The new global engagement of American evangelicalism during and after World War II unfolded in close relationship with the American state. Viewing the US's new power as providential, postwar evangelicals eagerly took advantage of the manifold opportunities that the country's advancing political, economic, and cultural influence offered to religious groups both in the domestic sphere and on the international stage. Eager to show that evangelical Christianity could “compete as a vital world ideology,” white conservative Protestants sought to connect with the resources of the state in the pursuit of a broad-based project of religious revival, missionary activism, and overseas institution building.Footnote 1 The sentiment was reciprocated. Policymakers in the late 1940s and 1950s, keen to launch spiritual weapons against America's Cold War foes, engaged in the “deliberate and managed use of societal resources to stimulate a religious revival.”Footnote 2 They engineered new ties between evangelicals, bureaucrats, and political elites in order to mobilize the faith's institutional resources for building up America's global presence.
This essay explores two key areas where white conservative Protestantism and the state intersected: missions – both at home and abroad – and foreign aid. It examines these networks in the context of recent research into the state–nongovernmental collaborations that underlay US foreign policy during the Cold War and newer studies on the development of evangelical global consciousness in the postwar period. Analyzing the institutional linkages that developed between evangelicals and the federal government after World War II reveals an ambiguous picture. On the one hand, the new postwar church–state networks tied evangelicals ever closer to the national security state and the “militarized globalism” of the Cold War.Footnote 3 They sustained evangelical efforts to return to the global arena and opened up significant “inside tracks” for conservative Protestants in Washington politics, positioning them as “backchannel diplomats” at critical foreign-policy junctures.Footnote 4 In this setting, conservative Protestantism's missionary fervor and zealous anticommunism frequently ended up sanctifying the nation, global hegemony, American-style democracy, and liberal capitalism.
On the other hand, the strident religious nationalism of the Cold War period failed to drown out entirely evangelical voices critical of America's corruptibility and worldliness. Looking beyond religio-political elites and official foreign policy suggests that many conservative Protestants involved in mission and foreign aid work stuck to a prophetic and antimilitarist stance critical of big government, a standing army, and market capitalism. As George Marsden notes, “the vision more critical of nation and self-interest is an equally venerable part of a heritage that goes back at least to Roger Williams.”Footnote 5 Fears of becoming agents of American soft power, concerns about the corrupting influences of accepting public funds in foreign aid work, and worries about how close church–state ties would be perceived in the recipient countries generated heated internal debates about the contours of evangelical global activism. What is more, instances of indigenization and “reverse missions” opened up opportunities for assertions from the global South through evangelical channels.
Postwar evangelicalism's expanding missionary and humanitarian activities thus both “naturalized” the Cold War order and preserved an adversarial identity encompassing both isolationist and anticolonialist positions. It was exactly this contradiction, however, that proved to be a major political and cultural asset for the movement during the fluid postwar years when America's rise to global power posed significant challenges for a nation that had neither cultivated the imperialist outlook nor developed the permanent military and administrative capacities necessary for sustaining this level of international engagement. Of course US history is blighted by many instances of colonial and imperialist exploitation and expansion – viz. the global entanglements of slavery, the colonization of the West, warfare against Native Americans, and the acquisition of imperial possessions after the Spanish–American war in 1898. This did not mean, however, that Americans accepted the ideological, institutional, and economic structures required for the exercise of global hegemony. In times of empire, nations are sacralized, power is consolidated, government expands, corporate influence grows, foreign interventions abound, and permanent military mobilization is depicted as a public good. Yet in the US these prerequisites of power clashed with deeply embedded traditions of anticolonialism, antistatism, antimonopolism, antimilitarism, exceptionalism, and distrust of centralized control.Footnote 6
This meant that the ideologies and institutions necessary for the exercise of American global power had to develop in conjunction with, rather than in opposition to, antistatist and anti-imperialist sentiments. Caught in this dilemma, Cold War policymakers ended up constructing something quite remarkable: a vast administrative state that hid the expansion of the federal government behind a “smokescreen of anti-statism.” For this purpose they relied upon cooperation between nongovernmental and state actors.Footnote 7 It was in this context that the newly globalizing evangelicalism's equivocal relationship with the state helped sustain America's hegemonic efforts—not by simply sacralizing and legitimizing American empire, but by assuming a powerful role in culturally reconciling the needs of the “New Rome” with the ideational legacy of the “New World Israel.” By being simultaneously superpatriotic and subcultural, antistatist and government-subsidized, expansionist and anticolonialist, white conservative Protestantism had just enough insurgent content to resonate with exceptionalist and limited-government sentiments, and just enough accommodationist velocity to fit comfortably within the ideological and institutional parameters of the Cold War state. Evangelicalism, reflecting a pattern typical in the history of religion and imperial politics, is thus very much part of the story of American global power after World War II in that it helped align the expansion of the state with traditional antistatist sentiments, and hegemonic policies with the legacy of anti-imperialism.Footnote 8
STATE–NONGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS: HEGEMONY, AUTONOMY, AND TRANSNATIONALISM
The study of state–nongovernmental networks has in recent decades greatly invigorated research into US diplomatic history in general and the Cold War in particular. As Emily Rosenberg has argued, the interaction of private and state efforts was historically part of the political economy of expansion.Footnote 9 Moving beyond the traditional focus on Presidents, statesmen, and generals, as well as the revisionist emphasis on state and corporate interests, research on “hybrid ventures” has shifted attention toward third-sector organizations in international relations. Challenging the notion that an expanded state eclipsed philanthropic and nongovernmental entities, this research indicates a synergistic relationship in which both sectors developed in conjunction with each other and the borders between “private,” “public,” and “third sector” were constantly negotiated.Footnote 10
