In the decade and a half since Andrew Rotter's pioneering article on religion in United States policy towards South Asia, the historiography of US foreign relations has undergone a religious turn.Footnote 1 Mainstream American historiography still generally pays insufficient attention to matters of faith, but the study of what used to be called diplomatic history has been reinvigorated by it.Footnote 2 In part, as many of the historians involved acknowledge, this can be attributed to the presidency of George W. Bush.Footnote 3 But the religious turn has also connected to a growing interest in cultural analysis and the internationalization of the field, providing one method of going beyond the state through the archives of non-governmental, often transnational organizations like missionary groups and ecumenical movements.Footnote 4 Moreover, by virtue of the temporal biases of the field and the wealth of sources created by the religious revival that swept America from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, this new literature focuses mostly on the cold war.Footnote 5 It thus contributes to work that investigates the notion of a post-war ‘consensus’, and to the increasing interrogation of what ‘the’ Cold War/cold war actually was.Footnote 6 It is clear now that most Americans in this period saw religion as both a cause and an instrument of the cold war, believing particular kinds of religious belief to be shibboleths of anti-communism and loyalty to the United States.
Three features of this literature are especially important to this article. The first is periodization. In several new works, from William Inboden's Religion and American foreign policy to Jonathan Herzog's The spiritual–industrial complex, it is implied that the revival ended with the presidential election of 1960. The complicated ways in which John F. Kennedy dealt with that revival – as an ambitious Catholic politician making a splash in foreign affairs, and later as president – are thus written out of history. Second, this literature shies away from explicitly contributing to wider debates in the religious history of the United States, especially those surrounding questions of constitutional law and the secularization thesis. This is particularly unfortunate as the post-war years saw the erection of the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), a flourishing of talk about the threat of secularisms at home and abroad, and eventually the development of that curious hybrid, ‘secular theology’, all as part of and reaction to the religious revival.Footnote 7 The religious turn ought to do much more to historicize legal questions and, as J. C. D. Clark recently suggested in this journal, the secularization thesis itself.Footnote 8 Third, although the new literature has drawn welcome attention to previously unheralded state and non-state initiatives – from Myron Taylor's Vatican diplomacy to the Godly State Department run by the National Council of Churches (NCC) – it has, as Philip Dow has argued, largely ignored missionaries.Footnote 9 Combine all three points, and it is unsurprising that the Peace Corps has not featured at all in the new literature.
On another level, this is not a shock. The Peace Corps, which was a government organization founded in 1961 to send volunteers around the world to teach, to build, and to promote the United States, features in few scholarly books or articles. Histories of the Kennedy administration's foreign policy often ignore it entirely, while those that do include it tend just to use the Corps as a synecdoche for views on the period as a whole.Footnote 10 Conversely, books by Gerald Rice and Fritz Fischer on the Corps have focused solely on the institution and the individuals who volunteered to serve in it.Footnote 11 Although works on modernization theory by Nils Gilman and Michael Latham brilliantly treat the Corps as part of America's global technological drive, the only book to deal with it at length remains Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman's All you need is love.Footnote 12 Cobbs Hoffman places the Corps in a line of secular private service organizations, demonstrating how it put existentialist ideas of action and a tradition of voluntarism at the service of international politics. For her, the Corps's chilly relationship with volunteers’ personal religious beliefs is evidence enough that the Corps had little to do with religion generally.Footnote 13
This article uses the developing historiography and new archival sources to reinterpret the early years of the Corps. It argues that in part it should be seen as a vehicle for the Kennedy administration's novel interpretation and continuation of the religious cold war. After all, both aspects of what Kennedy called ‘a movement for the political and spiritual freedom of man’ ought to garner some attention.Footnote 14 At the heart of the Corps's attraction to thousands of Americans was the conviction that it represented a commitment to universal moral forces, whether in the duty of wealthy nations to help poorer, or to fight communism through economic development, or to enact religious faith. The Corps aimed at the intersection of East–West conflict and North–South divergence, and was a global attempt to show that ‘the foreign policy of the United States is founded upon concern for the welfare of man’, a demonstration, as Kennedy put it, ‘of our moral purpose’.Footnote 15
This article begins with the first analysis of Kennedy's accommodation with the revival of the 1950s, showing that he tended to present himself as a fairly liberal Catholic who had significant problems about the way in which Dwight Eisenhower was prosecuting the moral war. It ties this period to Kennedy's language and actions as president, when for political and philosophical reasons he transformed, to some extent minimized, but hardly ceased discussion of religion and foreign relations. It then shows how the Corps was connected to missionary groups and, by some, to shifts in Catholic doctrine in the run-up to Vatican II, as well as to Kennedy's own conception of the religious cold war. Finally, it analyses a church–state battle over the first amendment's freedom of religion clause that resulted from the Corps's inherently religious nature, one that Kennedy and the Corps's director, Sargent Shriver, struggled to control. Catholic service organizations were most keen to work with the Corps, and, partly as a consequence of pressure from other religious groups and partly to pre-empt more widespread political opposition, the Corps decided not to sign contracts with denominational groups at all.
The article thereby argues that what we might consider to be a simple example of secularization in action was far more complex. The outline of the story suggests an administration dominated by secular, self-consciously ‘modern’, academic liberals creating a government organization in direct competition with religious groups, taking over their activities, and then separating the sacred content from the secular. This was not how it had to turn out, nor was it universally desired, and nor was the story seen that way at the time. The Corps represented religious values even as it trod on religious toes. Religious groups had worked with the federal government to deliver foreign aid for years, and no legal challenge had been lodged by 1961. If we think in terms of secularization – as we tend not to now but as most of the historical figures referenced in this article did – it was in this case partial, political, and sectional. So too was the interpretation of the first amendment.
But through the example of the Peace Corps, we also see how many Americans at the start of the 1960s were renegotiating and often expanding the definition of ‘religion’ itself.Footnote 16 What was secular and what was pious was constantly up for grabs, and the boundary between the two was fuzzy at best, notwithstanding Everson's wall. In the absence of consensus in the religious community, to try to find that boundary through policy, as Kennedy and Shriver did, was conceptually puzzling, denominationally divisive, and politically treacherous.
