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In this talk, first given at the Just and Sustainable Peace conference at Lambeth Palace in March 2026, Philip Powell argues that Christian internationalism is an overlooked force behind the founding of the United Nations. He traces how ecumenical leaders, church commissions and Christian diplomats helped shape the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, just across the street, there is a small park named after Ralph Bunche, the first African-American recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
On the wall facing the UN, we read these words from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah carved on granite stone.
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
And on the other side of the road, next to the main UN building, we see the ‘Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares’ bronze sculpture by Russian artist Evgeniy Vuchetich. This sculpture is of course based on Micah 4:3.
Both the Bible verse and the sculpture expresses the prophetic hope and ultimate aspiration of the United Nations – a turning away from militarism and toward peace-building, to bring an end to armed conflict and the longing for a peaceful and productive world built on cooperation and justice.
Going back eighty years ago, on 26 June 1945, official representatives of 50 countries, meeting in San Francisco, signed the Charter of the United Nations. And four months after the San Francisco Conference, the United Nations officially began on 24 October 1945.
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…
To explain the origin and formation of the United Nations in 1945, the most straightforward answer would be the victory of the Allied Powers in World War II.
After the failure of the League of Nations to prevent the Second World War, we can reference significant events during the war that led up to the 1945 San Francisco Conference.
There was the Inter-Allied Conference at St. James’s Palace in 1941. A few months later, while the Battle of the Atlantic was raging, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met “somewhere at sea,” and issued a joint declaration, the Atlantic Charter.
The following year, in 1942, a month after the Pearl Harbor attack, representatives of 26 allied nations at war with one or more of the Axis powers gathered at the White House and signed The Declaration by United Nations – the first time this historic phrase was used in an official document. It was Franklin Roosevelt who actually coined the term “United Nations”.
So, in one sense the United Nations is the outworking of “victor’s justice”. The “big three” – Churchill, FDR and Stalin, meeting in Tehran (1943) and in Yalta (1945), determined the post-war international order and what the UN should be for and become. This is the world of international power politics.
Furthermore, according to Mark Mazower’s 2009 book, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, the UN was created as an instrument to manage, secure and extend Anglo-American imperial internationalism based on the racial superiority of the white man.
The book has excellent chapters on South African statesman, General Jan Smuts (who drafted the text of the UN preamble), one of the few leaders who was present at the creation of both the meetings the League of Nations in Paris and the UN in San Francisco, and another chapter on Sir Alfred Zimmern, the English IR scholar connected with Lord Milner’s Kindergarten Group.
For some other IR scholars, the intellectual origins of the UN go back to Immanuel Kant’s 1795 famous essay, Zum ewigen Frieden (Toward Perpetual Peace), and his proposal for a federation of free, republican states working together to prevent war.But I want to make a case today that ‘Christian internationalism’ has been an under-investigated and overlooked factor in the founding and creation of the United Nations.
Before I can explain what Christian internationalism is, let me add two further preliminary remarks.
One, there are many kinds of internationalism – marxist internationalism, socialist internationalism, liberal and even imperial internationalism, and more…
Two, there is a separate story to be told, which I cannot include here, of evangelical anti-internationalism in the twentieth century, both in the United States and increasingly transported around the world, and how Christians were mobilised to actively work against the United Nations and its objectives.
A name to mention here would be Pastor Carl Mclntire and his role in the politicisation of Christian fundamentalism. A window into the worldview of this movement can be found in the writings popularized by Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind book series.
The United Nations is portrayed as a vehicle used by the Antichrist to take over the world and destroy the true Christian faith. The zenith of this movement’s success arrived in the election of Donald J. Trump to the US presidency in 2016. Trump is the political face of White Christian Nationalism, the exact opposite of what I want to talk about today – Christian Internationalism.
Christian internationalism is a constellation of ideas, individuals and institutional forms, both formal and informal networks, primarily but exclusively identified with liberal protestant Christians based in North America and Europe but also extended to other parts of the world, during the period from the middle of the nineteenth century and to the second half of the twentieth century.
In essence, Christian internationalism is about affirming our solidarity to humanity as a whole beyond our membership to a particular nation or state.
According to Michael G. Thompson, he explains in his 2015 book, For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States Between the Great War and the Cold War, Christian internationalism had three broad and far-reaching impulses.
First, it was action-oriented, with a proliferation of new enterprises such as travelling seminars, conferences and publications devoted to reflection on the ethics of international relations.
Second, it had a holistic, oppositional and radical political orientation and agitation against imperialism and racism.
Third, in the American context, the movement was premised on a fundamental critique of the idea of America as a “Christian nation”.
To give a flavour of Christian internationalism, let me mention four individuals from a list of over forty prominent Christian internationalists.
He is known as the ‘Lutheran peacemaker’. He was invited to attend the San Francisco conference as a member of civil society. Some have argued that without Nolde’s leadership the UN Charter would not have included the need for a Human Rights Commission and a universal charter on human rights.
As we know universal human rights, and not any religious creed, is the “soul” of the UN.
Later he became director of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA), as part of the WCC, and worked tirelessly to turn the vision of the United Nations into reality.
Is a Lebanese diplomat and Christian Orthodox theologian. He was a member of the Lebanese delegation at San Francisco and signed the UN charter on behalf of his country.