In the post-World War II period the experiences and resources of nongovernmental organizations were crucial for developing the knowledge base and the administrative capacities necessary for the exercise of global hegemony. The growing networks between the state and nongovernmental agencies helped forge the ideological and institutional infrastructure of foreign-policy governance. As federal fiscal practices changed after the war from balancing the budget to ensuring the fulfillment of specific strategic objectives, government grants fuelled the growth of both nonprofit and for-profit organizations.Footnote 11 Foreign aid expenditure, for example, became one of the most reliable components of the federal budget, creating a quintessential Cold War project that connected the state and nongovernmental agencies in the pursuit of the shared goals of international relief, commercial access, military support, and containment. To this day, an estimated 41 percent of overseas development funds in the US are channeled through nongovernmental organizations. Comparable figures for Japan and the UK are 2 percent and 12 percent respectively.Footnote 12 Many of the largest philanthropic foundations often functioned as nonofficial extensions of US policy. Close organizational ties and a revolving door in personnel marked their relations. Former secretaries of state Dean Rusk and John Foster Dulles, for example, moved from the Rockefeller Foundation to the State Department, while presidential advisers John McCloy and McGeorge Bundy moved from public service to the Ford Foundation.Footnote 13
Religious organizations were at the very heart of these new organizational fields between the state and nongovernmental agencies in foreign-policy governance.Footnote 14 Faith organizations brought a number of important resources to the table. Globally, their missionary knowledge base, international institutional presence, and role as transcultural mediators facilitated American entries into the Third World, which many policymakers considered to be the key to winning the Cold War. Close contacts between missionaries and US diplomatic staff remained the norm throughout the Cold War as both the patriotic fervor of World War II and the spiritualized anticommunism of the Cold War had made missionaries less wary of cooperating with the state. Likewise, in the humanitarian aid field, the government's close wartime regulation of voluntary agencies had by the late 1940s yielded to a system of generous subsidies for nongovernmental providers. The main church–state funding ties in foreign aid developed in the aftermath of the federal government's decision to fund ocean freight costs in 1947; to distribute US surplus food abroad under the Agricultural Act of 1949 and the 1954 Food for Peace legislation; and to offer international technical assistance under Truman's Point Four proposals, which later developed into the AID program. In 1948 a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs acknowledged that religious voluntary agencies should be seen as “an essential counterpart of foreign assistance programs.”Footnote 15 In the early 1950s, the share of revenue from federal sources was greater for religious aid agencies than for secular ones, and from 1955 to 1966, federal shares for both averaged 58 percent.Footnote 16 Convinced that aid to church-related institutions would buttress national defense, John Foster Dulles strongly supported public aid funds for religious agencies.Footnote 17 And the director of the United States Information Agency (USIA), George V. Allen, told the North Carolina Council of Churches in 1959 that he would like to see the churches “take over” America's foreign relations.Footnote 18
Research into the state–nongovernmental networks in US foreign policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has raised a number of important questions. Were third-sector agencies that received public funds doing the state's dirty work or asserting their own agendas? Were they coopted into the “national interest” or subverting government objectives? Are we dealing with a sham distinction between the state and the nongovernmental sector or a countervailing power holding government to account? And did religious missions and aid providers further neocolonial dependency or empower recipient populations? In offering answers to these questions, the wider academic literature has been dominated by three main interpretive angles. These conceptualize the state–nongovernmental network in terms of hegemony, autonomy, and transnationalism.
Advocates of a hegemonic approach maintain that aid organizations, even if they were dedicated to impartiality and internationalism, all too often became instruments of American empire building. They helped legitimize strong central government, continuous military mobilization, and the penetration of colonized spaces via technology and bureaucracies.Footnote 19 They also contributed to what intellectual historian Charles Maier has called an “obsession with social enclosures”; that is, the drawing of clear physical, cultural, and bureaucratic lines between nations, ethnicities, and classes.Footnote 20 Examining the American foreign mission movement between the 1790s and 1840s, for example, Emily Conroy-Krutz shows that missionaries, motivated by deep faith as well as cultural chauvinism, attempted to export their religion, gender norms, and labor practices to the entire globe on the basis of a “Christian imperialism.”Footnote 21
In contrast, proponents of the concept of autonomy suggest that the specific configuration of the state–nongovernmental relationship enabled third-sector agencies to build up counterinstitutions to government and play an active role in shaping foreign policy. In a recent study of the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service (ACVAFS), for example, Josh Mather explored how religious groups used the state to empower themselves. In particular, he examines the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act of 1954. Initially designed as a temporary program for getting rid of the US surplus of agricultural commodities, it quickly became a permanent foreign-assistance program as voluntary agencies, such as Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service, and CARE, significantly increased their food distribution and took advantage of federal freight funding. The expansion of the “hybrid humanitarianism” in international aid, Mather suggests, both sustained religious efforts to return to the global arena and helped legitimize Cold War interventionism.Footnote 22
Finally, scholars who utilize a transnational perspective understand the state–nongovernmental networks as pluralistic and multidirectional enterprises. Examining circulations, interactions, and connections beyond the nation-state, they highlight instances of indigenization, resistance, and feedback effects that challenged boundaries of race, gender, class, and nation. Stephen Warren, for example, depicts nineteenth-century missionaries seeking to convert Indians as inadvertent agents of preserving Indian cultural identity. Ian Tyrrell traces how the colonial experiences of missionaries infused antiracist and anti-imperial activism in the US. And Heather Sharkey shows how evangelical missionary activity in Egypt in the twentieth century inadvertently helped foster the rise of anti-imperialist movements.Footnote 23
In spite of this significant new research on both secular and religious groups in American foreign relations, however, evangelical global engagement after World War II and the faith's participation in the new state–nongovernmental networks has received remarkably little attention from scholars. Yet the “international turn” of American evangelicalism in the 1940s and 1950s both constitutes one of the most distinctive dimensions of the postwar religious resurgence and paved the way for a new relationship with the state. A brief review of both aspects illustrates the way in which they were intertwined.
