AT THE END OF THE WAR, religious Americans celebrated victory over Germany and Japan along with all other Americans. Aside from posing a seemingly existential threat to religion and democracy, the war had raised difficult questions of faith and morality, and few mourned its passing in 1945. “We lift our hearts in thanksgiving this day for the assurance that the threat of the totalitarian form of government has been destroyed,” preached Benjamin Hersey, a New York Universalist, upon the death of Hitler and the capitulation of Germany. Few disagreed.1
But joy at war’s end could not hide the divisions within the churches that resulted from the war in the first place. There is a myth, particularly powerful and enduring, that because World War II was a “good” war, it was also a war of consensus and solidarity. If they had once sought to avoid Europe’s strife, the American people patriotically united as one behind a noble cause after Germany and Japan had forced war upon them. Reinforced subsequently through film and television, and maintained by the demonstrable evil of Nazism, the notion that World War II was “the best war ever” remains as popular as ever in the American imagination.2
And of course it was a good war, in the sense that the adversaries, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, were aggressive tyrannies bent on regional if not global hegemony. (Yet even this traditional narrative has come under criticism from recent historians who have chronicled the terrible costs inflicted by the Allies.) It was not an especially good war, however, when we consider domestic solidarity and consensus. For at the time the war was deeply controversial; the tide of patriotic fervor released by Pearl Harbor did not completely wash away dissent, pacifism, anticommunism, or isolationism. If Franklin Roosevelt conceived of the war as a crusade for religion, liberty, and democracy, it was for the American people, especially the churches, a “cautious crusade” driven by “a cautious patriotism.”3
STILL, the heady mix of patriotism and faith traditionally found in wartime was not entirely absent. Religion still had its uses in the presentation of war aims and in mobilizing support. In fact, the president himself led the way by sanctifying the war as a holy enterprise. In addition to the Four Freedoms and numerous speeches portraying America’s war as a struggle for religious liberty, Roosevelt set aside national days of prayer and thanksgiving. In a 1942 fireside chat, he led Americans in prayer for “the cause of all free mankind” and “victory over the tyrants who would enslave all free men and Nations.” Perhaps Roosevelt’s most famous prayer, suitably couched in the lyrical, foreboding style of the King James Bible, came shortly after D-Day and the invasion of Europe. He asked God for “strength” and “Faith” in this almighty battle against “the unholy forces of our enemy.” He also asked Americans not to set aside only one day of prayer, as had been his custom, but to pray continuously.4
Other wartime leaders used the rhetoric of faith to build support for America’s war and to demonize the enemy. Vice President Henry Wallace, a modernist Social Gospeler whose dabbles in New Age spirituality would damage him politically, perceived the war in Rooseveltian terms of a “fight between a free world and a slave world,” with the “ideal of freedom … derived from the Bible with its extraordinary emphasis on the dignity of the individual.” Fascism and Nazism were antithetical to faith, while “Democracy is the only true political expression of Christianity.” But Wallace also had darker, more apocalyptic visions. In this same, bizarre speech, he invoked Satan—by name—five times. Stranger still were the rhetorical links he made between fighting Nazism abroad and injustice at home. Wallace was shrill not only out of a desire for victory, but because Hitler’s Nazism seemed to be a twisted, populist bid for the allegiance of the “common man,” and thus a direct threat to Wallace’s own Christian progressivism:
Through the leaders of the Nazi revolution, Satan now is trying to lead the common man of the whole world back into slavery and darkness. For the stark truth is that the violence preached by the Nazis is the devil’s own religion of darkness. So also is the doctrine that one race or one class is by heredity superior and that all other races or classes are supposed to be slaves. The belief in one Satan-inspired Fuhrer … is the last and ultimate darkness.
It was as if Wallace had channeled the spirit of William Jennings Bryan and his firebrand, fundamentalist populism. But he was just getting warmed up. “In a twisted sense, there is something almost great in the figure of the Supreme Devil operating through a human form, in a Hitler who has the daring to spit straight into the eye of God and man.” Americans now realized they could never appease such evil: “No compromise with Satan is possible.” Instead, the “people’s revolution is on the march, and the devil and all his angels can not prevail against it. They can not prevail, for on the side of the people is the Lord.” He then quoted scripture—Isaiah 40:29–31, on the awesome powers God granted to the righteous—and concluded: “Strong in the strength of the Lord, we who fight in the people’s cause will never stop until that cause is won.”5
Less dramatic but probably more effective was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of D-Day, who had not yet found God—that would come later, during his presidency—but who nonetheless used religion to steel his troops for the trials that lay in store. Instead of adopting Wallace’s imagery of Armageddon or Roosevelt’s language of the Bible, Eisenhower invoked the ideas of an American civic religion, thought to date back to the Puritans, that fused patriotic destiny with moral virtue. Eisenhower did not quote Christ, but John Winthrop. “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months,” he said to the D-Day soldiers hours before they landed on the shores of Normandy. “The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you …. And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”6
