Academics are falsely rumored to have a low regard for religion. Although Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, authors of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great, respectively, made atheism a best-selling subject in the United States, it is not coincidental that Hitchens and Dawkins are English. They were educated in a country where a strident antipathy toward religion is not unpatriotic. American atheists with as much brass are rare. Kicking religion around cannot be an American sport because, from colonial to contemporary times, religion has been a central component of American culture. To be sure, a lot of scholarly criticism has been directed at right-wing Christian and Islamic movements. But scholars whose personal views on faith incline them to echo Hitchens's mordant formula that “religion poisons everything” should probably look for a country other than the United States to study. The recent books of historians and sociologists of American religion have taken a tone toward the subject that has ranged from gentle to friendly.

A case in point is the important study of the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam and his Notre Dame co-author David Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (2010). Understandably Putnam, who taught us that Americans bowl alone, was happy to find in his extensive survey data the evidence that Americans in their religious behavior get together and form clubs. “Club” is my word, but I think it is justified. People join churches to worship and to interact socially. They stay members as long as they enjoy the fellowship. Putnam and Campbell find many good qualities among churchgoers. They are more generous and happier than nonchurchgoers. But perhaps Putnam's and Campbell's most important and most surprising finding is that people of faith accept religious diversity as a strong matter of principle. Religion bridges difference more effectively than politics even if religion often is a factor in political division. Americans more frequently marry across religious divides than they do across racial or class divides. They enjoy “faith without fanaticism” (547). Religious Americans, in other words, make cultural pluralism work. They have become comfortable with differences they once shunned.

That is one version of pluralism premised upon the all-conquering advance of tolerance. There are other ways to talk about religion and pluralism. But few historians would quarrel with a notion that religion has been, from the beginning of national experience, a key factor in the way Americans have demarcated and celebrated group differences. The confusing point was whether pluralism relied in part upon barriers of exclusion and discrimination or required their complete destruction. It is a point that continues to rile the politics of pluralism. The two books that are the subject of this essay, Kevin Schultz's Tri-faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise and Jonathan Herzog's The Spiritual–Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War, provide important support to the view that, however we seek to characterize pluralism in contemporary America, the discussion must pay careful attention to religion.

Both books are about efforts to alter America's religious landscape. They concentrate on the same period, the quarter-century that followed the end of World War II. Both bolster the view that a religious revival formed a major story in the 1950s, a phenomenon that reversed what had been an ebbing tide of religious influence in the decades between the wars. Neither book views the religious resurgence in the postwar years as a church-driven or grassroots affair. It was the work of secular leaders in secular organizations. In Schultz's case, this top-down effort intended to expand the space for America's largest religious groups to be different. In Herzog's story, it hoped for almost the opposite effect. It aimed to make Americans subordinate their differences and present themselves to the world as God-fearing people united by a common faith. The implications for pluralism are different, although in the concluding sections of the books Schultz and Herzog wind up with similar views about the shape of religious pluralism that took hold after 1970.

The difference between the two authors'characterizations of the postwar era is illustrated in the way they tell the celebrated story of four chaplains, a Catholic, a Jew, and two Protestants, who gave their life jackets to others when a German submarine torpedoed the USS Dorchester in 1943. They recount the orchestrated effort to honor them with a so-called interfaith chapel proposed by Daniel Poling, a conservative Protestant who lived in Philadelphia and whose son had died on the Dorchester. Schultz, analyzing the meaning of the Four Chaplains Chapel, notes that John Kennedy, a young Congressman, failed to attend a gala fund-raiser that was organized to finance the construction. Kennedy pulled out two days before the event. Later, when he ran for president, he faced the charge that he had bowed out because of pressure applied to him by the Church. Speaking to Protestant ministers in Houston, Kennedy replied sharply that the so-called Interfaith Chapel was a charade and had never held a Catholic service. He had been invited as a token Catholic to a Protestant affair. To Schulz this detail is important because it indicated how Catholic and Jewish leaders, by popularizing the concept of a Judaic–Christian tradition, had successfully toppled Protestant hegemony in the United States. Schultz sees the 1950s as a decade when minority religious communities carved out the space to be different. Kennedy at the end of the 1950s was no longer afraid of anti-Catholicism.

