CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Great Schism and the Myth of Consensus

THE EARLY YEARS of the Cold War are remembered as a golden age of bipartisanship, when politics supposedly stopped at the water’s edge and Democrats and Republicans put aside their political differences in a common pursuit of the national interest. Perhaps this was true of politics—though it almost certainly was not—but it is wildly inaccurate when we consider religious opinion in the early Cold War. Instead of a monolithic anticommunist consensus, what actually occurred was a great schism between religious liberals and conservatives, a schism that led to the kind of bitter arguments over America’s role in the world normally associated with the partisanship of later decades.¹

This great schism stemmed in large part from differences over foreign policy, but its root causes were the result more of social and cultural changes to American religion. As a religious nation, the United States underwent a profound transformation in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Two changes were especially important and had lasting effects on religious attitudes toward war and diplomacy.

First, the nature of religion altered dramatically. Although Protestantism was still the majority faith, and although it continued to be the dominant religious influence on culture and politics, it was no longer the only religion. After years of immigration and intolerance, Catholicism and Judaism had finally matured as American faiths and become part of the mainstream. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism were not yet dead, but they were fading fast; by the 1960s, they would more or less be consigned to the hateful, lunatic fringe, marginalized in both religion and politics. Just as important was the rise of secularization. On the major questions in life, many Americans were turning to science instead of religion. In a wide variety of institutions—medicine, education, the law—religious authority could no longer command automatic allegiance and deference. Religion was still a force in politics, mainly because of the efforts by the faithful to keep it relevant. There was nothing inevitable about secularization, and it did not spell the end of American religion. But the increasingly wide division between the sacred and the secular in modern American life meant that religion’s social importance could no longer be assumed.²

Second, as the nature of American religion changed, the relationship between religion and politics changed with it. Religion still mattered in politics, but its influence became much more complicated. The kind of separation between church and state established by the Founders and maintained throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had not been intended to remove religion from the public sphere. Religion was thought to be a source of community spirit and moral values, both of which were considered vital in preventing American society from becoming too fractious and self-interested. Though the notion of a hard “wall of separation” is rightly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, it did not form the legal basis of church-state separation until after World War II. Partly this resulted from the fact that America was no longer a Protestant nation, or even an exclusively Christian nation. While Protestantism had always played an intimate and unifying role in politics, its role became more contentious when not everyone was a Protestant. Newly confident postwar Jews, for example, took the lead in using the courts to tighten the First Amendment and ensure that Protestants and Catholics did not receive preferential treatment at their expense. And of course, even Protestants were divided among themselves between fiercely competing liberal and conservative factions.³

But perhaps most important, the balance of power between church and state had begun to shift away from the church and toward the state. With the New Deal, the Cold War national security state, and the rights revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s, the federal government was increasingly responsible for things that had normally been the church’s prerogative. Thus the hardening of the wall of separation contributed to, rather than caused, the empowerment of the state at the expense of the church. All this led to religious identification being determined more by political issues rather than the other way around. For example, religious liberals and conservatives were becoming defined as “liberal” and “conservative” not only by where they stood on the virgin birth or belief in miracles, but by where they stood on divisive political, cultural, and social matters such as school prayer, abortion, welfare, and women’s rights. Over time, moreover, conservative Protestants and Catholics partly overcame theological differences to form once-unthinkable alliances on social and political issues. Anomalies remained, and the changes would not become fully apparent until the 1970s. But the foundations had begun to shift nonetheless.⁴

Long before the culture wars of the 1960s and after, foreign policy was probably the first of these divisive issues to provoke religious and political controversy. Most historians identify the extreme anticommunism of the early Cold War with the postwar surge in religious piety, but religious views of world politics were much more diverse and complex. They tended to divide between conservatives, who usually were ardent anticommunists, and liberals, who were not. Conservatives not only wanted Truman and Eisenhower to pursue containment, they often called for rollback. Liberals, on the other hand, thought containment was too rigid and feared that it distorted issues, such as decolonization and global poverty, that did not fit so easily into an anticommunist foreign policy. Moreover, liberals were much less willing to support the militarization of containment and much more supportive of diplomacy and the United Nations.⁵

