This book tells how a group of Protestant theologians, including Henry P. Van Dusen, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Bennett, Francis P. Miller, Georgia Harkness, and Samuel McCrea Cavert, forged a theology of international engagement for America in the 1930s and '40s. As a result, they informed the public rationale for U.S. participation in World War II and stimulated American leadership in establishing both secular and international organizations for the promotion of world order.

Heather Warren shows how, in creating a coherent, theologically derived position and bringing it to bear on contemporary international issues, this group combined ideas with public action in a way that set the standard for American theologians' social activism in the years to come. They did this by explaining the significance of world events in religious terms that the laity understood, providing a moral calculus for the principal issues leading to war, such as racial nationalism.

They established a reputation as "prophetic," by criticizing the dominant liberal theological tradition and the existing social order. They proposed concrete remedies for social and political ills, working to implement their solutions through changes in the policies of governments as well as the churches. They gained a hearing in the national press and were regularly published in religious journals that reached the active, influential segment of American society.

In retrospect, Warren argues, their story sheds light on the related subject of how attention to international issues became a hallmark of the American Protestant establishment in the mid-twentieth century.