For their part, many churches and synagogues followed suit. While some Christians remained ambivalent about the war, others rallied to the cause and threw their support behind a war for freedom against fascism and religion against paganism and atheism. The Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, particularly the fact that it was a surprise attack that violated treaty obligations while diplomats were still negotiating, provoked a furious response. Until then, Japan had avoided much of the American furor over religious liberty: the Japanese did not appear to have an explicitly anti-Christian program as did the Nazis and Soviets, and missionaries to Japan formed a vocal body of pro-Japanese sentiment in America. For many, Pearl Harbor changed all this. American Protestants had long prioritized the written word, an objective, lasting testament for all to read themselves, as the rock of Christian civilization. Pearl Harbor therefore seemed, in a manner perhaps only Hitler would dare, to defy all civilized behavior and Christian norms. “Japan not only slaughtered Americans last Sunday,” preached Albert Day of the First Methodist Church of Pasadena, California, a week after Pearl Harbor. “She assaulted that faith in the pledged word without which neither men nor nations can achieve understanding and cooperation. She cleverly deceived us but basely betrayed that mutual trust which is humanity’s only bulwark against chaos.” Not surprisingly, after Pearl Harbor it did not take long to uncover Japan’s supposed plot against religious freedom. Time reported ominously that the Japanese had abolished Christianity in Filipino schools and that Tokyo vowed to shut down Christian churches throughout Asia that did not openly support Japanese policies. It all added up, the magazine warned in a play on the phrase the Japanese used to describe their ambitions, to an “Un-Christian Co-Prosperity” sphere in East Asia. U.S. diplomats abroad reported accounts of intensifying Japanese cruelty toward U.S. missionaries and other civilians in Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and occupied China.7
The spirit of righteous nationalism pervaded the armed forces, as well. The ranks of the chaplaincy swelled in all three branches of the military (a separate air force did not yet exist), and among them were few if any doubters of either the faith or the cause. One of the most popular songs during the war, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” told the story of a navy chaplain’s attempts to rally troops under heavy Japanese fire. When some members of the clergy back home complained that the song was blasphemous and warmongering, a chaplain stationed in the South Pacific responded angrily that “out here” he and the fighting men sang the song “with religious zeal.” He thanked God “that there are men in the ministry who still have sufficient practical and immediate faith in the Almighty … to stand on battleship in an hour of dark … and sustain the men by saying, ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!’ ” This was in stark moral contrast to the comforts of home and the “ministers who are so far detached from the struggle as to be wholly unaware that it exists.” Another hit song among enlisted men was the sanguinary “God Is My Co-Pilot,” in which the protagonist “strafed Japs swimming from boats we were sinking” and “blew a Jap pilot to hell out of the sky.”8
Remarkably, and crucially for the war effort overall, the patriotic, interventionist mood enveloped institutions that had for years fought against the drift to intervention. In the first of many declarations of support, the Federal Council of Churches, once steadfastly opposed to American belligerency, organized a 1942 petition in support of the war signed by nearly a hundred of the nation’s leading Protestant figures. A year later, the FCC reiterated its support for the war and declared, controversially for many liberal Protestants, that peace could only come through military victory. Church Peace Union abandoned its antiwar stance to call for a “complete military victory” to secure a peace that would be “backed by an international police force.” Individual denominations also pledged their support and cooperation. Methodists who had once been among the most passionately pro-labor and antiwar of the mainline churches now condemned workers’ strikes as unpatriotic and called on the government to enforce a quick settlement in industrial disputes. The Catholic hierarchy had been wary of war before Pearl Harbor, but now they too presented a united front. In November 1942, the Catholic Archbishops and Bishops of the United States, the most important body of American Catholic leaders, officially declared its unreserved support for Roosevelt and the war effort (even as it expressed reservations about the administration’s encouragement of women to take industrial jobs while working men enlisted in the service). Given the strongly isolationist sentiment among Catholics before the war, this was vital support indeed.9
Just as important was the often shrill support for the war by renowned individual clergy. The 1940s remained a time when religious leaders were national public intellectuals and could command not only audiences of millions over the radio, but access to the nation’s most important secular newspapers and magazines. Because Roosevelt had declared America’s cause to be virtuous and moral, it was important for the recognized guardians of virtue and morality to pronounce a similar message. And so they did. If Francis Cardinal Spellman had had his doubts about intervention in 1940, he most emphatically did not in 1942. In wonderfully purple, patriotic prose, Spellman recalled the moment when the Japanese, “with fire and brimstone,” forced war upon peace-loving Americans. “America’s throat was clutched, her back was stabbed, her brain was stunned,” he wrote of Pearl Harbor; “but her great heart still throbbed.” That day, “America began the fight to save her life.” The archbishop even offered all Americans, not only members of his Catholic flock, a wartime “Prayer for Victory” that was, characteristically, equally pious and pugnacious in linking the sanctity of family and nation:
Lord, give us Victory.
In the clearer visioning of
The mission of America;
The glory of manhood;
The achievement of paternity;
The beauty of motherhood;
The sacredness of childhood;
The inviolability of our souls, our homes, our
nation, our altars.