World War II and the Cold War ushered in the broad-based revival of white evangelicalism as a significant “third force” in American Protestant politics and culture. In the eyes of a new generation of so-called neo-evangelicals, such as Billy Graham and theologian Carl F. H. Henry, prewar fundamentalism had made the mistake of abandoning social engagement to secularists, while the war had exposed the shallowness of theological modernism and the naive postmillennialism of the Social Gospel. Seeking to show that evangelical Christianity was “an intellectually viable and vibrant faith and not a suspect cult,” Henry concluded that only a firm belief in transcendent moral principles rooted in spiritual conversion could turn the Western concept of freedom into an intellectual potion powerful enough to ward off the threats of fascism and communism.Footnote 24
The formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942, Fuller Theological Seminary in 1947, and the magazine Christianity Today in 1956 gave institutional shape to this revival. Under the auspices of the decentralized and loosely organized NAE, evangelicals organized lobbying efforts in Washington, set up a clearinghouse for legislative campaigns, coordinated relief and missionary work, spawned the powerful National Religious Broadcasters, and fostered the training of conservative Christians for positions in government. In this way they laid the foundation for the emergence of modern evangelicalism as a technologically savvy, commercially pioneering, politically engaged, and internationally active movement.Footnote 25
The renewed effort to convert the world was an important part of this endeavor. According to Sarah Miller-Davenport, the postwar shift from separatism to engagement among “a core of evangelicals who believed worldwide conversion would go hand in hand with American expansionism” was at the center of evangelicalism's political resurgence.Footnote 26 Indeed, the massive growth of evangelical mission activism after World War II meant that, by the 1980s, 90 percent of American Protestant missionaries in Africa were evangelicals.Footnote 27 Likewise, in the foreign aid field the rise of evangelical agencies was the most striking change after World War II. Whereas in 1940 they had comprised 10 percent of religious aid agencies, by 2004 they constituted close to half (forty-eight percent). What is more, the revenue share (including government funding) of evangelical aid agencies increased dramatically. In 1946 it stood at 4 percent of all agency income. By 2004 it had reached 43 percent.Footnote 28
The revival of both evangelical missionary fervor and humanitarian aid activism facilitated new partnerships with the federal government. In contrast to diplomatic and military personnel, missionaries engaged in long-term and intimate ties with foreign cultures were fluent in their languages, interacted closely with the native population, and were present in areas that were initially peripheral to US interests. In turn, from the viewpoint of policymakers, missionaries were a primary source of knowledge. Manifold informal exchanges and regular patterns of interaction, including picnics, holiday celebrations, sports events, and hunting trips, linked missionaries and primary intelligence agents, who often lacked other viable intelligence sources.Footnote 29
The linkages between evangelical missionaries and policymakers influenced US perceptions and policy in important ways. Africa, for example, was a continent where an established evangelical missionary presence coalesced with Cold War government interests, and evangelical missionaries became a key nexus between religious and diplomatic circles, as Philip E. Dow has shown. Among the most active organizations with evangelical leanings in Africa were the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), Moral Re-Armament (MRA) and International Christian Leadership (ICL). The last of these, led by Abraham Vereide, had long cultivated ties between politicians and religious leaders through breakfast prayers, conferences, and informal meetings. It had also set up an effective political network of evangelical Christians in the military. The ICL chapter in Addis Ababa provided a contact point for Ethiopian elites, US policymakers, and evangelical missionaries. In particular, Dwight Eisenhower's right-hand man, Kansas Senator Frank Carlson, a prominent figure in the domestic religio-political scene, encouraged close ties between the Ethiopian ICL and Washington Congressional chapters. Likewise, the influence of MRA missionaries, such as William Close (father of actress Glenn Close), combined “evangelical missionary ethos, zealous anticommunism, and connections to the international diplomatic elite.”Footnote 30
Similarly, humanitarian aid involved evangelicals in ever closer church–state cooperation. Despite a tradition of evangelical aversion to the close intertwining of church and state, conservative Protestant aid agencies became increasingly willing to accept government funding. Seventh-Day Adventists, the Salvation Army, and the World Relief Corporation (WRC) of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) became major players in government-funded distribution of surplus foods, hospital building, land reclamation programs, and similar endeavors. Although Catholics and ecumenical Protestants continued to receive the largest share of their funding from federal sources (averaging 70 and 65 percent respectively between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s), evangelical agencies received an unprecedented average of 34 percent of their income from federal sources between 1955 and 1967.Footnote 31 With the help of an array of federal grants and contracts, World Vision, the California-based evangelical relief agency established in 1952, was by 2003 operating in one hundred countries and received over a third of its revenue from US government sources. By the 1990s, only a quarter of evangelical international aid organizations received no government funds, as opposed to one-half of mainline Protestant agencies.Footnote 32
The confluence of the “international turn” of evangelicalism with postwar state efforts to mobilize the resources of religion for the exercise of America's global power was very much at the heart of what Jonathan Herzog has called the “spiritual–industrial complex” of the Cold War. This raises the question in what ways the interpretive matrix provided by the recent research into state–nongovernmental networks sheds new light on the relationship between conservative Protestantism and America's rise to global power. Did the new ties between evangelicals and the state in the mission and foreign aid fields turn conservative Protestant agencies into handmaidens of government interests? Did they enable them to preserve their autonomy? Or did they open up avenues for the assertion of voices critical of American foreign policy and evangelical complicity? The following section probes these questions in more detail.
