American Democracy Promotion and the Missionaries of Empire

While the field of religion and international relations has grown and deepened over the past forty years, this article suggests that scholars have neglected the ways in which religious practices and structural relations shape seemingly secular policies such as democracy promotion. Security scholars have long lamented the adverse effects of democracy promotion, while comprehensive empirical reviews of democracy promotion affirm that it did not increase the likelihood of democratization. If democracy promotion did not spread democracy, what did it do? What was democracy promotion? Drawing on original interviews, research in multiple archives, and a new dataset of grants by the National Endowment for Democracy, the article demonstrates that American democracy promoters were to contemporary American liberal imperialism to those of Christian missionaries were to European imperialism. Democracy promotion was the ideological component of American liberal imperialism, with democracy promoters playing an analogous role to missionaries seeking to structure the social order. Key practices include universalizing a particular tradition, being sustained by mission rather than outcome, and evangelizing to sustain belief in the home church. In its claims of universality, its use of ideology as a double mask for hegemony, and its deployment of secularized theology, democracy promotion provided the motivation and legitimation for American liberal imperialism. Understanding democracy promotion as the missionary component of American liberal imperialism helps to explain aspects of the policy that were otherwise inexplicable. More theoretically, understanding democracy promotion as the missionary component of American liberal imperialism opens new avenues for scholarship on religion, empire, and international affairs.