Although not as erudite as William Inboden's Religion and American Foreign Policy (2010) or as ambitious as Andrew Preston's forthcoming Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith, this book nonetheless makes a valuable contribution to scholarship exploring the religious dimension of twentieth-century US domestic politics and foreign relations. Jonathan Herzog's thesis is simple but compelling: that whereas earlier eruptions of religious enthusiasm in the United States – notably the two Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – “spread from the bottom up,” driven by local preachers and grassroots organizations, the theological renaissance of the early Cold War years owed its origin and ubiquity to what Herzog terms a spiritual–industrial complex comprising elite figures in American government, media, business, education, and entertainment (7). The complex's roster included such eminences as Attorney General Tom Clark, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Omar Bradley, press lord Henry Luce, hotel titan Conrad Hilton, celebrity intellectual Arnold Toynbee, Hollywood mogul Cecil B. de Mille, and, of course, evangelist Billy Graham and “TV priest” Fulton Sheen. Overseeing this coalition of luminaries and directing its efforts – insofar as any one person can be said to have done so – was Dwight Eisenhower, who, in Herzog's view, “tied religion and societal conflict together more effectively” than any US President since Abraham Lincoln (97).

Members of the complex lent their talent, authority, and resources to engineering a religious revival for essentially one purpose: to win the Cold War. They understood communism not just as an economic or political philosophy but as a “sinister religion … complete with prophets, zealous adherents, and a unique cosmology” (45). Defeating this rival creed would require more than material abundance and technological prowess, more than dollars and bombs. America needed faith as well as power. Thus the complex worked to reverse the galloping secularization that had characterized American life since at least 1925, when the Scopes “monkey” trial held religious fundamentalism up to ridicule. During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, religion reasserted its importance in ordering society, a process Herzog labels “sacralization.”

Congress's revising of the Pledge of Allegiance to include the words “under God” and its adoption of “In God We Trust” as the national motto are the examples most often cited by historians to demonstrate the extent of this spiritual renewal, but, as Herzog documents, age-of-consensus sacralization went beyond legislative resolutions. It shone forth from movie and television screens, as de Mille's The Ten Commandments broke box-office records and Bishop Sheen drew a larger prime-time audience than funnyman Milton Berle. It filled the pages of America's most widely read press organs, among them Luce's Time and Life, which ran frequent articles on religious issues and religious leaders. It underlay, at least in part, bedrock national-security mechanisms like the United States Information Agency and the Operations Coordinating Board. It drove the Crusade for Freedom, the Back to God Program, and other religion-themed campaigns that attracted the attention and financial contributions of millions of Americans. And it legitimated such “startling exercise[s] in social control” as the “Fort Knox experiment,” in which the US Army put young recruits through a basic-training regimen devoted as much to religious instruction as to marksmanship or physical fitness (116). “Rare are the moments when so many organizations unite in an effort to make a country more religious,” Herzog notes, and if the fruit of this effort was often condemned by critics as superficial and this-worldy – a Seventh-Day Adventist called it “juke box religion” while Union Theological Seminary professor Robert McAfee sneered that Eisenhower wanted Americans to “worship God so we can lick Communism” – it nonetheless left a profound imprint on the cultural landscape (12, 175).

Even scholars who have written and published widely on America's mid-century religious revival will learn something from this imaginatively researched, engagingly written text. For example, I had long believed that Eisenhower's choice to open his first inaugural address with a prayer was impulsive, a last-minute decision that caught advisers by surprise (although my only evidence for this had been statements issued by the President's public-relations team). Herzog, however, reveals that the prayer grew out of an intensive process of deliberation initiated by Secretary of State-designate John Foster Dulles. Over a week before Harry Truman vacated the White House, Dulles told Eisenhower to scrap his initial speech draft, complaining that it dealt too much with material matters and ought to be refocussed on “faith,” the free world's principal bulwark against communism (94). Eisenhower ultimately deferred to the judgment of his chief cabinet officer, which was to be expected. After all, Dulles, as cofounder and former chairman of the Federal Council of Churches, was the only religious leader, lay or clerical, ever to head the State Department. In other words, he was probably the highest-ranking member of America's spiritual–industrial complex, apart from the President himself.