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“Russia's Most Effective Fifth Column”: Cold War Perceptions of Un-Americanism in US Churches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2013

MARKKU RUOTSILA
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Abstract

From the very beginning of the Cold War, fundamentalist Christian organizations in the United States were engaged in a strident polemical campaign against the modern ecumenical movement and its American supporters in the major mainline churches. Consistently, this movement and its Social Gospel supporters were perceived as allies or tools of the Soviet Union, or at the very least as unwitting co-conspirators in world revolutionary projects that posed a direct threat to US national security. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the American Council of Christian Churches and other key fundamentalist organizations of the era developed a set of key theological arguments about the perceived un-Americanism of said churches and their clergy. Later in the 1950s, the fundamentalists allied with others on the religious and political right to push for a series of Congressional and FBI investigations into perceived subversion as practised by these churches. While ultimately unsuccessful in terms of their originally stated goals, these prolonged fundamentalist campaigns became a crucial site for disseminating the faith-based conceptions of Americanism and un-Americanism that eventually cohered in the contemporary religious right. This paper will investigate the Cold War fundamentalist discourse on un-Americanism and subversion in an effort to illumine the contours of perceived religious otherness in this exceptionally religious nation.

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Type
Un-American Articles
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Journal of American Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4: The “Un-American” , November 2013, pp. 1019 - 1041
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Little attention has been paid by historians of anticommunism and political repression, or by religious historians, to Cold War campaigns by Christian fundamentalists in the United States to expose communists and alleged fellow-travellers in the churches. From various studies we know of fundamentalist, evangelical and Catholic support for Senator Joseph McCarthy's activities,Footnote 1 and Cold War Christian public theologies and their use by politicians have by now been quite exhaustively canvassed.Footnote 2 Yet we still have little documented knowledge about “McCarthyism” in the churches; that is, about the public discourses that were deployed during the Cold War to name specific individuals and communities of faith as subversive and un-American and about the efforts to remove those named from their positions in the churches.Footnote 3

These lacunae are best filled not by further investigations of the already much-studied National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), the best-known and ultimately most influential of the era's conservative church associations. The NAE community and its chief spokesman, Billy Graham, engaged in anticommunist sermonizing that had a significant impact on Cold War public ideology, but preoccupied as they were with evangelizing they never made it a priority to tackle alleged churchly subversion. The kind of grassroots populism that sustained McCarthyism in the churches was not for the elite-oriented NAE.Footnote 4 To get a grasp on this phenomenon, we need instead to turn to the Cold War-era public speech by the NAE's rival, the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC). This much lesser-known organization was created one year before the NAE by the controversial Bible Presbyterian pastor and broadcaster Carl McIntire as the voice of the self-designated fundamentalists, and it was equal to the NAE in membership for most of the Cold War.Footnote 5

It was the ACCC that launched the then-noted but historiographically largely ignored campaign of the mid-1950s to pressurize the US Congress and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into investigating communist influences in the American churches. The result, a hearing of the Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the public agitation campaign that preceded and followed it, provide a singular entrance point into what was actually a broad field of faith-based public discourse, encompassing the fundamentalists and the evangelicals alike, and most of the political right as well, on these issues that both pre-dated and long outlasted this one hearing.

The Oxnam campaign became a crucial site for disseminating theologically and politically conservative faith-based notions of Americanism and un-Americanism that involved the construction, reconstruction and politicization of religious otherness in this highly faith-friendly nation. Seen this way, the fundamentalists' claims during this campaign about specific clergymen's Communist Party or front affiliations were but spearheads in a decades-long attempt at popularizing a specifically fundamentalist understanding of what constituted genuinely American religiosity and citizenship, an attempt that, arguably, did reshape popular conceptions in fundamental, long-lasting ways in the faith-based grass roots of the nation's conservative heartland. It helped to pave the way to the late twentieth-century ascendancy of the Christian right over the previously dominating but now, because of their association with un-Americanism, compromised liberal mainline churches.

THE OXNAM CAMPAIGN OF 1953

For a brief moment in 1953, fundamentalist anticommunists commandeered national political discussion in the media and in the US Congress with their campaign to push the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) into investigating communist subversion in the churches. The leaders of the ACCC, the single largest fundamentalist organization of the time, had been talking about liberal Christians as “Russia's most effective fifth column in America” ever since the organization's founding and had called for HUAC and FBI investigations, repeatedly, for just as long.Footnote 6 Yet it was only at their April 1953 annual convention, in the middle of Senator McCarthy's greatest prominence, that they formally passed a resolution naming their chief ecclesiastical rival, the theologically and politically liberal National Council of Churches (NCC), “among the most dangerous enemies confronting the Church and the Nation.” The ACCC asked that in the interest of national security the NCC's alleged subversive clergymen be “exposed and removed” as soon as possible.Footnote 7

To this end, the ACCC organized a series of nationwide rallies that culminated in a mass demonstration at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, where the HUAC was presented with a petition signed by some 25,000 Protestant church members against a “socialistically-minded clique” of “Fifth Columnists” in the churches and at church-maintained theological seminaries and colleges.Footnote 8 Over the following months, the ACCC and cooperating groups distributed millions of copies of pamphlets and other exposés that their own investigators had produced, and organized further mass rallies in various parts of the country.Footnote 9 Involved in this campaign were each of the professional fundamentalist Christian anticommunist preachers of the time and their organizations, all of whom were affiliated with the ACCC – that is, Carl McIntire and his Bible Presbyterian Church and Twentieth Century Reformation Hour radio ministry, Billy James Hargis of the Christian Crusade, Edgar C. Bundy of the Church League of America and Verne Kaub of the American Council of Christian Laymen.Footnote 10

At the same time, ACCC leaders engaged in information exchange and quite intense behind-the-scenes pressurizing of the HUAC chairman Harold H. Velde and his staff, members of Senator McCarthy's staff, the FBI, and the Senate Judiciary Committee's Special Investigative Sub-committee (SISS).Footnote 11 They were supported in their demands by the separately organized but partly coordinated press campaigns of such influential lay Christian anticommunist publicists as the radio broadcasters Fulton Lewis and Paul Harvey, the syndicated columnist John T. Flynn and U. S. News & World Report reporter David Lawrence. Documentary information was exchanged and meetings were arranged between the ACCC leaders and these individuals, and the latter issued their own exposés of allegedly subversive clergymen, exposés that were in fact based on data provided by the ACCC.Footnote 12 In all, it was a historically unprecedented agitation campaign, unparalleled in scope, length, intensity and cast of characters.

