In April 2000, at the Royal Foundation of St. Katharine's in the East End of London, a small gathering of scholars from across the disciplines and around the world came together to discuss “Religion and the Cold War.” The simplistic, crudely reductionist view that religion was merely an instrument of propaganda and manipulation used by “cold warriors” for purposes that could be adequately defined and understood without reference to religion was roundly rejected. Rather, a variety of diverse insights materialized that presented religion, in all its complexity and variations, as having played a rich, multifaceted, multidimensional role during the Cold War era.Footnote ¹

The two books under review are important additions to what now appears to be an emerging field within Cold War history that explores its religious dimension. The Cold War was, of course, fought on the home front as well as abroad. Both research monographs illustrate the significance of the roles accorded to and assumed by religion in the domestic and international arenas. The subject of religion and the Cold War undoubtedly benefited from the apparent resurgence in global society of militant Islam, which heightened awareness of religion's relevance and potency as a political force and hence re-legitimized it as an object of study. Unfortunately, September 11, 2001, and the War on Terror unleashed a plethora of pseudo-scholarly works. Neither of these works falls into that category. Indeed, Angela M. Lahr's monograph is notably erudite and scholarly. Michael Phayer's monograph brings a wealth of new archival evidence to bear. Both bring forth exciting new perspectives on the different ways Christians responded to the evolving Cold War both in the United States and in the wider world.

In addition to providing important insights into Cold War politico-religion and helping us understand our recent past, these books illustrate that this is a subject crucial for understanding the contemporary significance that religion appears to be assuming. The Catholic theologian John Henry Newman noted that the church is not “placed in a void, but in the crowded world,” meaning that it must adapt to “persons and circumstances, and must be thrown into new shapes according to the form of society” in which it exists.Footnote ² The Cold War, a ubiquitous presence pervading virtually every facet of the latter half of the twentieth century, proved an opportunity as well as a challenge to Christianity and its churches. Lahr explores how the Cold War climate provided evangelicals with the chance to merge with mainstream culture to generate a political-religious power base for the new Christian Right. Phayer examines the attempts of the Vatican to influence American attitudes toward the Soviet Union and exploit the rivalry between the two superpowers to protect and promote papal interests.

Viewed by many contemporaries as one of history's great religious wars, it should not be surprising that religion was a key variable in the Cold War or that the conduct of the conflict had a major impact on religion. Yet for a long time religion was neglected in Cold War histories, and the Cold War was often absent from religious histories. Quite clearly, however, if the role of religion is truly significant, then some explanation is required as to why it has taken so long to address it, particularly in the United States. At the most mundane level, the neglect of the religious dimension can be attributed, in part, to the fact that American scholars working in North American “secular” universities for a long time dominated the historiography of the Cold War. These adopted rather a frigid attitude toward church history and religious studies. Defended by many as a necessary adjunct to the separation of church and state, the disdain, as John Conway has pointed out, “was in fact due to the ideological hostility of the majority of the professorate towards religion in general and Christianity in particular.”Footnote ³

Conway argues that the controversial misinterpretation of the alleged conflict between science and religion took an unfortunate toll. Consequently, although for most history departments it was inconceivable to teach the history of the Middle Ages without reference to religion, the opposite was true for more recent centuries. In addition, despite the emergence of departments devoted to religion, the frequent tossing of the subject between departments of religion and history had adverse repercussions, with departmental barriers too often preventing profitable collaboration. Perhaps more instrumental still in the neglect of religion was the fact that it is too complex and too intertwined with other cultural and social forms to be easily isolated. With religion constituting a very complex category for analysis and the Cold War remaining a contested and contentious era that continues to defy any single narrative, Lahr and Phayer are to be commended for undertaking so daunting a challenge.

