From the wide halls of Congress to the serpentine corridors of the corporate bureaucracy, from the Cabinet Room to the boardroom, government and business leaders during the late 1940s and 1950s adopted a policy of religious revival in the name of national security and societal well-being. Its optimism was unmatched. But, then again, the early Cold War era was rife with projects on grand scales. This policy benefited from the dawning of a new American age, the time of the “other-directed” individual and the “organization man”—a time when, at least according to sociologists, the average citizen had devolved into a level of social malleability unthinkable in ages past.Footnote ¹ Similar partnerships had tamed the atom and delivered victory in history’s most destructive war. Basking in the glow of this justified confidence, policymakers set their sights on the nation’s religious economy.

For scholars interested in the influence of religion on American policymaking, few time periods are as rich in case studies. Between 1945 and 1960, religious concerns attained a rare degree of salience in the development and implementation of policy. There were specific legislative achievements, such as the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. But there were less visible, and as a consequence largely forgotten, policy adoptions regarding religion in the areas of foreign propaganda and psychological warfare, military training, state-sponsored or state-supported national faith drives, and public education.

For most of American history, government and corporate leaders were not in the business of religious revivals. To be sure, presidents periodically called the citizenry to prayer, and many of the nation’s industrial captains graced the pews of their local churches. But federal and corporate policy toward religion could long be categorized as one of general disengagement. As a result, American religious revivals typically were organic, democratic, sensitive to market forces, and, above all, innovative. From the preachers who fascinated Alexis de Tocqueville to the latest wave of evangelical leaders, revivals have regularly been movements from the bottom up—products of the world’s foremost religious free market. Over time, a lack of government interference in the nation’s religious economy created incentives for competition and theological originality.Footnote ²

But this changed in the early Cold War. When Eisenhower coined the phrase “military industrial complex” in his 1961 valedictory, it would have been equally appropriate for him to mention the spiritual-industrial complex, whose policies helped shape public life and private worship during the previous decade. Like its more famous cousin, the spiritual-industrial complex was born of assumption and urgency. It was unique among other Cold War entities, standing athwart two worlds—one within the realm of policy decisions and the other within the realm of theological conjecture. It was the beneficiary of brassy state sanction and commercial talent. It was conceived in boardrooms rather than camp meetings, steered by Madison Avenue and Hollywood suits rather than traveling preachers, and measured with a statistical precision of which Charles Grandison Finney or Dwight Moody could only have dreamed. Its importance came not from the fact that for a brief time in the 1950s record numbers of Americans attended religious services but instead from those state and business interests who eagerly measured such statistics. In this case, the impulses of the “saved” were far less instructive than the motives of the “saviors.”

What exactly was the spiritual-industrial complex? Most simply, it was the deliberate and carefully managed use of government rhetoric and corporate resources to stimulate a religious revival in the late 1940s and 1950s. More important, it signaled the drawing of a curious conclusion among American leaders: that secular institutions and beliefs alone were insufficient in meeting society’s Cold War needs. American leaders built the spiritual-industrial complex to reendow religion with social, cultural, and political meaning. They formed an interlocking network of committees, organizations, and advisory boards, availing the vast resources of the American bureaucracy toward that end. They set out to create a religious citizenry that grounded material power in sacred wisdom and immunized itself to the atheistic, immoral, and corporeal siren song of Communism.

The relationship between religion and policymaking continues to produce excellent historical investigations and policy studies by a growing number of dedicated scholars.Footnote ³ In a first-rate, introductory article on religion and policy for this journal, Hugh Heclo identified three distinct levels at which this relationship can be studied: (1) the institutional, which “focuses on the way organized structures of religion and government impinge on each other and together and society”; (2) the behavioral, which is “the idea that through religious attachments people are moved to act in public ways”; and (3) the philosophical, which tries “to capture the intersections of religion and policymaking that involve ideas and modes of thought bearing on the fundamental ordering of a society’s public life.”Footnote ⁴ This article uses the spiritual-industrial complex of early Cold War America as an aperture through which to study the impact of religion on policy at all three levels. Using a case study of national faith drives in the 1940s and 1950s, it examines how policymakers identified a problem in need of a religious solution, the adoption and implementation of religious policies, and both intended and unintended policy effects.

ASSUMPTIONS

The spiritual-industrial complex’s policymaking depended on two widely held assumptions: that Communism was itself a sinister religious system and that American society had atrophied spiritually. These fears created a wide canopy of necessity under which a host of projects, material and unworldly alike, found justification. Communist hostility toward religion had been well documented by journalists since Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks stormed Petrograd’s Winter Palace in November 1917, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s the media fed Americans stories of executed priests, despoiled relics, unbaptized children, and spiritually browbeaten peasants.Footnote ⁵

While Communism’s antireligious nature was no doubt troubling, Americans studying it took this conclusion one step further. From the 1930s to the 1950s, journalists, theologians, and scholars saw in Communism a powerful religious system with martyrs, missionaries, dogma, heretics, saints, sinners, promises of redemption, and even a well-developed eschatology. Marxists or Communist sympathizers like Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, and Will Herberg made well-publicized “conversions” to more traditional religions. Theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr probed the tenets of the Communist faith, bandying about words like “Marxianity,” “Collective Messiah,” and “Man-god” to describe its religious foundation. American Catholics prayed en masse for the safe release of religious leaders imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain. With these acts grew a powerful realization: if Communism was a dangerous pseudo-religion, then a powerful weapon in the anti-Communist arsenal was genuine religious faith.Footnote ⁶

