William Inboden has made a signal contribution to Cold War history and to post-1945 American religious history. This well-written and impressively researched work convincingly documents the centrality of religion in shaping interpretations of the Cold War's meaning by U.S. leaders, not only ecclesiastical figures, but also top policymakers, especially Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (As Inboden acknowledges, Dean Acheson is notably absent.)

Inboden begins with the (generally ineffectual) early-postwar foreign policy pronouncements and initiatives of the Federal (later National) Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches; singles out Reinhold Niebuhr for particular attention; and traces how the liberal–evangelical–fundamentalist split in American Protestantism, as well as Protestant suspicions of Roman Catholicism, complicated efforts to forge a united position on early Cold War issues.

Inboden then explores how religious and providentialist convictions shaped the Cold War ideology of Truman, Eisenhower, Dulles, and other government leaders. The rhetorical trope contrasting America's “spiritual values” and “atheistic communism” that pervaded presidential oratory and government propaganda, he insists, was not mere window dressing but an expression of firmly held beliefs about the fundamental nature of the conflict.

Inboden documents Truman's repeated assertions in his speeches, and even more explicitly in his private jottings, that God had destined America to usher in a millennial era of justice, peace, and human freedom, while vanquishing atheistic communism in the process. Although a “Christian nation” (Truman's phrase, 112), America had failed God by embracing isolationism after World War I but had now been granted a second chance to fulfill its destiny. Inboden traces Truman's persistent efforts, in cooperation with America's long-time Vatican emissary, Myron Taylor, to persuade religious leaders to throw down the ideological gauntlet to communism by putting aside doctrinal differences and affirming their shared commitment to basic “spiritual values.” But to Truman's annoyance, Protestant–Catholic and Catholic–Orthodox tensions, as well as growing fissures within U.S. Protestantism, doomed his efforts to forge a religious united front against communism.

A fascinating chapter on New Jersey Senator H. Alexander Smith, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and convert to Frank Buchman's Moral Rearmament movement, documents Smith's diary entries recording daily communications from God on specific foreign policy issues. (When the messages from on high seemed weak or unclear, Smith blamed his cigar smoking.)

Another chapter explores the role of present and former Protestant missionaries to China in shaping U.S. China policy. While united in their concern for China's fate, these individuals offered mixed advice. Some, like Minnesota Congressman Walter Judd, embraced the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, a militant Christian, while others favored accommodation with Mao Zedong's communists.

Inboden's concluding chapters on Dulles and Eisenhower deal with a decade well-known for its embrace of civil religion, from the addition of “God” to the nation's currency and Pledge of Allegiance to presidential prayer breakfasts, a National Day of Prayer, and cabinet meeting prayers. Nevertheless, Inboden adds a wealth of detail. Tracing Dulles's Presbyterian roots and role in the Federal Council of Churches' Commission on a Just and Durable Peace in the 1940s, Inboden rejects the bifurcation that some have found between Dulles's early liberal internationalism and his later militant nationalism. Where others see discontinuity, Inboden finds an underlying consistency.

He also traces the Eisenhower administration's frustrations with the liberal Protestant establishment and its links to the burgeoning evangelical movement. Billy Graham and Ike's pastor, Rev. Edward Elson of Washington's National Presbyterian Church, enjoyed significant influence in these years. The conservative Quaker Elton Trueblood served as the United States Information Agency's “Chief of Religious Information.”

The Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order (FRASCO), headed by Edward Elson and Charles Wesley Lowry, a colorful anti-communist activist from Oklahoma, had close administration ties. At FRASCO's 1954 Washington conference, 250 religious notables heard speeches by Vice President Nixon; Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission; Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Eisenhower himself, who exhorted Americans to “take the Bible in one hand and the Flag in the other, and march ahead” (284). Participants in FRASCO's 1955 conference called for a worldwide “revival of faith in God” to counter godless communism (285).

Inboden also documents Elson's role in encouraging the Eisenhower administration to distance itself from Israel and reach out to the Muslim Middle East, a region of extensive Presbyterian missionary activity. This reversal of Truman's policy roused the ire of Niebuhr, whose pronouncements on Eisenhower and Dulles invariably dripped with contempt.

Inboden's conclusion notes the irony that in the post–1960s years, religion did indeed powerfully influence international relations but hardly in the irenic fashion envisioned by Truman and Eisenhower. Under the “Polish pope” John Paul II, the Vatican pursued its own anti-communist agenda. Protestant evangelicals emerged as a potent political bloc, pushing their sometimes apocalyptic worldview. While U.S. legislators pressured Russia to permit Jewish emigration to Israel, religious Zionists and their evangelical allies defended Israel's controversial West Bank occupation. As Shiite Muslims overthrew the Shah of Iran and vilified America as “the Great Satan,” Sunni Muslim jihadists drove the Russians from Afghanistan—and later turned on the United States. (And, one might add, religious zealotry fanned the flames of conflict in former Yugoslavia and between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.)

With this definitive history of the early Cold War's religious aspects, what now remains is to integrate this account with the less ethereal strategic and economic calculations that also preoccupied Washington and that dominate most diplomatic histories—the UN debates over atomic energy, the 1948 Berlin crisis, NATO, Truman's H-bomb decision, the Korean War, NSC-68, the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup in Iran, the Geneva Summit, big-power rivalries in Africa and Latin America, Dulles's preoccupation with forging military alliances encircling the Soviet Union, debates over nuclear strategy and atmospheric nuclear testing, the influence of U.S. defense contractors (Eisenhower's “military-industrial complex”), and so on. Apart from the debates over China and Middle Eastern policy, little of this nitty-gritty reality falls within Inboden's illuminating but narrowly focused study.

Also absent is any hint of a counter-discourse to all the high-level talk of God's role in the Cold War, of America's allegedly universally shared religious beliefs, and of the United States as a “Christian nation.” One gets little sense that America also included millions of secularists, atheists, and casual non-churchgoers, or that separation of church and state and the freedom to worship God or not were core national values.

Still, this valuable work highlights a neglected strand of early Cold War intellectual history, both inviting a reassessment of the initial stages of the U.S.–Soviet conflict and setting the stage for what lay ahead, from the role of Catholic prelates, Protestant ministers, and Jewish rabbis during the Vietnam war to President George W. Bush's post-9/11 pledge to “rid the world of evil.” Plus ça change … .