INTERPRETING GLOBALIZING EVANGELICALISM'S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE STATE
In many ways the relationship between a newly energized evangelicalism and America's global aspirations suggests that conservative Protestants were increasingly at home in the “American century” and participated in the hegemonic practices of empire. There is plenty of evidence to support this assessment. Many neo-evangelical activists interpreted the emergence of America's global power as the result of the nation's recovery of a “sense of divine providence” that had once shaped an America “strong in spirit, dedicated to fulfillment of God's will.”Footnote 33 Expressing faith in the universality of American values and institutions, and embracing the mantra of economic growth and democratic institutions, they provided religious sanctioning for the secular capitalist order and tied spiritual renewal to the assertion of America's global self-interest. “Instead of obscuring and depreciating the American dream which has built this noble society,” NAE cofounder Harold John Ockenga declared, “we ought to exalt the elements of it,” demanding that “firmness must be backed up by military strength and force.”Footnote 34 In asserting the superiority of American religion and culture, evangelicals both “rechristened their nationalism” and connected pietistic religion to the militarized globalism, defense–welfare state, and anticommunist crusade of the Cold War.Footnote 35 As Carl Henry put it, the fight against communism meant “sharing with the world the bold witness of faith in the Redeemer.”Footnote 36
Seen from this perspective, postwar evangelicals transformed pietistic conversionism into a means of sanctifying America's new global power and permanent military mobilization; their engagement with missions and government-funded foreign aid tied them ever closer to the expanding Cold War state; and their eagerness to return to the global stage integrated them into the liberal-capitalist and anticommunist policy consensus. As T. Jeremy Gunn has noted, while prior to World War II a significant number of evangelical Christians were pacifists and critics of military spending, they came to embrace the key components of an “American National Religion” that included “governmental theism, military supremacy, and capitalism as freedom.”Footnote 37
In mission work in particular, state–nongovernmental ties frequently facilitated a growing evangelical identification with American empire. Indeed, in the superheated ideological atmosphere of the Cold War, missionaries often saw a close relationship with government as part of their missionary calling. Through their direct dealings in education and medical work with indigenous elites and grassroots populations, they frequently prepared the ground for pro-American sympathies at both levels. Individual missionaries became key advisers to African leaders and emerged as mediators between indigenous and US foreign-policy elites.Footnote 38 Church–state ties also extended to logistical support, as in the case of the use of mission radio stations and the Missionary Aviation Fellowships (MAF) for reconnaissance and evacuation purposes.Footnote 39 What is more, evangelical missionaries frequently helped reassert established gender and race divisions. As Sarah Miller-Davenport has argued, for example, evangelical missionaries of the Far Eastern Gospel Crusade (FEGC) understood their encounter with Asians in gender terms, with Japan figuring as a sexualized, deferential woman. While the Japanese were no longer depicted as a subhuman bucktoothed menace after the war, they were either infantilized as adorable but spiritually empty creatures or shown as subservient geishas.Footnote 40
Stateside, government assistance for the military chaplaincy and promotion of church building on military sites further deepened the identification of evangelicals with American hegemonic aspirations.Footnote 41 This support was the background upon which the career of one of the most influential evangelicals in the Pentagon unfolded. Enjoying the support of Admiral Arthur W. Redford and Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, evangelical John C. Broger was put in charge of implementing the Pentagon's program to fight the “spiritual illiteracy” of young soldiers and to promote their commitment to his concept of “militant liberty.” As deputy director of Armed Forces Information and Education (AFIE) since 1956, and as the agency's director since 1961, Broger promoted ties to conservative and patriotic organizations, such as the American Heritage Foundation and ICL, as well as to extreme right-wing organizations, such as the John Birch Society.Footnote 42 Indeed, army training manuals in the 1950s divided the world into three kinds of nation: demonic (Soviet Union), secular (e.g. France), and covenanted (US).Footnote 43
Finally, government support for religious humanitarian aid translated into growing evangelical support of Cold War state building. Federal subsidies played a crucial role in the “statist turn” of evangelicalism because they packaged the growth of the state in a rhetoric and practice of limited government that muted traditional misgivings about breaching church–state boundaries.Footnote 44 Indeed, evangelicals accepted “a level of government activity and involvement unknown a hundred years ago,”Footnote 45 and “amplified the unambivalent statist posture the right had adopted in terms of defense.”Footnote 46 Former missionary and Minnesota Representative Walter Judd, for example, admonished Christianity Today readers that in the fight against communism, the main significance of religious foreign aid was not to replace government efforts, but to “give meaning to, and put heart and soul into the government programs,” which “administer, but rarely do they minister.”Footnote 47
In short, there is substantial evidence to suggest that the new partnerships between religious organizations and the federal government during and after World War II involved white conservative Protestants closely in hegemonic practices and effectively turned them into agents of American soft power. However, one could also read this differently: indirect funding streams and Cold War efforts to firm up the county's religious foundations also helped safeguard the independence of religious agencies and sanctioned their faith-based approaches. In turn, they enabled evangelicals to build up a denser infrastructure of faith-based organizations as counterinstitutions to government agencies, and to hone their political skills through access to power brokers and decision makers.