Perhaps more important, there was also a growing belief that power had both material and spiritual components. Those sharing this conviction agreed that America stood upon the summit of physical strength, but they warned that these victories of the flesh were purchased with retreats of the soul. Critics dubbed it “psychic lethargy,” “spiritual bankruptcy,” or just plain “materialism.” In the summer of 1946, John Foster Dulles urged his countrymen to “show that our free land is not a spiritual lowland.” One year later the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, halfway through his mammoth work A Study of History, embarked on an American tour heavily publicized by Time magazine, warning all who listened that the fall of civilizations began not with economic or military overreach but instead with a “schism in the soul.” Brigadier General C. T. Lanham, director of the Staff and Personnel Policy Board for the Defense Department, put it best in 1949. “Over and over again,” he wrote, “gigantic concentrations of physical power have gone down in defeat before a lesser strength propelled by conviction. The Goliaths have perished at the hands of the Davids.” Fellow military leaders agreed. “We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount,” chided Army Chief of Staff Omar N. Bradley, “The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.”Footnote ⁷

THE POLICY OF REVIVAL

The spiritual-industrial complex’s policies can be divided into two broad categories: tangible and tacit. Tangible policies included specific legislative action such as the establishment of a National Day of Prayer in 1952, the aforementioned act adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, the creation of “In God We Trust” postage stamps in 1954, the printing of that phrase on all currency in 1955, and its establishment as the national motto in 1956. Other tangible policies affected the military. In 1948, for instance, President Harry S. Truman created the President’s Committee on Welfare and Religion in the Armed Forces (Weil Committee), charging it with “encouraging and promoting the religious, moral, and recreational welfare and character guidance of persons in the armed forces and thereby enhancing the military preparedness and security of the nation.” The Weil Committee was the first presidential commission devoted to an expressly religious purpose, and due to its recommendations, basic training in the military would include a religious component throughout the 1950s. The spiritual-industrial complex’s tangible policies also governed American propaganda and psychological warfare efforts. Voice of America retained a director of religious programming, and the U.S. Informational and Educational Exchange mandated that each of its 165 worldwide information centers contained “balanced collections of U.S. publications which portray America’s spiritual heritage and religious values in true perspective.”Footnote ⁸

Tacit policies fulfilled a far greater part of the spiritual-industrial complex’s mission, but because they were not written into published documents or codified into law, the origins of their implementation are more difficult to trace. Leaders from Truman to Eisenhower strived to spiritually mobilize the American people through the use of speeches and highly visible actions. “Religion is like freedom,” Truman explained, “We cannot take it for granted. … Unless men live by their faith, and practice that faith in their daily lives, religion cannot be a living force in the world today.” Eisenhower’s inaugural parade began with “God’s Float,” an homage to the unifying power of faith across religious traditions, and annual prayer breakfasts sprung up within the halls of power in Washington.Footnote ⁹

The most visible syntheses of tangible and tacit religious policies during the early Cold War were national faith drives. Between 1945 and 1960, America bore witness to a host of such efforts. Some were stand-alone operations. Others attached themselves to larger, often procrustean journeys into the heart of the American Way. The fortunate few, those campaigns backed by the right combination of organization, clout, timing, and purpose, could lay claim to the unforeseen and simultaneously unfolding religious revival. In scale and attention, five national faith drives stood out: the Freedom Train, the Religion in American Life campaign, the Crusade for Freedom, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty, and the Foundation for Religious Action. They sketch out the basic contours of the spiritual-industrial complex’s unconventional policy implementation. Each urged citizens to develop, or deepen, a religious side to their lives, conflated religion with patriotism, and depended on the tangible and tacit policies of business and government. The tangible policy needs were largely met by business interests due to the constitutional limitations of state interference with religious matters. Business leaders controlled the drives’ boards of directors, and corporations footed the bills. But this is not to say that government actors did not participate in or tacitly direct these projects. Rather, they offered policy recommendations and afforded the projects crucial measures of legitimacy through the use of a state imprimatur. The drives were not led by religious leaders but rather by leaders who were religious, and that was the surest hallmark of both the spiritual-industrial complex and Heclo’s behavioral relationship between religion and public policy.

THE FREEDOM TRAIN

Those sharing this vision first gathered at the White House on May 22, 1947, at the urging of Attorney General Tom C. Clark: government officials, CEOs, media moguls, and leaders of America’s best-known voluntary organizations. John Foster Dulles was there. So were the heads of Paramount Pictures, Standard Oil, General Electric, and U.S. Steel. Press lord Henry R. Luce sent a writer and editor from Time, Inc. to serve as his emissary. Harkening to the Justice Department’s call, the group adopted the title of the National Heritage Foundation and approved an ambitious plan. They imagined a Freedom Train—a traveling exhibition of America’s founding documents. From city to city, it would reinforce American conceptions of freedom and highlight the difference between American liberty and Communist slavery. Execution required unprecedented state and business cooperation. The U.S. government lent the foundation one hundred original documents, the nation’s railroads provided free transportation, corporations footed the bill, the National Advertising Council conducted a publicity blitz before the train arrived in each city, and the Luce family of publications covered the train in detail. The endeavor was conceived and forged as a Cold War weapon, ironically bearing eerie similarities to the Lenin Train of 1918 that distributed Soviet propaganda to rural Russia.Footnote ¹⁰

