A few years ago I found myself at the Ogden, Utah rodeo with thirty schoolteachers from all over the world. They were participants in a Fulbright-supported American studies institute, and the trip to Utah was part of a weeklong foray into a part of America quite different from Amherst, MA, where the bulk of lectures and discussions had taken place in the previous three weeks. Our visit happened to coincide with “Armed Services Day,” and the spectacle my students encountered proved even more impressive than the riding and roping they had expected. The principle feature of that spectacle had to do with the organizers’ almost total confounding of religion and patriotism. At the high point of the event, over the roar of military band music and military helicopters passing overhead, the booming voice of the announcer declared that “God's helicopters” were protecting America and the rest of the world from tyranny. The books under review here endeavor to explain the spectacle in Ogden on that summer day—along with the train of events that, over sixty years ago, launched a crusade against “godless communism” and, a few decades later, made “the Christian right” a major force in American politics.

Spiritual Weapons concentrates on foreign policy, asserting that Protestant and Catholic apologists reinforced “American National Religion,” which incorporated as central tenets “governmental theism, a military that is second to none, and capitalism as freedom” (201). Gunn presents his theme in Part I, elaborates on each of the tenets in Part II, and addresses two case studies, Guatemala and Vietnam, in Part III, before concluding. Gunn seems mostly to be preaching to religious people—clergy, lay activists, teachers. He wants them to recognize the pernicious uses to which their piety has been and continues to be put. He wants them to eschew the crusading aggressiveness of “the redeemer nation” in favor of the inspirational model of “the city on the hill” (42). He wants them to know their history, which is filled with appalling examples of religious leaders duped by clever politicians or by their own hubris into sacralizing injustice and imperialism.

Education and the Cold War focuses instead on Deweyan progressive education, insisting that its obsession with relativism and scientific method robbed it of any moral vision strong enough to resist the tide of anticommunism and social reaction. Instead, “progressive education became beholden to the false consciousness of the Cold War ideological structure” (201). Hartman introduces Dewey's framing of progressive education as the embodiment of dynamic democracy, then shows its unraveling, from the late 1930s through the 1950s, in the face of assaults by “educational vigilantes” until it comes to be seen as its opposite, “red-ucation” (original emphasis). He ends with case studies of educators’ responses to the civil rights movement and Sputnik, both of which reveal their ensnarement within Cold War orthodoxies.

Hartman addresses professional historians who, he believes, misunderstand or are ignorant of the crucial role that educational theorists and bureaucrats played in sustaining Cold War conservatism in America. He is far more just to John Dewey and other shapers of progressive education than historians such as Christopher Lasch, but he asserts that Deweyan pragmatism too readily allowed itself to be coopted by the “life adjustment movement.” He cites critics who charged that the movement promoted conformity of children to the demands of the corporate social order and the imperial nation-state, rather than fulfilling Dewey's vision of education as part of a dynamic society continuously reconstructing itself in response to the needs of democratic citizens-in-the-making (72). Hartman also condemns the liberal educational establishment for its failure to defend teachers from the educational vigilantes, not only out of cowardice, but also because they could not offer a respectable metaphysical or political platform to stand on.

Both books well describe the dreadful political, moral, and intellectual failings of their subjects, religious people in Gunn's case, educators in Hartman's. The former retells tales that have already been well told. His reliance on secondary sources means that any historian generally familiar with the historiography of Cold War foreign policy will find little new here. His accounts of debates within religious circles may be less familiar, but even there the author relies mostly on established sources. Still, his recounting of the sheer obtuseness, hypocrisy, and self-delusion that various preachers and lay people demonstrated in their quest to turn religion into an engine of state retains its power to stun. Such people turned a psychopathic mass murderer such as General Rios Mont of Guatemala into not only a democrat but also a saint, and a ruthless dictator such as President Diem of South Vietnam into not just an unfortunate strategic ally but also a model Christian statesman. They also turned patriotic, but reform-minded, fellow citizens into treacherous agents not only of Moscow, but also of the devil.