Lahr in particular presents a thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis that engages with the questions surrounding evangelical and national identities and how they evolved in the context of a Cold War presented as an anti-communist crusade against evil. She emphasizes the indispensable role played by the atomic bomb and how it inspired deliberations on the end of human history among believers and non-believers alike. While premillennial dispensationalists conceptualized history as time partitioned into certain ages and with a definite end, secular critics of nuclear weapons postulated global annihilation. The seemingly real possibility of nuclear war in the context of the worldview induced by Manichaean Cold War rhetoric reduced the distinctions that had separated secular and evangelical America.

Lahr acknowledges the considerable disparities between different groupings of evangelicals: “Far-right Christian organizations that took anti-communism to the extreme often criticised more moderate evangelicals, who in turn tried to distance themselves from fundamentalists” (26). Nonetheless, the nuclear threat and the religious dimension of Cold War anti-communism allowed evangelicals of all stripes to construct a closer relational identity with the rest of the United States than had previously been the case. The potential for nuclear conflict, moreover, made foreign relations important for everyone.

Lahr points out how the pivotal Cold War document NSC 68, drafted by Paul Nitze, revealed the extent to which the American government reflected the premillennial, apocalyptic conceptualization of the Cold War world as it sought to exaggerate the Soviet threat. Although NSC 68 remained classified until 1975, government policy, statements, and propaganda were based on it. NSC 68 was one example of how the Truman administration used the concept of an evil “other” to secure a Cold War consensus and strengthen nationalism. In addition, Truman invoked the tradition of a divinely inspired nation that derived from the image of America as a city upon a hill and contributed to ideas of manifest destiny.

The political culture of the early Cold War, based on apocalypticism and anti-communism, eroded under the impact on American society of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, both of which contributed to the further political and social diversification of evangelicalism. More important, however, the demarginalization of evangelicals during the early Cold War helped them assimilate into mainstream culture, which meant political participation. Conservative evangelicals, who retained their eschatological anti-communism, entered into the political arena in alliance with fundamentalist organizations, such as Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, albeit increasingly absorbed by moral crises at home. Further, evangelicals had embedded born-again Christianity into America's cultural landscape, with telling implications for the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Lahr's meticulous scholarship and carefully constructed arguments convincingly show how conservative evangelicals were able to move from a tangential to a central subculture owing to Cold War discourse and the way it intensified strands of premillennialism. Reinforced by key historical events with portentous significance for those of faith, such as the potential for global destruction and the creation of Israel, evangelicals were able to renegotiate and redefine their place in American political culture. The emergence of a new patriotic evangelicalism during the Cold War strengthened the religious right and enabled its criticism of those aspects of secular America to which it was opposed, namely abortion, feminism, and gay rights.

Phayer presents a more exuberant account of the Cold War, replete with spies and conspiracy theories, papal politics and corrupt clerics. In addition to having the hint of a thriller, Phayer has combined scholarship and solid archival research with imaginative interpretations that involve a substantial degree of speculation—informed, certainly, but speculation still. Nonetheless, Phayer reinforces and adds to the growing scholarship surrounding U.S.-Vatican relations and Pius XII's role as an exceptionally significant cold warrior. In addition to adding to the existing knowledge about Pius XII's role in the Cold War, Phayer makes a notable contribution to the ongoing debate about its significance. However contentious the views Phayer presents about Pius XII's Cold War policies, it will be his treatment of Pius XII and the Holocaust that will arouse criticism.

Phayer is a Holocaust scholar and educator and a noted authority on the responses of the Roman Catholic Church to what came to be known as the “Final Solution.” Despite the new material that Phayer introduces, the defenders of Pius XII remain likely to dismiss his approach as ahistorical political polemic. They will place this new book along with his previous treatment of this subject, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), once again with what are regarded as the pope's primary detractors: James Carroll (Constantine's Sword [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001]), John Cornwell (Hitler's Pope [New York: Viking, 1999]), Susan Zuccotti (Under His Very Windows [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000]), and Garry Wills (Papal Sin [New York: Doubleday, 2000]).