Herzog, in contrast, does not mention Kennedy. For him the key detail about the building of the chapel was that President Truman attended the dedication ceremony and delivered the principal address. Truman, who previously had not made much political capital out of his Baptist upbringing, used the occasion to stress the vital importance of religion in the Cold War struggle. The spiritual–industrial complex trained Americans—whether Protestant, Catholic, or Jew—to embrace religion as the foundation of the American way. His account lays out evidence for a “frantic promotion of religion” that aimed to forge a strong bond of American unity to confront the godless Soviet state (5). Herzog acknowledges a broad conflict in American history between understanding America as a secular nation and understanding America as a “covenant nation,” but during the early Cold War, Americans came closer to a consensus “than at any other time in modern history” that society needs religion (9).

How does each author make the case for these seemingly different views? The first half of Schultz's book centers on the work and achievements of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ). Tri-faith groups (Protestant, Catholic, Jew) had been formed early in the twentieth century, but the resurgence of Ku Klux Klan activities in the 1920s prompted a new interfaith effort that in 1927 became the NCCJ. Its first president was the thirty-one-year-old Everett R. Clinchy, a Presbyterian minister who, after facing down the Klan, turned his attention to the murderous policies of Hitler's government. He found ready support for his work from American Jewish leaders. Catholics were slower to follow, for the Church was still not generally supportive of interfaith movements. That did not matter because, aside from Clinchy, the leadership of the NCCJ was secular. The three co-chairs of the board included a Jew, the industrialist Roger Straus; a Protestant, the former secretary of war Newton D. Baker; and a Catholic, the historian Carlton J. H. Hayes.

World War II provided an opportunity for many organizations to gain prominence on a national stage. The NCCJ was among them. It got permission to work among military units, where it paraded the idea of religious tolerance as the “best interpretation of why we fight.” The effort, according to Schultz, reached millions of soldiers. He writes, “By the end of the war, nearly every American soldier had touched a piece of NCCJ literature, watched an NCCJ film, or gone to an NCCJ Camp Program meeting” (49). The effort necessarily stressed the communalities of America's main faiths, but Schultz insists that communality did not erase distinctiveness. What mattered was that the theme of equality made acceptable to most Americans the idea of three different religious traditions. Each of those traditions had the right to depart in significant ways from the commonalities.

Schultz acknowledges that the Tri-faith ideal excluded a lot—Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, for starters. By conscious design the NCCJ did not touch the issue of race or the plight of Hispanic Catholics. Schultz excuses these omissions because any effort in that direction was bound to fail and harm the effectiveness of the Tri-faith campaign. That observation is doubtlessly correct, but it also is a reminder that the way the NCCJ conceived of pluralism worked to obscure other realities that affected postwar America. It is possible that the Judeo-Christian tradition was popular in part, perhaps in large part, because it enabled national leaders to ignore more troubling divisions than those caused by religion. Americans might be racists, a fact that America's enemies were eager to broadcast, but for leaders of the NCCJ it was sufficient to respond that Americans did not fight religious wars.

Rhetoric is one thing. Reality is more complicated. We can never find satisfactory evidence of what ordinary Americans make of efforts to change their minds. Postwar America, despite the Holocaust, continued practices of anti-Semitism that had been in place since the late nineteenth century. Arguably these began to fall away through actions of state and federal courts rather than because enlightened citizens decided to scrap restrictive covenants that kept Jews and Catholics out of their neighborhoods. Anti-Catholicism was a major factor in the 1960 election when Kennedy squeaked out a narrow and questionable victory. These thoughts are not to dismiss the achievements of the NCCJ. Its work undoubtedly played a role in reducing the importance given to the idea of a Protestant Establishment. True, the idea remained common in scholarly literature well beyond the 1950s. But the balance of public influence was shifting. Catholic representation in Congress and in other national institutions increased in the 1950s. Jews became members of university faculties and of law firms that had excluded them before the war. In these ways Schultz has a legitimate point in claiming that pluralism “was becoming the normative way to think about the United States” (73).