Despite the intense pressure and contrary to chairman Velde's initial promise, no actual full-scale investigations into the churches were undertaken by the HUAC, the SISS or Senator McCarthy's committee. Fundamentalists had to content themselves with the voluntary appearance before HUAC by Bishop Oxnam, their chief but by no means only target. Oxnam himself had asked for this opportunity to appear before the committee but had stressed to its chairman that he would not be there “in any sense defending mysef, but rather as one who is making formal request of a Committee to rectify errors in its files that have been released by the Committee.”Footnote 13 This he had been trying to do for some time even before the ACCC's campaign was started.Footnote 14 It was part of a much broader effort by the NCC's newly launched Committee for the Maintenance of American Freedom to have the HUAC itself either reformed or shut down because of the “un-American” methods (they said) it used.Footnote 15

Widely noted and discussed though the resulting hearing was, it lasted for only ten hours and did not even attempt to cover all the allegations raised.Footnote 16 As reported in the nation's secular press, the inquiry appeared to exonerate Oxnam and to discredit the ACCC, given that the HUAC's final report found no evidence of the Methodist bishop ever having been a communist (which his critics had never claimed in any caseFootnote 17). On the other hand, the committee could not agree on whether the bishop had given aid and comfort to communists through his past associations with the several communist front groups to which (they found) he had belonged. Some committee members insisted that “we demonstrated very clearly that the Communists are using well known and highly placed people, willing or otherwise as dupes and that the bigger the name, the better for their cause.”Footnote 18 Nevertheless, it was soon announced that no more hearings would be held.Footnote 19

Clearly, neither the politicians nor (even) the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to touch the controversial issue. The former were quite wary of trespassing the separation of church and state and of giving even the slightest appearance of being anti-faith, while the latter regarded the ACCC's McIntire as so “violently anticommunist” and his campaign as so controversial that it would be “in the best interests of the Bureau” not to be associated with it or with him and his organizations.Footnote 20 President Dwight Eisenhower publicly repudiated those involved and Vice President Richard Nixon intervened to have J. B. Matthews, a key propagandist for the cause, removed from his recently acquired post as chief investigator for the McCarthy committee.Footnote 21 Even the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who only a few years earlier had claimed that “many Communist fronts have operated under the guise of some church commission or religious body,” now turned against the fundamentalist campaigners. When others, including the NAE, in following years renewed calls for investigations, he deprecated what he now called the “hysterical,” “irresponsible” and “unsupportable” charges that some in the churches were making about subversion in their midst.Footnote 22

Apparently, then, fundamentalists had overreached with their 1953 campaign. Their moment in the national spotlight was cut short and without any lasting impact because of the patent absurdity of their charges against men and women of faith who were, by the apparent common consent of most reasonable Americans, self-evidently on the side of the right. A Christian could not be a Communist and was therefore, by definition, a loyal American. Generations of historians repeated and continue to repeat this rendition of the Oxnam campaign's outcome, so that it has wellnigh established itself as the received historical wisdom on Cold War era churchly McCarthyism.Footnote 23

THE ANATOMY OF SUBVERSION

The standard reading of the Oxnam campaign's import is misleading. It is based on and has been perpetuated by narrow concentration on the McCarthyite “naming of names” that animated the critics of the fundamentalist campaigners and has continued to animate much of the scholarship in this area. But proving or disproving that some specific individual was a spy or a member of the Communist Party of the USA was not what the fundamentalist campaigners were ultimately interested in. This focus misses the core substance of the fundamentalists' allegations about their churchly antagonists in 1953, earlier and later, and it obscures the long-term impact that their discourse had on perceptions of genuinely “American” religiosity.

None of the masterminds of the Oxnam campaign actually supposed or ever claimed that there were any great numbers of actual communists or communist front group members among the clergy. The numbers that were bandied about – at least seven thousand, maybe eight thousand and perhaps more than ten thousand suspect clergy – were almost always carefully defined as the numbers of “near-communists” (or, as J. B. Mathews put it in his most often referenced formulation, the “party members, fellow travelers, espionage agents, party-line adherents, and un-willing dupes” of the communists).Footnote 24 Even McIntire, as the principal leader of the countersubversive effort, never claimed that Bishop Oxnam was a communist; rather, whenever he spoke of the bishop or his many other targets, he referred to them being “virtually communist,” and he talked of “near-communism,” “pro-communism” and “the infiltration of communistic ideas” in American churches. Unimpeacheably noncommunist clergymen who proffered these ideas were much more useful to the communists, McIntire always maintained, than were the few actual Communist Party members in the churches.Footnote 25

Other leaders of the campaign for investigations admitted privately that in the early 1950s there were only two “outright Communist party liners” among the era's Protestant clergy (the Methodist Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary and Claude Williams, a Presbyterian Church minister in Detroit), plus one Trotskyist (the American Workers Party's founder A. J. Muste).Footnote 26 Neither in private nor in public did these campaigners suggest that there was any actual danger of any of the men named, or of those perhaps influenced by them, seizing the government any time soon, nor were they principally concerned about establishing the truth about the named men's Communist Party or front memberships.Footnote 27 During the campaign for a Congressional inquiry, fundamentalists had to name names because the Congressional investigators demanded names, the relevant statutes being so designed that Congress could deal with suspect subversives only on the basis of perjurable testimony. But this demand for names greatly frustrated, even exasperated, the ACCC leaders who worked with the Congessional staffers.Footnote 28

The fundamentalists' chief preoccupation was not with communists as such but, as Verne Kaub put it, with all those in the churches “who have been influenced” by communist ideas, but “do not know it.”Footnote 29 They proceeded from the premise that in the 1950s Americans were still minded to accept the moral authority of clergymen and to afford an a priori presumption of truthfulness to what was being preached to them from the pulpit as the Word of God. Given this, churches remained the most influential venue in shaping the political views of citizens. Conversely, churches were “the most advantageous place for the presentation of erroneous ideas,” theologically and more broadly culturally and politically.Footnote 30 Fundamentalists felt that theological liberals could use “the cloak of religion as garb” and “the vestibule of religion as hideout,” as McIntire put it in 1948, and so keep on “palming off on the Christian people alien ideologies in Christian terms, and thus undermining our free land.”Footnote 31 In their view, it was this reality that made the churches potentially the most subversive agency in the country.

Ever since the original fundamentalist movement had emerged during the First World War, its leaders had ascribed broad subversive impact, thus understood, to their churchly rivals, the theologically liberal Social Gospellers who founded the National Council of Churches and its 1908 predecessor, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ. These Social Gospel theologians were engaged in rethinking the essence of the faith in terms of purposive, systemic social renovation (rather than in the traditional terms of dogmas on the conditions of personal salvation and the nature of the deity), importing natural-science speculations into theological discussions and questioning received supernatural interpretations of biblical texts. They also offered public-policy propositions that sought to alter the existing American economic system in potentially far-reaching ways.Footnote 32

Fundamentalists existed as a separate organized movement and as a collection of their own churches precisely because they had become convinced in the 1910s and the 1920s that such Social Gospel liberal (or “modernist”) theologians had perverted the mainline churches and their teachings, forcing all traditional, literalist interpreters of the Scriptures to flee if they were to keep their faith intact.Footnote 33 Those in charge of the NCC (and, before it, the FCC) were, then, subversives in the most important sense of all; that is, apostate underminers of Protestant doctrine who deceptively paraded their new thinking under biblical and Christian guises. Admittedly, leadership in the FCC/NCC had passed during the Second World War to a younger group of “Christian realist” or neo-orthodox theologians of whom the Union Theological Seminary's Reinhold Niebuhr was the most prominent. This group engaged in vigorous polemics against some aspects of the original Social Gospellers' social vision and proffered an alternative, staunchly anticommunist, version of Cold War liberalism in its place.Footnote 34 But the mainline's fundamentalist critics regarded neo-orthodoxy as but “the new modernism” and thus did not differentiate between the two groups. They certainly could not abide Niebuhr, a former Socialist Party member who was never a biblical literalist and always championed the cause of a strong, socially reformist state.Footnote 35