I
In June 1954, Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill that added the words ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance. ‘We are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future’, the president said, and ‘in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource.’.Footnote 17 Eisenhower was hardly the first president to talk about a spiritual arsenal. Harry Truman, while lighting a White House Christmas tree, had also wielded religion as a weapon in the cold war.Footnote 18 For Kennedy, as for the editors of the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, this was confirmation of a trend that had long been worrying. Both agreed that to hear ‘ad nauseam that God is on “our” side’ and that religion was ‘a potent instrument in the cold war’ was complacent, for religion could not be tied ‘to the service of any particular nationalism’, as that would ‘betray the transcendental vocation of religion’.Footnote 19 Yet neither denied the centrality of religious belief to the clash between atheistic communism and what they considered to be a secularizing West. Faith was not a ‘weapon in the present world struggle’, Kennedy told an audience at Assumption College after his return from back surgery in June 1955, but the ‘root of the struggle’. Too often, he said, ‘we have utilized it as a weapon, broadcast it as propaganda, shouted it as a battle cry’. Like many of his political contemporaries, Kennedy urged a ‘revival of our religious faith’, but one that would give a moral compass in foreign policy, not justify its ill-conceived ventures or simply buttress the state. Religion was not something to be wedded to a national cause, but instead taught principles that would win hearts and minds if only the United States could live up to moral laws.Footnote 20
That this side of Kennedy is rarely seen in histories of him is the function of myth-making. For White House aides Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, and Theodore Sorensen, the only possible kind of religious cold war was the black-and-white eschatology associated with John Foster Dulles.Footnote 21 Despising Dulles and his policies, they sought in the books they published immediately after Kennedy's death to make him everything Dulles had not been. Sorensen, whose Unitarianism had long made him a reluctant cold warrior, insisted that Kennedy had ‘dismissed as dangerous folly all talk of a “Holy War” against atheistic Communism’.Footnote 22 Schlesinger argued in A thousand days that Kennedy was ‘bored’ by ‘the John Foster Dulles contrast between the God-anointed apostles of free enterprise and the regimented hordes of atheistic communism’. The characteristic 1950s idea that ‘it was all a struggle between good and evil never satisfied him’.Footnote 23 Sorensen and Schlesinger were still concerned, after Kennedy's death, with the president's legacy. To imply that religion had been important to his administration would be to imply that he had breached the barrier between church and state that he had called ‘absolute’ during the election campaign of 1960.Footnote 24 This concern with legacy has flowed into unexpected places. Even John McGreevy has accepted the ‘irrelevance of religion to Kennedy's presidency’.Footnote 25 By 1978, Schlesinger was writing confidently that Kennedy saw the cold war ‘not as a religious but as a power conflict’.Footnote 26
Kennedy would have been a surprising Catholic indeed if this had been the case. To investigate, we must go back to his congressional career. In a series of speeches given before he began running for the presidency in late 1957, Kennedy laid out views that aligned closely with his anti-imperialist politics. As an aspiring congressman in 1946, he had praised the ‘essential religious ideas’ that would help the United States repel ‘deathly [atheist] philosophies of hate and despair’.Footnote 27 After 1954, Kennedy began to dedicate entire addresses to the relationship between religion and foreign relations, speaking with remarkable subtlety. In a speech to a Holy Name Society in Vermont in May that year, he set out the need to adhere to a universal morality that existed ‘beyond the church and beyond this state and nation’. There were, he said, ‘ideals and faiths and philosophical needs which drive men far more intensely than military and economic objectives’. More significant, he said, borrowing from a John Courtney Murray sermon he probably heard in Washington in 1953, was the ‘moral struggle’, the ‘stern encounter’ prophesied by John Cardinal Newman, in which ‘two real and living principles … one in the church and the other out of it, at length rush upon one another contending not for names and words or half-views, but for elementary notions and distinctive moral characteristics’. To succeed, American Catholics had to fight Soviet fanaticism, to ward off ‘the slow attrition of our religious, ethical and cultural foundations’, to help ‘all oppressed people’, and to offer hope to religious believers behind the Iron Curtain, to help ‘keep alive the faith that will one day be free’.Footnote 28 Anti-communism, in this view, was only one part of a much broader Catholic duty.
Kennedy gave speeches on these themes multiple times. He talked of a struggle not ‘in terms of Christianity versus those of atheism, but in terms of good versus evil, right versus wrong’.Footnote 29 Yet as he began running for the presidency and courting the liberals best represented by Sorensen and Schlesinger, Kennedy started to lose his nuance. While he continued to mock Eisenhower, joking that Republican groups opened their meetings ‘with the prayer that Divine Providence will remain under the protection of the Administration’, he increasingly took on linguistic clichés and speaking engagements that he had earlier spurned.Footnote 30 At one point, he adopted the language of Judeo-Christianity, a cold war invention that Catholics tended to ignore, to argue that ‘no Communist dictatorship, no Godless totalitarian society, no people living in fear of the future and without faith in themselves, can ever match the wealth of [America's spiritual] inheritance’.Footnote 31 Although he had linked Catholicism and freedom in 1950 by suggesting that ‘every Catholic must believe in the essential dignity of the human personality on which any democracy must rest’, his 1957 address to the quintessential ecumenical organization of the decade, the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), was the first occasion on which he put religious dignity in the same bracket as ‘the Golden Rule’, the ‘teachings of Hillel’, and the Declaration of Independence's ‘consent of the governed’.Footnote 32 Kennedy, just like Eisenhower, could make religious belief and commitment to democracy indistinguishable.
In the election campaign of 1960, Kennedy began ‘any discussion of foreign policy with a great advantage’, for, as Schlesinger wrote to Robert Kennedy that year, ‘because he is a Catholic, no one can suggest very convincingly that he's soft on Communism’.Footnote 33 While he defended himself on church–state politics by avowing the complete separation of church, state, and Oval Office, as he most famously did in his speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September, Kennedy also deployed the rhetoric of the religious cold war to insulate himself from criticism on domestic and international grounds. There was no need to debate the content of his Catholicism, he told one audience, for the ‘great struggle today is between those who believe in no God and those who believe in God’.Footnote 34 At the Mormon Tabernacle in September, Kennedy united the two themes. Kennedy always had a strong relationship with the Mormons, admiring their commitment to religious liberty, their worldly application of belief, and their missionary work ‘against any encroachment by the godless enemies of western and Christian civilization’.Footnote 35 In Salt Lake City, he insisted that his election would prove America's point about the separation of church and state. There was a battle, he said, between ‘two conflicting ideologies; freedom under God versus ruthless, Godless tyranny’. ‘Here in our land’, the candidate said, ‘church and state are separate and free – in their lands neither is free, and the church lives in constant fear of the state.’Footnote 36 As the Washington Post put it, Kennedy thus ‘neutralized the religious issue’ by discussing ‘the American heritage of religious liberty’.Footnote 37 Talking about religion in general terms could insulate him. For Kennedy, the religious influence on foreign relations was welcome so long as it was ecumenical. It was a sign of how liberal Kennedy's Catholicism had been in the mid-1950s that it took this much of a shift towards boilerplate language to shore up his anti-communist credentials.
