in Europe came to him and said, hey, maybe we need to work a compromise out

[00:32:43] just so we can get it passed. And he fired him for it. He stopped opening letters from friends on Capitol Hill that had been his friends for a long time, basically under the impression like, no, they're not going to support me.

[00:32:52] I'm not going to read their letters anymore. He became absolutely resolute, stubborn to a T, that he had to win this because, and that he would win this because it was God's mission. He was just being tested in his faith one last time when he wasn't expecting it.

[00:33:04] Now Wilson realized he wasn't winning the Senate over. In fact, if anything, he'd push people away from him. So he said, okay, I'll win the American people over. He put together a tour of 32 cities that he would go to in 22 days.

[00:33:15] On trains, by the way, there's no planes back then. That is a whirlwind trip, right? They do have planes, but a lot of it's going to be on trains. Now he spoke at one location and he said this. He said, my ancestors were troublesome Scotchmen

[00:33:27] and among them were some of the very, that famous group known as the Covenanters. Well, very well, here's the covenant of the League of Nations. We should sign it. But then he also began to start saying some strange things. For example, in one speech, he said,

[00:33:38] I have been bred and am proud to have been bred in the old revolutionary stock which set this very government up. Well, the only problem was that was a total fabrication. He was not of Puritan origin as he claimed. And many newspapers quickly caught on,

[00:33:51] like what are you doing? You're not, there's no evidence that you have Puritanism in your family line. Why are you saying this? Had he just loved the Puritans and read them for so long that he started to imagine he was one?

[00:34:03] The papers went wild and attacked it for him. Now the very last public speech, the end is very last public speech that he gives with this. Now the myths of this great question have cleared away. I believe that men will see the truth eye to eye

[00:34:14] and face to face. There's one thing the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted the truth and we are going to be led by it

[00:34:23] and it's going to lead us and through us, the world out into the pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before. The next day, Wilson had a stroke. The pressure, all the storms of the controversy.

[00:34:36] Remember he had a stroke back at Princeton University. He'd been president over the worst war in American history. He had had the extremely, I mean not civil war, that was worse. It was the worst world war. It was not the worst war in American history.

[00:34:48] I'm sorry about that. It's been a long hours of recording this. He's been over this huge giant storm of controversy and it just crushed him. He had a stroke. Once he had a stroke, his treaty, it was already dying and it was done. There was no way.

[00:35:07] The US has never entered the League of Nations. Quite interestingly, just as he had once predicted that without the US and the League of Nations, the League of Nations would never become anything and it didn't. Now the League of Nations did go on to exist

[00:35:18] but at the start of World War II, it was officially dead. It was pretty much dead before that though. It really never had any major parts to play. 42 nations took part in it. In 1932 though, Japan invaded Manchuria and the other 41 nations in the league voted against it

[00:35:32] to which Japan left the league and was like, okay, we'll see you later. A few years later, Italy invades Ethiopia. Pretty much the same thing plays out. The league says, hey, that's bad and Italy's like, we don't care. Finally, World War II starts, the league is doing nothing.

[00:35:45] You can't make people and make nations good because of just saying you're a bad person if you don't. All of this did though become the blueprint for the United Nations. So the League of Nations, although it did not turn into anything, it was the blueprint model

[00:36:00] that would be used for the United Nations which the United States, as you probably know, is a part of that and would play a much bigger role in the world. Now, I'm gonna be kind of running through these next parts just a little quickly.

[00:36:11] I'm not gonna give you as many details as maybe I did in the first episode on some of these things. Just kind of moving through, there's a lot here. But Wilson, when he had a stroke, he was out.

[00:36:22] Like there are arguments over how out of it he was. There are some arguments that Wilson never really truly recovered fully from it but Wilson was still president for a while. And so during that time, his wife and his doctor and really his wife took over things.

[00:36:38] And some people say, look, she didn't play that big a role. She was just kind of there but she was just a messenger for Wilson. It doesn't seem to be the case though. For example, when there was a British ambassador that came to the White House,

[00:36:48] she had him removed because he had said some negative things about her. And I don't know that we had any evidence that Woodrow felt the same way about that ambassador. The wife here, Ellen, really took over and there's definitely a case that has been made

[00:37:02] that Wilson was completely out of it and that she was completely running the show. That basically doctors could never get a straight answer out of him. He had trouble putting sentences together. He could think but only for a little while. He almost never answered questions

[00:37:16] and that in reality, Ellen was the president and that she was really running the country, signing his orders, signing his declarations, doing this stuff and that the American people really didn't know how bad it was because if they would have,

[00:37:29] they would have probably said the VP needs to step in. The Democrat Party didn't expose him because they were embarrassed and they didn't want everyone to know how bad it was. But the Democrat Party did say no to Woodrow trying to run for a third term.

