Just one day after Winston Churchill warned that an iron curtain was descending on Europe, Harry Truman delivered a less-known but nearly as important speech to the Federal Council of Churches. “If the civilized world as we know it today is to survive,” he proclaimed, “the gigantic power which man has acquired through atomic energy must be matched by spiritual strength of greater magnitude. All mankind now stands in the doorway to destruction — or upon the threshold of the greatest age in history” (110).
Historians have long understood that the Cold War had a religious dimension. Politicians, preachers, and media tycoons often framed the conflict as a battle between atheistic communism and Judeo-Christian (and capitalist) values. Nevertheless, no historian has provided a thorough analysis of the relationships among religion and American Cold War policy until now. William Inboden's excellent Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960, is a meticulously researched, well-written, and carefully argued analysis of religion's central role in the Cold War.
Inboden frames the Cold War as a “religious war.” He argues that religion is as essential to our understanding of the post-World War II era as balance of power realities, security concerns, political and economic ideology, and individual leadership. Although previous historians may “ignore God,” he writes, and “neglect the spiritual factor, Americans in the 1940s and 1950s did not. . . . Many American political leaders believed that their nation had a divine calling to oppose the Soviet Union, and to reshape the world according to the divine design” (4). Furthermore, he argues, “only by summoning the American people to a religious crusade could U.S. leaders maintain domestic support for the extraordinary measures needed to fight the Cold War” (5). The people crafting Cold-War policy believed that among the United States’ most potent weapons was religious faith.
To make this argument, Inboden begins his narrative by focusing on the actions of religious leaders in the early Cold-War era. He does a masterful job of identifying and characterizing the three major Protestant groups that sought to influence the direction of the nation. Liberal Protestants, working through the Federal Council of Churches, preached pacifism, disarmament, and the virtues of the United Nations. Christian realists, most directly associated with Reinhold Niebuhr, preached a more hawkish defense and justified the maintenance of atomic weapons, while also advocating more aid for the developing world. Meanwhile evangelicals remained suspicious of the U.N. and were most interested in preserving the rights of their missionaries to move and preach freely abroad. Inboden also weaves Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox believers into his narrative although he views their impact as less significant than that of Protestants.
After establishing the religious context, Inboden turns to the ways in which Truman, Eisenhower, and the presidents' surrogates worked to mobilize the faithful in support of state policies. Truman believed that “the United States needed to lead the world's religious forces in opposing the forces of atheism and irreligion controlled by the Soviet Union” and he “saw religion as a potent tool to undermine faith in the Soviet system, and to bring about its eventual demise” (107). Therefore, he worked to organize all of the nation's religious leaders into an anti-communist bloc that would support America's Cold War policy at home and work with religious leaders abroad to undermine communism by spreading faith. At one point the president explained to his wife, “We've got to organize the people who believe in honor and the Golden Rule to win the world back to peace and Christianity. Ain't it hell!” (140). Unfortunately for Truman, it was hell indeed. The one thing that united American Protestants was their shared anti-Catholicism. No matter how hard Truman worked to build a unified religious coalition of Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox to fight communism and preach the merits of democracy and free markets to the world, Protestants refused to work with the Vatican. As a result, Truman and his advisors eventually bypassed religious leaders and crafted a new form of civil religion appropriate for the era. In Inboden's words, Truman developed a “theology” of containment, which was expanded by John Foster Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s. Truman and Ike's civil faith was bland and generic but effective, helping define American culture and policy.
Beyond the argument itself, what makes this book especially noteworthy is the breadth of its research. Inboden immersed himself in the major sources of American foreign policy at the Library of Congress and the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries; and in the major repositories of American religion including the papers of the National Council of Churches at the Presbyterian Historical Society and various evangelical collections at the Billy Graham Center Archives. He also looked at hundreds of newspaper and magazine article, speeches, and sermons. Rarely has an author achieved such fluency in both the language of American diplomatic history and the language of American religion.
Inboden has taken on an ambitious project — not many historians would be confident enough to tackle Billy Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and missionaries passionate about China, a Senator who routinely gets policy advice from God, and a host of secondary but equally fascinating characters in a single book. I suspect that specialists in the various fields that Inboden has united in this study will find issues or interpretations with which to quibble. But so what? This book is a tremendous achievement which demonstrates that if historians are to understand the world through the eyes of their subjects, they had better understand the significance of religious faith.
