Reply #13: I guess my point is that the Progressives were a large, diverse, and influential movement:

[struggle4progress]

we can blame them in part for Prohibition, as well as giving them due credit for labor reforms and the push for natural resource conservation

So I expect you'll find both isolationist and interventionist progressives. I don't doubt that you'll find some progressives pushing an interventionist policy using religious terminology

But I doubt you will find the real motives for intervention there: wars often reflect material interests; by the early twentieth century, the US had a long history of intervention to protect its foreign trade; and the blockades by both sides of the European conflict presented the problem of whether the US could accept such blockades

The Central Powers began at the end of 1916 to seek a negotiated end to the war, and (when that failed) the Germans in early 1917 declared unlimited submarine warfare. The actual public justification for the 1917 US war declaration seems to have been the Zimmerman Telegram, which was understood as a betrayal of prior US trust and willingness to convey German diplomatic traffic, as a sign of neutrality -- though I'm too amateur to discuss issues there in any detail. So by the spring of 1917, the US political class may have had an analysis something like this: The Central Powers are losing and increasingly desperate; our shipping is now completely insecure; and Germany is now attempting to foment territorial wars at our borders. So let's save ourselves a long headache, intervene on the winning side, and put an end to this