The Freedom Train is often remembered as a secular endeavor, but it was also the spiritual-industrial complex’s maiden venture. While businessmen filled its coffers, government leaders used their positions of authority to light its righteous path. Take the actions of Attorney General Tom C. Clark, whose Justice Department shepherded the Freedom Train project. In the months leading up to the train’s launch, Clark began a nationwide speaking tour—one man’s throwback to the itinerant preachers and circuit riders at the nub of the Second Great Awakening. He hoped the train would “be the springboard of a great crusade for reawakening faith in America.” In Boston, he publicly wondered if instead of admonishing the Corinthians, Saint Paul might also have been warning Americans in May 1947 that strength was possible only through spiritual unity. In Washington, he assured an audience that America had grown “in power and splendor under God.” He told a throng in Cleveland that “it is imperative that our people and our children return to God and walk in his ways.”Footnote ¹¹

Clark’s crusade peaked in a crowded, sweltering Des Moines convention hall on July 25, 1947. That night at 8:30 he took the podium and electrified the sweaty multitude of five thousand. Clark laid out a divine model for human history, one that sharply contradicted both the Communist concept of economic determinism and the predominant American model of secular progress. His best evidence for so strong an assertion was America itself, since each great document in the nation’s history flowed from the wellspring of divine inspiration. Clark told the approving crowd that Christianity and democracy were synonymous, that it was impossible to separate religious teachings from the American form of government, and that true loyalty and patriotism received power and endurance from God. He ended with an audacious prescription for any secular official: “Let us build for the future on the rock of religion.”Footnote ¹² The thunderous applause that followed carried well beyond the Sunday-school teachers assembled in the hall. Associated press reporters were also in attendance, and major newspapers including the New York Times publicized the address.

Clark considered religion implicit in the Freedom Train’s mission, but the National Heritage Foundation made it explicit as well. The train itself housed a special exhibit of important American religious documents, including The Mayflower Compact, Roger Williams’s The Bloody Tenet of Persecution, and the Bay Psalm Book.Footnote ¹³ Prior to its arrival, organizers instructed each host community to hold a “Rededication Week,” of which an “Inter-faith Day” was an important component. On this day, communities invited local religious leaders to deliver speeches on the religious foundations of American democracy and freedom. Rededication weeks culminated with mass recitations of an oath developed by the American Heritage Foundation. “The Freedom Pledge” began:

• I am an American. A free American.

  Free to speak—without fear,

  Free to worship God in my own way,

  Free to stand for what I think is right,

  Free to oppose what I believe is wrong.

Americans at the dawn of the Cold War eagerly accepted this affirmation of Americanism. In the New Orleans Sugar Bowl alone, 75,000 people recited the Freedom Pledge in unison.Footnote ¹⁴ But they were affirming a particular brand of freedom—not only the liberty of expression but also the entitlement to stand for what was morally right, and this freedom emanated from a belief in God, the lodestar of all moral compasses.

The train began its first twelve-month tour in September 1947 and was a rousing success, viewed by 3.5 million Americans in three hundred communities. An estimated 50 million participated in the Rededication Weeks.Footnote ¹⁵ The American Heritage Foundation provided a workable template for future campaigns devoted to catalyzing a religious revival. It demonstrated the ability of government and business interests to work together toward a common policy goal in the field of social and cultural values. But most important, it proved the willingness of the public to heed the calls of Cold War affirmation.

RELIGION IN AMERICAN LIFE CAMPAIGN

The spiritual-industrial complex’s next major faith-drive venture came in 1949, when American elites began an advertising campaign without precedent. For three weeks beginning on November 1, they saturated radio, print, television, and billboards with messages urging citizens to religiously rededicate themselves. The public service advertisement (PSA) has become a common fixture in modern America, delivering messages on the importance of education, the dangers of drugs, and the reminder that “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” But PSAs were newfangled in the late 1940s, as was their creator, the Advertising Council. Formed in 1942 to marshal the fresh powers of marketing behind World War II, both government and business considered the council an indispensable postwar mouthpiece for selling Americans on everything from the benefits of free enterprise to the promise of atomic energy. It was testament to the belief, expressed by one of the council’s early presidents, that any societal problem could be “solved or helped through the organized power of advertising.”Footnote ¹⁶

The Religion in American Life (RIAL) campaign set the advertiser’s power upon what was often considered the most private of matters. Its organizers adopted two policy goals: “(1) to emphasize the importance of our religious institutions in our nation, and (2) to call upon every American to participate more actively in the church or synagogue of his choice.” As with most successful ad campaigns, RIAL used celebrity endorsements to convince Americans that religious participation was a normative act. Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Betty Crocker, and J. Edgar Hoover appeared in print discussing the importance of religion. The ads varied. Some featured celebrities discussing their personal faith. Others focused on lonely people, those worried about the future, or children searching for security and meaning. The specter of Communism hung over the enterprise, providing a requisite sense of urgency. One print ad entitled “Democracy Starts Here” depicted a group of children singing in a choir, their cherubic faces illuminated by a light from above. The text followed:

This was a crucial way station in the journey of an idea. Forged in the 1920s and 1930s by theologians and intellectuals whose inquiries concluded that Communism was a faith and fanned by politicians as they contemplated the Red menace, RIAL’s ad execs distilled decades of arguments into a terse, simple statement.