Gunn's work would resonate more strongly had he connected his story to that of historians such as Edward Blum, who has narrated the great transition of nineteenth-century Protestant leaders from champions of abolition to apologists for white supremacy and empire.Footnote ¹ It would benefit, as well, from consideration of the involvement of religious leaders and communities in antiwar movements, from the 1890s through the present. Many Christian leaders signed on for Cold War duty in the 1950s, but many of them (or their successors) showed up in protests against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s, against US interventions in Central America in the 1980s, and against the Iraq war more recently. Conversely, Gunn might want to reflect more fully on the pacifism of those Christians who refused in the 1920s and 1930s to face squarely the fascist atrocities taking place in Europe (he gives them only a paragraph). Most importantly, Gunn needs to recognize that advocates for war and peace showed up across the political and religious (and nonreligious) spectrum at almost every moment in American history.Footnote ²

Hartman's primary research is extensive, delving into teachers’ union publications and records and the papers of educators. Most importantly, he resurrects the story of Theodore Brameld, a Deweyan Marxist whose “ends-oriented” pedagogy blended pragmatism and progressive politics along the lines of the early Sidney Hook, which Hartman finds theoretically (though not politically) successful. Brameld studied under both Dewey and Hook, earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and, despite being red-baited and harassed by politicians and officials at the University of Minnesota, where he taught in the early 1940s, won appointment and tenure at New York University in 1947, where he remained for eleven years. He spent the latter part of his career at Boston University, from which he retired in 1967, having authored more than a dozen books. In his later works, including books on education in Puerto Rico and Japan, he sounded more like a cultural anthropologist, even a global “ecohumanist” or “culturologist” of the Lewis Mumford stripe, than a doctrinaire Marxist.Footnote ³

However one evaluates Brameld's “audacious and cosmic vision” (201–2), Hartman laments that postwar progressives ignored it, preferring instead to find a place within the corporate and imperialist version of liberalism, the only kind they thought could survive the anticommunist onslaught. In the 1930s, Brameld had certainly sounded like an orthodox Marxist, insisting against the more moderate-sounding Popular Fronter, Communist Party chairman Earl Browder, that teachers needed to abandon the “illusion of neutrality” and indoctrinate their students into class consciousness (143). Although Hartman argues that he evolved into a revisionist along the lines of the early Sidney Hook, Brameld never departed from his theory of “defensible partiality,” which seems very close to his earlier arguments for indoctrination, something John Dewey himself noticed with disapproval in the 1950s (143–5).

Echoing Brameld, Hartman locates a weakness in Dewey's and many other liberals’ conception of ends. The noncommittal, open-ended experimentalism they so idealized faced rough seas in the crises of the Depression and war (hot and cold). Especially in a country as deeply religious as the United Sates, citizens needed a “fighting faith” more worthy of emotional commitment than a reasoned reliance on “process.” Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and Cold War liberal intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, offered a civic nationalist version. Robert Hutchins, the New Humanists, and other “metaphysical traditionalists” offered another, more elitist version anchored in classic texts and eternal verities. About the latter, Hartman seems a bit bemused, since Hutchins's stout defense of academic freedom and criticisms of McCarthyism separated him from more conservative traditionalists, while his insistence that education not train children to “adapt themselves to present conditions” allied him with his metaphysical adversary, the pragmatist Dewey (122).

In determining proper ends—of education, of politics, of life—neither pragmatists nor neo-Thomists had the advantage. Those who pinned their hopes for national survival or revitalization or progress on some version of a civil religion tried to confer a quasi-religious aura upon some sacred object or idea—the founding documents, the great books, democracy, or the like. But, as Gunn would surely appreciate, religious conservatives had a potent combination of advantages: familiarity and certainty. The offer of religious endorsement of a variety of negative emotional reactions—to child-centered curricula, to Soviet subjugation of eastern European nations, to “sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” to more intrusive government supervision of economic life, among many other things—gave considerable coherence and energy to the anticommunist surge, and later to the rise of the new right.

Brameld, unlike most pragmatists and Marxists, repudiated the “anti-religiosity” of Dewey and so may other liberals. Somewhat anticipating the recent arguments of David Hollinger,Footnote ⁴ Brameld insisted that “religion was too important to leave its instruction to religious doctrinaires.” Going beyond Hollinger's urging that liberals critically engage religion, that they not give religion a “pass,” Brameld wanted “a world-wide system of education so potent in values which religions have groped to supply . . . that it becomes its own best foil against renewed encroachments by such religions” (146). The problem for both Brameld and his latter-day champion comes when they attempt to specify those “values.” For Brameld, Marxism provided the grand narrative, though he made strenuous efforts to reconcile it with pragmatism and American democracy.