Lord, give us victory;
Not alone in the might of our arms,
But in the righteousness of our cause,
The defense of the defenseless,
The succoring of the weak
The shackling of Injustice, Greed and Passion;
Lord, give us Victory.10
Spellman had always been a nationalist and never a pacifist, so his turn to support the war was not especially surprising. More remarkable was the change of heart by many pacifists, mostly Protestant, who renounced their peace witness to support what they deemed not only a necessary war, but a noble one. Norman Thomas, the inspirational leader of American Socialists, quietly abandoned his Christian pacifism after Pearl Harbor. Others followed his lead. “If many of us didn’t see it yesterday, let it pass,” pleaded a Congregationalist minister and former peace crusader from Chicago. “We see it today.”11
Unlike Spellman and Thomas, Right Reverend William T. Manning, an Episcopal Bishop and rector at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, FDR’s preferred church in New York City, had been a consistent supporter of aid to Britain and American intervention. After Pearl Harbor, he focused his efforts not only on rallying support but on marginalizing pacifists and doubters. “We all know what the issues are in this great World Battle,” he declared in an August 1942 sermon. “America, and all that America stands for in human life, is in mortal peril.” The fate of the free world hung in the balance, which made reflective soul-searching, normally a most Christian quality, a form of sabotage. “No Church which is true to its principles, and to its Mission in this World, can stand lukewarm, or half-hearted, or apathetic in a conflict such as this.” To those who called themselves prophets of peace, Manning had only this to say: “there will be no Peace, and no new World Order, unless our Armed Forces, and those of our Allies, win this War.”12
Manning’s excoriation of outright pacifists and ambivalent doubters was not a random outburst. As we shall see, conscientious objection and condemnation of American strategy and military tactics were common among the faithful, and not only in the traditional peace churches, which explains why Manning was so eager to mount a public relations campaign. Led by an otherwise implausible alliance of Spellman and Father John A. Ryan, Catholic leaders launched a vigorous defense of the just war tradition, and with it the idea that pacifism was not synonymous with Christianity. In a just war, explained Ryan, a Christian did not in fact have the right to follow the dictates of his or her conscience over the demands of government. And World War II was exactly such a just war. “No man who is acquainted with Catholic moral teaching can honestly be a pacifist,” he concluded shortly after U.S. entry into the war. In a war to defend democratic and Christian values, said others, it was the pacifist who suffered from a shortage of morality. At Union Theological Seminary, president Henry Sloane Coffin took the highly unusual step of publicly denouncing those of his students who refused, on grounds of Christian conscience, to register for the draft.13
While the leaders of liberal Protestantism wrestled with their recalcitrant and unenthusiastic members, conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists had no such problems. True, many had embraced a hard-shell isolationism before 1941, while some, such as Gerald L. K. Smith, had adopted an anti-Semitic hostility toward fighting a Jewish war. But while Christian conservatives had often been opposed to the government, they were passionately patriotic, which eased their post–Pearl Harbor transition to supporting the war. Their anti-statism, moreover, instinctively alerted them to the dangers of totalitarianism in which a single leader could dominate the lives of ordinary citizens. And perhaps most important, just as Mormons, Catholics, and Jews had learned in previous conflicts, supporting the war effort would alleviate concerns among the rest of the population about the “eccentric” ways of the evangelical subculture. Youth for Christ, an important new group of young evangelicals, staged patriotic revival meetings in the United States and for U.S. forces overseas. Aimee Semple McPherson, the nation’s leading Pentecostal, did likewise. In 1942, she held a war bond rally in Los Angeles that raised over $150,000 in a single hour. “How many of you would like to see Hitler covered with boils from head to foot?” she called out. “Well, I would!” This was a noteworthy conversion for a group of people who normally distrusted the growth of government power. But the most astonishing about-face came from William Bell Riley, who throughout the interwar years had accused Jews of propagating Darwinism as a way to weaken America and dominate the world. He changed his tune in 1941, when he abandoned anti-Semitism (at least in public) and accused Nazism of being “the philosophy of evolution in action” and Hitler with being “the BEAST-MAN!” Riley even revived the old World War I charge that Germany was the home of biblical Higher Criticism and atheist philosophy, which Hitler was adapting to a new era to bring about German world domination.14
So overwhelming and cohesive was Christian conservative support for the war, and so ambivalent were liberals, that World War II marked a decisive shift in religious attitudes toward patriotism. After two decades of being portrayed as extremists, the war offered Christian conservatives a lifeline back into the mainstream. In the interwar period, fundamentalists had stridently attacked the hedonism of American society, the plausibility of modern science, and the legitimacy of the U.S. government (especially the New Deal). Some had even flirted with fascism and anti-Semitism. But, aside from Darwinism, World War II settled many of these issues so decisively that they were no longer a matter of debate, while the ethos of wartime sacrifice brought the conservatives’ stern morality back into fashion. Because Christian conservatives had always loved their country even when they hated their government, they felt completely free to support a war that provided a clear-cut crusade for religion, democracy, and American security.