As the historical evidence shows, independence from state interference remained a primary concern among evangelicals. Though evangelical agencies increasingly took advantage of government funding in order to extend their organizational presence overseas, the NAE, brandishing both separationist and anti-Catholic rhetoric, was an outspoken critic of the foreign aid program in the postwar period. Indeed, in the 1940s and 1950s, many evangelicals feared that government foreign aid money would inhibit their ability to relate service to faith, and the NAE's preference for doctrinal commitments was at times ill-suited for ecumenical cooperation, particularly with the interfaith ACVAFS.Footnote 48 A 1956 Christianity Today poll showed that many evangelical ministers did not regard curtailing foreign aid and fighting communism as mutually exclusive.Footnote 49 And Carl Henry thundered that foreign aid led down the garden path of big government, breached the separation of church and state, constituted an undue tax burden, delegated too much control to the UN, and had been hijacked by the Catholic Church. In his view it was driven by commercial self-interest, a desire for military strength, and the “the outworn optimism of the liberal social gospel.”Footnote 50
At the same time, however, evangelicals were increasingly aware of the autonomy thatreligious providers had under public funding arrangements that centralized revenue gathering but decentralized implementation of programs. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the evolving state–nongovernmental relationship is that it fostered the growth of evangelical agencies while simultaneously enabling them to engage in spiritual witnessing. Setting aside his previous worries, Carl Henry, for example, admitted that “the Point Four program has indirectly furthered some aspects of Christian missionary effort.” He envisaged that a spiritualized foreign aid regime could be used to “exercise a permanent ministry” regardless of the size and role of the state.Footnote 51 In the same vein, WRC chairman Christian N. Hostetter in his 1963 review of existing aid contracts calmed fears by noting that in most cases “the entire operation of the relief program rests in the hands of the church agency.”Footnote 52
The upshot was that evangelicals, who had always “openly talked of the need to relate service to faith,” used the rhetoric of church–state separation no longer to impede government funding, but to minimize federal controls and shore up spiritualized foreign aid work within the framework of a growing administrative state.Footnote 53 In turn, discussions within the movement concentrated on limiting regulatory intrusion and ensuring equal access, rather than on concerns about big government. Indicating the new direction, Hostetter declared that the main problem with church cooperation in overseas government programs was not public funding as such. Instead, what had to be avoided was a restrictive contract that “denies the church agency a satisfactory measure of selectivity in choosing candidates,” and “constitutes the agency as an arm of government.”Footnote 54 In turn, where evangelicals were able to exert the influence they desired, they frequently linked government aid distribution to proselytizing. A 1973 WRC agenda paper, for example, showed that recipients of government surplus food in Korea “were exposed to the Gospel in many different ways and their compensation and reward was WRC provided surplus food, clothing, vitamins, materials, equipment, and so forth.”Footnote 55
The postwar state–nongovernmental cooperations also strengthened the organizational independence of evangelical aid agencies by facilitating the transformation from narrowly focused missionary support providers to broad-based international spiritualized humanitarian aid organizations. World Vision, for example, founded at the beginning of the Korean War as a missionary support organization for which cooperation with Catholics, Jews, mainline Protestants, or secularists was anathema, gradually moved away from working with local churches and mission agencies that lacked the ability to deliver large-scale projects. By 1962 it had registered with USAID, enabling it to receive public grants and commodities. From this time onwards, it rapidly grew into the world's largest Christian humanitarian organization that undertook emergency relief, community development, justice, and advocacy efforts.Footnote 56 One organizational innovation in particular helped significantly increase revenue: World Vision, similarly to other agencies, such as Feed the Children, MAP International, and World Concern Development Organization, worked outside denominational control and cultivated relations with parachurches. This allowed these organizations to tap into a much broader fund-raising base than traditional denominational agencies and may account for the significantly faster growth of evangelical aid organizations compared to mainline Protestant, Catholic, ecumenical Christian, and Jewish ones.Footnote 57
Organizational changes, however, had theological and political consequences. According to David King, as religious humanitarianism began to overtake missionary motivations, evangelicals comfortably engaged with a mainstream language of humanitarianism. This resulted in the homogenization of the rhetoric, practices, and organizational features across international NGOs, and yielded a shared system of highly rationalized, production-oriented, and professionalized aid delivery. Agency leaders were “no longer pastors and evangelists but professionally trained development specialists, Ivy league-educated marketing directors, and CEOs from Fortune 500 companies.” At times this led to a shift away from evangelical roots, as in the case of World Vision, one of the largest nongovernmental organizations to undergo a change in orientation from evangelical to faith-founded Christian. Nonetheless, King sees the World Vision case not primarily as the story of “a small organization encountering modernity, subduing its religious identity, and emulating secular methods in order to succeed,” but as a process of the “re-articulation of its religious identity.” In balancing evangelism and humanitarian work it integrated “Christian witness” and “spiritual indicators” alongside a focus on issues such as nutrition and education.Footnote 58
Furthermore, evangelicals used agency autonomy, organizational growth, and opportunities for proselytizing to leave their ideological mark on foreign policy. In particular, they pioneered a new conservative worldview that combined American exceptionalism with traditional liberal causes, such as international development and human rights. Especially during and after the Vietnam War, evangelicals built upon their growing influence within the military and their expanding missionary enterprises in Southeast Asia to spell out this policy agenda. Moving away from traditional anti-Catholic invective and simple anticommunist crusading they began to package their campaigns in terms of the defense of religious liberty and the rights of missionaries overseas.Footnote 59 Indicating their growing legal and political competency, evangelicals in the ensuing years used the religious-freedom defense as a means of opposing international treaties they regarded as potentially threatening to their missionary interests. In 1970, for example, Floyd Robertson of the NAE's Office of Public Affairs expressed fears that the Genocide Treaty, first submitted by Harry Truman, “could be construed to prohibit the efforts of missionaries to evangelize because this would obviously change their [indigenous] culture and conceivably provide ‘mental harm’ for the people.”Footnote 60 This set the stage for what became one of core campaigns of the NAE, namely the call for religious-freedom treaties that included clauses guaranteeing the right to worship and to propagate the faith. By the mid-1980s, director Robert Dugan noted that a conference on religious liberty had been a success as “certainly the State Department was affirmed in its new policy of considering religious liberty to be one of its criteria for evaluating human rights in nations around the world.”Footnote 61 In 1998, this campaign culminated in the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act in Congress.Footnote 62