Since long before the Cold War, fundamentalists tended in fact to call all the liberal theologians “atheistic, bolshevistic and modernist ecclesiastics,” purveyors of a “communistic gospel” who were “revolutionists,” “enemies of the Constitution” and “red.”Footnote 36 During the 1930s and 1940s, characterizations of these kinds were sometimes exchanged for the new apellations “Hitlerized” and “Nazi.”Footnote 37 Yet neither of these two designations meant that the fundamentalists of the 1920s, the 1930s and the 1940s any more than those of the Cold War era would have believed that liberal churchmen were actually communists (or Nazis) or conscious collaborators with the communists (and Nazis). Rather, like others on the political right at the time, they used “communism” (usually in the lower case) as an overall catchphrase designation for all those whom they saw as threats to the established political, social, cultural and religious traditions of their age and the commonly accepted ideas of what constituted Americanism.Footnote 38

More specifically, the liberal Social Gospel clergy were seen as being engaged in subtly reconditioning the American people in fundamentally new, non-supernatural conceptions of the Christian faith and in views of America that denied the biblical rootage of its institutions, its way of life and its corporate purposes in the world. “God was recognized in early American history,” insisted William Bell Riley, the founder of the fundamentalists' first major corporate body, the World Christian Fundamentals Association, in 1935, “and in proportion as our fathers gave honor to Him and sought His direction in the government of affairs, this land flowered and fruited until the envy of the world.”Footnote 39 When Riley and his followers stated so, they had in mind a strictly fundamentalist conception of the Christian faith and of “Christian America” that, according to them, used to exist but now was being challenged by the theological liberals and by secular socialists. Fundamentalists took it for granted that whatever the intent, by questioning these fundamentalist dogmas the Social Gospellers were helping to pave the way for the most persistent of all of America's enemies, the socialists and the communists, and thereby towards an “atheistic determination of government” and the “triumph of the Russian sort of sovietism.”Footnote 40

This was the established interpretive matrix long before the Cold War. To it the onset of the Cold War added only one new element: after 1945–46 fundamentalists maintained that the Social Gospellers' (and, in most respects, the Christian Realists') theological and ideological reconditioning of American popular thought could only confuse Americans and lead to a gradual and almost imperceptible weakening of the resolve of its citizens. The citizens' allegiance to their country, to its institutions and its governing myths, would decay when subjected to the questioning of historic dogmas, biblical and national, in which the Social Gospellers were engaged. Given the global stakes in the Cold War and the single-mindedness of the Communists, this could only benefit the Soviet Union.Footnote 41

FREE ENTERPRISE AND UN-AMERICANISM

The fundamentalist anticommunists of the Cold War era were just as sworn believers in a Christian America as had been the founders of their movement in the 1920s. That is to say that in their considered view the United States Constitution was “grounded in the Bible, God's Word, from whence it came.” As Carl McIntire argued, the Founding Fathers had known “the ‘mind’ of God,” had cherished the Bible “above all earthly goods” and had constructed the American system of government and economy upon its commands.Footnote 42 Given this presumptive starting point, the fundamentalists' sense of Americanism was tied to notions of individual and economic freedom that they traced to the Bible, their defence of American nationalism and of biblical orthodoxy one and the same. On this basis, they saw also the 1950s campaign to expose “Red clergy” as “no petty church quarrel” about specific individuals but as one part of a much larger, fundamental “fight to the finish in the interest of our heaven-sent Christian faith and the Bible-inspired American way of life and government.”Footnote 43

The fundamentalists' perceptions of churchly un-Americanism were grounded in their presupposition about America as a uniquely Christian and Bible-based space. Moreover, in their view a Christian America was, by definition, a capitalist America with a weak central government. “Capitalism is in the economy of God as given to Moses on Mount Sinai,” Carl McIntire insisted. It was a “system based squarely on the Bible” that “comes from no other person than the Lord Jesus Christ” and it was to be understood “not as a by-product or some side-line, but as the very foundation structure of society.” Not only was the state to “stay out of business, completely,” he stressed in his book The Rise of the Tyrant in 1944, but for it to offer its own agency as solvent of any social and economic ills whatever was tantamount to idolatry and to creating an anti-Christian “God-State” that usurped God and weaned Americans away from their dependence on God as their sole comforter and provider.Footnote 44 Furthermore, McIntire maintained that since “in America we believe that we have the purest and the finest” approximation of the God-willed system of economy and government, for the United States now to move into “the collectivist realm of thought” would mean the utter destruction of its historic essence as well as the triumph of atheism.Footnote 45

It followed that for most of the early Cold War fundamentalists, any tinkering with economic freedom and any proposals for strenghtening the government were simultaneously “un-Christian and un-American.”Footnote 46 As Darren Dochuk, Kim Phillips-Fein and Bethany Moreton have shown, such Christian libertarian understandings of the link between Americanism, free enterprise and Christianity were systematically disseminated in the early decades of the Cold War by a wide range of fundamentalist and new evangelical education institutions and by publicity organizations such as the Christian Freedom Foundation, the Christian American Heritage Seminars and the Freedom Club.Footnote 47 They were neither marginal notions nor little known, but rather came to form the consensus among traditionalist, conservative people of faith soon after the Second World War. And at the very centre of the agitation that made it so were the denominations that formed the ACCC. More explicitly Bible-based than the lay publicity groups, the ACCC's apologetics for free enterprise had been a vital part of its public witness from its beginnings, and invariably its representatives had argued that one could not be a Christian or an American without being at the same time for free enterprise.Footnote 48

The churchly liberals' un-Americanism, then, was exposed first of all in what the fundamentalists were convinced had been under way since well before the Cold War, “a concerted, well-coordinated drive … to turn America from her free economy to a controlled socialistic order, and the most effective leadership for the drive is being furnished inside the churches.”Footnote 49 McIntire stressed that

it is not atheism in Communism which is the issue of Communism in the churches. It is the acceptance of the Communist attack upon our capitalistic order and its principles of individual freedom, and at the same time the offering of the whole Marxist concept of society in Christian terminology as Christian.Footnote 50

Apparent confirmation for the charge was not hard to come by in statements that the fundamentalists avidly lifted out of NCC and World Council of Churches official publications. After all, in 1948 American churchmen had taken the lead role in the WCC in censuring “Communism and laissez-faire capitalism” (in a statement by a committee chaired by Reinhold Niebuhr). At the same time, they had applauded a book that Bishop Oxnam had written (favorably) on aspects of the Soviet economic system. The NCC had also suggested that churches had something “to learn from state socialism.”Footnote 51 A truly Christian social order, according to one leading NCC cleric, required the “holding of the means of production by all in behalf of all,” while another insisted that “Christianity has no stake in the survival of capitalism” and that communism was a mixture of “half-truth and positive error” that “inherits from Biblical faith its passion for social justice.”Footnote 52

In fundamentalist eyes, all this exposed the mainline clergy as the principal threats to “the American way of life” and “our American form of government.” These two groups were immensely menacing not because they were communists, but rather because they deceptively used biblical phrases that were familiar to all to argue for an “unscriptural program and economic order.”Footnote 53 It was inevitable that the liberal clergy would do so, fundamentalists maintained, for once one lost faith in the literal reading of the Bible, all of it, one lost faith in the American freedoms, as well, that flowed from the Bible. “Collectivism replaced the Christian faith” and “socialism took over,” Edgar C. Bundy of the Church League of America put it in his Collectivism in the Churches (1958), the very moment that the mainline church leaders abandoned the fundamentalist view of the Bible.Footnote 54

CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM VERSUS INTERNATIONALISM

The second major motif in fundamentalist discourse about churchly un-Americanism, supplementary to equations of Americanism with a free-enterprise/limited-government system, was visually highlighted at the 1950 founding congress of the liberal National Council of Churches by the presence of the United Nations flag alongside those of the United States and the Christian church.Footnote 55 This visual spoke to the other key, abiding dimension in fundamentalist discourse on un-Americanism that lay at the core of their campaign against liberal clergy as “Russia's most effective fifth column in the United States” – their belief that the liberals' true allegiance was not to Christian America but to an international organisation beholden to the atheistic Soviet Union and working for purposes inimical to Christian America.