Most Americans’ distaste for that narrative has been based on more than “miseducation” by teachers, journalists, and politicians, however egregious their distortions have sometimes proved. Traditional religion, of course, shaped that distaste. Equally as important, however, the very structure of decentralized, localized government and an imperfect but very real pluralism have given the American political system durability. Precisely because the United States has left citizens alone, they have pursued their own religious (and other “private”) ends with astonishing vigor. Trade unions, consumer and environmental groups, and a congeries of single-issue movements have served as effective instruments for shaping public discourse and achieving real, if limited, gains in the local, state, and sometimes national political arenas.Footnote ⁵ Most attempts to jerry-rig anything remotely resembling a national faith founder on the rock of this diversity. Paradoxically, Americans remain, as Garry Wills had recently argued (and Barack Obama has reiterated), strongly committed both to separation of church and state and to their particular religious beliefs and practices.Footnote ⁶ Neither worshipers of some “American National Religion” nor atomized individuals incapable of solidarity or community, most Americans have embraced one or more “affiliations of revocable consent,” as Hollinger referred to ethnic, religious, or other subcultural identities in Postethnic America.Footnote ⁷

The harnessing of strong religious conviction to political ends has been part of American history almost since the founding. Often that infusion of religious fervor into politics has taken a conservative political turn, as in the Prohibition movement and the recent antiabortion movement. Historian Robin Archer has shown that one of several factors that determined why the United States, unlike Australia, failed to develop a labor party was the influence of religion on workers’ political choices.Footnote ⁸ But if religion has sometimes husbanded political conservatism, it has not always achieved its ends. As M. Gaines Foster has shown, the Gilded Age–Progressive era Christian campaigns to put God in the Constitution, impose strict Sabbatarianism, and ban gambling nationwide, among other causes, more often failed than succeeded. The big victory, Prohibition, came only when it could be sold in terms of public order and public health, not in terms of religious conformity.Footnote ⁹ Similarly, Kathleen Flake has shown that Mormons won legitimacy during the protracted effort to seat Senator Reed Smoot both because the Saints repeatedly blinked, abandoning theocratic pretensions and enforcing the ban on polygamy, and because, as the twentieth century began, senators and other politicians who had learned to accommodate diverse constituencies and to manage an expanding regulatory state came to accept a rough-and-ready version of pluralism as their working political credo.Footnote ¹⁰

Moreover, however efficacious politically, religion did not invariably tend toward conservatism. Just as often it championed freedom and justice for the oppressed. The civil rights movement, like the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century, relied to an extraordinary extent on the fervor and organizing potential of the faithful. Evangelical Protestantism—and, by the 1950s and 1960s, other religious communities—assured ordinary people who faced the clubs, dogs, and guns of the white supremacists that, as Martin Luther King memorably phrased it, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”Footnote ¹¹ When those masses of citizens opposed the status quo, they needed a powerful sense of transcendent justice to keep them from being cowed or discouraged. Secular liberalism is not incapable of providing such a sense, but traditional religions possess real advantages: a powerful track record of prophecy and resistance to “the powers and principalities,” as well as an extensive, ready-made network of grassroots support. Hartman argues the now familiar line that the civil rights movement was, to some significant extent, a Cold War propaganda project of the American imperial state. But all he proves is that the state tried to take advantage of an immense grassroots upsurge that could not be ignored and that relied significantly, if not exclusively, on religious conviction to set it and keep it on its course. Cold Warriors could exploit this well of feeling because it was deep and rich to start with.

In the end, Gunn's preaching to the religious choir makes a good deal of sense, even though it sometimes leads him to rhetorical embarrassments. With outrage (and with emphasis in the original) he charges that “the religiously devout Secretary of State Dulles, who despised communist lies,” actually lied about Vietnam! And it leads him to ask disingenuous rhetorical questions: “Why is the right to own guns more deeply cherished than the right to quality medical care . . .?” Still, given the hold of religion on the hearts and minds of Americans, interrogating their religious consciences seems a reasonable political tactic. Of course, it may be that those consciences most in need of stimulation will never hear or absorb his message. Whether the issue is support for Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “enhanced interrogations,” or weapons budgets, those who insist that the fate of morality in an evil world hinges on the willingness of the American state to do its righteous duty will not likely read this book or change their minds if they do.