Clearly the hegemony and autonomy perspectives tell powerful stories of processes of absorption into or assertion within the Cold War order. However, they do miss a crucial component in postwar global evangelicalism's relationship with American power: contestation. While the vast majority of evangelicals were patriotic, anticommunist, and morally traditionalist, many also felt uneasy about being seen as agents of the US government, or even sided with insurgent movements abroad. Many conservative Protestants were Christians first and Americans second. They were less interested in instilling democratic or capitalist values than in converting souls, and frequently expressed discomfort with exporting American secular culture.Footnote 63 Throughout the postwar decades, significant groups within the evangelical movement voiced pacifist sentiments, retained a strong aversion to civil religion, rejected the spiritual sanctification of US foreign policy, denounced the arms race, and demanded nuclear disarmament. A 1956 Christianity Today poll of evangelical clergy, for example, showed significant support for “world security built on a trusting spiritual level, and less on military spending.” Likewise, a significant minority called for “less emphasis on bombs and materials for war,” more international disarmament negotiations, and even efforts to strengthen international relations through the UN.Footnote 64 Even conservatives, such as the magazine's editor Harold Lindsell, insisted in 1967 that the church should avoid becoming “the voice of those who have managed to seize control of the power structures.”Footnote 65 Moreover, evangelicalism was a highly diverse and decentralized movement, and many in the fold took liberal positions on civil rights or military disarmament.Footnote 66
Seen from this “transnational” perspective, the new forms of postwar international missionary and humanitarian engagement opened up opportunities for the so-called “feedback effects of reverse missions.” Indeed, in an era of decolonization, many American Protestant missionaries, having interacted with indigenous movements and ecumenical thought, returned to America as advocates of foreign peoples and as agents of antiracist and anti-imperialist causes.Footnote 67 As David Swartz shows in this issue, leading evangelicals in the 1950s and 1960s, such as E. Stanley Jones, in part through his friendship with Mahatma Ghandi, held evangelicals to task over issues of domestic racism and international colonialism. Intermittent voices denouncing evangelical complicity in racial oppression and discrimination, such as during the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism (see the essay by Uta Balbier), were followed in the 1970s by more insistent demands that evangelicals should commit themselves to “social concern” and focus more fully on the poverty and injustices faced by vast numbers of people in the world. As Melani McAlister shows in her contribution to this issue, the growing reliance on an indigenous workforce in international aid, as well as new venues for evangelical voices from the global South, such as the Lausanne World Evangelical Congress in 1974, challenged American evangelicals’ abject neglect of issues of racial discrimination and social exclusion. Meanwhile, by the 1970s many of the hopes of the “American century” had been shattered as authoritarian governments, poverty, and economic dependency showed that foreign assistance was often used as an instrument of capitalist expansion and naked national self-interest. Growing fears about compromising the religious mission led to efforts to prohibit cooperation with US intelligence agencies abroad. Oregon Senator and evangelical Mark Hatfield, in particular, supported Congressional legislation aimed at making such contacts illegal.Footnote 68
Likewise, evangelical mission work, especially in Latin America, helped create what Nancy Wadsworth has called the “epiphanal spaces” that enabled evangelicals to develop the social reflexivity and cultural empathy required for dismantling racist attitudes and structures. In her view this represents “gradual challenges to social hierarchies” in a faith where rituals of admitting and forgiveness have “continually repressed cognitive reflection, inquiry, and open conversation about power and politics.” Or, as one white pastor who features in Wadsworth's study notes, “You talk to black Christians, they want to talk about justice; you talk to white evangelicals, they want to talk about reconciliation.” This new concern with race, driven in part by renewed international engagement and multiethnic churches, also holds out the prospect of reorienting evangelicalism away from the political right and its coded racism of sunbelt market fetishism and antistatism. Particularly the issue of immigration began to challenge conservative Protestantism's alignment with the right when religiously based relationships with (illegal) immigrants changed many evangelicals’ views on punitive policies. As one pastor noted, “watching a third grader cry because her dad is deported” opened his eyes to the injustices of the exiting policy regime: “And I talk about ‘family values’.”Footnote 69
What is more, recent research on evangelical missions and foreign aid also highlights their effects on subaltern self-assertion and transcultural identity formation.Footnote 70 In many instances this was a two-edged sword, however. On the one hand, the radical egalitarian logic of Protestant conversionism and non-hierarchical church governance fed into movements asserting indigenous pride and challenging the traditional order. As Philip Dow has shown, the expansion of evangelical influence in Africa, as well as the rise of indigenous elites educated at mission schools, helped establish democratic structures. In pre-independence Congo, for example, the experience with church governance was “virtually the only training in Western-style democratic institutions available.” Likewise, in Ethiopia evangelical education nurtured independence among believers and promoted “democratically-friendly values of individualism and egalitarianism.” Particularly during the Ethiopian revolution of 1974, this meant that radicalized Christian converts from marginal areas who had been taught at mission schools and had been discriminated against by the Haile Selassie regime formed the leading cadres of the insurgency. On the other hand, the evangelical “theology of submission” frequently reinforced traditional deferential attitudes to the governing authority and reasserted authoritarian structures. The prime example of this ambiguity is Kenya, where President Daniel arap Moi, mission-educated and zealously committed to missionary-inspired anticommunism, effectively used Christian images to defend his increasingly conservative philosophy and authoritarian style.Footnote 71
In summation, the narratives of hegemony, autonomy, and transnationalism tell three different stories of the absorption into, assertion within, and contestation of empire. But what if integration, separation, and subculturalism were not mutually exclusive features of the relationship between conservative Protestantism and the state, but just different aspects of the overall way in which evangelicals became part and parcel of the story of American global power? A closer look at both the sociology of religion and research on the relationship of religion and empire suggests this interpretation, which is the focus of the final section.