This perception traced to the 1918–1919 debates over the League of Nations and had at least as firmly established doctrinal bases as the fundamentalist equation of Americanism, free enterprise and limited government. Doctrinally determinative was the dispensationalist premillennarian body of end-times prophecy thought in which most fundamentalists believed, but less formalized notions about the prerogatives of Christian nation-states mattered too. Dispensationalist eschatology posited the any-moment emergence of a single anti-Christian world empire before the second coming of Christ and the battle of Armageddon. In this world empire the Antichrist would centralize all economic and political power, and he would create a religious adjunct to its institutions, a false syncretistic world religion organized in a world church. The fundamentalists expected the any-moment emergence of this empire and false church, and when they contextualized present-day world developments with their end-times expectation, they tended to link the Social Gospel to the League of Nations (and later to the United Nations). The liberal churches' endorsement of the world organizations was said to flow from their religious apostasy and to lead to the anti-Christian world religion and empire of the end times.Footnote 56

On a separate track, fundamentalist anti-internationalists objected to American membership in modern secular world organizations because these included, on a level of equality, non-Christian nations with which Christian ones ought never to be placed in what they called “unequal yoke-fellowship.” The national sovereignty of Christian nation-states had to be unlimited and unquestioned. It was profoundly un-American, therefore, for the League of Nations' and the United Nations' clerical protagonists to endorse and to work with these two world organizations, for, as one early influential fundamentalist leader stressed, Christian nations were biblically “under obligation to foreswear any alliance with a pagan nation.”Footnote 57 This line of argumentation connected the un-American specter to non-whiteness as well, for many a fundamentalist tended to discuss the UN's Third World member states in terms of their ethnicity, betraying in the process their own racial prejudices about (as Billy James Hargis put it) the “semi-civilized nations … only slightly removed from cannibalism.”Footnote 58 For some of the fundamentalists, Christian America was also a white supremacist America.

Furthermore, liberal clergy apostasy, and above all their un-Americanism, was exposed in what they hoped to gain from the religiously and ethnically mixed world organization. Fundamentalists accused them of attempting to transfer the church's salvific functions onto a secular agency, and they mined the NCC's pronouncements for proof that the aim was to coerce the world into a socialist, therefore profoundly un-American, economic system. For mainline clergy and churches to seek such ends in a circuitous, international fashion outside America's democratic institutions was proof positive of their lack of faith in democracy, the Bible and America.Footnote 59

Fundamentalists voiced each of these arguments already during the Second World War when the liberal mainline churches' Commission on a Just and Permanent Peace offered their Six Pillars of Peace program. This key mainline document drafted by leading neo-orthodox theologians (with major Methodist input) was used in the construction of the United Nations. Bishop Oxnam had chaired some of the principal meetings that led to the program.Footnote 60 Unsurprisingly, McIntire and the ACCC assailed the program because, in their view, it “attacked the capitalist system and declared that it has failed” and because it would “give us a collectivistic world.” McIntire claimed that the mainline leaders were proposing this program because they “do not believe in our free system of private enterprise.”Footnote 61 In 1949 and 1955, he published two books on the topic, arguing quite forcefully that on the strength of their pro-UN apologetics America's liberal churches had become “the greatest single force working for world government on the face of this earth,” and for a “socialist world.” To him, the crux of the matter was in the Six Pillars of Peace's call for “world economic planning and control,” but McIntire maintained, as well, that the liberal clergy had forgotten that national pride and sovereignty were biblically prescribed for all peoples for all times (as an inherited punishment for the idolatry of those who built the Tower of Babel). Therefore, too, for Christians in a Christian nation such as the United States to deny or to weaken either one was tantamount to a repudiation of the “American way of life.”Footnote 62

Speaking before Carl McIntire's congregation in Collingswood, NJ in 1958, J. B. Matthews maintained that “in the matter of the U. N., the churches generally have become an agit-prop department of this international hoax … organized in hell for the sole purpose of aiding and abetting the destruction of the free world.”Footnote 63 According to the Christian Crusade's Billy James Hargis, liberal clergy support for the UN could be traced to the fact that they “deny the historic Christian faith” and therefore “repudiate our historic American way of life.” Their constant propaganda for the United Nations was “driving a nail into America's coffin” and, if left unchecked, it would “destroy men's faith in God and destroy men's love for their country.” Additionally, Hargis maintained, liberal American clergy were “being used by the Communists to bring about a world government where the Reds predominate, and to bring about a world church that will ultimately receive its orders from the Kremlin.”Footnote 64

Against this background, it was hardly surprising that immediately after their campaign for Congressional investigations into the churches had ended, the ACCC's leaders launched on another campaign for Congressional action. This time it was for the so-called Bricker amendment, a measure that would have given Congress the power to veto UN treaties that weakened US national sovereignty. Throughout this new campaign, the ACCC leaders held up the mainline churches' opposition to this proposed amendment as proof of their pro-Soviet and un-American proclivities.Footnote 65 The ACCC supplied key Congress members involved with pushing the amendment with information, as well, on liberal clergymen's attempts (as they had it) at whittling away at American national sovereignty through key UN agencies (where their Churches Commission on International Affairs worked as a nongovernmental body recognized by the UN's Economic and Social Council).Footnote 66

CATHOLICISM AND UN-AMERICANISM

On the key conceptual pairings of collectivism versus free enterprise and American nationalism versus UN internationalism, Cold War fundamentalists were engaged in constructing liberal Protestantism as the un-American Other. By the same token, they were gradually but steadily transferring the mantle of religious un-Americanism from Roman Catholicism, the traditional Protestant target, onto liberal Protestantism. While the process of tranference was halting and tentative and would be completed only in the post-Cold War alliances of the “culture warriors,” progress had already started and was evident during the 1950s campaign against “Red clergy.” Even in fundamentalist Protestant circles, in other words, religious un-Americanism was starting to be framed in terms, principally, of liberal Protestantism, and conservative anticommunist Roman Catholics were gradually being welcomed into the fold of those genuinely American. The ACCC played a pivotal role in this process.