Phayer's condemnation of Pius XII's perceived failure to respond adequately to the horrors of what is now known as the Holocaust reflects a very contemporary revulsion to Nazi crimes. Retrospectively our own age has found the murder of Europe's Jews to be the ultimate atrocity. But that was not the understanding of, or reaction to, the Nazi state and its policies toward the Jews at the time or in the immediate aftermath. The first investigations into the inadequacies of reactions to the genocidal policies effected toward Europe's Jews were published in the 1960s and excoriated, in particular, the British and American governments. As Holocaust scholar Tom Lawson has observed, “The argument that the Vatican's response to Jewish suffering was overly diplomatic and lacking in compassion, or that the US and British governments could have rescued more Jews if their policies had been governed by more humanitarian concerns, are commonly heard. These are moral judgements of which the historian should be nervous.”Footnote ⁴

The logic of Christian anti-Semitism has assured an extensive examination of Christian responses to the Holocaust. The common perception is that Christian leadership collapsed, illustrated above all by Vatican and papal silence. There was also the participation of Hungarian and Slovakian bishoprics in the politics of anti-Semitism as it unfolded, plus the complicity of Germany's evangelical churches.Footnote ⁵ Phayer's analysis of Christ's representatives measures their Christian worthiness by the caliber and strength of their protests and active opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism. It is an approach that critics will claim moves beyond the boundaries of history. Phayer bases his analysis on archival research. Nonetheless, Pius XII defenders and critics of Holocaust scholarship remain likely to challenge his conclusions. They will charge that Phayer has succumbed to the temptation to move outside the traditionally conceived limits of historical investigation to assess, against some universal moral criteria, those caught up in the drama of history.

The emergence of Holocaust studies at a time when Pius XII was, as he still is, a potential candidate for canonization rendered him the most controversial religious leader of the twentieth century. Phayer acknowledges that “historians must not be acolytes lighting the path for Pius XII's canonization, nor should they play devil's advocates who try to derail it” (x). Nonetheless, despite the discernible caution with which the author attempts to address his subject, his approach can be categorized as “bystander” historiography, which is morally conceived, based on a religious conception of the obligation of witness.Footnote ⁶ It judges individuals, suggesting what they could or should have done in the past confronted with Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Pius XII is accorded particular opprobrium owing to his elevated position, but other Christian leaders during and after the war shared his attitudes, fears, and mindset. Many other Christian leaders, clerical and lay, shared Pius XII's tendency to see Nazism and communism as attacks first and foremost on Christian civilization, with communism the more dangerous of the two.Footnote ⁷

British propagandists greatly emphasized the persecution of Christian churches in Europe, yet their sufferings did not compare to those of the Jews. Wary that too much horror would repel the normal mind, the Planning Committee of the Ministry of Information had in July 1941 stated: “A certain amount of horror is needed but it must be used very sparingly and must deal always with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents. And not with Jews.”Footnote ⁸ The propagandists considered that the British people would identify and sympathize with Christian victims of Nazism. Evidence from Home Intelligence reports of growing anti-Semitism during the war possibly deterred the propagandists from trying to use crimes against the Jewish population in the same way.Footnote ⁹ Although a Jewish Section was set up in July 1941 as part of the Ministry of Information's Religions Division, it was not allowed to touch political problems. After the war, the revelations of the death camps and the suffering of the Jews created a well of sympathy. During the war, however, even respected Christian ministers reflected anti-Semitic prejudices. Visser ‘t Hooft, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches in Formation, observed at a Peace Aims Group meeting, at which the Jewish question was discussed by some of Europe's most prominent Christians, that

Lahr and Phayer have written very different books, each of which makes a valuable contribution to the burgeoning interest in religion as a political, social, and cultural force in the international as well as the domestic arenas. Both are salutary reminders that, like class, race, and gender, the impact of religion cannot be ignored.