The Advertising Council and its RIAL campaign were creatures of government and business symbiosis. Business lent money, organization, and conceptualization, advocating a position that the state could not. The council’s official advisory board boasted executives from the Rockefeller Foundation and Studebaker along with the publisher of the Washington Post. General Electric’s president Charles E. Wilson oversaw the RIAL campaign. The J. Walter Thompson Company, credited with inventing modern American advertising, developed the ads. American periodicals, radio networks, and budding television stations donated valuable space or time. Added up, these contributions exceeded $3 million over the initial three-week campaign.Footnote ¹⁸

Government, by contrast, offered the project a warrant. The evening before the 1949 campaign began, President Truman endorsed RIAL in a live address. “Each one of us can do his part by a renewed devotion to his religion,” he spoke. “If there is any danger to the religious life of our Nation, it lies in our taking our religious heritage too much for granted.” The following year, as RIAL geared up for another campaign, Wilson called the program an effort toward “spiritual rearmament.” Truman once again endorsed the plan, noting: “These are times that demand the vision and fortitude of men of faith such as never before in the history of the world.” Impressed by RIAL’s success, Truman tapped “Electric Charlie,” as Wilson was known, to head the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1951. After all, once he had mustered the nation’s spirituality, mobilizing its material resources for the Korean War would be straightforward by comparison.Footnote ¹⁹

The RIAL campaign ran for ten consecutive years from 1949 to 1958 and reached millions of Americans. In its first year, more than two thousand communities participated by holding grassroots religious mobilization campaigns. Three thousand towns and cities joined in 1950. The Outdoor Advertising Agency donated 5,200 billboards across America, and 1,800 daily newspapers either published editorials supporting the program or carried RIAL advertisements. By 1956, more than three hundred television programs aired the calls for religious mobilization. If stacked upon one another, the RIAL posters alone would extend twelve miles into the sky.Footnote ²⁰

THE CRUSADE FOR FREEDOM

The same cadre who made the Freedom Train and RIAL possible also turned their attention to international affairs. At the time, Cold War religious dimensions remained troubling but nonetheless hypothetical for most Americans. In Europe, however, the spiritual abstract had become all too tangible. General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor of Germany during the Berlin Airlift, worried that the Soviets were winning the ideological battle in Europe. In 1950, he conceived a plan to rally Americans behind their European allies. The United States had saved West Berlin from starvation by flying in crucial supplies, but Clay also envisioned a “spiritual airlift.” This belief led to the Crusade for Freedom with a national board of directors that included Luce and other media titans, twelve U.S. senators, the heads of Hollywood’s largest studios, and other business executives.Footnote ²¹

The crusade had a simple aim. Each American was asked to donate one dollar and sign a Freedom Scroll. The donations would pay for completion of a ninety-eight-inch, ten-ton bronze bell to be installed in West Berlin. Excess donations would be applied to the fledgling Radio Free Europe, a privately funded series of stations launched in July 1950 to combat Communist propaganda. Around its circumference, the Freedom Bell displayed figures representing the five races of humanity passing the torch of freedom. Etched beneath was the inscription: “That this world under God shall have a new birth of freedom.” By signing the Freedom Scroll, Americans accepted the pledge: “I believe in the sacredness and dignity of the individual. I believe that all men derive the right to freedom equally from God. I pledge to resist aggression and tyranny wherever they appear on earth.”Footnote ²²

The Crusade for Freedom enlisted thousands of volunteers across America to operate signature collection centers. In Washington, D.C., citizens could sign outside the District Building. In the boroughs of New York, they could contribute at their local firehouse. To generate publicity, organizers sent the Freedom Bell on a twenty-one-city tour, and the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times widely covered the crusade and supported it in editorials. On the evening of September 4, General Eisenhower delivered an address supporting the cause that was carried by all four of America’s major radio networks. He spoke of Communist “godless depravity in government” and asked Americans to declare their faith in freedom and in God. They responded in the millions.Footnote ²³

The crusade explained its mission in a straightforward statement of purpose: “The soul of the world is sick, and the peoples of the world are looking to the United States for leadership.” It beckoned Americans to light the lamps of spiritual guidance. And so they did. Twenty-five million signed the Freedom Scroll, raising $3.5 million for Radio Free Europe. Millions more went to their churches and synagogues on October 8 for “Freedom Sunday.” The Crusade for Freedom wrote to more than eighty thousand religious leaders requesting that they prepare sermons emphasizing “the truth that all human rights are derived from God.” New York’s mayor Vincent Impellitteri urged residents to spend the day offering “thanksgiving to the Almighty for safeguarding our way of life against the evil forces who would destroy it and by begging God to give hope and courage to the enslaved peoples of the world seeking to regain freedom and self-government.”Footnote ²⁴