The received historiographical wisdom about Cold War-era fundamentalists as anti-Catholics pure and simple remains encapsulated in the oft-repeated statements that the Democratic National Committee made during the 1960s presidential election campaign. At that time, mainline Protestants, as well as fundamentalists, were opposed to the election of the Catholic John F. Kennedy and carried on campaigns against his candidacy, arguing that the American system of separation of church and state would be threatened by a Catholic in the White House.Footnote 67 Yet the DNC singled out only the fundamentalists as “extremists” who operated “beyond the pale on the religious issue” when they made accusations of this kind. Carl McIntire in particular was called a “prominent anti-Catholic of long standing.”Footnote 68

There was truth to these claims, for the ACCC did keep parlaying traditional Protestant arguments about Catholicism as in many ways un-American. In a strident 1950 resolution, for example, they insisted that the Pope was not a fit partner in the anticommunist fight since the “Roman Catholic Church itself [is] totalitarian.” “Any kind of cooperation with Roman Catholicism” was therefore out of bounds.Footnote 69 When President Truman proposed establishing diplomatic relations with the Vatican that same year, the ACCC told him that such relations would lead to papal representatives starting a push for federal aid to education, whereby they would move America “just one step closer to state socialism and the regimentation of citizens.”Footnote 70 Similarly, in 1957 McIntire stressed that “to the fundamentalist, there are three main enemies – Communism, Roman Catholicism and modernism.”Footnote 71 In the 1960s, he started issuing special “Catholic Communismgram” newsletters in which he maintained that after the Second Vatican Council “Communists are cooperating with Roman Catholics and the Roman Catholics are cooperating with the Communists.”Footnote 72

The kind of questioning of Catholics' allegiance to American institutions and traditions that these statements exposed lived on in fundamentalist (and in new evangelical) circles through the Cold War era. Yet there was also another, coexisting strain in fundamentalist public speech. Schizophrenically, Carl McIntire had also been repeating, again and again ever since the mid-1930s, how the gulf separating fundamentalists from at least conservative anticommunist Catholics was “a small one compared to that indefinitely large chasm which separates the modernists from the fundamentalists,” the chasm of supernaturalism versus naturalism in one's biblical interpretation.Footnote 73 For just as long, he had celebrated such noted Catholic publications as Our Sunday School Visitor for their anticommunism and pro-capitalism and had lavished praise on conservative Catholic anticommunists, including John T. Flynn and Phyllis, Fred and Eleanor Schlafly.Footnote 74 Verne Kaub and Billy James Hargis were even more explicit on this score when they insisted (in one instance as early as in 1950) that the fundamentalists' “strongest ally” imaginable was in the Catholic Church and that “Catholics and Protestants must unite in a crusade against godless anti-Christ communism.”Footnote 75

Four years before the Oxnam campaign, the HUAC's chief investigator, the Jewish ex-communist Benjamin Mandel, had even proposed to McIntire that the Protestant fundamentalists should join conservative Catholics and conservative Jews in setting up an interfaith anticommunist organization under McIntire's leadership. This organization would have taken as its principal target not actual communists but the likes of Bishop Oxnam and their anti-capitalist preachings.Footnote 76 Made in all apparent seriousness by a man who worked closely with ACCC leaders and knew them well, the proposal showed how the fundamentalists were already seen on the Catholic issue by those who knew them best. A few years later the New York conservative rabbi Benjamin Schultz, head of the American Jewish League against Communism, made a like proposition to McIntire (with whom he had worked closely behind the scenes for some years).Footnote 77

Because they were wedded to ecclesiastical separatism as a matter of faith, the ACCC leaders would not go ahead with Mandel's or Schultz's proposals. But already in the 1950s McIntire did welcome émigré Eastern European Catholic clergymen to his anticommunist rallies, stressing that “your cause is our cause”; took money from known Catholics; and recruited them as collaborators in his worldwide organization, the International Council of Christian Churches. Some of his associates would even attend interfaith anticommunist events in support of Senator McCarthy and (in stark violation of fundamentalist doctrine) jointly pray with the Catholics and Jews on the platform.Footnote 78 By such associations fundamentalists were acknowledging that Catholic anticommunist conservatives (although not other Catholics) were now to be seen as bona fide American patriots.

The fundamentalists were, then, at the very forefront of the gradual transfer of the un-American ascription from Catholicism to liberal Protestantism that was in fact completed after the ending of the Cold War. In this, fundamentalists had recourse to first principles; that is to say that their gradual but growing acceptance of conservative Catholics as true Americans was not based on any merely incidental agreement on the nature of the communist menace but on the more profound sense of shared faith in supernaturalism. Everything else, including Americanism, flowed from this, since for the fundamentalists it was a given that a traditional supernaturalistic understanding of the Bible as God's fixed, revealed Will led to a free, sovereign, capitalist America.

THE FUNDAMENTALISTS' SUCCESS

We should not underestimate the reach and appeal of the conceptions of Americanism and un-Americanism that were popularized by fundamentalists during and after the 1950s campaigns against alleged subversion in the churches. Although it was not widely recognized at the time, fundamentalist and other conservative churches were then the ascendant ones, their membership constantly on the rise, and they continued to be so for the next several decades.Footnote 79 They had available to them a range of media which disseminated, without stop, for several decades, the notions about free enterprise and individual freedom, limited government and Christian nationalism that they offered as the sole definion of true Americanism. No small part of this was the sense of purpose and of urgency of the post-1960s new Christian right, which emerged out of this very community of discourse, rooted in these conceptions, and which by the late 1970s had become a key constituency in the Republican party. The New Christian Right's popular appeal and the GOP's interest in recruiting it would have been inconceivable had the fundamentalists and other conservatives not first managed to infest public debate with these notions.

The ACCC itself had only just over one million members in the 1950s and the 1960s. But its principal publication, the Christian Beacon, one of more than twenty ACCC-affiliated newspapers, alone reached more than 150,000 (which was more than three times the subscribership of the liberal churches' chief periodical, the Christian Century).Footnote 80 Carl McIntire preached weekly sermons on some six hundred radio stations across the country, Billy James Hargis on nearly as many, and both (and many others like them) distributed an unceasing stream of pamphlets and books throughout the Cold War.Footnote 81 A weaker and more intermittently transmitted version of the same argument flowed from the new evangelicals' media outlets, especially from 150,000-circulation Christianity Today after it came to be controlled by the more conservative section of the new evangelical movement. By the late 1960s, only 15 percent of religious periodicals in the United States were published by the liberal mainline churches; by the early 1970s, Christian radio and television were dominated by fundamentalists and evangelicals.Footnote 82 Not only did the conservative preachers' message about churchly un-Americanism saturate their own communities during the Cold War, but these were also precisely the years when these conservatives returned to the mainstream of the national conversation and suffused it too.

Arguably, these fundamentalists' (and their new evangelical rivals') success in renaming and reframing Americanism and un-Americanism in the churches of their time explains, in no small part, the Protestant mainline's loss of its earlier dominance in US public life. To argue thus is not to challenge the established historiographical interpretations about the mainline churches' post-1960s membership decline. This has been traced by many a scholar to the mainline's inability to offer clear behavioural and doctrinal standards and a satisfying sense of community.Footnote 83 Rather, to dwell on the perceptions of un-Americanism and radicalism is to add a parallel, equally important dimension to the discussion that addresses the Mainline's fast declining cultural and political influence.

As James F. Findlay has shown, by the mid-1960s the National Council of Churches was already so concerned about their popular image as pro-communist that they started to actively distance themselves from their erstwhile communist allies in the work they were doing for black civil rights.Footnote 84 In this, the NCC leaders were not just reacting to fundamentalists' and secular segregationists' (and the FBI's) mostly unjustified claims about the civil rights movement as allied to communists. Rather, the NCC were trying belatedly to deal with a longer-standing image problem that had only grown the longer the fundamentalists had persisted in making their charges. By the 1970s, perceptions of mainline un-American and pro-communist tendencies were so well established and so usable that the “church renewal” groups that conservatives created inside the mainline were instinctually led into making these their initial first line of attack in attempts at change from the inside. They picked up on and amplified the fundamentalists' latest allegations, ones that related to the NCC's and the World Council of Churches' funding of revolutionary guerilla groups in Africa.Footnote 85 It was the fundamentalists' decades-long agitation over mainline un-Americanism that made this funding salient to begin with.