Essentially, the great schism did not divide anticommunists from communist sympathizers, for most religious Americans were to some degree opposed to communism. Instead, a division emerged between conservatives who wanted U.S. foreign policy to promote liberty and liberals who wanted their country to pursue progress. The apostles of liberty set aside all other priorities in favor of containing and perhaps even defeating communism at home and abroad. The apostles of progress, on the other hand, believed that questions of global social justice should drive foreign policy, even if it meant working with communists, socialists, nationalists, and even the Soviet Union itself.

“THE AMERICAN PEOPLE stand firm in the faith which has inspired this Nation from the beginning,” Harry Truman declared in his inaugural address of January 1949. “We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God.” In the pursuit of their ideals and security, Americans “find themselves directly opposed by a regime with contrary aims and a totally different concept of life,” a regime that “adheres to a false philosophy which purports to offer freedom, security, and greater opportunity to mankind.” This was a dangerous new heresy, a rival vision of progress and liberty that actually threatened to destroy all hope of true progress and liberty forever. In issuing his call to arms, Truman wanted to be clear about who this enemy was. “That false philosophy,” he warned starkly, “is communism.”⁶

For many religious Americans, Truman was preaching to the choir. Communism represented the antithesis to everything they and America stood for: atheism instead of religion, materialism instead of spirituality, dictatorship of the proletariat instead of liberal democracy, command economy instead of free enterprise. To some liberal Protestants, communism embodied a system of violent materialism; to virtually all conservative Protestants, communism represented the ultimate nightmare of state power at the expense of individual liberty; and to most Catholics, communism represented the ultimate rejection of God and Christian ethics. To Whittaker Chambers, the ex-communist turned professional anticommunist who had dabbled in the Episcopal Church and Quaker meetings, the fundamental struggle of the modern world was between Christianity and communism. “At every point, religion and politics interlace,” he wrote in his 1952 bestselling memoir, Witness, “and must do so more acutely as the conflict between the two great camps of men—those who reject and those who worship God—becomes irrepressible.” Even more ominously, these two camps “are not only outside, but also within nations.”⁷

The intense ideological atmosphere of the early Cold War—when extreme anticommunism flattened out the fine, subtle distinctions between social democracy, socialism, and outright communism—benefited religious conservatives who were unafraid to attack any form of leftist politics. Because anticommunism dovetailed so closely with the tenor of their faith, evangelicals and fundamentalists were most able to exploit the red scare climate of McCarthyism. Conservative Christians had largely faded from popular view after the 1925 Scopes trial and the end of Prohibition. They rallied during the religious fervor of the war and organized their growing numbers: moderate “neo-evangelicals” formed the National Association of Evangelicals while arch-fundamentalists, led by Carl McIntire, established the American Council of Christian Churches (its very name a deliberate patriotic challenge to the ecumenical Federal Council). Thus by the early Cold War, conservatives were poised for a major revival. Unlike liberals, conservatives felt no hesitation about attacking communist ideology or the Soviet Union, and they felt no compunction in calling for the most vigorous response that American foreign policy could muster. And unlike liberals, ambivalent and internally divided on all these questions, their patriotism was never in doubt.⁸