[00:37:46] Woodrow, at least through his wife, put out the idea, I plan to run for a third term despite the fact that I have a stroke and I'm in my bed almost all day and my wife does all my work. I still plan to run for a third term.

[00:37:56] And the Democrat Party, after a year, this went on for about a year of basically Woodrow's wife running the show and the Democrat Party was like, no, we're not gonna run you and yeah, you're gonna have to get over that. And he never announced a third term.

[00:38:12] It almost seemed as if they threatened the wife like we'll expose you if you don't. Regardless, Woodrow was still a little bit cognizant and he put all his support behind another guy that ran for the Democrat Party and he hoped that this guy could get America

[00:38:28] to embrace the League of Nations and this guy ran saying, I will accept the League of Nations as we agree to it in Europe. He got crushed. I mean, he got slaughtered in the re-election. Warren G. Harding, who wasn't exactly a great guy

[00:38:46] who probably cheated on his wife and a bunch of other stuff, absolutely slaughtered this guy that Woodrow Wilson embraced and Warren G. Harding's entire slogan for president was a return to normalcy. Things have been great, let's get America back to being America. Let's go back to normal.

[00:39:04] Let's stop doing whatever we're doing over here in League of Nations and segregation and all this stuff. He didn't end segregation but he actually did do some reappointing of black people to positions in the government and it never got back to where it was.

[00:39:18] It took a while before it would be back to where it was but he at least tried and Harding was a giant, basically blow back to Wilson. Remember, Wilson only won re-election because he promised he wouldn't go to World War I. He immediately goes to World War I

[00:39:32] and even though America wins the war and it's good for America, people are done. They do not want any more of this stuff going on and they do not want whatever is going on with Wilson and this League of Nations and that was a huge blow

[00:39:47] because Wilson up until this point had basically been saying, the Senate doesn't want me but the American people do. The American people are gonna want the League of Nations and they were just like, no, we don't want the League of Nations. You're wrong. What was really interesting

[00:39:59] and kind of ironic to me too was Wilson was convinced that if all the countries could come together and vote and talk, they would, a peace would ensure. Yeah, who's the number one group he's having trouble with? The Senate

[00:40:13] who is a group of people elected to vote and talk and he's being driven crazy by them. He once said to the Senate during this time, he said, the Senate is worthless and hasn't had an original idea in 50 years which I'm like, okay, but you're,

[00:40:26] so the Senate in America is bad but a Senate of Nations will work is your idea? Like what are you thinking here? Just what a weird guy. Wilson, one of his last days of his life on basically victory day of, I think it was 2024, he kind of came,

[00:40:43] it was 2023, he came out, he kind of gave a speech basically still giving how God's gonna use the League of Nations, how God's gonna use his work, how he's not done yet. He's very angry, very emotional, he cried a lot off and on.

[00:40:54] Some people think that was because of the stroke. Some people think he was basically being force fed lines and then he dies. The year after he dies, Mary, the woman that he was flirting back and forth with for years, sells all of her letters to a biographer

[00:41:09] so they get out pretty quickly. People really struggle with what to think of Woodrow Wilson. Sigmund Freud tried to write basically a psychoanalysis of Wilson and it got mocked. It actually hurt Freud's reputation like a lot because he basically tried to do a psychoanalysis of him

[00:41:25] and everybody was like, that's the stupidest thing we've ever read. Your analysis is full of nonsense, Freud. But people really struggle. What do we do with Woodrow? Like on the one hand, this dude prayed, he read his Bible, he gave speeches to God,

[00:41:37] everything he said was saturated in Jesus. And on the other hand, he was a segregationist, a eugenicist, a horrible person politically, but nobody really called him on it. All of the big Christian academics seem to be okay with that part of him. The biggest issue seemed to be

[00:41:53] his League of Nations World War I stuff to them. What a mess and what a confusing guy. I think there's a few lessons we can learn from him. For starters, danger is a politics in God. Politics is important. God has a lot to say about politics

[00:42:07] and who we vote for and what we do does matter. But when you get in your head that you were in a divine war and you were in a divine mission from God, like Woodrow did, you're in a dangerous place. And when you begin to believe

[00:42:19] that the people who are in your way are trying to caution you as you go down that road, Ahab, after Moby Dick, when they try to warn you that you're going too far and this isn't gonna work and you don't listen to them, you're not humble,

[00:42:31] it comes back to bite you and it came back to bite Woodrow. He was miserable by the end of this. Another issue, why do people reject academia? One of the big questions, why did the fundamentals become a thing? They were supporting Woodrow. They were supporting eugenics.