On the other hand, liberals and other heirs to modernism still had difficulty overcoming their bitter experience with ultrapatriotism during the Great War. They were just as patriotic as fundamentalists and evangelicals, but they now saw dissent as a form of patriotism because it would protect Americans from their more aggressive impulses. This proved to be a most controversial stance in wartime, and Christian conservatives used it to discredit religious liberalism. Patriotism does not usually sit well with ambivalence or moral self-reflection, so it is no surprise that conservative clarity began to prevail over liberal soul-searching. For some liberals, then, it was essential that they support the war not only to preserve freedom and democracy in the great crises overseas, but to protect themselves in religious politics at home. Those “who are commonly rated as patriotic belong almost exclusively to the Fundamentalist sect,” complained a United Presbyterian educator from Chicago in a letter to Niebuhr. Their patriotism “has become one of the worst incriminations against Modernism.” This was why prowar liberals like Niebuhr were so important, for they showed “that not every liberal theologian is taking to the woods.”15
World War II enabled conservatives to rescue a reputation that had been tarnished by their political and theological extremism of the previous two decades, for their uncompromising patriotism was now very much in tune with the national mood. Victory over Germany in May 1945 and Japan in August not only brought widespread celebration but also provided the best example of a civil religion of American righteousness. Purity of faith and nation had prevailed over the forces of paganism, atheism, and tyranny. God carried America to victory and ensured that the devastations of war would remain far from its shores. In this heady atmosphere, it was no surprise that evangelicalism surged in the armed forces. Writing in the American Journal of Sociology, the FCC’s F. Ernest Johnson was astonished by the growth of faith in the military, especially when compared to civilians. The triumph of a righteous America sped the process of evangelizing the military, but it was also encouraged by evangelicals at home who now viewed the U.S. military as a mission field in itself. In turn, the armed forces encouraged religion as an ideological glue that would hold together a massive body of soldiers who had only just enlisted. To speed the process, the State Department and the newly founded United Service Organizations drafted prowar religious leaders, such as Henry Sloane Coffin and Sherwood Eddy, to produce moral propaganda for the troops.16
President Truman therefore spoke for many when, in announcing Germany’s surrender in May 1945, he offered “thanks to the Providence which has guided and sustained us through dark days of adversity.” He spoke of “the debt” that Americans “owe to our God,” praised the nation’s “sacrifice and devotion” that won the war “with God’s help,” and asked people to “give thanks to Almighty God, who has strengthened us and given us the victory.” He then declared the first Sunday after VE Day to be an official day of national prayer. In August, Truman repeated these rites of civil religion in announcing the surrender of Japan. Again, he proclaimed a national day of prayer, and called “upon the people of the United States, of all faiths, to unite in offering our thanks to God for the victory we have won, and in praying that He will support and guide us into the paths of peace.”17
THE WAR SHOULD have been a time of unbridled, triumphalist nationalism. Given that the United States achieved victory on two fronts on two separate continents a world apart, all without suffering any physical damage itself, and given how wealthy the nation emerged after fifteen years of war and Depression, it would not have been a surprise had Americans treated world events as a total vindication of their way of life. And of course, many if not most Americans felt exactly this way, and celebrated accordingly. But many others did not, and most of those who questioned that the war provided confirmation of America’s goodness or disagreed that it had come at a worthwhile cost were religious Americans. Religious belief is often a source of dogmatic moral certainty, but it can also cause profound doubt and self-reflection, even among the most devoted. This seems to have been the case during World War II, for a sizable number of religious Americans did not support the war.
For obvious reasons, American Jews supported the war with near unanimity and Jewish pacifism was marginal to the point of irrelevance. Yet a sizable number of Protestants and a small but articulate and passionately motivated hard core of Catholics opposed America’s participation throughout World War II, even after Pearl Harbor and even with a victory that seemed to justify it all. Just as important were the much larger numbers of Christians who believed the United States should fight but who strongly denounced the ways in which the Roosevelt administration and U.S. military did the fighting. Either through pacifist opposition, halfhearted ambivalence, or moral criticism of military strategy and tactics, Christian dissent represented a major challenge to the self-satisfied triumphalism of self-righteous nationalism.
“Whatever … this war is named, there is one thing it is plainly not,” complained a prowar writer in the New Republic in June 1942. “It is not a Holy War. On the civilian front, it is being waged with less benefit of clergy than any major war of our history.” This was an exaggeration: faith-based antiwar movements had been major aspects of the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Philippine War, to say nothing of the religious character of the Loyalists during the American Revolution. Yet it was a valid point. The clergy had formed the moral core of pacifism in the 1920s and anti-interventionism in the 1930s, and many of them simply could not abandon the cause even after Pearl Harbor and Germany’s subsequent declaration of war upon the United States. With most secular pacifists abandoning the cause, absolutist pacifism became an almost exclusively faith-based phenomenon. But even those erstwhile pacifists who now supported the war did so reluctantly and with little enthusiasm or vigor. In its critique of the “church unmilitant,” the New Republic charged institutional religion with a dereliction of duty. Instead of rallying the American people to a noble but difficult cause, the clergy, especially the mainline Protestant clergy, were in a state of “spiritual immobilization” that was “notably lame, halting and sometimes shameful.”18
