In this extensive cultural history of Cold War popular theology, Jason W. Stevens argues that the era fostered the creation of a new master narrative challenging the notion of American innocence in the face of the persistence of global evil. This narrative proclaimed that rather than functioning as a bastion of moral innocence and progressive certainty, America had to act in a politically messy world in increasingly messy ways. Forged by containment, détente, nuclear brinksmanship, and McCarthyism, this narrative positioned the United States as the internally flawed champion of freedom that needed to act responsibly in a world of totalitarianism.
Stevens envisions this narrative expressed through the output of professional theologians, ministers, and intellectuals, as well as works of popular fiction and film. His approach therefore blends the methodologies of intellectual history, cultural history, and textual criticism. Stevens takes this approach because, as he writes, “the American propensity to conduct cultural life through religious symbols was never more pronounced in the twentieth century than during the Cold War” (x–xi). Since religious faith infused American culture, Stevens looks to that broader culture as the carrier of the new theology of lost innocence.
All of the thinkers and cultural artifacts that Stevens considers in some way embody what the author terms “theological countermodernism,” a Cold War refutation of the modernism of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, and with it the ideals of progress and idealism. Stevens highlights the Cold War forms of neo-evangelicalism and Christian Realism embodied by Billy Graham and Reinhold Niebuhr respectively, both of whom he positions as countermodernist. Stevens argues that Graham and Niebuhr mobilized narratives of lost innocence to engage in moral self-examination of the place of America as a superpower in the Cold War. Additionally, both called for American “domestic regeneration” (40) as a means of supporting domestic unity as well as aiding the battle against totalitarianism, though they envisioned this regeneration differently.
Stevens also highlights narratives of confession and criticism in religious and quasi-religious popular culture, including narratives of guilt among Cold War leftists, prophetic calls for change from American novelists, and cinematic critiques of American sentimentality and mass culture. One strength of this book is its attention to popular theology at work in film. Stevens illustrates how McCarthy-era film noir as well as McCarthyism itself encapsulated similar themes, what he calls “sentimental melodrama” linked with political theater. Stevens shows how popular film culture “correlates” (140) to the political theatre of McCarthyism and how Americans lived out their political struggles through religious themes in popular culture. Particularly valuable are the sections on how Inherit the Wind (1960) and Elmer Gantry (1960) encapsulated elite Cold War critiques of mass culture as materialist, anti-intellectual, and subject to demagoguery.
A clear strength of this book is the author's disciplinary position. A professor of English, he deftly incorporates novels, short stories, and the aforementioned films into his analysis. But, unfortunately, the book does not fully engage the scholarship of American religious history. Besides some reference to William McLoughlin's multiple treatments of Billy Graham, and Richard Fox's Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1985), there is little sustained engagement with the scholarship on Cold War religion. I had hoped that Stevens would more extensively engage the work of other historians of religion during the Cold War period, namely Robert S. Ellwood, Steven M. Tifton, and James Hudnut-Beumler, among others.
Despite that caveat, Stevens expertly connects a series of lay and professional theological thinkers whom scholars seldom assess in the same context. Stevens notes the thematic connections between the work of American novelists such as James Baldwin, Shirley Jackson, and Flannery O'Connor, religious leaders such as Billy Graham and Reinhold Niebuhr, and popular American films such as The Bad Seed (1954). The book succeeds in demonstrating the manner in which Cold War theology permeated American popular culture, and its extensive treatments of Niebuhr and Graham situates these figures in a shared context of postwar reassessment of America.
The book does have one major flaw: while the author's argument for the presence of the new master narrative is convincing, he does not adequately note how it functioned alongside other competing narratives. The persistence of a countering master narrative of America as chosen nation is well documented (see A. G. Mojtabai, Blessèd Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986]), and even some of Stevens's own subjects sometimes advanced this position, most notably Billy Graham and other neo-evangelicals. I would have liked to see more attention to this competing master narrative, and an examination of how it relates to that of the loss of innocence. Finally, the complexity of the argument and its length (over three hundred pages) make this fine work of scholarship difficult to adopt for use in an undergraduate classroom. That being said, I recommend it to specialists in American religion as well as graduate students or advanced undergraduates exploring the topics of twentieth-century American religion.