Hartman's effort to revive the Popular Front, or at least appreciation of it, may face even stronger headwinds. Certainly, he does well to remind educators of the baleful consequences of failing to explore the deeper metaphysical grounds and broader political implications of their pedagogy. But every effort to concoct a civic religion to compete with the traditional sort—from Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being to Brameld's “cosmic vision”—has come up short. Rather, despite the limitations and failures of liberalism, its virtues may need to be reiterated. First, those who defended the Bramelds of this world from unjust dismissal or other injury were “procedural liberals” who engaged in “rights talk,” at least as often as they were Popular Fronters defending a comrade. This “content-neutral” defense of rights goes back a long way—from Locke and Madison and Mill to Theodore Schroeder, the radical libertarian secretary of the Free Speech League, who assumed the defense of the anarchist–communist Emma Goldman, and to the American Civil Liberties Union, which defended socialists, anarchists, pacifists, the anti-Semitic Henry Ford, neo-Nazis, Communists during the Cold War (although with occasional shameful lapses), and “terrorist” detainees in the post-9/11 years. Over time, “mere” liberalism, with its homely virtues—“mere” tolerance, “mere” open-mindedness, “mere” procedural fairness, “mere” rights talk, and the like—has proven an unsteady but durable bark on which to hazard the rough political seas of the modern world. Not the least of its virtues has been its capacity to encourage private religious piety and to welcome (sometimes uneasily) highly motivated religious allies (including true-believing Marxists, among others) in the struggle for justice and a more perfect democracy. And a very large number of people all over the world continue to find the achievement of basic civil liberties a goal worth fighting and occasionally dying for.

Second, liberalism's virtues and strengths always made it the real target of the red-hunters. No matter how fevered the imaginations of anticommunists (well sampled in these works), they mostly took aim not at godless communism but at godless liberalism. Some Catholics and Protestants, along with a few Jews, had begun, around the turn of the twentieth century, to experiment with a conservative form of ecumenism intended to counter the threat of liberalism. Protestants accustomed to excoriate the “whore of Babylon” found themselves in common battle with the Vatican, whose condemnations of “modernism,” “liberalism,” and “secular humanism” sounded quite familiar. As Protestants increasingly joined Catholic and Jewish campaigns against “intolerance,” the latter two began joining Protestant crusades for the censorship of books and films. Catholics eventually took over the leadership of the Hollywood censorship apparatus.Footnote ¹² Later, as Kevin Schultz has shown, Catholics and Jews—like the Danbury Baptists to whom Jefferson wrote his famous letter—together sought and won from the Supreme Court a definitive judgment that Protestant prayer, no matter how diluted or silent, could not be imposed on children in public schools. Separation of church and state, for them as for so many other religiously devout people in American history, guaranteed not secularism but religious freedom. It meant that no denomination would lord it over any other.Footnote ¹³

Still, however prudent many religious people found the appeal of pluralism, many could not stand the philosophical tenets which most liberals thought underpinned that doctrine. Liberalism's great sin was its denial of revealed truth, its corrosive attitude toward all received authority. Of course, religious leaders resented liberals’ efforts to replace clerical authority with the authority of scientific expertise. But religious antiliberals were not just self-serving. Most genuinely feared that belief in progress and the efficacy of human reason made liberals unfit to engage a world challenged on all sides (left and right, outside and inside) by implacable evil. Reinhold Niebuhr's prophetic realism won immense respect in the Cold War era in large part because it unblinkingly acknowledged the dangers of both militarism and self-righteousness, while insisting on the special evil of totalitarianism.Footnote ¹⁴ It gained popularity also because it captured a deep strain of gender anxiety in mid-century America. It seemed tough-mindedly masculine, immune to the feminine softness and pliability that liberals brought to every conflict. Thus Niebuhr's realism may have been the “macho of the intellectuals,” giving those who disdained the right-wing ravings of the Reverend Carl McIntyre the courage they needed to push back against the red bullies who had humiliated them at countless faculty meetings, editorial conferences, board meetings, and other venues over the years. At times it may have given a few of them the spine to stand up to the red-baiters.