Their champion, and soon to be the new face of American Christianity, was a handsome young evangelist with a soft Southern drawl from Charlotte, North Carolina. By the time of his 1949 breakout revival in Los Angeles, which made him a national figure, Billy Graham was already something of a rising star in evangelical circles. He had been a regular speaker on the Youth for Christ circuit and—like evangelists from George Whitefield to Dwight Moody before him—had launched a successful revival tour of England. But the eight-week tent meeting in Southern California surpassed all expectations and reintroduced evangelicalism to mainstream America. That the L.A. revival met with success in the fall of 1949, when revivals only a year or two earlier had received a tepid response, was no coincidence: it came during a wave a hysteria over the spread of communism, bracketed between the Soviets’ first successful atomic test in August and the “fall” of China to Mao and the communists in October. Graham explicitly linked the cause of Christ with the cause of America, of Christianity’s struggle against Satan with America’s struggle against communism. “There are communists everywhere,” he proclaimed in Los Angeles, and “unless the Christian religion rescues these nations from the clutches of the unbelieving, America will stand alone and isolated in the world.” Communism stood “against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion. Communism is not only an economic interpretation of life—Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed, and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war against Almighty God.” As Graham’s biographer William Martin has noted, the evangelist’s blend of intense patriotism, stern moralism, fervent anticommunism, sunny optimism, and simple Christian message was perfectly “geared to the times.” This was an evangelism for the Cold War, and it propelled Graham to the front ranks of American public life.⁹

But Graham the Cold Warrior could display nuance and vision as well as wield fire and brimstone. He was not a fundamentalist, but something rather new on the American religious scene: a neo-evangelical, straddling the vast chasm between Carl McIntire’s hard-shell fundamentalism and the Federal Council’s soft-touch modernism. If Graham and his cohorts from the National Association of Evangelicals were going to have broad-based success, they would need to tailor conservative Protestantism to the modern age. They did so brilliantly, by adapting evangelicalism to contemporary society. They were masters at using the media to spread a message of born-again love rather than fundamentalist anger. The neo-evangelicals were also adept—much more adept than liberals—at appealing to young people, which gave them a critical advantage in a society that was becoming increasingly obsessed with youth. Thus Graham’s message for the Cold War could be moderate as well as dogmatic. While he wanted Americans to “stand firmly” against the “incoming tide of atheistic communism and all that comes in its wake,” and while he urged them to “remember that at this moment all of civilization is in the crucible,” in the next breath he also called for commonsense restraint. “There are those in the United States … who have been talking about a preventive war,” he warned. But an attack on the Soviet Union “cannot be done … on the basis of the principles of Western civilization and Western culture, because of our basis of Christian principles.” America, he preached, must be vigilant but not vengeful. It was a message of both love and strength, and Americans adored Graham for spreading it.¹⁰

Rather more direct was the troublesome fundamentalist Presbyterian Carl McIntire, who was a constant thorn in the Eisenhower administration’s side because even Republicans did not receive leniency in his uncompromising, all-consuming crusade against communism. Eisenhower aide Frederic Fox described McIntire’s followers as “230,000 humorless souls” and, referring to Jesus’s parable on the dangers of being judgmental, described McIntire himself as “a discredited Presbyterian minister with a big log in one eye and a beam on his shoulder.” If Fox exaggerated, it was only slightly, for McIntire’s anticommunism was harder-edged than most. But it was not unusual among fundamentalists. He ascribed the invention of communism not to Marx and Engels but Satan. Satan intended to enslave the world, and the “most brilliant scheme he has ever invented for this purpose is the totalitarian State. He is the author of it; and communism, its most highly developed form, is his brain child. It looks very much like his last trump card.” If America could defeat communism, it could defeat Satan; but if Americans did not defeat communism, Satan would eventually overtake the world. At home, the danger lay in the welfare state, a form of creeping socialism that had already found expression in the New Deal. Such a government seizes power “which it actually does not have under God” and results in “great bureaucratic combines” that become “burdensome, crushing, destructive of freedom.” McIntire also pointed to the objectivity of the written word as the source of all liberty, comparing the sanctity of the Bible with that of the Constitution. “The Author of liberty,” God, “has given us the Book of liberty. The issue confronting the Western world is the Christ of this Book versus the Marx of Moscow.”¹¹