He was both President of the Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations General Assembly.
Malik worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt in drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
Because of Malik’s diplomatic acumen, when the final text of the Declaration was voted for adoption by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, it passed with 48 votes in favor and zero votes against it. The Soviet Bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa abstained from voting.
The UN understood the important role of women in peacemaking and sustaining peace efforts.
A methodist advocate for social and racial justice. She served 28 years as secretary for Christian social relations of the Woman’s Division of the Board of Missions of The Methodist Church.
She was part of the World Order Movement and worked to mobilize grassroots support in churches for the United Nations.
She is an Indian professor and ecumenical leader, a member of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church.
She is the first woman to become the President of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and was also International Vice-President of Young Women Christian Association (YWCA).
She traveled extensively in the United States, Europe and the Middle East promoting Christian internationalism. One local newspaper in the US reported that she could talk fluently and with authority about the flora and fauna of India as she talked about political philosophy.
At the first General Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam in 1948, she and a group of women challenged Karl Barth’s theology about women in leadership. Later Barth remarked that he was intimidated by Chakko’s dark eyes.
Let me now mention one important gathering of Christian leaders.
Given we are meeting here at Lambeth, I can talk about the 1920 Lambeth Conference, which issued the “Appeal to All Christian People”. The conference strongly advocated for the inclusion of Germany in the League of Nations and called for working toward the healing of the wounds of war. The resolutions of the conference addressed international issues and affirmed the rights of indigenous races.
For our discussion today, I have to mention the more important 1937 Oxford Conference, officially the World Conference on Church, Community, and State. It was a landmark ecumenical gathering of the good and great. J. H. Oldham, who was the Chairman of the conference, had invited John Foster Dulles to join, who would go on to play a key role as the US representative to the San Francisco conference and later became the Secretary of State under president Dwight Eisenhower.
The Oxford Conference brought into centre stage a Christian understanding of human dignity and human freedom rooted in divine creation and revelation over-against modern totalitarian projects like Marxism, communism and capitalism.
The conference report, The Universal Church and the World of Nations, stressed the necessity for an international order based on moral principles of human dignity, freedom and justice.
It also developed a dialogical social method of “middle axioms” derived from Christian ideals that provided provisional and practical guidelines for concrete action within particular historical and cultural contexts.
While the Oxford Conference was an ecumenical Christian gathering, its emphasis on Christian principles applied to international affairs directly influenced the lobbying efforts during the formation of the United Nations.
Dulles’ Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, as part of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) in the US, made nine recommendations based on its “Six Pillars of Peace” in response to the Dumbarton Oaks proposal for the creation of the United Nations.
At San Francisco, six of the nine recommendations of the Commission made it into the Charter.
Some of these were:
1) A preamble statement about the moral aims of the United Nations,
2) A commitment to develop a body of customary international law,
3) a declaration of fundamental universal human rights.
Made sure the UN could act as a barrier to thwarting human aggression and sinfulness on an international scale.
As Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, said in 1954: “The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell”.
So, it is beyond question, the ideals of Christian internationalism have had a direct bearing on the Charter of the United Nations and the objectives for why the UN exists as an international forum for nations to resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully.
While it would be credulous to make a case for a simplistic causal relation between Christian internationalism and the founding of the United Nations, my argument here this morning is that Christian internationalism created the conditions and catalysed the vision that gave birth to the international organisation for peace that we now call United Nations.
This is why, Dulles said at a pivotal conference in Girton College, Cambridge after the war in 1946, without the churches the United Nations would not have been formed. Let us be clear, the United Nations is not a religious organisation, and neither does it have sovereignty over its member states. It is after all an inter-governmental organisation based on the Westphalian model of governance. But I have to add it is not simply a legalistic structure, it is built on moral foundations.
The way the United Nations was constituted and constructed was an improvement and advancement from the League of Nations. The opening words of The Covenant of the League of Nations from 1919 did not read: We the peoples… It begins with the words: The High Contracting Parties…
So what was different about the UN? The UN included a role for civil society – for NGOs, religious groups, and other non-state actors to contribute to achieving the overall objectives of the United Nations Charter. This meant that there was real bottom-up buy-in as to why the United Nations existed.
Secondly, the founders of the United Nations, understood and worked hard to include in the Charter, and according to the argument I am making, Christian internationalism was heavily involved in this aspect, that the root causes of war have to be addressed, not simply the manifestations of war. Otherwise there would be no guarantee of a long-term sustainable peace.
As it is clearly stated at the entrance to the UNESCO building in Paris.
‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’
That is why people like Nolde and Malik worked so tirelessly to include Article 18, ‘the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
They understood that without real civil and political rights, not just economic and social rights as the Soviets believed, there can be no real peace in the world.
At this moment in history, when the drum beats for war seem to be getting louder, we are once again confronted by Isaiah’s vision of peace – nations shall not lift up swords against nations.
The longing for this prophetic dream to come true will never die and can never be quenched, because as Christ-followers, we believe that Jesus is the Prince of Peace. We believe his victory on the cross over against all violence and injustice, through laying down his own life for others, including his enemies, will come to ultimately determine the telos of the unfolding drama of world history.
You and I have a part to play in this.
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