II
Kennedy kept his personal faith private from the public and historians alike. Few sources still exist, if any, that did not and do not serve some sort of political or mythological cause. His wife, his closest advisers, and clergy who knew him all disagreed on the quality of his belief.Footnote 38 This would be an insurmountable barrier if this article were to argue that the Peace Corps was a reflection of, even caused by, Kennedy's personal faith. It does not, not least because that faith is ultimately unknowable. Instead, it is primarily interested in the kind of role that Kennedy and others in his administration publicly envisaged for religion within and beyond foreign relations, and how the Peace Corps interacted with shifting understandings of the place of religion in domestic society and foreign policy.
By the time Kennedy gave his inaugural address, the business and culture of the post-war revival were beginning to falter. The majority of Kennedy's foreign policy advisers had come to abhor the simplistic worldview that Eisenhower had supposedly held. Sorensen, in a speech draft written months before the Cuban missile crisis, argued that ‘the stale, sterile dogmas of the Cold War’ could be ‘left literally a quarter of a million miles behind’.Footnote 39 In preparation for one set-piece speech in October 1961, a who's-who of the foreign policy elite chimed in on the same theme. ‘We cannot’, wrote Henry Kissinger, ‘encompass our policy in simple slogans’. ‘We live’, agreed Paul Nitze – the primary author of NSC 68, the quintessentially monochrome policy document of the early cold war – ‘in a complex, multi-dimensional world which cannot be viewed in the absolutes of black and white; it is instead a kaleidoscope of delicate and ever changing shadings’.Footnote 40 ‘It is no service’, wrote another correspondent, ‘to present these conflicts in terms of an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil.’Footnote 41 In this decolonizing world of fraying alliances and onrushing nuclear parity, a new focus on modernisation theories, scientific progress, and economic development did not excise the support of religious belief from the national interest. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it in November 1961, support for the major world religions, ‘whose influence transcends national boundaries’, was vital because of ‘the importance which the United States attaches to spiritual values’.Footnote 42 However, if religious belief and freedom of religion were to play a role, and the administration thought it must, it would be a different one to that of the Eisenhower years.
Shifts outside government reinforced this. The foremost liberal Christian magazines, including Commonweal, Christianity and Crisis, and Christian Century, had long condemned the revival's vacuity.Footnote 43 Reinhold Niebuhr and Will Herberg had cast doubts since the early 1950s, but with the publication of William Lee Miller's Piety along the Potomac in 1957, opposition to the nature of the religiosity prevalent in public discourse began to grow.Footnote 44 ‘Isn't it time’, sighed the editors of the Washington Post in February 1958, ‘to end this offensive business of self-righteously invoking the Deity as a crutch in American diplomacy?’Footnote 45 That year, Niebuhr published Pious and secular America, a scathing critique that was gentle compared to what followed.Footnote 46 In 1959, Martin Marty deplored what had been not a religious revival, but a ‘maturing national religion’ cloaked by a ‘revival of interest in religion’.Footnote 47 For sociologist Peter Berger, writing in 1961, those who made God ‘an ideological weapon in our political conflicts are engaged in blasphemy’.Footnote 48 Firebrand theologian Gabriel Vahanian went even further, arguing that America was no longer ‘post-Protestant’ (as Marty insisted) but ‘post-Christian’. God was dead, he declared, and the revival had killed Him.Footnote 49 In the mainline tradition, the hardheaded realism that Niebuhr had expressed in the pages of Christianity and Crisis was slowly being replaced by the considerably more ambivalent views of Niebuhr's counterpart at Union Theological Seminary, John C. Bennett. TIME magazine's provocative title of a profile of Bennett symbolized the growing distance between ecumenical Protestantism and the interests of the state: ‘Whose side is God on?’Footnote 50
We make a mistake, however, if we assume that theologians and sociologists were broadly representative. The revival did not die down until after Kennedy's death, and especially until its ecumenical and institutional underpinnings were destroyed by the politics of racism and the war in Vietnam. In 1962, 45 per cent of Americans still believed that religion was expanding its political influence.Footnote 51TIME only declared that ‘the great postwar religious revival in the US is over’ in February 1963, and it did not popularize the ‘death of God’ theologians until 1966.Footnote 52 In a survey given to Sorensen in January 1962, pollster Lou Harris demonstrated that the revival's themes were still in the public mind. Of respondents, 33 per cent said that the biggest difference between America and the Soviet Union was ‘religious freedom here’, while nearly two-thirds said that ‘freedom to worship’ was a key difference to them personally. ‘The lodestars our people live by’, concluded Harris, ‘are essentially non-materialistic.’Footnote 53
In this fluid atmosphere, the language of a presidential campaign was not the language of governance. Kennedy wanted to move away from the specific forms of the religious cold war waged by his predecessors, but he could not and did not want to move far from emphasizing the ‘stern encounter’ of which he had talked in the 1950s. Cold war language and revival language had, after all, intertwined. Still, Kennedy had to be careful. While Eisenhower could, as William Inboden has written, build a ‘diplomatic theology’ for the country in the absence of clerical agreement on what foreign policy ought to look like, Kennedy's Catholicism and the increasingly tricky politics of religion meant that he could not create anything similar so explicitly.Footnote 54 In addition to the specifics of the Catholic view of the cold war that he had sketched in the 1950s, Kennedy's wariness stemmed in part from a desire to show that religious pluralism was a reality in the United States, to show that a Catholic could be president for all Americans while disproving the suspicion, as Press Secretary Pierre Salinger put it, ‘that he would be a Catholic president’.Footnote 55 It was also cynically political, as Sorensen acknowledged when he wrote to Kennedy insisting that the administration was one ‘political-religious explosion’ away from ‘reviving bitter religious disunity’ with ‘potentially serious implications for 1964’.Footnote 56
Moreover, Kennedy received early notice that he would have almost no control over such events. In March 1961, his decision to bar federal aid to parochial schools in a new education bill, in line with recent constitutional precedent and his campaign promises, raised Catholic hackles and caused widespread division. Kennedy bemoaned the fact that ‘the matter of religion’ had been brought into domestic party politics even after his election, while Sorensen noted with bemusement that the old game of church–state politics was now being played ‘with new teams’.Footnote 57 The bill was defeated, even as Kennedy garnered unexpected praise from mainline and evangelical Protestants for standing up to the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC). While Catholics, led by John Courtney Murray, found novel ways to reconcile their religious and national creeds, Lou Harris told Kennedy that ‘one conciliatory gesture toward compromising church-and-state relations will undoubtedly blow up all the gains now being registered’.Footnote 58 If we can pick out a moment when American religion began to be ‘restructured’, as Robert Wuthnow puts it, this might be it.Footnote 59
Kennedy put together no coherent strategy to deal with the politics of religion, whether in terms of domestic church–state relations or of foreign policy. What emerged was an accommodation with the revival's institutions and language, but with twists that updated the themes of his earlier speeches by taking much that was recognisably Catholic out of them.