The social and political advances of Jews and Catholics are not the only tangible consequences that Schultz cites to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Tri-faith campaign. He discusses others in the second half of his book. With the crumbling of Protestant hegemony, Jews and Catholics acted through secular organizations to build pride in their identity and to stress their own traditions. Religious communalism in 1950s America, bolstered by the ideals of the NCCJ, promoted apartness in many crucial areas of everyday life. Schultz draws on the work of Herbert Gans to show how, in Levittown, New Jersey, discussed by many commentators as the epitome of a cookie-cutter constructed America, Catholics and Jews fought successfully for their own agendas in the public schools. They worked through separate social and service organizations.

Chosen separation was a hard-won option that cut in several different ways. Catholic and Jewish groups fought in American universities to end the discriminatory practices that ruled the elite fraternity and sorority system dominated by Protestants. By the early 1960s their legal battles were largely successful. At the same time, however, many Jewish and Catholic students still preferred the association of their own Greek societies that perpetuated the same sort of discrimination they had fought. This preference would seem to suggest that Jewish and Catholic students, whatever equality they might claim under the Tri-faith banner, continued to regard themselves as minorities. That have-it-both-ways standard returns us to the poser about whether pluralism thrives on acceptance or rejection. Can a country be truly pluralistic if a purported majority group creates a minority consciousness among others who must perpetually struggle for equality? Or does any concept of pluralism worth talking about necessarily involve minority consciousness? Only minority consciousness and a hierarchy of perceived advantages that separate groups can explain a demand for two sets of rules that complicated the debate over college fraternities. Advocates of cultural pluralism stress the creativity of the mixture. However, in creative matters groups without grudges may lose their critical edge.

Another conundrum was apparent in the battle that Shultz describes over whether to include, for the first time, a question about religious affiliation in the 1960 census. Given the assumed importance of religion in American life, many thought that the question was appropriate. But if religion was a private matter, what business did government have nosing around in something outside its purview? The proposal divided religious groups, illustrating Schultz's claim about the reality of different faiths taking different stands. Catholic leaders lobbied in favor of the idea because even if Catholics were not a majority they were a growing minority. Publicity about their numbers was regarded as useful in building group pride and in the struggle for political leverage. Protestants groups, still the comfortable majority, were largely neutral. It was Jewish groups, representing what was by far the smallest number of Americans in the Tri-faith formula, who led what turned out to be a successful opposition. Memories of what had happened in Germany prompted part of the opposition. At the same time, Jewish leaders worried that any data open to the interpretation that Jews were overrepresented in elite areas of American life might stir hostile reactions. They aggressively used their own networks of self-interest to kill the proposal. Pluralism dealt each group a playing card. Each was selective in how and on what occasion it got played.

Herzog's book also provides a compelling story. Unlike Schultz, who centers his analysis on the work of one organization, Herzog coins the term “spiritual–industrial complex.” It was not a formal association, but a loose coalition brought together by the exigencies of the Cold War. As was true for Schultz, the people in Herzog's book are for the most part not religious leaders. They are editors (Henry Luce), politicians (Truman and Eisenhower), movie moguls (Cecil B. de Mille and Walt Disney), writers (Whitaker Chambers), and military leaders (General John Devine). The religious leaders whom Herzog does mention find their way into the story because they became media stars after nonreligious leaders decided to promote them. William Randolph Hearst Jr told his affiliated newspapers to “puff Graham,” and Luce put Fulton Sheen, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Norman Vincent Peale on the cover of Time. The importance of religion in fighting the Cold War was not an accident. It was the result of a carefully calculated campaign promoted by “American elites” (5). What the United States saw in the 1950s was a “top-down” religious revival “conceived in boardrooms rather than camp meetings” (7). Schultz's book is also about top-down efforts, but Herzog, perhaps curiously, never mentions the work of the NCCJ.