THE COMMITTEE TO PROCLAIM LIBERTY

When church bells rang across America on July 4, 1951, it was no spontaneous outpouring of religious patriotism, but rather the culmination of another carefully orchestrated plan backed by the spiritual-industrial complex. Like RIAL, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty (CPL) used celebrity endorsements and glossy advertisements to hasten what by then appeared to be America’s coming religious revival. CPL’s basic message made God the guarantor of true freedom, and to this end Independence Day seemed the perfect opportunity. It was the most secular of American holidays—a time of fireworks, parades, flags, and picnics—when Americans celebrated the achievement of men rather than the contributions of the Almighty. But the CPL envisioned each July 4 as a day of solemn religious observation when church leaders would expound on the connection between religion and Americanism. James C. Ingebretsen, a retired Los Angeles attorney and the committee’s coordinator, contended that “it is not only proper to give prayerful thanks to God for liberty … but that it is only in this spiritual understanding of the true source of our liberty that our country will be able to survive.”Footnote ²⁵

CPL was yet another creation of the spiritual-industrial complex, a combination of industrial resolve and government authority. Its leadership comprised fifty-six prominent Americans: Hollywood heavyweights like Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, and Ronald Reagan; media moguls including Luce; business tycoons like Conrad Hilton, James L. Craft, and J. C. Penney; and prominent religious figures like Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam. Major American newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times carried editorials lauding the proposal. The heads of America’s utility companies contributed as well. Customers of San Diego Gas & Electric, Detroit Edison, and Utah Power and Light received CPL flyers inserted into their monthly bills. The entire effort culminated at 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 1, when CBS broadcast the “Freedom Under God” program. Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby, and Gloria Swanson spoke during the eclectic half-hour event, which blended church choirs with military and religious speeches. They instructed all patriotic Americans to attend their places of worship on “Independence Sabbath” and to reread the Declaration of Independence as the church bells rang on July 4.Footnote ²⁶

The state held up its end of the bargain as well. Mayor Impellitteri applauded the CPL’s attempt at emphasizing the “sacred and spiritual foundations of our freedom.” Thirty-one governors signed declarations instructing their electorates to use Independence Day for religious reflection. “The question which must be determined is whether we and the other people of the free world, through faith in God and belief in the dignity of man, can match in fervor the fanaticism of atheistic and totalitarian communism,” California governor Earl Warren proclaimed, “The fate of the world is in the balance until this conflict is resolved.” By choosing to emphasize July 4, government sent the unmistakable message that civic conceptions of freedom were inadequate in the Cold War. Simply calling oneself an America was not enough. “As a good American,” one pamphlet read, “you believe that God is the Creator of all men … your rights, and the rights of your fellow-men, are God-given … [and that] as a personal creature of God, each of us is equal in the sight of God.”Footnote ²⁷

A Los Angeles pastor, and CPL member, announced that “firecrackers won’t save freedom.” The committee members argued that Independence Day began as a religious holiday only to become another casualty of secularization. On this point they were mistaken. The Fourth of July in the early republic was the noisiest and most raucous day on the American calendar—a time of parades, military musters, drinking, and civic speeches that were scarcely the embodiment of religious observation. If by chance the holiday fell on a Sunday, Americans put off their celebrations until Monday, a clear sign that they considered Independence Day a secular occasion.Footnote ²⁸ Yet on July 4, 1951, the opposite rang true, literally. Rather than serving as one of many props to the state, religious groups subordinated it. They asserted the preeminence of the sacred over the secular and continued to do so. As late as 1955, the mayor of Los Angeles was still declaring the Fourth a religious holiday.Footnote ²⁹

THE FOUNDATION FOR RELIGIOUS ACTION IN SOCIAL AND CIVIL DISORDER

The final major faith drive was the Foundation for Religious Action in Social and Civil Disorder, the closest the spiritual-industrial complex came to crossing the line between church and state. Co-founded in 1954 by Eisenhower’s personal pastor, its national advisory council included religious leaders like Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, former politicians like Herbert Hoover, businessmen like Luce and Henry Ford III, and government officials like former Psychological Strategy Board director Gordon Gray. Its self-professed mission was “to make religious truth an effective force for ordered freedom and the common good,” though the foundation’s more specific aim was “to unite all believers in God in the struggle between the free world and atheistic Communism.” By mid-1954, its leaders had settled upon a three-pronged plan of attack involving a national conference, media programs, and the dissemination of literature.Footnote ³⁰

The signature program of the foundation was the National Conference on the Spiritual Foundations of American Democracy, held in annually in Washington, D.C., beginning in November 1954. “To meet the crisis of our time,” the foundation warned, “an ideological and spiritual counteroffensive is needed.” The conferences, which were publicized by the domestic media and recorded by United States Information Agency cameras for propagandistic distribution overseas, brought together religious, business, and political leaders who spoke variations of one basic theme: America was winning the Cold War militarily but not spiritually. The answer according to many was a closer relationship between church and state. Conference participants heard sociologist Will Herberg speak on the biblical basis of American democracy, Missouri senator Stuart Symington declare that the current crisis demanded a major reworking of the relationship between religion and government, and conservative intellectual Russell Kirk decry the dangers of removing faith from public education.Footnote ³¹

