To the growing scholarship on the relationships between American religion and foreign policy comes this welcome new book from David Settje, associate professor of history at Concordia University in Chicago. Settje attempts the ambitious task of exploring the views held by a wide array of American Christian communities on both the overall Cold War and one of its particularly contentious local manifestations in the Vietnam War. To do so, the book selects six entities spanning American Christendom and assesses their published opinions on the Cold War and the Vietnam War during several crucible periods, including the presidential election years of 1964 and 1968, the escalation against Cambodia in 1970, the American troop withdrawal in 1972–73, and the final collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. The Christian entities that Settje explores are three denominational bodies (the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Church of Christ, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church) and three sets of periodicals (the evangelical Protestant Christianity Today, the liberal Protestant Christian Century, and a sampling of Catholic magazines such as America and Commonweal). Examining the denominational pronouncements and editorials of these diverse Christian voices, Settje finds that the more theologically conservative Southern Baptist Convention and Christianity Today generally maintained a vigorous opposition to Communism and support for American Cold War policy and prosecution of the Vietnam War, while the more theologically liberal United Church of Christ and Christian Century generally criticized American Cold War policy and the Vietnam War. In the middle were the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which, while anticommunist, also came to express misgivings over Vietnam, and the Catholic periodicals, which represented a range of opinions both among themselves (from the more hawkish America to the more dovish Commonweal) and also over time as they eventually came to criticize the Vietnam campaign.

The book's strengths are several. Settje has conducted an extensive amount of archival and periodical research, and uncovered much texture and diversity in American Christianity's foreign-policy positions during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s. As he demonstrates, these religious divisions amounted to an earlier version of a “culture war.” The book also resists oversimplification by exploring a representative and diverse sampling of the various voices across the denominational, theological, and racial spectrums of American Christian life. While his sympathies are obviously with the more liberal branches of American Christianity, Settje makes an admirable effort to be evenhanded and judicious in his assessments. He takes religious and theological convictions seriously and gives voice to these religious communities on their own terms, while resisting the scholarly hubris of treating them as mere socially constructed notions in a contest of power.

Yet the book is not without its weaknesses. The challenge in trying to write on the connections between two historical topics (in this case, American religion and American national security policy) is demonstrating sufficient expertise in both areas to make the argument persuasive. Here the book has a mixed record. While it displays commendable knowledge of American religious history, particularly the various denominations and movements of American Protestantism, it is much weaker in its understanding of American diplomatic history. For example, Settje repeatedly attributes the American entry into the Vietnam War to the “containment” doctrine, the strategic framework that guided much of American Cold War policy. However, containment was a complex, multivalent doctrine with diverse manifestations. While some of the Vietnam War's architects were motivated by one understanding of containment, many of containment's proponents (including its chief architect, George Kennan) actually opposed the American entry into Vietnam. Moreover, some of the war's strongest opponents criticized it on the very basis of containment – specifically, that Vietnam was a peripheral distraction from the core strategic priority of containing Soviet Communist expansion and eventually outlasting the Soviet Union.

One other area where the book might have been strengthened is in a deeper consideration of the reasons why the various Christian communions embraced different foreign-policy positions. Settje at times mentions possibilities such as the evangelical Protestant support for missionaries endangered by Communism, or liberal Protestantism's predilection for humanitarian concerns and preference for peace. Yet mostly absent from this analysis is theology. Specifically, did the differing doctrinal convictions of conservative Protestantism, liberal Protestantism, and the varieties of Catholicism, which defined many of their ecclesiastical divisions, actually shape their foreign-policy positions? Or were their divergent foreign policies not theologically grounded, but rather merely reflections of differing cultural and political preferences? Such are questions that future scholars might want to take up, building on the solid foundation that Settje has already laid.