Both the State Department and the British Foreign Office were unsettled by the mood of the churches, and for good reason. In the Great War, almost all mainline Protestants, even those who had campaigned in the peace movement, had converted to the cause of the Wilsonian creed in 1917 before returning to the pacifist fold after postwar disillusionment had set in. But now, in 1941–42, thousands refused to budge from their opposition to war—all war, including this war. The traditional peace churches, among them Quakers and Mennonites, did not support World War II. Yet neither did many mainline Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, which posed a significant problem for the government and helps in part to explain why Roosevelt featured religion so prominently in his wartime proclamations. The mainline churches continued to claim the nation’s moral high ground and still counted millions among their flock. Though the laity did not always follow their preachers’ lead, the clergy nonetheless had an influential platform at their command. They were articulate and well-connected, and they could not be moved. “I feel sure that pacifists will do better to stick to our main business,” wrote Harry Emerson Fosdick to Reverend John Nevin Sayre in 1944, “proclaiming that this unspeakable horror now going on is war, is essentially and irredeemably war, that war reaches out for every new power and turns it to destructive purposes,” and that “all military strategy is an utter denial of Christian motives.” The “whole military business,” Fosdick concluded balefully, “is essentially antichristian.”19
As the New Republic feared, even many liberals who supported the war could not bring themselves to do so wholeheartedly. America itself was also a source of profound injustice, they said, especially on matters of race; Americans could not claim innocence or be absolved from responsibility for the world’s problems. “The rise of Hitlerism is no accident,” wrote one erstwhile pacifist who grudgingly supported what he called a “just war of unjust nations.” The Nazis were simply the most extreme manifestation of an evil that imperial Britain and France and racist America had allowed to flourish. “Had the democracies been what they are supposed to be, they would have been impregnable. Our defects gave Hitler and his allies their chance.” In a similar spirit, as late as 1944 the annual meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention passed a prowar platform but made a point of removing stridently patriotic phrases from the first draft. Perhaps learning from the FCC’s controversy, the Northern Baptists also emphatically declared, “we will not bless war.”20
Neither, for the most part, would missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic, who had always coexisted uneasily with imperialism. After the Great War, missionaries themselves began to appreciate just how closely associated their movement was with imperialism, and just how easily its conversion initiatives facilitated Western political and military dominance. Led by E. Stanley Jones, Sherwood Eddy, and other Social Gospel–minded evangelists, and prodded by the 1932 Laymen’s Report that reevaluated the purpose of mainline missionaries in a strikingly radical direction, Protestant mission boards increasingly stressed their independence from, even outright opposition to, great power politics. On balance, this did not change with the war, even though many within the single largest group of evangelists overseas, the China missionaries, had come around to the idea of using military force to fend off the encroachment of Japan, and even though some liberal missionaries, like Eddy, supported the war. Throughout 1941, missionaries across the theological spectrum pressed their case for peace with Japan. Bishop James E. Walsh and Father James M. Drought of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society met privately with Roosevelt and Hull to argue that a clash was not inevitable and that Japanese had genuine grievances. Similarly, E. Stanley Jones badgered Roosevelt and the State Department to accept his services as an intermediary between Tokyo and Washington; he even entered into freelance discussions with Japanese officials, suggested that New Guinea could be turned over to Japan as a way to appease its desire for territory, and, less than a week before Pearl Harbor, vowed to bring peace to the Pacific through Christian understanding. Needless to say, none of them received much encouragement—or success—yet they refused to budge. Even in 1942, the Foreign Missions Conference, the largest body of mainline missionaries, pointedly refused to sanctify the war. Instead, as Christians they stressed their “supranational and truly ecumenical loyalty” to all peoples, ally and adversary alike.21
Just as novel was the emergence of a full-blown pacifist movement in the Catholic Church. By accepting the legitimacy of the Augustinian just war, Catholics essentially denied that a Christian could ever be a pacifist. The true Christian should not condone war except under certain circumstances and within certain rules outlined in just war doctrine, but this was much different from denying the validity of any war at any time under any circumstance. This was the position of the Vatican as well as the Catholic hierarchy in the United States, including those on the left such as John Ryan. Yet the Catholic Worker movement represented something different. Ryan, Spellman, and other Catholics had not supported intervention before December 7, 1941, but they had little hesitation in doing so afterward. Catholic Workers did not join them. In its first issue after Pearl Harbor, The Catholic Worker defiantly pledged to “continue our pacifist stand” against the surge of wartime patriotism. “We are still pacifists. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers.” Allied with like-minded souls in the Association of Catholic Conscientious Objectors, Catholic Workers extended their search for social justice by rejecting the validity of just war doctrine. No Christian could justify war, not even one against Nazi Germany.22
ASIDE FROM THE WAR ITSELF, four issues in particular troubled the consciences of American Christians: the draft, the Allied strategy of total war and unconditional surrender, Japanese internment, and the use of atomic weapons. On each of these issues, religion comprised the predominant strand of dissent because moralistic people of faith were much more likely to be ill at ease with the methods used to prosecute the war.