Effectively branded the new religious Other – as both un-Christian and un-American in some ways – the liberal mainline never fully recovered its reputation. So definitely and for such a long time had many of these churches been associated in the popular imagination with forms of un-Americanism (rather than with communism as such) that the demise of the Soviet Union hardly affected their public image. In other words, and contrary to what some scholars have claimed, the Cold War did not so much convert Americans into seeing Christian-ness and American-ness as identical, and atheism as un-American.Footnote 86 Rather, for a significant section, the conversion was into the fundamentalist understanding of a particular, conservative version of Christianity as the only genuinely American one and into suspecting that the other, theologically and politically liberal version was in essential ways un-American.

Footnotes

1 See Crosby, Donald F., God, Church and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Miller, Steven P., Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 22–27; Clabaugh, Gary K., Thunder on the Right: The Protestant Fundamentalists (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), 84–85; Jorstad, Erling, The Politics of Doomsday: Fundamentalists of the Far Right (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970), 52–56.

2 See Lahr, Angela M., Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Dochuk, Darren, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Williams, Daniel K., God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Inboden, William, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Finstuen, Andrew, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Herzog, Jonathan P., The Spiritual–Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Stevens, Jason, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Settje, David E., Faith and War: How Christians Debated the Cold and Vietnam Wars (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

3 For rare, brief mentions see Lahr, 46–47; Jorstad, 40–41; Gasper, Louis, The Fundamentalist Movement, 1930–1956 (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1981), 65–66; Schrecker, Ellen, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1998), 259; Heale, Michael J., American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 88.

4 For the NAE's approach to public policy in the Cold War see Carpenter's, Joel A. unaparallelled Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. 141 ff.

5 For biographical and organizational details see Ruotsila, Markku, “Carl McIntire and the Fundamentalist Origins of the Christian Right,” Church History, 81 (June 2012), 378–407; Fea, John, “Carl McIntire: From Fundamentalist Presbyterian to Presbyterian Fundamentalist,” American Presbyterians, 72 (Winter 1994), 254–268.

6 Christian Beacon, 21 Aug. 1941, 2; Christian Beacon, 25 March 1943, 4; Christian Beacon, 21 Nov. 1946, 4; Robert T. Ketcham to W. O. H. Garman, 15 Feb. 1947, W. O. H. Garman Papers, Folder “Ketcham, Robert T.,” J. S. Mack Library, Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina; McIntire, Carl, “Russia's Fifth Column in America – the Federal Council of Churches,” Christian Beacon, 30 Oct. 1947, 3.

7 ACCC press release, 1 May 1953, Garman Papers, Folder “Communism and Religion.”

8 Christian Beacon, 14 and 19 May 1953, 1, 5; ACCC press release, 8 May 1953, Carl McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 254, Folder “Ketcham, Dr Robert T. 1953–1958 (1 of 2),” Henry Luce III Library, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey; Gasper, 65–66.

9 Verne P. Kaub to William Harrlee Bordeaux, 24 Jan. 1953, and Carl McIntire to Kaub, 21 April 1953, American Council of Christian Laymen Papers, Reels 5 and 6, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison; International Council of Christian Churches press release, 16 Dec. 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 353, Folder “News Releases ICCC 1952 1953’; Garman, W. O. H., Oxnam Worked with Communists and Belonged to Communist Fronts (New York: ACCC, 1953); McIntire, Carl, Oxnam, Prophet of Marx (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1954).”

10 See Jorstad, 39–48, 51–58, 67.

11 Wm Harrlee Bordeaux to Verne P. Kaub, 6 March 1953, American Council of Christian Laymen Papers, Reel 6; Carl McIntire to Harold Velde, 29 June 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 248, Folder “Velde, Harold H.”; Harold Velde to Edgar C. Bundy, 29 April 1954, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 170, Folder “Bundy, Edgar C. 1954–1955”; William E. Jenner to Carl McIntire, 17 April and 13 May 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 162, Folder “Jenner, Hon. William E.”; W. O. H. Garman to McIntire, 7 April 1954, Garman Papers, Folder “McIntire, Carl,” BJU.

12 Carl McIntire to H. R. Warner, 16 Jan. 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 158, Folder “Flynn, John T. 1953–”; Edgar C. Bundy to Carl McIntire, 30 April 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 170, Folder “Bundy, Capt. Edgar C. 1953”; Edgar C. Bundy to Carl McIntire, 10 April 1954, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 170, Folder “Bundy, Edgar C. 1954–1955”; Carl McIntire to David Lawrence, 13 Nov. 1953, Garman papers, Folder “ICCC.”

13 G. Bromley Oxnam to Harold Velde, 10 July 1953, G. Bromley Oxnam Papers, Box 38, Folder “House Committee on Un-American Activities: Harold H. Velde,” Library of Congress Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC.

14 Christian Beacon, 21 Nov. 1946, 4; G. Bromley Oxnam to John S. Wood, 27 April 1950, Oxnam Papers, Box 38, Folder “Correspodence with Other Members of House Committee on Un-American Activities”; “Statement by Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam Relative to the Reasons for His Request for a Personal Conference with the Hon. Harold H. Velde, Chairman of House Committee on Un-American Activities,” 22 April 1953, Oxnam Papers, Box 38, Folder “House Committee on Un-American Activities: Harold H. Velde.”

15 See Henry Knox Sherrill to Harold Velde, 19 June 1953, Oxnam Papers, Box 38, Folder “Un.-Am. Act. Comm. (HofR) – H. H. Velde, Material for Velde Letter”; Samuel McCrea Cavert, “Memorandum on the Protestant Clergy and the McCarthy–Matthews Episode,” 14 July 1953, National Council of Churches of Christ in America Special Topics Records, Box 6, File 10, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia.

16 Testimony of Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, Hearing before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 83rd Cong., 1st sess. July 21, 1953 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1954).

17 The ACCC stressed that “this Council has never believed that Bishop Oxnam is a member of the Communist Party, nor has this Council left the impression in any of its pronouncements.” ACCC press release, “A Reply to Bishop Oxnam,” 22 July 1953, National Council of Churches of Christ in America Special Topics Records, Box 6, File 3.

18 “Probers Deny They Cleared Bishop Oxnam,” Washington Times-Herald, 23 July 1953, Oxnam Papers, Box 39, Folder “House Committee on Unamerican Activities: Post Hearing Opinion of Committeemen”; Gasper, The Fundamentalist Movement, 68.

19 “Indicate House Committee May Drop Clergy Probe,” Religious News Service, 29 Oct. 1953, National Council of Churches in America Special Topics Records, Box 6, File 10.

20 Memorandum, 7 Feb. 1951, FBI Headquarters File 94-37990, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, DC; J. P. Mohr to Clyde Tolson, 28 Oct. 1953, FBI Headquarters File 94-37990; Memorandum, 13 July 1954, FBI Headquarters File 94-37990; Special-Agent-in-Charge, Newark, NJ, to J. Edgar Hoover, 6 May 1958, FBI Headquarters File 94-37990.