Like its fellow spiritual-industrial-complex programs, the Foundation for Religious Action enjoyed a government imprimatur, though at times the organization served less as the state’s ally and more as its mouthpiece. Shortly after the foundation’s incorporation in June 1954, Eisenhower gave it a public endorsement. The following month in a private meeting with the foundation’s co-founder, the Episcopalian theologian Charles W. Lowry, Vice President Richard Nixon voiced the need “for taking the issue of Communism … to the church members and religious-minded people of America.” Nixon also promised the foundation full support, even offering to help it secure whatever financial backing necessary. The vice president became sufficiently comfortable working with the foundation’s board of directors, so relaxed, in fact, that by September 1954 he was including them in covert religious operations in Vietnam.Footnote ³²

Of course the best support the Eisenhower administration could offer the foundation domestically came in the form of endorsement and participation. Eisenhower attended the inaugural National Conference on the Spiritual Foundations of American Democracy, telling the assembled dignitaries, and through newspaper accounts the rest of the nation, that “democracy is nothing in the world but a spiritual conviction.” Nixon arrived the following year and shook his head at the “harsh fact that religious truth is not yet a controlling force in world affairs.” Laments like these carried farther than the conference centers of Washington, D.C. The commanding officer of Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, for instance, after hearing of the first conference, designated one Sunday on his base as “Foundation for Religious Action Day,” bidding his men not only to attend church but also to donate money to religious groups affiliated with the foundation.Footnote ³³

INTENDED AND UNINTENDED POLICY EFFECTS

Why do these national faith drives and the spiritual-industrial complex behind them matter? Imagine an average American in 1954: middle thirties and middle class. She may have thumbed through literature produced by the Foundation for Religious Action or been one of the millions who viewed the Freedom Train in the late 1940s, more likely participating in the “Interfaith Day” of her community’s “Rededication Week.” Chances are better that she signed the Freedom Scroll at a local firehouse or shopping center, pledging her belief in God, her unflinching patriotism, and her disdain for atheistic Communism. She may not make it a habit of attending religious services on Independence Day, but she probably hears the church bells ringing on July 4. Even if there are no churches nearby, she may have received a CPL flyer in the utility bill. And if she reads a newspaper, listens to the radio, watches television, or looks at highway billboards, she cannot avoid noticing the RIAL advertising campaigns each year that beseech her to find God.

As a matter of simple probabilities, chances are best of all that this ordinary American will participate in the postwar religious revival then in full stride. In fact, at no other point in history did higher percentages of Americans pray, belong to churches, and believe in God. By the mid-1950s, the engineers of the spiritual-industrial complex could celebrate efforts that had corresponded with one of America’s most statistically significant periods of religious renewal. They had, at least in numerical evaluations, achieved their intended policy effects. Eisenhower’s personal pastor declared the nation to be in the midst of “the greatest moral resurgence and spiritual awakening in the history of our land.” Sales of the Bible doubled that of the previous decade, seminaries operated at full capacity, the rabbinate boasted record enrollments, and religious titles accounted at times for up to half of the national bestseller list.Footnote ³⁴

From the classroom to the living room, Americans during the 1950s prayed more visibly than ever before. Such expressions of piety had been part of American life since the beginning, but during Eisenhower’s first term, prayer became an exercise in social acceptance and public duty. The president prayed before cabinet meetings, athletes prayed before events, followers of Norman Vincent Peale prayed for wealth, celebrities prayed for continued popularity, schoolchildren prayed for protection, and the obese prayed for weight loss. Popular magazines featured articles on proper prayer technique. Prayer guides like Pray Your Weight Away and Go with God made their way to the bestseller list. Those too busy or uncreative to conceive their own entreaties to the Almighty could pick up the phone and call Dial-A-Prayer. Public opinion polling revealed the magnitude of the praying 1950s: 94 percent of Americans believed in the power of prayer, and 82 percent reported praying often or occasionally.Footnote ³⁵

Unlike some previous religious renewals, America’s growth in church membership in the 1950s can be closely measured. In 1951, American religious groups claimed a total of 88 million members. By 1961, these same denominations and faiths claimed more than 116 million, an impressive increase of 31 percent, especially since the U.S. population grew only 19 percent during the decade. The percentage of Americans who belonged to a church or synagogue rose steadily, setting records throughout the decade, from 57 percent in 1952 to 60.3 percent in 1955. While Protestants grew a healthy 23 percent, Catholics could claim an explosive 46 percent increase.Footnote ³⁶ Because such figures depended upon the calculations and, in many cases, estimations of religious leaders, they are inexact, but one cannot deny that something statistically extraordinary occurred during the 1950s.

Church attendance swelled as well. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Gallup pollsters routinely measured rates of attendance by asking Americans if they happened to attend religious services the previous week. Attendance sank slowly through the 1930s, reaching a nadir of 35 percent in 1942. By 1957, reported attendance had climbed steadily to approximately 50 percent. Recent studies conducted by sociologists suggest that Americans tend to exaggerate rates of attendance in opinion polls, but whether or not church attendance actually increased substantially during the 1950s, the polls reflected the normative values of religious participation. Another measure of this effect can be detected in the rate of people professing belief in a higher power. Undoubtedly, overwhelming majorities of Americans have always believed in God. In a 1947 survey, 94 percent of respondents admitted as much. But by early 1953, more than 99 percent professed a similar belief. It seems doubtful that nonbelievers disappeared altogether.Footnote ³⁷ Rather, during the height of Cold War spiritual mobilization, as religious belief became tantamount to patriotism, atheists and agnostics most likely chose to bury their doubts.Footnote ³⁸