In his first chapter Herzog suggests that the British historian Arnold Toynbee, who toured the United States in 1947, provided part of the inspiration to cast the Cold War in religious terms. Toynbee argued that the West was ailing from the disease of secularization. There had been no opportunity during World War II to cast the Soviet Union in the role of an evil, atheistic nation. The Soviet Union was our ally. But once the Cold War had begun, and the Soviet Union began to crack down on religious dissidents in Poland and other nations that fell behind the Iron Curtain, the idea was born that communism was itself a religion that could only be battled with a renewal of religious faith in the West. A group of ex-communists, Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley, presented themselves to Bishop Sheen for conversion to the Catholic Church. Their former God had failed. By the time Whittaker Chambers published Witness in 1952, a book that perhaps more than any other pitched the Cold War as a battle for the human soul, a script for the Cold War had already been written. It was carried on the Freedom Train that toured the United States in 1947 and 1948. The train was the inspiration of Attorney General Tom Clark, who declared, “let us build for the future upon the rock of religion” (84). The sacralization of America went forward as a way to lead the “free world.”

Herzog's broad approach has some decided advantages. He is able to show more effectively than Schultz just how invested the military became in the work of religious indoctrination. An experiment at Fort Knox introduced mandatory religious services and mandatory religious classes. The experiment was judged a success (the boys at Fort Knox were immune to vice), and chaplains were enlisted to teach soldiers that democracy could not survive without religion. The Cold War demanded moral servicemen who presumably made better fighting machines than the troops trained under the godless regime of Soviet communism. These and many other examples that Herzog has uncovered leave little question about a concerted effort to sacralize the American Way and to demonize the Soviet way. The ease with which “In God We Trust” replaced the secular formula “E Pluribus Unum” as the national motto is powerful testimony to the efforts to align national defense with a religious foundation.

At the same time it is possible to drive a good argument with too much energy. Herzog gets around to acknowledging that the spiritual–industrial complex had critics in the 1950s and that the spiritual–industrial complex was not by itself responsible for the tone of the early Cold War. Still, in too much of his book he cherry-picks his evidence to simplify what Americans were thinking and hearing during the frustrating years of the Korean conflict.

Consider, for example, the use that he makes of the film industry. It played a prominent role in 1950s culture because of both the large audience it reached and the charges of communism leveled at some of Hollywood's most famous writers and directors. Partly in reaction to HUAC's grilling of the Hollywood Ten, some significant producers contrived to make sure “Americans received an anti-Communist religious education as cinemas became Cold War classrooms” (158). Actually, despite a flurry of activity that included the 1952 film Red Planet Mars, the statement claims too much. Herzog discusses de Mille's epic film The Ten Commandments, which led the box office in 1956. In a filmed prologue to his drama about ancient Egypt that pitted God's law “against the whims of a dictator like Ramesses,” de Mille told the audience that “this same battle continues throughout the world today.” Even so, box office receipts do not make out a very good case for American movie houses as Cold War classrooms. After The Ten Commandments, Americans’ favorite films in 1956 were Around the World in Eighty Days, Giant, War and Peace, and The King and I. In 1955 the top-grossing film was Lady and the Tramp, and not one of the top ten films, which included Picnic and Rebel without a Cause, had a Cold War or a religious theme. In 1952 and 1954 no religious film made it into the top ten; and in 1953 Peter Pan topped The Robe in box-office receipts. In five of the hottest years of the Cold War, only one top-grossing film clearly served the purposes of Herzog's “spiritual–industrial complex.” Herzog observes that many science fiction films in the 1950s “explored the miracle of scientific discovery and its capacity to cause great harm” (160). What he fails to say is that like the celebrated The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), these films often warned of the horrors of nuclear calamities and of genetic mutations that cast blame on all nations.