21 Powers, Richard Gid, Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 266–67.

22 J. Edgar Hoover to J. Howard Pew, 31 May 1961, Christianity Today International Records, Box 1, Billy Graham Archives Center, Wheaton, Illinois; News and Views, 20 (Aug. 1957), 3; NAE press release, “Protestant Official Calls for Investigation,” 1 March 1960, National Council of Churches of Christ in America Special Topics Records, RG 17, Box 6, File 24.

23 See Herzog, The Spiritual–Industrial Complex, 89; Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares, 46–47; Heale, American Anticommunism, 88; Gasper, 69.

24 See Matthews, J. B., “Reds in Our Churches,” American Mercury (July 1953), 3–13; J. B. Matthews to Benjamin Mandel, 2 Dec. 1953, J. B. Matthews Papers, Box 692, Rare Books, Manuscripts and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Matthews, J. B., “Moscow's Religious Fifth Column in the United States,” Christian Beacon, 9 Sept. 1954, 2–3, 6; Christian Beacon, 8 April 1954, 2; News and Views, Special Report (April 1962), 5.

25 See McIntire, Carl, Twentieth Century Reformation (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1944), 91–2; Christian Beacon, 28 Nov. 1946, 1; McIntire, “How and Why the Federal Council of Churches Is Leading America into Socialism,” Christian Beacon, 24 April 1947, 3–8; McIntire, “World Council of Churches Offer Pattern for World Revolution,” Christian Beacon, 28 Sept. 1948, 1; McIntire, , Russia's Most Effective Fifth Column in America: A Series of Radio Addresses (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1948), 3–8; McIntire, “A Bishop of Near-Communism,” Christian Beacon, 14 Oct. 1954, 2; “Address by Dr. Carl McIntire, Faith and Freedom Rally, American Legion Stadium, Hollywood, California, Thursday, December 17, 1953,” Oxnam Papers, Box 47, Folder “Un.Am. Act File: Funds, etc. ACCC (3),” italics added.

26 Verne P. Kaub to Sterling Morton, 6 Dec. 1949, and Verne P. Kaub to Wm Harrlee Bordeaux, 13 March 1953, American Council of Christian Laymen Papers, Reels 1 and 6; Edgar C. Bundy, “Christianity or Communism?”, Christian Beacon, 30 Aug. 1951, 1. On the Muste accusation see McIntire, “Prominent Communist Leader in Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.,” Christian Beacon, 3 Aug. 1939, 1–4.

27 Cf. International Council of Christian Churches press release, 16 Dec. 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 353, Folder “News Releases ICCC 1952, 1953.”

28 Wm Harrlee Bordeaux to Verne P. Kaub, 6 March 1953, American Council of Christian Laymen Papers, Reel 6.

29 Verne P. Kaub to Wm Harrlee Bordeaux, 13 March 1953, American Council of Christian Laymen Papers, Reel 6.

30 McIntire, Carl, The Rise of the Tyrant: Controlled Economy vs. Private Enterprise (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1945), 6–10. See also “Crusade against Communism in the Churches,” 8 May 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 254, Folder “Ketcham, Dr Robert T. 1953–1958 (1 of 2).”

31 McIntire cited in Samuel Cavert to G. Bromley Oxnam, 7 Oct. 1948, Oxnam Papers, Box 45, Folder “Un.-Am. Act. File: Personalities – Fulton J. Lewis, Jr.”

32 See Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Curtis, Susan, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

33 See Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 32–35, 53–91.

34 See Warren, Heather A., Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Brown, Charles C., Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr's Prophetic Role and Legacy (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002).

35 For fundamentalist assessments of neo-orthodoxy see The International Council of Christian Churches: A Testimony (Amsterdam: ICCC, 1948); Schaeffer, Francis, The New Modernism (Philadelphia: The Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions, 1950). For criticisms of Niebuhr see Kaub, Verne P., The Federal Council of Churches Takes Its Stand with Enemies of America (Madison, WI: American Council of Christian Laymen [1950]); 1–6; McIntire, Carl, The Twentieth Century Reformation (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1944), 52; McIntire's address, “How and Why the Federal Council of Churches Is Leading America into Socialism,” 20 April 1947, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 385, Folder “ACCC Cleveland April 1947.”

36 The Christian Fundamentalist, 3 (July 1929), 248; Christian Beacon, 4 June 1936, 7; Christian Beacon, 16 Sept. 1937, 4.

37 Letters, 3 Aug. 1936, 12.

38 Cf. Ruotsila, Markku, British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2001), xii–xiv and passim.

39 Riley, William Bell, The Philosophies of Father Coughlin (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing Company, 1935), 10–13.

40 The Christian Fundamentalist, 1 (Aug. 1927), 7–8.

41 McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant, 6–10, 29; McIntire, “Russia's Fifth Column in America – The Federal Council of Churches,” Christian Beacon, 12 Feb. 1942, 3; W. O. H. Garman to Carl McIntire, 27 July 1946, Garman Papers, Folder “McIntire, Carl”; McIntire, “The Communist Party Line in the Churches,” Christian Beacon, 21 May 1953, 1–2; Edgar C. Bundy, “Christianity or Communism?”, 1; McIntire, “A Bishop of Near-Communism,” Christian Beacon, 14 Oct. 1954, 3, 7.

42 McIntire, Russia's Most Effective Fifth Column in America, 12–13; McIntire, Carl, Author of Liberty (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1948), 4, 8.

43 W. O. H. Garman's address, 21 Nov. 1950, Garman Papers, Folder “ACCC – Conferences,” italics added.

44 McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant, 18–27; McIntire, Author of Liberty, 15, 20–21, 26–28, 95–105, 119–27; McIntire, Twentieth Century Reformation, 26, 112–16, 131–33, 182–186.

45 McIntire, Author of Liberty, 117–119.

46 See McIntire, Twentieth Century Reformation, 150; McIntire, Author of Liberty, 113–14; Garman, W. O. H., What Is Wrong with the National Council of Churches in the U.S.A. (New York: ACCC, 1957), 5, 14–15; Bundy, Edgar C., Collectivism in the Churches (Wheaton, IL: Church League of America, 1964), 229.

47 Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, 51–56, 63–74, 114–34; Phillips-Fein, Kim, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Moreton, Bethany, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

48 Cf. Christian Beacon, 18 May 1944, 4; Carl McIntire to J. Howard Pew, 23 April 1947, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 257, Folder “Pew, J. Howard”; ACCC press release, 3 Oct. [1947], McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 385, Folder “Detroit 10/16–19/47”; Historic Christianity's Defense of Freedom (New York: ACCC, 1947); Garman, W. O. H., What Is Wrong with the Federal Council? (New York: ACCC, 1948), 4–5, 11, 23; ACCC executive committee minutes, 29 April 1949, Garman Papers, Folder “ACCC–Resolutions.”

49 McIntire, Russia's Most Effective Fifth Column in America, 1.

50 International Council of Christian Churches press release, 26 June 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 353, Folder “News Releases ICCC 1952 1953.”

51 Brown, Niebuhr and His Age, 144–145; Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 39–41, 46–48; McIntire, Carl, “World Council of Churches Offers Pattern for World Revolution,” Christian Beacon, 28 Sept. 1948, 1, 8. Italics added.