For the hard core of pacifists who refused to accept the moral meaning of the war, a clash between God’s law and U.S. law was inevitable. In September 1940, Congress passed the Selective Service Act and instituted the first peacetime draft in American history. Nonetheless, conscientious objectors refused to cooperate with draft boards, and even encouraged young men to defy the law by not registering. They continued to obstruct selective service after Pearl Harbor. While much of the rest of the nation prosecuted a foreign war with Old Testament fervor, conscientious objectors adhered to a New Testament gospel of love. “When Jesus said that His disciples should not resist evil, should turn the other cheek, should love their enemies, that His kingdom is not of this world,” wrote Dan West of the Church of the Brethren in 1943, “we thought He meant that for us too.” Friends, Mennonites, and Brethren continued their historic stand against war, but this time they were joined by mainline Protestants, radical Catholics, and even liberal Catholics from establishment institutions like the Catholic University of America.23
This time, unlike during the Great War, their right to do so was supported by Christians who supported the war. When it looked as if Congress was going to resurrect the draft laws of 1917, which limited conscientious objection to the traditional peace churches, Roswell P. Barnes of the Federal Council testified before the House Committee on Military Affairs to urge lawmakers to broaden their definition. To Roosevelt and the Senate Military Affairs Committee, the FCC’s Walter Van Kirk likened conscientious objection to the freedom of religion FDR had enshrined in the Four Freedoms. Other religious bodies followed suit, including the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church and the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. Even Coffin, an ardent interventionist who had publicly censured COs at Union Theological Seminary, used his close personal ties to Secretary of War Henry Stimson to ensure that pacifists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation received a hearing on Capitol Hill. These efforts were largely successful. The Selective Service Act included a watered-down definition of who could claim CO status and provided for the establishment of alternative forms of service through domestic Civilian Public Service camps that were administered and run by the peace churches themselves. Toward the end of the war, moreover, the FCC called upon Congress to terminate the draft once victory had been achieved. More surprising was the director of Selective Service, General Lewis Hershey, whose ancestors were Mennonites and who proved sympathetic to the more capacious definition of COs.24
Conscientious objectors were often vilified as cowards and shirkers, but for COs the moral stakes involved were worth the sacrifice. “Bear in mind that each of us is responsible for the actions of our government,” admonished one conscientious objector, “and if these actions exceed the limits” of morality “the guilt is ours.” This was no idle warning. According to most COs, by 1943–44 the U.S. government was engaged in warfare of a most dubious morality. The intensity of conscientious objection actually increased as the war dragged on and as victory neared. Though the true scale of Nazi atrocities was becoming clear, the Allies’ own strategy was increasingly brutal and, said an increasing number of Americans, immoral. Much to the fury of the Soviets, who had borne the brunt of the Nazi war machine, the British and Americans could not open a second European front until the invasion of Italy in 1943. Even this did little to blunt the Nazi war effort, and the Normandy invasion was still a year away. But in the skies, the Allies had superiority at a much earlier point. Their obvious recourse was to pound Germany into submission from the air. At the same time, U.S. war planners arrived upon a similar solution to their inability to mount a direct assault against Japan. But the resort to what critics called “obliterative bombing” triggered furious protests. From Europe, victims of German aggression could not fathom why the Allies would imitate their indiscriminate tactics. The British writer Vera Brittain condemned Allied bombing as immoral, while continentals who had endured years of German occupation now found themselves in a new line of fire. “How can this conduct be justified before the reason and conscience of mankind?” pleaded Cardinal Jozef-Ernest Van Roey, the head of the Belgian Catholic Church. In the United States, Fosdick led other prominent clergy in protesting the “carnival of death,” while others exhorted that by allowing the killing of “innocent women and children,” even if they were German or Japanese, “we Christians must stand our share of the blood-guilt.”25
The dissent of Protestants like Fosdick and A. J. Muste called into question the Allies’ claims to moral superiority, but a much more serious challenge emerged from the Catholic Church. Pope Pius XII did not much like fascism or Nazism, but while he sympathized with Allied objectives he could not bring himself to support a war that would devastate the European continent. Instead of rallying to one side or the other, Pius continued treading the careful line of neutrality he had laid down in the two years before 1941. However, in 1943–44, he leveled a strong moral condemnation of the Allied campaign. That same year, fearing a repeat of the inconclusive end to World War I, Roosevelt and Churchill vowed they would accept nothing less than Germany’s unconditional surrender. However, Pius believed that unconditional surrender was unnecessarily brutal and merciless, and he criticized indiscriminate aerial bombing as tantamount to mass murder. That it was mainly Catholic countries—Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, Poland—that bore the brunt of Allied bombing made it even more difficult for the Vatican to accept, even as an unfortunate necessity of war. The Vatican’s polite requests to Roosevelt that “the civil populations be spared the horrors of war” went answered but unheeded. As the war ended, the Vatican complained bitterly that the United States had never “been able to comprehend the fatal damage which they have inflicted upon this continent, casting it into the depths of misery by aerial bombardment.”26
Following this papal lead, American Catholics condemned Allied strategic bombing. Not only antiwar pacifists but Catholic just war ethicists in the United States issued stern moral rebukes of their own and likened Allied bombing to a war crime. Perhaps the strongest, most eloquent denunciation came from John Ford, a Jesuit priest whose detailed, theologically informed article, “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing,” became required reading for American Catholics and Protestants much as Vera Brittain’s “Massacre by Bombing” had before.27
