The “religious turn” in the study of American foreign relations marches on. If you have not been paying attention to the work of Dianne Kirby, Andrew Preston, Lauren Turek, Cara Burnidge, Emily Conroy-Krutz, Daniel Hummel, Heather Curtis, David Hollinger, Gene Zubovich, Raymond Haberski, William Inboden, Michael Thompson, Gale Kenny, Matthew Sutton, and many more, you should be. Of course, readers of this journal do not need to be told that religions matter. Like those scholars, they are interested in better questions: what are religions, and how and why are they important?

John Wilsey provides some surprising answers in his new book. God's Cold Warrior is a part of Eerdmans's monumental Library of Religious Biography series. Wilsey's study of statesman John Foster Dulles represents another must-read addition. His “Dulles” looms large in the story of twentieth-century American church and state power-sharing. His “Foster” is also small enough to have a rye whiskey around a fire at his family's private island. God's Cold Warrior is accessible to a wide audience, richly detailed and researched, and exactly what you want in a biography: the humanization of an overly stereotyped public figure.

Wilsey wants to take issue with historians—notably Mark Toulouse, author of The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From Prophet of Realism to Priest of Nationalism (Mercer University Press, 1985)—who have charged Dulles with building a messianic as well as a military-industrial complex. Through thick description, Wilsey identifies several patterns in Foster's life and thought, including a utilitarian conception of Christianity, the existence and supremacy of universal moral law, and the proactive struggle for peace in an ever-anarchical world (17).

From a young age, Dulles and his brother Allen were immersed in intertwined worlds of Presbyterianism, classical education, state intrigue, foreign travels, and sail boats. Fishing was as next to godliness for the young men as was Communion. Foster's attraction to pragmatism will surprise readers, given that he is remembered as an idealist. Dulles's time in Washington studying law made him a cosmopolitan, although Wilsey stresses that he never left his provincial New York roots far behind. Dulles's work at the Versailles peace conference following World War I solidified his internationalist convictions. During the interwar years, he worked as a Wall Street lawyer dedicated to outlawing war and bolstering ecumenical Protestant organizations in the peace movement.

Dulles was always a realistic Wilsonian, criticizing British and French foreign policy during the 1930s while excusing Hitler's, Mussolini's, and Meiji Japan's imperialism. Foster deepened his ties to the world ecumenical movement after its 1937 Oxford meeting. He looked more intently for Christianity to become a world-making force, while churchmen welcomed Dulles's political clout. Foster chaired the Just and Durable Peace commission of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) during World War II, which produced some of the most widely circulated material in favor of world organization. He then abandoned church work to become a Christian crusader against “godless” communism. Dulles's faith in moral law, once fundamental to his internationalism, became a nationalist weapon against the Soviet Union. Wilsey says Toulouse was probably right about Foster's conversion to military Wilsonianism but still prefers to see him as a pragmatist.

Dulles was summoned to spearhead peace treaty negotiations with Japan in 1952, which gave him an opportunity to apply Christian principles of forgiveness on a global stage. Still, Foster wedded defense of moral law to a graceless foreign policy while Eisenhower's Secretary of State. Eschewing containment, Dulles risked direct confrontation with the Soviets in Eastern Europe. He furthered expansion of the Cold War into the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Much to the chagrin of his old FCC friends, he advocated going to the “brink” of nuclear combat (178). Nevertheless, Wilsey concludes that Dulles remained hard to typecast. His inflexibility regarding China and Vietnam was offset by his neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Wilsey concludes, “Any credible assessment of John Foster Dulles as a major figure of American diplomatic history from 1919 to 1959 must reckon with him first and foremost as a human being” (190). Many of Dulles's contemporaries would have been skeptical of that claim. Take, for instance, journalist and fellow moralist Walter Lippmann. He used the occasion of Dulles's address to Protestant leaders to roast the secretary's “pretense to know and to speak for the universal order of things.” As Lippmann elaborated:

Lippmann rejected Dulles's ecumenical brand of Christian nationalism, and no amount of birds Foster watched and catalogued could change that. Nevertheless, Wilsey works harder than previous biographers to show that Dulles was more than the sum of his controversial politics. He is to be commended for offering a holistic, sympathetic portrait of a world-renowned Christian diplomat that Carol Burnett once made a fool of herself over (188).