52 E. Stanley Jones and John Bennett quoted in McIntire, Carl, The Truth about the Federal Council of Churches and the Kingdom of God (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1950), 2, 11–12.

53 McIntire, Twentieth Century Reformation, 144–51; McIntire, Author of Liberty, 20–21; McIntire, Russia's Most Effective Fifth Column in America, 1, 2, 5; Garman, What Is Wrong with the National Council of Churches in the U.S. A., 5, 14–15.

54 Bundy, Collectivism in the Churches, 24–6, 229.

55 Schneider, Robert, “Church Federation in the Twentieth Century,” in Hutchison, William R., ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 95–121, 117.

56 See Ruotsila, Markku, The Origins of Christian Anti-internationalism: Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008), 27–52, 171–80.

57 Ruotsila, The Origins of Christian Anti-internationalism, 38–40, 48–49, 70–71, 176. The quote is from J. C. Massee at 39.

58 Billy James Hargis, The United Nations: Destroying America by Degrees (Christian Crusade pamphlet, nd (1960)), 5. For examples of earlier fundamentalist argument along these lines see Ruotsila, The Origins of Christian Anti-internationalism, 38–40.

59 Kaub, The Federal Council of Churches Takes Its Stand with Enemies of America, 1–16; Challenge, 3 (June 1953), 1; Challenge, 4 (Oct. 1954), 1; International Council of Christian Churches press release, 23 Aug. 1954, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 353, Folder “News Releases – ICCC – 1954.”

60 Nurser, John S., For All Peoples and All Nations: The Ecumenical Church and Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), 57–62, 69–70.

61 Christian Beacon, 15 Aug. 1946, 1; American Council of Christian Churches press release, nd, c. Oct. 1948, National Council of Churches of Christ in America Special Topics Records, Box 6, File 2.

62 McIntire, Carl, Modern Tower of Babel (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1949), 9–15; McIntire, XX, Servants of Apostasy (Collingswood, NJ: Christian Beacon Press, 1955), 196–99, 218.

63 J. B. Matthews, “Christ and Communism,” Christian Beacon, 28 Aug. 1958, 8; J. B. Matthews address in the Bible Presbyterian Church, Collingswood, NJ, 22 March 1958, Matthews Papers, Box 713.

64 Billy James Hargis, The Truth about UNESCO (Christian Crusade pamphlet, nd); Billy James Hargis, “Separation – Not Reform,” Christian Crusade, 12 (June 1960), 16; “The National Council Says Surrender to the U. N.!”, Christian Crusade newsletter, 20 Jan. 1961.

65 Christian Beacon, 28 Nov. 1957, 8; Carl McIntire, “Presbyterian Exaltation of the United Nations Organization,” Christian Beacon, 18 April 1957, 5, 8; News from the American Council of Christian Churches, 25 Oct. 1956, Matthews Papers, Box 27.

66 Carl McIntire to Charles A. Webb, 12 Nov. 1953, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 170, Folder “Bricker, John W.”

67 See Carty, Thomas, A Catholic in the White House? Religion, Politics, and John Kennedy's Presidential Campaign (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

68 ACCC to the Democratic National Committee, 21 Sept. 1960, John F. Kennedy Pre-presidential Papers, Religious Issue Files of James Wine, Box 1018, Folder “ACCC,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston.

69 Resolutions passed by International Council of Christian Churches convention in Geneva, 22 Aug. 1950, American Council of Christian Churches – International Council of Christian Churches Collection, Box 466B, Presbyterian Church in America Historical Center, St. Louis.

70 W. O. H. Garman to Harry S. Truman, 16 March 1950, Garman Papers, Folder “Truman, Harry S.”

71 Christian Beacon, 21 Feb. 1957, 6.

72 McIntire, Carl, Towards an Alliance of Communists and Catholics (Collingswood, NJ: Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, 1965), 1–2, 8; Christian Beacon, 14 Oct. 1965, 1, 8; Roman Catholic Communismgram, nd (March 1978), Hargis Papers, Box 67.

73 Christian Beacon, 26 May 1938, 4. For later, nearly identical, formulations see Carl McIntire to Warren Lilly, 26 Dec. 1950, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 71, Folder “RC-Correspondence to 1950”; Christian Beacon, 16 June 1966, 5; Busler, Joseph, “Rev. Carl McIntire: A Fundamental Approach to Fighting Satan,” (Camden, NJ) Courier Post, 15 Sept. 1973, 2–9.

74 Christian Beacon, 28 Oct. 1937, 7; Christian Beacon, 18 Nov. 1937, 6; McIntire, The Rise of the Tyrant, 241; Christian Beacon, 19 Jan. 1950, 1; Christian Beacon, 25 Oct. 1951, 8; McIntire, Towards an Alliance of Communists and Catholics, 8; Christian Beacon, 22 Feb. 1973, 1.

75 Billy James Hargis to Harvey Springer, 25 July 1961, Billy James Hargis Papers, Box 67, University of Arkansas Special Collections, Fayetteville; Verne Kaub to Billy James Hargis, 13 Nov. 1950, American Council of Christian Laymen Papers, Reel 1.

76 Benjamin Mandel to Carl McIntire, 28 Jan. and 7 Feb. 1949, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 24, Folder “McIntire Letters + Correspondence ca. 1940s–1950s Ma–May.”

77 Benjamin Schultz to Carl McIntire, 4 Aug. 1954, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 246, Folder Schultz, Rabbi; Benjamin Schultz to Carl McIntire, 14 July 1948, McIntire Manuscript Collection, Box 84, American Jewish League against Communism.

78 Ruotsila, “Carl McIntire,” 388–90; Carl J. Reitsma, “I Attended an Anti-Khruschev Rally,” Bible Presbyterian Reporter, 4 (Dec. 1959), 5; Valiant for the Truth, 1 (1964), 3.

79 Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 31–32.

80 Reich, Jutta, “Twentieth Century Reformation”: Dynamischer Fundamentalismus nach Geschichte und Erscheinung (Marburg and Lahn: N. G. Elwert Verlag, 1969), 118–19; Ferris, Thomas J., “Christian Beacon,” 146–7, in Lora, Ronald & Longton, William Henry, eds., The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); Settje, Faith and War, 11–14.

81 Williams, God's Own Party, 38–43.

82 Voskuil, Dennis, “Reaching Out: Mainline Protestantism and the Media,” in Hutchison, , Between the Times, 72–92, 74–75; Hangen, Tona J., Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion and Popular Culture in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 152; Fowler, Robert Booth, A New Engagement: Evangelical Political Thought, 1966–1976 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 23–34.

83 See Kelley, Dean M., Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Roof, Wade Clark and McKinney, William, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Finke, Roger and Stark, Rodney, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Wuthnow, Robert and Evans, John H. (eds), The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

84 Findlay, James F. Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 87–88.

85 Tipton, Steven, Public Pulpits: Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 146–53, 155–93, 202–14. For the fundamentalists' and evangelicals' charges see The World Council of Churches: How It Is Helping to Finance Communists in Southern Africa (Collingswood: NJ: Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, 1973); How Church Groups Have Used Church Money to Bring Communists to Power (Collingswood, NJ: Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, 1974); Christianity Today, 19 Oct. 1979, 48.

86 Herzog, The Spiritual–Industrial Complex, 89–90, 104–5, 137.