EVANGELICALISM AND EMPIRE
Much of the recent research that has mapped resurgent evangelicalism onto the political economy and cultural transformations of American society in the second half of the twentieth century has shown that conservative Protestantism was deeply contradictory. Socieconomically, evangelicals simultaneously supported the state-sponsored military–industrial complex and upheld an insurgent message of free enterprise in a kind of “libertarian corporatism.” Socioculturally, evangelicals combined morality politics and consumer capitalism into a form of “reactionary modernism.” Rather than being a mark of weakness, however, many observers note that these contradictions are part of the strength of resurgent evangelicalism. Lisa McGirr, for example, argues that apocalyptic fundamentalism's combination of countercultural trappings with a morally and politically conservative message matched the sense of ambivalence about living in a hypermodern environment.Footnote 72 And sociologist Christian Smith maintains that evangelicalism's standing power needs to be understood as the “result of the combination of its socially-constructed cultural distinction vis-à-vis and vigorous socio-cultural engagement with pluralistic modernity.”Footnote 73 In their view, the evangelical stance appealed to an electorate particularly in the South and the West of the country that had benefited from federal defense spending and the social-service expansions, but clung to the vision of self-made entrepreneurs and frontier individualism. It also spoke to people who were comfortable with technological change but felt besieged by the race and gender transformations it had generated.
This perspective on the domestic religious resurgence can also be used to shed new light on the theme of this essay, namely the relationship between evangelical globalism and the American state. As examined above, evangelicals sanctified the global role of the “redeemer nation,” but also remained ardent critics of US Cold War policy. They railed against the state, but were the beneficiaries of large-scale federal spending. They emerged both as staunch advocates of racial division and gender hierarchies at home, and as supporters of antiracist and anti-imperialist causes abroad. Instead of being a sign of confusion and division, however, this can also be regarded as an asset. The combination of integration, separation, and subculturalism helped the movement position itself as a crucial cultural arbiter in American society at a time when the country's postwar role was not yet ideologically and institutionally established. Evangelicalism was perfectly positioned for this task, because it was the dominant cultural tradition in the US that had centuries of experience in negotiating the very conflict between empire building and anticolonialist, antistatist, and antimilitarist sentiments.Footnote 74 In particular, religion's combination of a universalistic message with a profoundly nationalistic faith was crucial in mobilizing a largely isolationist and skeptical public for the new global struggle. As William Inboden has argued, “only by summoning the American people to a religious crusade could US leaders maintain domestic support for the extraordinary measures needed to fight the Cold War.”Footnote 75
Two aspects of America's rise to global power–one domestic, one related to foreign policy – exemplify this argument. First, in regard to the domestic arena we need to remember that popular attitudes in the immediate postwar years, rather than reflecting a “triumph of internationalism,” were marked by the domestic tenacity of isolationist and noninterventionist attitudes. Indeed, following World War II public sentiments largely reverted to the pre-1941 period.Footnote 76 Hence the isolationism–internationalism binary that still dominates the foreign-policy literature eclipses the broader range and depth of American debates over the country's global role. As Christopher McKnight Nichols has shown, isolationist forms of conservative nationalist noninterventionism, instead of fading away, resurfaced after World War II. Among its most ardent defenders were Ohio Republican Senator Robert Taft, a longtime hawkish isolationist and former America First sympathizer, as well as former President Herbert Hoover and conservative Republican senator John W. Bricker. This group rejected virtually every form of binding internationalism, including NATO. They opposed the direct rearming of Western Europe, and expressed strong reservations about the United Nations and the Korean War. While Taft called for “neutrality” and “non-interference,” however, he endorsed global economic and cultural exchanges.Footnote 77
Similarly, evangelicals occupied a ground that is difficult to capture with the isolationist–internationalist binary. On the one hand, conservative Protestants were among the most ardent advocates for using Judeo-Christian teachings as templates for understanding the postwar totalitarian threats, fighting the evils of communism, and supporting the moral mission of the redeemer nation to spread American democracy. Their flag-waving patriotism located spiritual renewal in the postwar exercise of American power and transformed pietistic religion into a means of sanctifying the country's military–industrial complex, free-enterprise ideology, and Cold War nationalism. As Billy Graham exclaimed, “If you would be a true patriot, then become a Christian. If you would be a loyal American, then become a loyal Christian.”Footnote 78
On the other hand, conservative Protestants retained a deeply apocalyptic, premillennialist, and antiliberal view of world events, at times marked by paranoid invective and an obscure prophetic outlook. They frequently denounced American foreign policy, particularly when it supported Italian Catholics, shored up Franco's Catholic regime in Spain, or was not doing enough about attacks on Protestants in Colombia.Footnote 79 Indeed, by the 1960s, many evangelicals were neo-isolationists in the sense that they vigorously opposed the United Nations, negotiations with the communist world, and the admission of mainland China to the UN. In the 1950s the NAE supported a neo-isolationist constitutional amendment sponsored by John Bricker. This amendment, had it been passed, would have placed severe restrictions on treaties and executive agreements entered into by the US government.