[00:42:45] They were supporting all of this. And it's a good lesson to remind us that we may have issues with the way the fundamentalists are, we may have issues with the way the fundamentalists are today, especially, but it's a good reason to understand

[00:42:57] why did they come about in the first place? Because they were responding to something else that was very bad. And you may not like the direction they went. You may complain about how you grew up. I know so many people,

[00:43:08] oh my parents didn't let me play Dungeons and Dragons or listen to rock and roll. They were such fundamentalists. Maybe you didn't like that. And I understand that was not good and that legalism had a problem too. I understand it, but it didn't come from nowhere.

[00:43:22] It came as a response from the academia and this stuff that Woodrow Wilson was doing before. They were responding to that and so they over responded and over corrected. Our response to them can't be to over respond and over correct too and just completely throw out

[00:43:37] the idea that there was ever such thing as problems with this. We each need to be careful not to just recognize the flaws but to recognize what the generation above us was responding to in the first place. When we do that and we understand a little better

[00:43:51] why they acted the way they did, it gives us a little bit of perspective. So back to the Postmills. Again, I hope this wasn't seen as a rebuke or an attack on your movement or that you're all a bunch of Woodrow Wilsons,

[00:44:03] but I do hope that you have a plan. What are you gonna do? What is it that you actually aim to do? Not just the theology up there pie in the sky stuff, but what is it that you make when you actually apply your ideas to real life?

[00:44:17] Explain what your thoughts are and what you need to be doing and what this will look like for the people around you. Who are you voting for? Because you know what, we might actually be interested in voting for some of the same people. I might be actually interested

[00:44:33] in supporting some of your ideas. If I actually knew what they were and they were on the ground, Postmills be careful. You've seen 100 years ago when you turn into something beautiful, it could become a real problem. Notice that throughout Woodrow's entire thing, he had merged government and God

[00:44:51] and science in a way that these things were number one. But where was sharing Jesus? Where was conversions? Maybe it was in his personal life, but I never saw it in anything that I read. No accounts of him sharing the gospel. It is not a coincidence

[00:45:07] that very recently there's been a trend in history in the history of the gospel that we move towards this movement of going back in this direction, of towards this. People are gonna be mad. They're gonna say, we're not the same. But there's been a real movement against missions

[00:45:26] and against missionary movements. Trust me, I talk to missionaries and I talk to people and I see the books that are being written and missionaries is being questioned again and what is taking its place? The idea that we should be loving our neighbor

[00:45:40] and that we should be doing good and that we should be taking care of their condition and why are we sending money overseas to share Jesus with lost people and translate Bibles when we have neighbors that are hungry next door and you hear that, don't you?

[00:45:53] Do you hear that? That's an echo of the social gospel. It's an echo of Woodrow Wilson. This movement is not gone. It's coming back. It's all around us. It's beginning to take place again and if we are not careful, we will see an exact repeat again.

[00:46:10] And you will see an exact repeat if you don't learn the lesson. What we need to be careful to do is to not be like Woodrow, to not be prideful and by the way, if you're not a post-mill, I know that this last two parts

[00:46:24] we've been talking to them a lot but you're not out of this either. If you're proud and think that your eschatology has no problems, you have people in your camp too that cause problems, everybody does. We need to be humble and work with people and let's work together

[00:46:42] to share the love of Jesus to the world, not just the social gospel. Not just getting focused on the government and the politics of this world like Wilson did but recognizing that there is something more to all of this going on. That we are about sharing

[00:46:57] the love of Jesus and bringing souls into the kingdom and that's something certainly all of us regardless of eschatology can come into agreement with, can't we? Now I didn't actually originally plan to end this story with another president and you may be like, oh my goodness, another president?

[00:47:13] But let me tell you a really cool story about a guy named William McKinley who was also president. You may not have heard of him. He's extremely unremembered. Historians mark him as like average. He's not somebody anybody remembers but he has a really interesting story.