Presidential prayer breakfasts had been held each year since 1953, but it was Kennedy who was responsible for making them a tradition. Led by Billy Graham, they had been an important symbol of the centrality of religious values in the cold war, and Kennedy's decision to attend one only a few weeks after his inauguration sent signals that ecumenical continuity, notwithstanding his faith and the rancorous election campaign, would be the order of the day. Despite the evangelical's role in fomenting opposition to Kennedy over the previous months, Graham made a peace offering by quoting Pope Leo XIII (favourably) in his breakfast sermon.Footnote 60 The Chicago Tribune usefully pictured Graham and the president grinning over their food, while Kennedy took along the nation's diplomatic elite, including Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Adlai Stevenson, as an indication of the importance in which he held the event.Footnote 61
Sorensen, though, struggled to work out what Kennedy should say to such a gathering. His files for this brief speech are unusually littered with drafts and alterations.Footnote 62 What the president actually said underlined his shift of emphasis. Kennedy nodded to the ‘great constitutional principle’ of ‘religious independence, of religious liberty, of religious freedom’, and urged Americans ‘to call upon our great reservoir of spiritual resources’. Speaking extemporaneously, he deployed his only documented use of the official national motto, created in 1956. ‘The guiding principle and prayer of this Nation’, he said, ‘has been, is now, and shall ever be “In God We Trust.”’ After speaking in front of Graham, Kennedy went next door to address the breakfasters’ wives, this time without a script. Noting how much he admired missionaries, those who ‘carry the message in which they have such great conviction’, Kennedy professed the same ideas that had infused his Catholic speeches in the mid-1950s. He repeated his warning not to ‘confuse a system of freedom with one of disinterest, uninterest, cynicism, [and] materialism’. Most importantly, he used his anti-Eisenhower line from years gone by: ‘I do not regard religion as a weapon in the Cold War. I regard it as the essence of the differences which separate those on the other side of the Iron Curtain and ourselves.’Footnote 63 Few noticed the difference, but one who did was John Bennett. Writing in Christianity and Crisis, Bennett declared it ‘good news’ that a president ‘says explicitly that religion should not be a weapon in the cold war’, especially as ‘it takes Christian discrimination to hold to this view when our opponents are atheists’. Kennedy's words, Bennett acidly noted, ‘would surprise many of the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church’, and all those ‘accustomed to other forms of religiosity in Washington’.Footnote 64
As president, Kennedy largely avoided talking about religion. God would be invoked from time to time, but only as part of a stirring peroration. Far more often, he congealed religion into a set of amorphous, ecumenical ‘moral values’. What did theology count, he asked the NCCJ in November 1961, if ‘we all – regardless of our particular religious convictions – draw our guidance and inspiration, and really in a sense moral direction from the same general area’?Footnote 65 By addressing foreign audiences with appeals to ‘universality and spiritual values’, wrote Rusk, Kennedy could nod to the national interest in religious belief while minimizing domestic criticism.Footnote 66 Anti-Catholic politics threatened Kennedy across borders, and so he adopted much the same tactics at home and abroad. He still connected religious belief to democracy, to progress, and hence to peace on American terms. Just as he had told the NCCJ in 1957 that religious belief taught freedom just as well as the Declaration of Independence, so now he said that those who believed were united ‘in a common commitment to the moral order – and the relationship of the individual to the state’.Footnote 67 As he very rarely spoke about morality or religion outside of a foreign policy context, ‘moral values’ kept their anti-communist roots.
What was different from the Eisenhower years was that Kennedy saw this as something that should primarily occur naturally, as far as possible without governmental help. He lauded the 1962 prayer breakfast as part of a ‘worldwide effort’ – illustrated by the World Council of Churches' meeting in New Delhi that year – to build ‘a closer and more intimate association among those of different faiths and in different countries, who are united by a common belief in God’.Footnote 68 When Pope John XXIII released Pacem in terris, an encyclical calling for peace on the basis of human rights and an end to the arms race, Kennedy praised the Holy Father for addressing it to ‘all men of good will’. Pacem and other ‘notable expressions of conviction and aspiration from churchmen of other faiths’, he said, showed that people were ‘learning to talk the language of progress and peace across the barriers of sect and creed’.Footnote 69
It is clear, then, that religion under Kennedy remained inherently political, at home, abroad, and in what Fredrik Logevall calls the ‘intermestic’ space that links the two.Footnote 70 By having the White House step back, Kennedy's implicit argument was that he was restoring the religious conflict to its essential place in the cold war, its root. In this view, speaking about the conflict less meant treating the conflict more seriously, not less. So the religious cold war did not disappear, even if it changed. Kennedy left it to religious groups to conduct their own foreign policies more than had his predecessors. The Vatican, which commenced its own version of Ostpolitik and expanded its efforts in Latin America, and the NCC, which convened a series of summit meetings between American Protestant and Russian Orthodox leaders, were only two of the most successful groups to take advantage.
Administrations, however, are heterogeneous and often contradictory affairs. Kennedy's strategy was close enough to the old that his administration opened new fronts on the battlefield of foreign aid. As the believing West had a permanent advantage in spiritual matters, or so it was thought, that fight still needed to be waged. So while the Peace Corps partly reflected everything that was novel about Kennedy – his style, his vigour, and so on – it also partly continued that spiritual war. Yet the administration's desire to continue the moral cold war abroad led directly to the church–state problems that it wanted to avoid at home. The religious conflict therefore continued to shape, and be shaped by, changing interpretations of the first amendment and the political alliances that they engendered.
III
‘We as Christians’, the speaker cried,
must fulfil our obligations to our fellow men, or God may well permit others to crush us. Either we do these jobs or the Communists will. And if we don't meet the test, the days of the Catacombs will return sooner than anyone in this audience suspects. For as our Lord Himself said: ‘Would that you were cold or hot; and so because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I am going to vomit you out of my mouth. You say “I am rich and have become wealthy and have no need of anything.” But you do not know that you are wretched and pitiable and poor and blind and naked … ’ The shocking fact is that this is exactly what the Communists say about us.