Protestant neo-evangelicals and fundamentalists were flourishing, but no group benefited more from the Cold War than Roman Catholics. For more than fifty years, Catholics had debated how their hierarchical church could function alongside the pluralism and individualism of American society. Their concern with “Americanism” subsided as time went on and Catholic immigrants successfully assimilated while maintaining their religious traditions. But nothing helped settle the issue like anticommunism. While Protestants and Jews differed among themselves as to the nature of the communist threat, Catholics did not. They were perhaps the most robustly anticommunist group at a time when communism became the nation’s overriding priority and when the validity of someone’s patriotism largely depended on their attitude toward communism. To be sympathetic to communism was not only to be anti-American, but positively un-American. Though he was not especially observant, Senator Joseph McCarthy, an Irish Catholic, represented the apotheosis of the Catholic anticommunist crusade. Mitigating McCarthy’s buffoonery and legitimating his message was a new generation of Catholic laymen, led by the journalist and public intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., who advanced a sophisticated but no less robust anticommunism. For their part, Catholic Church leaders seemed to compete with one another to see who could issue the strongest attacks against the communist menace. In religion, Francis Cardinal Spellman paralleled McCarthy’s efforts in politics. More philosophical but equally strident was Bishop Fulton Sheen, who damned communism as an ideology that “wishes to be not only a State but a Church judging the consciences of men.” Catholic McCarthyism was not monolithic—Senator McCarthy found opponents in the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Commonweal magazine, and other prominent Catholic laypeople such as fellow Senator Eugene McCarthy (no relation)—but it was dominant. It was also durable, surviving Joe McCarthy’s ignominious downfall in 1954 only to be reinvigorated by the trials of Cardinal Mindszenty and the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956.¹²

However, if Cold War anticommunism enabled Catholics to move closer to the cultural mainstream, it had the explosive potential to do the opposite for Jews. It did not help that two of the leading fundamentalist crusaders against communism, the Reverends Hyman Appelman and Fred Schwarz, were foreign-born Jewish converts to American Protestantism, leaving the mistaken impression that Jews could only be true anticommunists if they were not Jews. Schwarz’s organization, Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, was especially active, and his bestselling book You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists) sold more than a million copies. Nor did it help that two of the most notorious communist spies of the era, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were Jewish.¹³

Unfortunately for Jews, their politics made it easy for extremist opponents to tar them with the brush of anticommunism, however unfairly. Unlike Catholics, who could easily mount an anticommunist crusade because it was rooted deep in the politics and culture of their church, naturally internationalist, progressivist Jews could be accused of being soft on communism because they were indeed softer on communism. In Israel, Zionists established a socialist state, while in America polls revealed that Jews were much less confrontational toward the Soviet Union. In 1948, for example, while less than a third of Catholics and Protestants said they would “allow communists to speak over the radio,” 78 percent of Jews said they would. They were also similarly out of step on Joseph McCarthy: in a November 1954 poll, after his senatorial censure, 58 percent of Catholics still held a favorable view of him while only 15 percent of Jews did. This of course did not mean that Jews were communists, or even communist sympathizers: such views reflected the importance Jews ascribed to tolerance and dialogue, values they had prioritized after centuries of being persecuted themselves. Still, anti-Semitic anticommunists made much of the impression that Jews were closet communists and thus a danger to the nation. Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, leader of the Christian Nationalist Crusade, maintained his virulent anti-Semitism even as he pivoted opportunistically from interwar isolationism to extreme Cold War interventionism.¹⁴

Nonetheless, anti-Semitism remained confined to these marginalized extremes. Despite the best efforts of Congressman John Rankin, a notorious red-baiting anti-Semite, and despite the intensive investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee, most Americans did not lump communism and Judaism together. Most telling of all was Joe McCarthy himself, who not only refused to make anticommunism a form of anti-Semitism but also supported Israel and campaigned for the rights of persecuted Jews in the Soviet Union. When asked why he was soft on Jews but hard on communism, McCarthy simply replied, “I have many friends who are Jewish.” Among them was his chief investigator, Roy Cohn, who had been one of the prosecuting attorneys in the Rosenberg espionage trial, and Cohn’s assistant and best friend (and possibly lover), David Schine. Notwithstanding the haunting specter of old Jew-hating ghosts, America’s Judeo-Christian civil religion, one of its prime weapons in the Cold War, held together.¹⁵