Nor was America's print industry grinding out messages that in some lopsided way depicted the Cold War as a religious struggle. Chambers's Witness was a nonfiction best seller in 1952, and other books, including William Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951), illustrate Herzog's point that America's early cold warriors were obsessed by the idea of a battle between two warring religions. But can one really sustain the claim made by Herzog that the United States fought the early Cold War with religion and then switched in late 1950s to emphasize military, scientific, and technological superiority? Periodization is never that neat. Norman Vincent Peale provides a prime example for Herzog to illustrate the effectiveness of the spiritual–industrial complex. Yet Peale did not mention the Soviet Union in his mega-best seller The Power of Positive Thinking. If anything, that book reads like a paean to material prosperity, a theme that Herzog claims played little role in America's Cold War rhetoric until around the time of Nixon's famous Kitchen Debate with Khrushchev in 1959. In the early 1950s many influential arguments against communism never mentioned religion. They were phrased in economic terms (Hayek's The Road to Serfdom), or security concerns (Philbrick's I Led Three Lives and Schlesinger's The Vital Center), or even psychological terms (Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality and Fromm's The Sane Society). The justifications for foreign aid, beginning with the Marshall Plan, rested on the belief that communism fed on economic, not spiritual, impoverishment, a view that Herzog implies was only articulated when JFK became president. The Congress of Cultural Freedom, which was an important propaganda tool for the United States to fight communism in Europe, made free artistic expression the base of Western superiority over the Soviet Union. However, even with the exaggerations, Herzog's account of America's religious revival in the 1950s is the best I have read.

So what do we make of the two accounts? Did postwar American religion constrict or expand a pluralism that respected difference? If pluralism derives from lived experience, much about it depends on who is doing the reporting. One fact seems reliable. It is the commonsense notion that Americans don't like to tout pluralism if it suggests conflict. Schultz was bold to use the phrase “religious communalism” to characterize as a positive achievement the work of the NCCJ. Applied to the history of much of the rest of the world—South Asia and Ireland, for example—the phrase has strongly negative connotations for social cohesion. Schultz has more in mind Milton Gordon's characterization of ethnic pluralism as “the right of ethnic groups . . . to maintain some degree of cultural difference and some degree of ethnic communality,” because cultural variation is “beneficial for American culture as a whole” (188–9). One reason why, in Herzog's account, religion becomes such a convenient vehicle to promote American values in the Cold War was that Americans could draw upon a history that, aside from anti-Catholic riots in the first part of the nineteenth century and the anti-Mormon campaign in the latter part, had resulted in little violence. Stable pluralism was a favorite formula in the 1950s to describe American exceptionalism, and both Schultz and Herzog, whatever their differences, serve up histories consistent with that understanding of reality.

In the final sections of their books, Schultz and Herzog analyze how, beginning in the 1960s, the uses of religion dramatically shifted. Schultz is comfortable showing how the vision of Tri-faith America helped launch the civil rights movement of the 1960s even though it reduced the importance of Tri-faith rhetoric to define American pluralism. Leaders finally had to deal with race and non-European ethnicities. What happened in the 1970s bothers Schultz more. Conservative evangelicals became part of the national discussion. Although they had organized the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, they don't make it into either of the Cold War narratives under review. “Old-time religion,” with its fire-breathing rhetoric condemning many forms of modernism, didn't fit the schemes of the makers of top-down religion. In the 1950s America's three major networks, who had a legal obligation to provide public-interest broadcasting, gave fundamentalism no time on the air. The situation changed in the 1960s when the FCC changed the rules, and all religious groups could get television time as long as they paid for it. Evangelicals knew how to raise money and they sought respectability. Up to a point, they were happy with the Tri-faith depiction of pluralism. But as they became more political, they attacked a cultural pluralism that in their view signified a more secular and a less Christian country. Their backlash after 1970 created a new landscape of religious pluralism, one where the communal identities of Catholics and Jews weakened and where religious divides tended to unite liberals of all faiths and conservatives of all faiths. It is not, for Schultz, a happy picture.