The fire and brimstone came not from a revivalist stage or a Southern pulpit, but in a policy address at the University of Notre Dame, from the Catholic brother-in-law of the president of the United States, newly appointed head of the Peace Corps. The Corps, continued Sargent Shriver in June 1961, exemplified ‘the belief in a civilization based on the God-given dignity of the individual human being’, and aimed to give those in the Third World whom it served ‘what we and we alone can give them – hope, skill, and a knowledge of the dignity of man under the Fatherhood of God’.Footnote 71
Years earlier, Will Herberg had eviscerated such words as empty revival clichés, but the Peace Corps also had deeper religious roots.Footnote 72 Sorensen wrote that it was based on ‘Mormon and other voluntary religious service efforts’, among other things.Footnote 73 In addition to Shriver, key figures within the Corps had strong backgrounds in religious service. Bill Moyers, later press secretary to Lyndon Johnson, was a trained Baptist preacher. Paul Geren, who became the Corps's deputy director midway through 1961, had helped to found the Journal of Church and State, had long written about the importance of freedom of religion, and was close to the NCC.Footnote 74 Not for nothing did Arnold Toynbee call the Corps's volunteers ‘a new lay missionary army’, or Billy Graham call them ‘modern missionaries of freedom to the underdeveloped areas of the world’.Footnote 75 Kennedy, too, noted that the Corps's ‘idealistic sense of purpose’ had also motivated ‘a good deal of our international policy in the private church groups, in the aid groups’.Footnote 76 This conflation of state-backed volunteerism and traditional service efforts, not to mention that of religion and ‘idealism’, was part of the Peace Corps's appeal, especially to understandably flattered church organizations. There was a difference, though. In government service, volunteers would explicitly be countering, said Kennedy when he first mooted the idea in the election campaign, the hordes of ‘missionaries for world communism’ sent out by the Soviet Union, those ‘hundreds of men and women, scientists, physicists, teachers, engineers, doctors, nurses … prepared to spend their lives abroad in the service of world communism’.Footnote 77
For this struggle, Kennedy reserved his fieriest rhetoric. He had built his foreign policy reputation on foreign aid and the Third World, and in the campaign he chastised Eisenhower, reminding audiences as Franklin Roosevelt had in 1936 that ‘the immortal Dante tells us that Divine Justice weights the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warmhearted in a different scale’.Footnote 78 Better, Kennedy insisted, the ‘occasional faults of a government living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference’.Footnote 79 The ‘hottest places in hell’ were reserved for people who ‘in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality’, Kennedy told the founders of the West German Peace Corps in 1963.Footnote 80 Whereas Dulles had aimed this rhetoric at neutral countries, Kennedy aimed it at the West, outlining its moral duty to uplift the poor before the communists could. But it was more complicated than that. Kennedy also said that the Corps was ‘not designed as an instrument of diplomacy or propaganda or ideological conflict’, words reminiscent of how he envisaged the relationship between his government and religion.Footnote 81 While Newsweek called the Corps ‘America's latest weapon in the Cold War’, it inhabited a peculiar position in the foreign policy structure.Footnote 82 Staffers protected its independent status within the State Department, having vehemently opposed Kennedy's original plan to subsume it within his reorganized foreign aid bureaucracy (thereby earning his lasting displeasure).Footnote 83 No less a figure than the secretary of state himself had to remind his ambassadors that they were not to interfere with the Corps. ‘The Peace Corps is not an instrument of foreign policy’, Dean Rusk wrote, ‘because to make it so would rob it of its contribution to foreign policy.’Footnote 84 The Corps did international work in the interest of the United States in the same moral zone as religious belief.
In the early months of the Kennedy administration, the Corps was more than just a tribute to church service organizations: it intended to fund them.Footnote 85 With little internal discussion, Kennedy announced while establishing the Corps by executive order on 1 March 1961 that he intended ‘to make full use of the resources and talents of private institutions and groups’, thereby ‘making it clear that the responsibility for peace is the responsibility of our entire society’.Footnote 86 He implied to Congress that voluntary agencies would be able to choose their own volunteers, train them, and bid for contracts.Footnote 87 There was an element of necessity to this. Between 1940 and 1960, Americans donated over $3 billion to private assistance organizations, while their taxes contributed to widened foreign aid efforts that further enlarged funds available to voluntary agencies through contracts. Most of the large voluntary agencies had religious backing of some kind, whether they were funded by religious contributions (like the Heifer Project), or were explicitly controlled by church groups. Shriver originally planned to spend half of his $40 million contracting budget on church-related agencies.Footnote 88 Using religious groups would demonstrate the importance of moral values to the United States, while also accommodating the realities of the aid situation, and showing that, contra the communist line, not all problems could be solved by direct government intervention alone.
While groups like the NCC and the National Association of Evangelicals held back, several church organizations applied for contracts immediately. The most vocal of these was the service arm of the NCWC, Catholic Relief Services (CRS). Founded as a wartime agency by the episcopate to help alleviate famine and help refugees, it had taken on independent work during the 1950s to support economic development. Led by Bishop Edward Swanstrom of New York, by 1961 CRS had become the largest non-governmental aid agency in the world.Footnote 89 If the Corps's position in the cold war was debatable, that of CRS was not. In its view, economic relief would undermine the causes of communism, while battling poverty would serve God in the spirit of the Samaritan, defending the needy against an atheistic foe. This reflected an updated Catholic approach to the global south that John XXIII had outlined in his encyclical Mater et magistra (1961). Although the Peace Corps's raison d’être involved a hefty dose of state interest, the moral justification for it outlined by Kennedy, Shriver, and others came close to what the pope envisaged. ‘Justice and humanity’, John wrote, demanded that wealthy countries help ‘responsible human beings … without thought of domination’ by ‘providing these citizens with the scientific, technical and professional training they need, and to put at their disposal the necessary for speeding up their economic development with the help of modern methods’. While John presciently warned against ‘a new form of colonialism’, he also feared unnamed but clearly Soviet plans for ‘world domination’.Footnote 90
For CRS, the imperatives of Mater and the Corps were indistinguishable. The Corps, wrote one staffer to a prospective volunteer, was ‘visible testimony of the responsibility all Catholics must accept and welcome as members of the one Body of Christ’.Footnote 91 ‘Free institutions’, wrote another, following a New Deal line, ‘cannot flourish where poverty and disease are rampant.’ Hence, the Corps presented ‘an opportunity, as well as a challenge, to all who would bear witness to the Truth in Charity by rendering material assistance to their less fortunate brothers in Christ’.Footnote 92 In April, CRS set up a dedicated Peace Corps desk, met with Corps leaders, and asked its operatives abroad to formulate ideas, telling them that ‘Peace Corps support will be granted to sectarian voluntary organizations.’Footnote 93 While there were caveats, the Corps told the American Council of Voluntary Agencies for Foreign Service – the ecumenical umbrella organization of voluntary agencies – that this would indeed be the case.Footnote 94 Proposals from CRS's outposts in Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, Togo, Nigeria, and elsewhere soon followed.