Perhaps the most notable aspects of America’s postwar revival were not its religious accomplishments but, rather, the enemies they created—enemies drawn primarily from within the religious community. Religious critics did not necessarily object to the thought of the religious revival itself, but they did little to hide their contempt for the spiritual-industrial complex behind it. A Methodist pastor in Queens frowned upon the “revival by slogan and easy formula.” A Presbyterian church official bemoaned the fact that “most people seem to want God as you want a hot water bottle in the night—to get you over a temporary discomfort.” Seventh-Day Adventists called it “juke box religion.” Others began wondering if the construction of the Cold War as a spiritual struggle—the “Worship God so we can lick communism” effect, as Union Theological Seminary professor Robert McAfee Brown described it— had produced side effects. A Unitarian minister from San Francisco worried that if making “belief in God a test of proper hatred of communism” had in the end reduced notions of the Almighty “to the level of the fierce tribal deity of the early Old Testament.”Footnote ³⁹

In different words and phrases, the critics shared one inescapable conclusion: America’s postwar “revival” was no revival at all. And whether they called it the worship of worshipping, the growth of faith in faith, or the exaltation of mere attitudes to ultimacy, they pointed to the same sad fact. For them, the spiritual-industrial complex, that joint effort of government and business, had privileged visible acts over internal beliefs. It had created a broad umbrella of religious acceptance under which Americans could shelter themselves without troubling themselves, and this sucked valuable oxygen from the fires of what might have been a true national awakening. Eisenhower had warned his countrymen of the military-industrial complex, the concentration of power made necessary by postwar exigency, but he had also presided over the work of an equally tenuous religious collaboration. Whereas the former threatened liberty, the latter imperiled the vitality of American religiosity.

POLICY CHANGES

By the early 1960s, much of the spiritual-industrial complex had become a casualty, first of growing disinterest and then of conscious policy changes. Religious revival proved unsustainable over a long period of time. In the late 1950s, the signs were unmistakable that the crest was already receding. In 1957, a year often considered the apex of the postwar religious renewal, 69 percent of Americans believed that religion was “increasing its influence on American life.” Five years later, only 45 percent believed that religion was still expanding in influence. This percentage continued to fall, reaching a low of 33 percent by 1965. Questions like these were value-neutral. They did not ask Americans whether or not they approved of religion’s declining influence on society. Were that the case, most Americans would have deplored the return of secularization. But the renewal began shrinking in other statistical measures, too. Between 1960 and 1962, the percentage of Americans who were members of religious groups fell, as did the number of ordained clergy.Footnote ⁴⁰ By the time of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural, the Freedom Train was a distant memory, and the Freedom Scrolls were collecting dust. Church bells no longer rang in unison across the nation on July 4, the RIAL campaign’s ten-year run had ended (though a tamer version would reappear in future decades), and the Foundation for Religious Action was but a shadow of its former glory.

Why, then, did these ongoing faith drives and the spiritual-industrial complex behind them break down? There is no single, convincing answer. Rather, a change in the policy of religious revival was the combined result of several developments: altered Cold War assumptions, electoral calculations, the politicization of anticommunism, and policy constraints imposed by the courts. As with all policies, America’s spiritual-industrial complex built its plan of action on changeable assumptions. What the urgency of the early Cold War afforded the policy of revival in 1950, the conflict’s increasingly quotidian nature would take away a decade later. Nonbelievers did not become vessels of Communist spiritual domination, and the statistically impressive growth in American religiosity did not make victory in the Cold War any more attainable. When the torch passed “to a new generation of Americans” in 1961, it signaled also the demise of those fears articulated by Clark, Dulles, and Eisenhower—fears that America was too spiritually weak to lead the Free World in combat against a pseudo-religious foe. John F. Kennedy evinced no such worry. By then, policymakers were more concerned about the missile gap than the religious chasm. Material strength became the centerpiece of his general election campaign. There would be no firm delineations of the Communist faith—no cautionary tales of materialism gone sour—but rather a battery of observed Soviet accomplishments and American failures. “Communist power has been, and is now, growing faster than is our own,” Kennedy informed the attendees of the VFW’s 1960 national convention, “And by Communist power I mean military power, economic power, scientific and educational power, and political power.”Footnote ⁴¹ The spiritual toll of material strength, best articulated with the pen of Toynbee, seemed a necessary risk in the shadow of Sputnik.

Changes in assumptions explain in part why American leaders began to de-emphasize spiritual solutions to the Cold War in favor of more concrete, material approaches, but Kennedy’s personal faith was also a factor. The anti-Catholic sentiment stirred by Alfred Smith’s 1928 campaign for the presidency hung like a specter over the Kennedy campaign. As the first Catholic nominee since Smith, Kennedy and his advisers had to walk a fine line between demonstrating faith on the one hand and assuaging fears that the Democratic nominee was too Catholic on the other. Kennedy was politically sensitized to the “so-called religious issue.” In his watershed address before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960, he argued that there were “real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues.” He decried any president who would accept instructions on public policy from religious organizations. He promised to make decisions based on his personal conscience rather than his religious convictions.Footnote ⁴² Kennedy would not and could not continue in the role of high priest as Truman and Eisenhower had before him. The office of the presidency, so integral to the spiritual-industrial complex through the first fifteen years of the Cold War, terminated its leadership role.