Furthermore, in an era when “organization men” really wanted to be “rugged individualists,” and when “Momism” seemed to rob Dad of his authority over young “rebels without a cause,” a kind of psychosocial fundamentalism led many Americans to discover wisdom in conservative conceptions of family and gender. Whatever liberal social scientists said, middle-class men and women found comfort in the thought that, after all, “the fundamental things apply, as time goes by.” Ironically, Niebuhr himself, along with others inspired by him, warned of the “suburban captivity” of Protestantism, whereby churches reassured congregants, who were comfortably isolated from the problems of the city, that when men did their job (earning), and women did theirs (spending), they fulfilled the American dream and God's eternal plan at the same time.Footnote ¹⁵

Still, what no one seemed able to figure out was whether excessive conformity or excessive individualism was the greater danger. Were Americans “other-directed,” “men in grey flannel suits,” “rugged individuals,” or “rebels without a cause?” (That African Americans were none of the above had already dawned on some Americans, thanks to Gunnar Myrdal; that the same was true for women was beginning to dawn on many thanks to Betty Friedan.) Hartman is especially confusing on this count, even resorting at one point to the formulation “militaristic individualism” to capture the essence of “the Cold War ideological structure” (201). Other authors—for example, Daniel Horowitz, Stephen Whitfield, and Richard Pells,Footnote ¹⁶ to name just a few—offer sharper insights into the intellectual and cultural thickets of the 1950s.

In truth, many Americans returned—or paid lip service—to religious verities because the world had grown very confusing and secular authorities offered little reliable guidance either to postwar strategic arrangements or to postwar family arrangements. The estimable Doctor Benjamin Spock won an immense following not, as Hartman suggests, because, like a good Cold War liberal, he taught parents to “benevolently coerce their children into maturity,” but because he offered nonsectarian common sense at a moment when little was available, as, for example: “A good teacher knows that she can't teach democracy out of a book if she's acting like a dictator in person” (quoted on 58–9). Spock's durability, despite the rage leveled against him by certain evangelicals, serves as an important corrective to the impression conveyed by both books reviewed here that Cold War ideology or the “American National Religion” holds hegemonic sway over the American mind.

Whether from ideological fervor or prudent conformity, Americans have often demonstrated both devout patriotism and devout religiosity. But the meaning of those commitments varies depending on circumstance. Through most of the twentieth century the politics of American Catholics seemed both economically progressive and culturally conservative. But whether this emanates from their ethnic, religious, or class identity, or some combination, remains a conundrum. Evangelicals have swung from moral crusade to hermetic withdrawal and everything in between; in significant numbers today, even after decades of Christian right mobilization, they affirm the value of freedom of conscience and worry about the political misuse of their faith by prominent clerical and lay leaders.Footnote ¹⁷ American Muslims seems almost totally immune from more radically politicized forms of Islam; going much farther afield, Robert Hefner shows that Indonesians insist that democracy is not only compatible with Islam, but has deep roots within it.Footnote ¹⁸

And so, to return to that rodeo in Ogden, it is worth noting that, while most of the western European participants in the program (and their professor) found the patriotic spectacle unseemly, a number of others—among them Chinese, African, Arab, and Latin American—found it inspiring. They were impressed that Americans rose as one to sing the national anthem, that they expressed their love of country and of God with such enthusiasm, and that they seemed so good-natured in these expressions, not threatening or arrogant. Earlier in the program, as they encountered debates over the Constitution, abolition, immigration, civil rights, and war and peace, and visited the local Select Board and School Committee and the editorial office of the Springfield Republican, they had been impressed by the extent to which Americans—and foreign visitors—were free to criticize America's foreign policy, social conditions, and authorities, sacred and secular. Some were surprised to learn that, although children could not pray at school, they could wear headscarves, yarmulkes, or crucifixes (and that jurors and lawyers in American courtrooms could do likewise). Some were also surprised to discover that, wherever they traveled, no American denigrated their color, their dress, or their accents. Several visited religious establishments they had never encountered before and to which they were, again surprisingly, welcomed.

These visitors, that is, absorbed diverse, sometimes conflicting, impressions of the United States and, in that sense, reflected a truer picture of the nation than some scholars who try to shoehorn that complexity into too grand or too seamless a narrative or conceptual scheme. On several counts they seemed to agree: about the danger of American imperialism, the sincerity of Americans’ religiosity, and the diversity and freedom of America. But, no less than the scholars discussed and cited herein, they struggled to understand the interconnections among these facts. No scholar, however he or she assesses the desirability or influence of religious motivations in politics, should doubt that those motivations are almost certainly there to stay. As long as most Americans retain an equal commitment to separation of church and state—and to that “rights talk” that many conservatives, as well as many postmodernist radicals, consider theoretically misguided—the effect of such motivations will necessarily be filtered through the procedures and compromises of liberal democracy. Those procedures and compromises seem a readier defense against tyranny, whether threatened by the national security state or by crusading sectarians, than does any “cosmic vision” presently on offer.