Meanwhile, the debate over federal aid to education erupted, and the Corps began formulating its own church–state stance.Footnote 95 The Corps's chief counsel was Morris Abram, a civil rights lawyer who had aided the Jewish community's legal actions to enforce a division between church and state in the 1950s. A few days before the American Council meeting, Abram saw no legal problem with allowing church agencies to bid for contracts, as long as there was open recruiting for volunteers, a distribution of projects among the faiths in any given area, and most importantly a firm ban on proselytising and teaching religion in schools. Providing an early indication of the coming debate, Abram also warned against allowing groups to act for ‘religious purposes’, without, crucially, defining what that might mean.Footnote 96 As an article of peace that reflected the pluralistic character of the United States, Abram's policy satisfied most. ‘In the absence of such a ban’, wrote Robert Melina, the head of CRS's Peace Corps bureau, ‘a team of Protestant Peace Corps workers … would be free to devote a great deal of time to proselytising among Catholics.’Footnote 97
Even so, the Corps remained worried. In early May, officials expressed their anxiety to voluntary agency representatives that the ‘religious issue may be raised … before Congress’.Footnote 98 Such fears naturally transferred to CRS, which knew that the insistence of the NCWC in the education debate that the federal government ought to fund parochial schools might cause problems. Melina thought that allowing friendly Protestant groups to put forward a similar case to Catholics, even letting one win the first contract, would likely be a more successful approach.Footnote 99 This would enable Catholics to argue that they were being excluded from a pluralist arrangement, whereas the opposite, given continuing anti-Catholicism, might be interpreted as a church–state threat. Melina knew that it was ‘obvious that this administration is going to be over-cautious re Catholic groups’, and that it was therefore essential that ‘the “visibility” of the Church be kept at a minimum’.Footnote 100 He also tried to dissuade the Corps from hiring Catholics, unaware that it seriously considered hiring him.Footnote 101 On the one hand, its contacts, experience, size, and willingness to play by pluralist rules made CRS very attractive to the Corps. On the other, political optics were felt by both sides to dictate a cautious approach.
It was neither traditionally anti-Catholic religious groups nor congressional Republicans that blew debate into the open, but the New York Times. Three days before Shriver was due to testify to the Senate's Committee on Foreign Relations in support of the Peace Corps Act, a front-page story featured interviews with all the main players and tested the boundaries of Kennedy's campaign promises. Ecumenical Protestant leaders took this opportunity to distance themselves from official work with the government. Crucial, in that context, was the Times's assertion that ‘of all the religious officials polled, the Catholics appeared most wholeheartedly in favor of church participation’. Journalist John Wicklein quoted Vatican Radio, which had called the Corps ‘beautiful, even magnificent’. Vitally, Wicklein exposed the naivety of the Corps's line that a ban on proselytizing would be sufficient to calm church–state nerves. He rightly pointed out that few church programmes were ‘straight proselytizing operations’, as many were also humanitarian efforts that presented ‘a Christian “witness” only through example’. While Melina made a distinction between the attempt of the new Papal Volunteers for Latin America (PAVLA) at ‘winning the souls of the people of developing regions’ and the Corps volunteer's duty to ‘manifest his zeal simply by bearing witness to his convictions’, Wicklein still wrote that it would ‘be difficult to avoid the suspicion that the Peace Corps was subsidizing religion with its contracts’. The question turned on what constituted ‘aid’ to religion, indeed what ‘religion’ really meant. Individuals could not be prevented from bearing personal witness, for that was to be encouraged in a religious cold war. But could the government pay for institutions collectively to do so?Footnote 102
The reaction to the Times story was immediate. The American Jewish Congress, one of the guardians of Everson's ‘wall of separation’ in the 1950s, broke ranks with Abram, declaring its ‘vigorous opposition’ to ‘any use by religious groups of Government funds or of Peace Corps personal in their church-sponsored projects’. The United Presbyterian Church, the largest association of mainline Presbyterians in the country, insisted that the Christian mission was ‘to proclaim the Gospel’, not to take money from the state.Footnote 103 The editorial board of the Washington Post quickly followed, questioning whether service agencies could be considered simply humanitarian groups, especially given that ‘churches which sponsor welfare projects in other lands are basically interested in proselytizing regardless of how much emphasis is laid upon economic, social, and educational aid’.Footnote 104 Over time, crucial keepers of the church–state truce came out against Shriver's plans, even if they all agreed that the Corps was a tribute to, and extension of, religious work. For the Baptists, the idea that church service groups and the government could work together was based on ‘very serious misunderstandings’. A representative of the Methodist Student Movement worried about whether church groups would be seen as extensions of the government. Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU), a key organization inspired by Paul Blanshard that had set the terms of church–state debate in the 1940s and 1950s, worried as it always had about Vatican influence, and feared that the Peace Corps's use of religious groups would further soil the ‘image of disinterested concern which Christian missions have been able to project in the past’, an image already associated ‘with “imperialistic” aims of government’.Footnote 105 Except with POAU, in none of these cases was anti-Catholicism explicit. But it was clear that Kennedy's stance on church and state, itself a response to anti-Catholicism, was being mobilized in ways that would work to the detriment of Catholics more than others.