[00:47:29] I wanna share a really quick one with you. Now he was not yet, he wasn't perfect. He had, one of the things that happened is he basically dealt with the Spanish-American War. And the Spanish-American War, if you don't know, America went to war with Spain in like 1898

[00:47:43] and they didn't mean to but when they won the war with Spain they ended up with the Philippines. They weren't really aiming to control the Philippines. They didn't know what to do with it. So William McKinley was giving a speech. He had some ministers coming.

[00:47:57] He often, always, he loved, William McKinley was a Christian. He had ministers come to his office all the time to pray for him and he would say, I'm going to go to the Philippines. I'm going to go to the Philippines. He said, wait a minute, wait a minute.

[00:48:12] I wanna talk to you. And he said, hold a minute longer gentlemen. Not quite yet gentlemen. Before you go, I would like to say a word to you about the Philippine business. I have been criticized a good deal about the Philippines but I don't deserve it.

[00:48:30] The truth is I didn't want the Philippines and when they came to us as a gift from the gods to the Philippines, he said, quote, that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos

[00:48:43] and uplift them and Christianize them and by God's grace do the very best we could by them as our fellow men for whom Christ had died. And then I went to sleep and I slept soundly and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer

[00:49:01] of the war department of the Americans running the Philippines. You may say that was wrong but look at the difference in just all that language we heard between Woodrow Wilson and William McKinley. Look at how they sounded. Look at the difference. McKinley struggled, he struggled like Woodrow Wilson.

[00:49:20] What do I do? And then he said, I will teach them about Jesus Christ. That is how it changed the Philippines. That is what I'll do with this opportunity that was given to me. All his intelligence and all of his academic training blocked the way for him

[00:49:38] whereas William McKinley looked over and said let's share the gospel. We're gonna teach people about Jesus. Let's make that the United States mission. We didn't want the Philippines but let's do something good with it. Now McKinley will be assassinated by an anarchist

[00:49:52] and this is one of the coolest stories ever. Not that he got assassinated. I'm like, ooh, he got assassinated. But what he does afterwards is he slumped into his chair and he says to the guy who assassinated him, even at a time like this

[00:50:06] he didn't want to see him hurt. And as the Secret Service was taking him in he's been, as far as I can tell, shot or stabbed. And he then says to them, go easy on them boys. Telling the Secret Service

[00:50:20] not to hurt this guy that just assassinated him. A couple days later he's on his deathbed and McKinley was murmuring disconnected lines but he kept kind of just humming slash singing to himself and once in a while he would say that as a prayer too.

[00:50:34] Finally, his final goodbye. And some people say he didn't exactly say this. Evidence shows he wasn't this articulate but he definitely said this over the course of hours. Goodbye all. It is God's will. His will, not ours, be done. And then he died. Now Dr. Park,

[00:50:54] the doctor who watched the president said that he was amazed. He had never seen anyone so gentle that could die like that. He just said he'd never seen anything like that. Such peace was over him. And the doctor was quoted as saying, up until that time

[00:51:12] I never really believed that there could be a good man who was a good Christian and also a good politician but McKinley's death, his love, his forgiveness of his assassin and his just closeness to God convinced the doctor that you know what? You could be a Christian

[00:51:28] and also you could be president. I tell you this story and I'm like we gotta get out there and start repping William McKinley again but just look at the difference of these two men. Look at the difference of these two stories in Spire.

[00:51:40] One of these men clung to God, not ideas, not theology, not eschatology but he just clung to Jesus. He showed a love for Christ. He wanted the world to be saved. He even forgave his assassins and one of these men was rigid and clung to his books

[00:51:56] and his ideas and his 14 points and I just tell you guys, I think that for me I don't know what his eschatology was. I don't know all those ideas. He might have not been great. I really don't know what his politics were but I'm just saying

[00:52:12] I want the reputation of Christians to look like William McKinley where when we die, when we live, we take the most of every opportunity to share Jesus Christ. I think that's what we should be aiming for and if our politics doesn't look like

[00:52:28] love to the guy who assassinated us, willing to forgive even the guy who killed us, let's go easy on him. That I think is a much more profound message of Jesus to the world than so often the message that we are sending.

[00:52:44] This is Troy and this is ReviveThoughts. Shopify You can set up your online shop in the new without programming or design knowledge. Thanks to the efficient setup and intuitive social media and online marketplace integration you can advertise and sell via Instagram, Ebay and Co.

[00:53:29] It has never been so easy to reach new target groups. Shopify offers all the tools to build your online business on a single, secure platform. Test for free Visit shopify.de-try Simply type in shopify.de-try and get started. Made for Germany Powered by Shopify