Meanwhile, as discussed earlier, evangelicals often voiced substantial critiques of American Cold War power politics. Even some of the neo-evangelical trailblazers, such as Carl Henry, urged evangelicals to address issues such as “aggressive warfare, racial hatred and intolerance, the liquor traffic, and the exploitation of labor or management.”Footnote 80 And pronouncements by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), which did not join the NAE, continued to be moderate or even liberal on international issues until the 1960s.Footnote 81
It is exactly this position of evangelicals between being “effective communicators of the myth of American righteousness” and “die-hard supporters of conservative piety” that enabled them to become key cultural arbiters during the volatile war and postwar years.Footnote 82 Ideologically, neo-evangelicalism's combination of pietism and custodialism outlined the “isolationist globalism” that appealed to a population trying to reconcile deeply embedded anti-imperial outlooks with the realities of global power. Institutionally, the involvement of evangelical voluntary organizations in federal funding arrangements paved the way for the “antistatist statism” that helped make the expansion of the state palatable to a public still committed to limited government. In this way evangelicals helped legitimize the Cold War order under the conditions of the cultural resonance of isolationist and antistatist sentiments.
Second, in regard to the foreign-policy arena, we need to remember that America's rise to global power happened at a time when the postwar collapse of the old imperialist system opened up opportunities for the assertions of the global South. After all, Germany and Japan had invaded and, despite the allied victory, severely weakened the old centers of imperialism. Postwar efforts by Britain and France to restore their global influence remained mostly haphazard, ill-conceived, and largely unsuccessful. In turn, American hegemony was circumscribed by both the growing strength of anticolonial movements and the liberationist impulses of world communism – movements that both connected with the revolutionary legacy of the United States and posed profound challenges to American liberal capitalism.
Having to take cognizance of postwar challenges to imperialism and capitalism, and lacking fully operational ideologies and institutions for the exercise of global power, American policymakers pursued a type of empire building that sought to merge hegemonic policies with anticolonial traditions. Religious groups in general, and evangelicals in particular, were crucial in this project, particularly in the Third World as a key Cold War battlefield. Regarded locally with fewer suspicions than were government agencies, while largely subscribing to the same faith in the universality of American values and institutions, evangelical missions and aid organizations often prepared the ground for pro-American sympathies at the grassroots and elite levels, and gained political access where the US government failed to do so. As the examination of foreign aid and missions has shown, the growing participation of evangelical providers in government programs both helped define the boundaries of American international aid provision and shaped the patterns of state–nongovernmental collaborations that underlay US foreign relations. It afforded evangelical Christians opportunities to invest heavily in carrying out new missions and overseas commitments, and furthered their transformation from missionary support agencies to international spiritualized humanitarian aid providers. Humanitarian aid and missionary activism, as Sarah Miller-Davenport notes, were thus increasingly part of a broader neo-evangelical effort to synchronize nationalism and internationalism and to reconcile the tension between a deeply Americanized gospel and a universalized Christian message.Footnote 83
In summation, the combination of evangelicalism's absorption by, assertion within, and contestation of empire was an integral part of the ideological and institutional infrastructure of American global power. Evangelicals negotiated between deeply embedded traditions of isolationist nationalism, anti-imperialism, “no entangling alliances,” and limited government on the one hand, and hegemonic aspirations, empire building, liberal internationalism, and the national security state on the other. Domestically, this helped align America's “mystic chords of memory” with new hegemonic needs, and adjust Americans to the “realities” of postwar global power. In the international arena, it helped generate pro-American sympathies during a volatile time when Western hegemony was contested by anticolonial movements and the liberationist trajectories of global communism. Seen from this perspective, evangelicalism's ambivalent positioning was both constitutive of the construction of American empire overseas and the basis of the movement's organizational strength, cultural attractiveness, and political efficacy at home.
Putting the effort to reconcile anti-imperialist and antistatist traditions with the exigencies of empire at the center of America's Cold War ideology, however, also suggests that evangelicalism, despite its moments of insurgency, ultimately ended up legitimizing and asserting US global power. This runs counter to other findings discussed above – and also presented in essays in this issue – that show how involving conservative Protestants in the practice of empire opened up spaces for subaltern self-assertion, indigenization, resistance, and feedback effects.
The broader mediating function of evangelicalism thus raises the question whether a religious form that, in both its support for and opposition to the hegemonic project, has tied itself so solidly to nation and empire does indeed have the internal capacity to transcend established power structures. In order to answer this question, further research into global evangelicalism as a transnational, policentric and multilayered enterprise, rather than as mainly encompassing US-based activism, is needed.Footnote 84