The sordid story of Japanese internment also provoked vigorous religious dissent, this time over race as well as militarism. Deemed an internal security threat, hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens, were forcibly imprisoned in camps scattered throughout the American West. It was a drastic thing to do, but most Americans approved of internment as a matter of wartime necessity. Typically, however, many if not most Christian leaders did not approve, including in the West. In the shadow of the rugged Sawtooth Mountains, Reverend Emery E. Andrews delivered one of the most impassioned moral protests against internment. Andrews had lost his entire congregation to the war, for his parishioners had been Japanese Americans. Speaking to the 1943 Idaho Baptist Assembly, he excoriated America for its violation of basic liberties at home while it professed to defend them abroad and pleaded that the Japanese Americans were innocent. Upon hearing that his congregants were to be locked up, Andrews confessed that “two conflicting emotions stirred within.” He would either “become the most ardent and fanatical conscientious objector” or “I would seek revenge on those who were responsible for such injustice to an innocent people.” In the end he did neither, though he did become one of the war’s sterner critics. “What a sad commentary on our civilization,” he lamented. “This we have done in Christian America to people just as loyal as you or I. How loyal would you be if you were treated the same way that these people are treated? I would not be loyal. There are some things I would not fight for, even in America.” Other western Christians, such as the Colorado Council of Churches, offered lonely voices of protest amid the anti-Japanese din. But opposition to internment was not confined simply to pacifist opponents of the war or preachers of Japanese American congregations. It was “important to go before the public and make an appeal in behalf of justice for our Japanese citizens,” Reinhold Niebuhr believed. “This is a time when people who keep their heads will have to work hard against the hysteria of the nation.”28
Perhaps no other event caused as much soul-searching as the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in the very last days of the war. President Harry Truman authorized the use of two atomic bombs on Japanese targets: Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9. Not long after, Tokyo sued for peace. Truman himself expressed no doubts, at least in public, although there is compelling evidence that privately he felt troubled by his decision even if he ultimately thought it was necessary. And Truman’s ambivalence was by no means exceptional. As Paul Boyer has noted, Americans reacted to the news of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a wide variety of emotions: exultation that the war had ended victoriously, relief that it had finished quickly, vindictive satisfaction that the “Japs” had been brought so low, discomfort about atomic warfare. These were certainly some of the emotions of those sitting in the nation’s pews. But from the pulpit, opinions were not so divided. Among the nation’s clergy, an overwhelming majority responded to the atomic bombs with trepidation, fear, and moral outrage. Thus as Boyer has also pointed out, “the greatest concentration of critical comment on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings came from the churches.” There was little triumphalism among the clergy. In fact, for many of them the war’s culmination in a mushroom cloud reignited their drive for world peace.29
Moral protest was not simply confined to the pacifist Protestant left. Supporters of a righteous, progressive war for democracy and human rights against Germany and Japan also voiced their outrage. One minister’s condemnation of the bomb as “moral degeneration” reflected widespread disgust. Thirty-four prominent church leaders signed an open letter to Truman to express their opposition to “an atrocity of a new magnitude” and to Truman’s “reckless and irresponsible” decision to commit “so colossal a crime.” Among the signatories was the missionary leader E. Stanley Jones, which was not surprising. Missionaries, many of whom had either lived in Japan or knew people who had, reacted to the bombings with a particular revulsion. “I am in soul agony over that Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima,” lamented William Axling, one of the leading Japan missionaries. “That is not war, it is mass murder. I hold no brief for the militarists who are in the saddle in Japan today but whatever Germany and they have done it is heart breaking to see my beloved America resorting to such diabolical measures.”30
This was typical stuff from Axling, who for years had criticized American racism and condescension toward Japan. Less expected was the moral criticism from those who had actually been in charge of the war effort. Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to Roosevelt and Truman during the war, believed the bomb was immoral because it killed not only through immediate destruction but through “poisonous” long-term radiation. As the first country to use nuclear weapons, Leahy charged, the United States “had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” It was a way of waging “uncivilized warfare” and represented “a modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man.”31
Among Protestants, the FCC used its institutional authority to assume a leading role in opposition to the bomb. Its first foray into the moral politics of nuclear weapons, an August 9 statement by John Foster Dulles and G. Bromley Oxnam, a Methodist Bishop and president of the Federal Council, was relatively tame. Writing after the attack on Nagasaki, Dulles and Oxnam hailed the wonders of American science and refrained from direct criticism of the bombings. But they also called on Truman to declare a halt to further use of the bomb and hinted that only international control of atomic energy would ensure peace. Privately, however, the FCC was much more pointed in its criticism. The same day as the Nagasaki bombing and the Dulles-Oxnam statement, Samuel McCrea Cavert, the FCC’s general secretary, wrote Truman that American Christians were “deeply disturbed” by atomic weapons “because of their necessarily indiscriminate destructive effects and because their use sets extremely dangerous precedent for the future of mankind.” Cavert instead urged Truman to regard the secret of splitting the atom and harnessing its power as being held in “trust for humanity” by the United States, and not as a weapon of war. Two weeks later, Richard Fagley of the FCC’s Commission on a Just and Durable Peace combined the moderate internationalism of the Dulles-Oxnam statement with the stridency of the Cavert letter. The discovery and use of the bomb, Fagley said in a statement, had brought on a “profound crisis of man” that could not be solved by the United States alone.32
Following logically from their wartime denunciations of strategic bombing, Catholic priests were almost uniformly opposed to the atomic bombing of Japan. Much more than even the most conservative forms of Protestantism, Catholicism viewed life as sacrosanct. The taking of human life was justified according to the just war tradition, but only under the most deliberately considered and circumscribed conditions. World War II fulfilled those just war requirements, but not by much and, for most Catholics, not until the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Then it became not only a war for democracy, which was just, but a war of self-defense, which was even more clearly just. Yet as we have seen, American Catholics and the Vatican together condemned many aspects of Allied strategy, especially strategic bombing and unconditional surrender. Their denunciations of the atomic bomb were therefore unsurprising, but their tone adopted an even greater sense of urgency. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper and a reliable indicator of papal opinion, condemned the atomic bomb as a “catastrophic conclusion” to a war full of “apocalyptic surprises.” Father John Ryan, who had done much to shape Catholic response to the upheavals of the 1930s, categorically condemned the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as immoral and unbecoming of American values. “Here is obliteration bombing with a vengeance and upon the largest scale,” he declared in a statement. Americans “must reflect upon what is in store,” in terms of both God’s infinite judgment and world politics when America’s adversaries obtained the atomic secret for themselves. Blunter still were Catholic pacifists, who simply condemned the atomic bombings as acts of “murder.”33