The concluding section of Herzog's book also moves the American story to a more troubled place. He skips the story of civil rights and in a thoughtful argument suggests that the spiritual–industrial complex had overplayed its hand and opened the door for “a new period of secularization” (189). “By binding religious faith to the ebb and flow of the Communist peril” it ensured that, as the threat of the peril receded, “so would too the urgent need of revival” (7). Religion was not a useful tool to combat Soviet scientific might exemplified by the launch of sputnik, so “educators purged their curricula of religious instruction” and “networks stopped televising religious appeals” (189). Like Schultz, Herzog traces the way in which he believes strong religious feelings began to polarize the political spectrum. What part of religion remained from the Cold War crusade, formerly the preserve of “mainline faith institutions,” served to launch “modern political conservatism” (206). In both analyses, the landscape of contemporary American pluralism defined through religious lenses is much more contentious that it was in the Cold War years.

One can read too much into these findings, although they do suggest some questions. If the only discernible legacy of the Cold War spiritual–industrial complex is right-wing groups who wish to restore the purported glories of Protestant America, or if Tri-faith America no longer points to the most salient divisions in American life, including religious ones, then can we still claim that religion matters much in defining American pluralism? Religious pluralism might mean, rather lamely, that people who claim that God matters to them are joined by a slender thread of theological ignorance, which makes them tolerant, but divided by their subservience to different secular causes that bear no resemblance to what Puritans understood as God-centered faith. Political operatives who understand the demographics of religion with scary precision lead them around by the nose. Religion then matters in only one form of our contemporary pluralism, one symbolized by the crippling polarization of red states and blue states.

I often hear a version of this tale told at the university where I work. Yet it isn't correct, not in its entirety. Most white religious Americans, Protestant or Catholic or Jew, who worship in places where Scripture is taken seriously as the word of God carry their religious conservatism into other areas of life. The great majority of white evangelical Protestants vote Republican. However, Putnam and Campbell have placed an important corrective to the account of why this is so. American Grace presents convincing evidence that overt politicking is rare in American churches.Footnote ¹ In fact, Americans in liberal churches are far more likely to hear a political sermon than Americans in evangelical or conservative churches. Church and synagogue leaders do not turn their members into Republicans any more than university presidents and deans turn college professors into Democrats. Political affiliations are already set before people join the club. White religious Republicans choose a congregation where they expect to find people who are like them in many ways other than their politics. Part of the culture of the white evangelical club views private charity as more effective than government social programs and is hostile to gay marriage and abortion. Yet the survey conducted by Putnam and Campbell suggests that many evangelicals who attend church regularly have never heard a sermon about government, or about abortion or about gay marriage.

The ways in which religion affects the outline of American pluralism will likely in the future mimic what it has done in the past. Americans will use their religion to sort themselves out along a broad spectrum of values which at times take on more political significance than at other times. Religious pluralism in American experience has always illustrated a mixture of joining in something that is common and in finding ways to stand apart. Schultz and Herzog have well described the particular, albeit different, ways in which leaders tried to shape this process in postwar America. But another story about the same period might suggest that top-down efforts to manipulate faith often receive credit for changes they have done little to foster. For beneath whatever reasons are given to explain the secular purposes of religion lies the prior commitment that many Americans make to faith. That attachment is not so easy to explain, especially since for most Western Europeans the credibility of the grace that Americans seek in their religions evaporated a good while ago. Why Americans believe is a puzzle that scholars have not yet solved.