When the Committee on Foreign Relations met, discussion of the religious issue took up more time even than matters of cost.Footnote 106 The Corps's tenuous distinctions between ‘religious’ activities, the ones picked up in the New York Times article, began to unravel. In an attempt to help Shriver, Hubert Humphrey – who had put forward proposals similar to the Corps in the 1950s – drew a line between helping religious groups and helping specific denominations, something that the Corps itself had been careful to avoid. Under pressure from Albert Gore, Sr, he distinguished between organizations ‘set up by religious denominations’ and those that ‘operate in a religious fashion’. He noted the prevalent hypocrisy by listing the religious agencies that had been involved in foreign aid programmes for years, and pointed out that it would ‘theoretically’ be possible ‘to proselytize with a basket of food for a hungry person more effectively than just with a brain full of ideas’. Shriver, notably, agreed. Less attuned to the perceived risks of church–state politics than the administration, however, Humphrey also provided a rationale that was untenable. ‘May I just say’, he told the hearing, ‘that I am a believer in the so-called doctrine of the separation of church and state, but I am not a believer in inaction, and there are people who will rationalize this political principle of separation to a point where you get nothing done.’ Shriver, he concluded, ought not to worry.Footnote 107
Others, however, did. When religious leaders testified the next day, there was clearly no consensus on the church–state boundary that was in play in this case. The Quakers, the Mennonites, and the Brethren all suggested that they had no qualms signing a contract and allowing other groups to do so too.Footnote 108 Robert van Deusen, of the National Lutheran Council, decided the opposite, and entered into a long discussion about what constituted religious motivation with Gore and Stuart Symington, the conclusion being that most of the churches he represented had not yet decided whether they might be interested. Importantly, though, he swore that if his organization resolved not to accept government money, no religious group could, for it would automatically result in a ‘skewed pattern of church–state relationships’.Footnote 109 CRS certainly had decided that it was ready to work with the Peace Corps, Melina told the committee. In the Catholic view, or at least that of the NCWC, there was no problem. Surely, Melina asserted, there was an obvious difference ‘between welfare and humanitarian projects carried out by people of religious conviction and activities which are strictly concerned with conversion’. Churches could decide for themselves whether to work with the Peace Corps, as long as they agreed not to discriminate in terms of the faiths of the volunteers they sent abroad. Moreover, those young people interested in true missionary work would ‘never be attracted to the Peace Corps’, precisely because of the short duration of service and differing style of religious service. There was, he agreed with Gore and Humphrey, an ‘area of cooperation’ in which church and state could have a ‘mutually beneficial relationship’, in which neither the state nor churches acting voluntarily would be threatened.Footnote 110
The editorial board of the New York Times disagreed, and there the debate ended. ‘No sectarian religious organization should receive financial support’ from the Corps, it argued, a few days after the hearing, for the ‘separation of church and state’ was ‘sacred’ and already ‘being taken far too lightly in the educational field here at home’. Implicitly, but obviously, it meant Catholics.Footnote 111 Such high-profile criticism could not be tolerated by the administration. At the end of June, Shriver was summoned to see Kennedy at his Hyannisport compound.Footnote 112 A week later came final word in a meeting at the White House. Sorensen had been insulating Kennedy from church–state attack since 1957, and here he did once more. The Special Counsel to the President argued that although the law and matters of theology were ‘fuzzy’, politics was not. ‘The Peace Corps of course wants to be above suspicion in this whole matter’, he said, and although religious groups were doing ‘good work abroad’, there would be ‘trouble’ if ‘federal aid, funds or personnel’ were caught helping a ‘religious organization’.Footnote 113
For the first time, the Peace Corps now began fully to think the matter through. New legal memoranda were commissioned to argue both sides of the case.Footnote 114 Staffers who had experience in foreign aid lobbied on behalf of CRS and the other interested agencies.Footnote 115 Yet politics won out, in a case argued by Bill Moyers. Although he had not been in the meeting with Sorensen, Moyers similarly agreed that the constitution was ‘not really the issue’, for this was ‘an emotional controversy with strong political overtones’. In any other year, Moyers suggested, it might be possible for the Corps to work with religious groups. But not now:
A confluence of special factors is operating – the first Catholic President in our history; a suspicious public; a Catholic brother-in-law; a sensitive issue before Congress in the form of a bill to aid education; a highly emotional public opinion; and the normal, but cunning hostility of the opposition party.
Moreover, the Corps had purposefully been branded as ‘President Kennedy's Peace Corps’. Could the Corps really take a less firm line than the president had on schools?
For Moyers, as for Abram in April, the education debate dominated. After all, this was where the political and legal precedents lay. The most important church–state cases to pass through the Supreme Court in the previous two decades had all been related to schools. Everson v. Board (1947) and McCollum v. Board (1948) had both confronted the question of public money and religious schools, while Zorach v. Clauson (1952) and the decisions to come in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963) all focused on school prayer or Bible reading in class.Footnote 116 This specific issue was taken as universal, along with what Philip Hamburger and John McGreevy have argued was its anti-Catholic content.Footnote 117 The constitutionality of federal aid to voluntary agencies operating abroad had not been legally tested. In the court of public opinion, however, it was assumed that this was a fight the Corps would not win. Sorensen had already noted the changing shape of the politics of religion, and now Moyers too suggested that ‘public sentiment as a whole’ was turning away from the traditional Protestant–Catholic divide. More people (57 per cent, up from 49 per cent in 1949) believed now that tax funds should go only to public schools. Footnote 118 At a staff meeting on 12 July, Shriver conceded that ‘the Peace Corps will not work with the service arms of religious organizations, even though these affiliated “arms” are of the non-proselytizing variety’.Footnote 119 The following day, the secretary of state agreed.Footnote 120
Rather than informing the voluntary agencies of this decision immediately, while his bill was still in Congress, Shriver waited several months. CRS was told in mid-July that its proposals were being put on hold, but merely due to temporary ‘political considerations’.Footnote 121 While news flowed into the NCWC that Peace Corps workers were being uncooperative around the world, CRS remained confident of a deal, at least until October.Footnote 122 After the Peace Corps Act had passed, Swanstrom deduced, the Corps could stop avoiding ‘on the one hand an open Church–state controversy’ and, on the other, a politically dangerous ‘alienation of the voluntary agencies associated with religious bodies’.Footnote 123 In November, Paul Geren told the American Council that the number of projects that the Corps could begin with voluntary agencies was limited. Melina was furious, suggesting that it was ‘difficult to understand why so many obstacles have arisen in regard to voluntary agency relationships with the Peace Corps, which have not existed during eighteen years of cooperation between private organizations and other government departments’. Geren replied that the difficulties had not originated with the Peace Corps, but left open the question from whence they came.Footnote 124
Shriver, however, knew exactly what the issue was. On his return from a long overseas trip, he finally informed Swanstrom – alone among voluntary agency leaders – of the final policy in the first week of December. Swanstrom, writing soon after, expressed visceral displeasure at Shriver's ‘politically expedient’ line.Footnote 125 Shriver took offence, apparently believing that he had settled the matter on purely legal grounds.Footnote 126 In a meeting of all the voluntary agency heads a week later, he showed how tenuous his distinctions were. With Swanstrom seated far away, Shriver told the agencies that many people felt ‘that there is a legal and constitutional question involved’, and that he had therefore made a decision that precluded ‘our actually negotiating contracts with straight ecclesiastical or church organizations’, as well as proselytizing groups. He noted, though, that this might not be ‘a matter of principle forever’. On the one hand, Shriver gave examples of how individual volunteers were showing religious initiative while abroad. On the other, he argued that the difference between the Corps and other government agencies was simple. ‘We supply people’, he said, and supplying people was different to supplying food. In the summer, Shriver had argued the exact opposite, but his theological views now switched for political purposes.Footnote 127 ‘Just because it's a difficult line to draw’, said the president's brother-in-law, ‘we shouldn't stop trying to draw it.’Footnote 128
IV
As the NCWC closed down its Peace Corps desk, the NCC opened one. Unlike the NCWC, the NCC took the election of Kennedy as an opportunity to distance itself from the government, indeed as a chance explicitly to allow what a new generation of theologians embraced as ‘secularization’ to happen. Years before the war in Vietnam, as Axel Schäfer supposes, mainline Protestantism had begun to distance itself from explicit government co-operation in foreign aid.Footnote 129 Churches could, the NCC resolved in June 1961, ‘relinquish the [religious] institutions that have been established to meet … unmet human needs’ as soon as ‘government and/or society’ had been made aware of them.Footnote 130 An extraordinarily slow bureaucracy prevented the NCC from taking an earlier stand, but by October it had announced that it could not support the Corps's plan to sponsor religious groups, even if it was a ‘welcome means for the possible expression of Christian vocation’.Footnote 131 Still, in January 1962 it set up a liaison office in Washington, aiming to help the Peace Corps promote its purposes within the churches it represented and to help educate volunteers about the religious situation in the countries they were to visit.