The sudden appearance of the bomb also raised the most profound existential questions of the kind that had preoccupied the greatest minds in Christianity and Judaism for centuries. For fundamentalists such as Carl McIntire, it was second nature to conclude that the atomic bomb “makes seem more real the Biblical statements of the earth’s destruction.” Paradoxically, then, the scientific mastery behind the bomb merely corroborated the conservative belief in an inerrant, literally true Bible. Yet even the liberal Christian Century observed that the “function of Christians is to make preparation for world’s end. For generations this fundamental aspect of the Christian faith has been ignored or relegated to the subconscious.” But after Hiroshima, eschatology now “confounds us at the very center of consciousness.” This was quite an admission for a modernist magazine that itself normally avoided eschatology—indeed, did not even realize that millions of conservative Christians believed in end times prophecies—which illustrates just how difficult it was to avoid questions about the meaning of life in the atomic age. Fortune magazine, not normally known for its philosophical or theological musings, predicted that the bomb would trigger a “religious awakening” and a “reaffirmation of Christian values” across America. After the war, Americans wanted to return to their normal lives, back to things the way they were before depression and war. But that was impossible, claimed Reverend Benjamin B. Hersey of the Church of the Divine Paternity in New York. “Back to what?” he asked his congregation in a sermon based around the unveiling of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the sixth and seventh chapters of the Book of Revelation. “The world as it was? O no, things have gone too far for that. There is no going back. That possibility vaporized with the steel tower on the New Mexican desert and in the explosions over Hiroshima” and Nagasaki.34
AND OF COURSE, while religion influenced the war, the war in turn exerted a profound, lasting effect upon American religion. We have already examined Roosevelt’s cementing of the interfaith civil religion that Washington, Lincoln, and Wilson had nurtured over the past century and a half. But the war had other effects, mostly by spurring spiritual mobilization and regeneration. While the idea that the interwar era marked a “depression” of religion has been exaggerated—only liberal mainline Protestantism declined, while fundamentalism, evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and Judaism all flourished—the war nonetheless triggered a process of tremendous growth and resurgence in virtually all corners of American religious life.35
In particular, spiritual mobilization spurred Christian conservatives forward. Contrary to popular belief, evangelicals and fundamentalists cared deeply about wider social, cultural, and political issues. As the government expanded first with the New Deal and then with the war, they realized they too would need to consolidate and speak as one if they wanted their voices heard. The effectiveness of the liberal Federal Council, which claimed to speak for the majority of Protestants, was an unending source of frustration for conservatives. But now, instead of simply lambasting the New Deal state and the FCC, conservatives used the “united action” ethos of the war to imitate them. Led by Reverend Carl McIntire, an indomitable, extremist Presbyterian, fundamentalists established the American Council of Christian Churches in 1941. Evangelicals followed with the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals two years later. At a time when internationalism was finally coming of age, the NAE enacted a form of collective security for America’s Christian conservatives. Still, by adopting “Cooperation Without Compromise” as its motto, the NAE made it clear it would not abandon the sanctity of sovereignty and autonomy that underpinned the Christian conservative worldview.36
Wartime spiritual mobilization also created space for political and social mobilization. For conservatives, this meant a push for moral reform. With parents away fighting or working long hours, young people had more free time on their hands than ever before. The result was a full-scale moral panic over an epidemic of juvenile delinquents. Evangelicals mobilized Youth for Christ to divert gangs of wayward adolescents away from the boredom that led to petty crime. Not coincidentally, this mobilization coincided with the initiative to establish the NAE. Conservative missionaries made similar efforts abroad. Their champion, Walter Judd, a Minnesota congressman and former medical missionary to China, prodded U.S. diplomats to ensure that the control of opium and other drugs was enshrined in the UN Charter.37
For liberals, especially pacifists, wartime spiritual mobilization meant a push for racial reform. Campaigning against the war was frustrating and lonely work, and pacifists quickly decided to channel their energies and organizational skills into causes at home. The war, wrote a Presbyterian minister from Plainfield, New Jersey, was “exposing” Americans to their own “deadly perils” by making them “painfully aware of the ways in which we are defying the will of the righteous and loving God, in our treatment of minority groups like the Japanese Americans and the Negroes.” Harry Emerson Fosdick pursued this line by linking domestic peace and tranquility with the success of postwar collective security. Both, he claimed, would succeed only if they respected difference by enshrining tolerance. Writing to Senator Harry Truman in 1943, Fosdick hoped that Americans would do “everything that we can do, both for the sake of our own democracy at home, and of a better understanding between the different races of the United Nations, to improve interracial relationships.” African Americans certainly hoped so. According to a black Baptist preacher from Ann Arbor, Michigan, their World War II was one in which Americans “died that civilization might be saved from utter destruction by ruthless nations” and “that all peoples of the earth, all nationalities and races might be free.” Similarly, Protestant and Catholic missionaries used the moral meaning of the war to push for the repeal of anti-Chinese immigration laws.38
Clearly, a wide gulf was opening up between religious conservatives and liberals over political rather than theological issues, foremost among them foreign policy. Though it was not yet apparent, the climate of war had been much kinder to patriotic conservatism than dissenting liberalism. However, their disputes did not dissipate after the war. On the contrary, as we shall see: they intensified, and provided Cold War policymakers with both their most ardent supporters and their sternest critics. In this sense, the religious response to the bomb was important, for it revived a liberal peace witness and critique of American power precisely at a time when victory in a righteous war might have killed it off. Instead, the Cold War began a new argument over the soul of American foreign policy.