Politicization also contributed to a change in American policy as anticommunism became more of a contentious issue throughout the 1950s. In short, the spiritual-industrial complex became a casualty of politics. Policymakers began objecting more stridently to politician’s insincere appropriation of religion in the name of anticommunism—a trend that journalist William Lee Miller cynically labeled “piety along the Potomac.” One of the first major politicians to speak out against the public displays of religiosity then at the center of the spiritual-industrial complex was Matthew Neely, the eighty-year-old senator from West Virginia. On March 28, 1955, in a speech before the United Autoworkers Convention in Cleveland, Neely questioned Eisenhower’s public use of religion. “Eisenhower never joined a church until after he became President,” Neely observed, “Next Monday, I don’t want to have to see in the papers a picture of the President and a story that he attended this or that church.” And then the kicker: “Any man who tries to parade his religion that way before the public is ungodly.” Neely’s colleagues in the Senate were quick to repudiate his criticisms of Eisenhower, but he augured the reintroduction of partisan politics back into government-sponsored religious anticommunism.Footnote ⁴³

In the wake of McCarthyism, some well-established policies of the spiritual-industrial complex also came under fire. In June 1955, for instance, army intelligence released the ill-fated pamphlet “How to Spot a Communist,” which was designed to give troops the tools of detection necessary to purge their ranks of Marxist traitors. Still in the heyday of its spiritually-centered character guidance program, the army devoted one-third of the booklet to religion. “While it is generally believed that Communists are atheists as a result of their political indoctrination,” it declared, “it appears likely that many find in Marxist philosophy a substitute for religion in which they had previously lost faith.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Arguments like these were common in years past, but influential newspapers like the New York Times lampooned the enterprise. “One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the contents of the pamphlet,” opined the paper’s editorial board. The ACLU worried that it would encourage Americans to spy on one another, and rather than making a stand, the army confiscated and quickly destroyed all pamphlet copies.Footnote ⁴⁵

More instrumental in policy changes was the growing conclusion among liberal politicians and journalists that virulent anticommunism was becoming a weapon of the American right. Worries about the fusion of anticommunism, politics, and religion in the military intensified over the next several years and culminated in the summer of 1961 after Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a widely publicized letter to President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The twenty-two-page missive, which became known as the Fulbright Memorandum, charged that military education programs carried out under the aegis of anticommunism were becoming platforms for “Radical Right-Wing” political propaganda. When the memo leaked, conservative political leaders howled in protest, framing the issue in terms of both security and liberty. But the Department of Defense immediately issued a directive that restrained officers from championing conservative policies during public duties and appearances.Footnote ⁴⁶

The spiritual-industrial complex began as a bipartisan endeavor with contributors drawn from across America’s political spectrum, but the national emphasis on faith and the evils of Communism provided fertile soil for the recrudescence of conservatism and evangelicalism. Conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk grounded their ideology firmly within a religious framework. Meanwhile, conservative writers like Whittaker Chambers and Clare Boothe Luce helped to fashion the anticommunist zeitgeist into a weapon by which liberalism could be bludgeoned. Communism was evil, they reasoned, because it put too much faith in the improvement of human nature and the creation of a heaven on earth. So too did liberalism. In a clear swipe at the New Deal, Luce once quipped that “no Christian saint ever had more faith in the power of God’s grace to transfigure his own nature, than a Communist has in the power of State [sic] ownership of electricity and plumbing to transfigure all human nature.” These intellectuals were joined by conservative Christian leaders, who often mixed religious elucidation with political instruction. In the early 1950s, evangelist Billy James Hargis fashioned his anticommunist Christian Crusade into a radio and direct-mail empire. Similarly, Australian-born psychiatrist turned lay preacher Fred Schwarz operated a traveling anticommunist school, which became a favorite networking site for suburban conservatives.Footnote ⁴⁷ The spiritual-industrial complex was the product of remarkable consensus among the powerbrokers of American society. When that widely held agreement frayed under the weight of political debates, so too did the policy of religious revival.

The courts provided the spiritual-industrial complex with its coup de grâce. The policy constraints of state-sponsored religious revival were too great. Though state actors were ever cognizant of the First Amendment, often choosing tacit rather than tangible policies, it was a matter of time until the courts evaluated the spiritual-industrial complex through the lens of the Establishment Clause. In its most contentious and publicized decisions since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Supreme Court pulled the constitutional rug out from underneath the entire endeavor. In Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and in Abington School District v. Schempp a year later, the court specifically invalidated prayer and Bible reading in public schools. The precedent carried beyond the nation’s public schools, serving as a shot across the bow of state promotion of religion. The military, for instance, abandoned the religious components of its character guidance program in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions. When asked about the Engel decision in a press conference, Kennedy noted that people were divided in their reactions, but that if they truly supported their Constitution, they would follow the Supreme Court decisions “even when we may not agree with them.” Then, in a savvy political pivot, he argued that by removing prayer from public schools, the court had given parents an opportunity to reinforce their children’s religious development at home.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was an argument for the re-privatization of spirituality.