While Shriver's Catholicism and family connections to the White House dictated caution, the appointment of Paul Geren as deputy director gave the NCC an advocate within the Corps for its point of view. The Baptist's position in the organization and his preference for a clear dividing line between church and state, wrote R. Edwin Espy, the NCC's general secretary, ‘augur[ed] well for the relationship to the Peace Corps not only of the National Council of Churches but of the churches generally’.Footnote 132 Although Shriver had taken his decision in July, his failure to inform outside groups made it seem to the NCC that the Corps was slowly coming around to its arguments. ‘As our experience develops’, Geren wrote to Espy, ‘we see the wisdom in the resolve of the NCC and member denominations against direct sponsorship of Peace Corps projects.’ The NCC's new office would put ‘us in a better position vis-à-vis the National Catholic Welfare Conference’, he wrote, making it clear that the NCC's refusal to consider contracts would provide an alternative way forward and help to stave off political problems.Footnote 133 It was, in the end, a line that Shriver fully endorsed. The New York Times and the Washington Post approved of what they saw as an example of Protestants respecting the separation of church and state, juxtaposing that against Catholic efforts to breach it.Footnote 134
Whether necessarily or not, by taking up the church–state idols of anti-Catholicism, Kennedy only ensured short-term Catholic disappointment, despite pride at his election. But the ‘wall’ of separation that Kennedy had said ought to be ‘absolute’ at Houston was not the only language that constrained legal and political debate. Uncertainty about whether the Peace Corps, its volunteers, and CRS were ‘missionary’ reflected continued linguistic and conceptual confusion. When the Times reported Shriver's final decision, it termed it a bar on ‘missionary aid’, missing its most important aspect and allowing Shriver and the Corps far more consistency than they deserved.Footnote 135 Swanstrom and Melina constantly bemoaned Shriver's failure ‘to distinguish between voluntary agencies and missionary societies’.Footnote 136 The Times, conversely, called PAVLA a ‘Catholic Peace Corps’, when it was clearly a missionary organization.Footnote 137 Even Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, conflated faith and nation. When he wrote to Shriver telling him that he should simply ignore CRS – showing that there was no single ‘Catholic’ position on the matter – the cardinal also told him that that he had ‘a Peace Corps of my own’, a group which consisted solely of priests attempting to recruit more clerics in Latin America.Footnote 138 How, in the light of this, could Shriver's ‘difficult line’ be drawn at all? For historians, as David Hollinger has written, ‘the secular–religious dichotomy is too gross to equip us with what we need to investigate the destiny of the Christian project in the United States’.Footnote 139 At times, it was also too gross for historical actors to find their bearings.
Anti-Catholicism dwindled at the political level during the Kennedy years, not least through the White House's astute but improvisatory management of what it called the ‘religious issue’. The president was able to visit the Vatican in 1963 with barely a hint of dissent at home. Even if contracting Corps work with voluntary agencies proved unworkable – and evangelical groups kept a beady eye – that did not mean that the religious impulses behind it disappeared.Footnote 140 At the height of the debate, in June 1961, the vice-president of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions wrote to Kennedy. The Corps, suggested Alford Carleton, was ‘involved in one of the major dilemmas of our times.
We recognize materialism and secularism as major evils. Yet we so abhor sectarianism that we too easily accept secularism as the alternative. Can we not find a middle ground that is neither secular nor sectarian? Perhaps the Peace Corps can be a valuable experiment on that score.Footnote 141
In time, this was how Kennedy and Shriver came to see it, although Shriver especially retained a distinctly Catholic view too. In a speech at Fordham University in June 1963, he went extraordinarily far. ‘Separation of Church and State meant one thing’, he said, ‘when government and religion were at cross purposes’, but ‘it means something different when they have common purposes.’Footnote 142 The Peace Corps, Shriver continued, was a ‘perfect example of the need for spiritual values in the work of Government’, a prototype of the ‘infusion of spiritual values into secular affairs’. For Catholics, he said, it was ‘a model in miniature of that fellowship of heart and hand aimed at construction of a united world community to which John XXIII devoted his Pontificate’, a ‘forerunner of a genuine world-wide effort among people of different nations, different religions, and different races to establish an ecumenical community among men’.Footnote 143 In one draft, a speechwriter went still further. Even if the Peace Corps's motive was not always a religious one, he wrote, it was ‘a natural – perhaps an inevitable – outgrowth of this nation's Judeo-Christian heritage’. By deploying the central concept of the religious cold war, he showed how tightly bound to that war the Corps really was. More radically, the speechwriter also wrote that ‘Christian Peace Corps Volunteers give action to the Word by rushing to perform the tasks of Christianity, regardless of their individual creeds’.Footnote 144 Through charity, however self-interested, it transmuted what Kennedy called a world made ‘safe for diversity’ into John XXIII's ‘new Pentecost’.Footnote 145
In this view, the Corps reflected Christian values whether its members chose that or not. In the face of such grand visions, the quotidian experience of the Corps's volunteers was rendered irrelevant. For many of them, the Corps seemed keen, perhaps too keen, to divide the religious and secular sides of their experiences. Indeed, it is because Fritz Fischer saw the Corps through its volunteers that he argued that ‘Shriver felt it critical to separate religion from his Peace Corps.’Footnote 146 As this article makes clear, that was not entirely the case. While the Peace Corps enabled individual Americans to feel involved in international relations, those individuals were part of a wider (if implicit) strategy that saw support of spiritual values as being in the national interest. The Corps, held at arm's length from the daily tactics of American diplomacy, was one way in which the Kennedy administration continued the religious cold war of Truman and Eisenhower, albeit in a novel form. Kennedy decentralized the conflict, almost privatized it, in part for political reasons and in part because that was how he had always presented the intertwining of spiritual and national interests. In doing so, however, he and his administration raised old questions anew. How far did the separation of church and state go? Did it apply just to organizations, or to people too? If people in their personal capacities maintained a Christian witness in their work, did that make aiding them an aid to religion? Was converting people in the Third World to the ‘American way of life’ the same as converting them to the tenets of an ecumenical religion-in-general?
The attempt to find answers to all of these questions, however far answers were possible at all, was made more difficult by confusion over what was ‘religious’ in a search for something neither ‘secular’ nor ‘sectarian’. What Reinhold Niebuhr called the ‘bewildering confusion of secularism and religiosity’ in mid-century America carried on.Footnote 147