Cohn and Schine were the unlikely exemplars of a new trend: Jewish anticommunism. American radicalism remained disproportionately Jewish, but a new generation of disillusioned Jewish leftists was moving quickly toward anticommunism. They were the first of the neoconservatives, though they were not yet known as such, moving swiftly through the political spectrum from left to right. One of their main concerns was Soviet communism, which they saw as a new form of the old totalitarianism and thus a menace to both international security and universal rights. Many Jewish public intellectuals, from Will Herberg to Irving Kristol, feared that liberals were not taking communism seriously enough and vowed to do something about it. Magazines such as Commentary—founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee—assumed a stridently anti-Soviet editorial stance; the predominantly Jewish Partisan Review adopted a similar tone. Also common to both magazines, stemming from a desire to assert Jewish patriotism and a fear that anti-Semitism would be roused once again if Americans began associating Jews with communism, was a desire to promote the Jewish and American identities as complementary. If Catholics found their anticommunist views to be an easy way to assimilate into a broader American culture, anticommunist Jews felt they could do the same. “As Americans of the Jewish faith we have an especially profound challenge,” intoned Rabbi Norman Gerstenfeld in 1951. Because European Jews had historically been subjected to “tyranny and superstition” and denied basic liberties, American Jews, “the greatest Jewish community in the world and the freest in all the pages of historic time,” had a special obligation to fight communist autocracy.¹⁶

IF COMMUNISM WAS anathema in theory, it was positively dangerous at home. Religious Americans worried about the power of communist ideology when deployed by the military and political might of the Soviet Union, but they were just as concerned with the encroachment of communism in the United States. This was in keeping with the general postwar hysteria over communist espionage, but religious Americans also worried that the nation’s values were a communist target. They were terrified most of all by what they saw as a tightening embrace between the mainline churches of liberal Protestantism and the collectivist aspirations of communists. As early as 1945, McIntire predicted that “America faces the greatest struggle of her existence. In the postwar world the conflict between a free economy and the Russian idea of controlled economy will produce its severest conflict within the United States.” Economics was a concern not because most conservative Christians were wealthy—far from it—but because liberty was considered to be absolute and indivisible: if tyranny could weaken one element of freedom, all would eventually succumb. “Liberty plus liberty equals liberty,” McIntire explained elsewhere. “Tyranny plus tyranny equals tyranny. But liberty plus tyranny equals tyranny!”¹⁷

Either out of ideological zeal or tactical savvy—probably both—secular organizations also used the libertarian strain of Protestantism to attack communism. In 1946, the National Association of Manufacturers, the largest and most powerful lobby for American business interests, established a quarterly newsletter “devoted to cooperation between clergymen and businessmen” at a time when “Church and Industry face a common foe.” Communism, claimed the NAM, “destroys all liberty—religious, economic, and political.” Church and industry had to unite to stem “the rising tide of collectivism—a system in which man’s dignity and independence is lost to him, and he becomes a slave to the State.” The National Economic Council, a much smaller and even more conservative organization based in New York, warned of a global campaign “to marry Communism to Christianity.”¹⁸

Conservative Protestants mounted a parallel campaign to discredit the liberalism and ecumenism of the Federal Council and its successor body, the National Council of Churches. McIntire, founder of the rival American Council of Christian Churches, railed against liberals and their “Superchurch” that “twisted Christ to propagate their perverted, revolutionary, new order.” Just as Stalin and the United Nations aimed for a global political and ideological monopoly, liberal ecumenists hoped for a religious monopoly that would “produce a tyranny in ecclesiastical circles that the world has never seen.” Such “one-world planning” for a “one-world social order” sought to build on earth “the Kingdom of Antichrist.” To McIntire and others, the monopolistic tendencies in the FCC and NCC were but an extension of the Soviets’ totalitarian methods and communist ideology. Members of the ACCC were incandescent with righteous fury when the NCC’s Walter Van Kirk proclaimed that “the Christian community in the United States is unanimous in its judgment that nation states must surrender to the organized international community whatever measure of their national sovereignty is required to establish peace and justice on a global scale.” Not surprisingly, they focused not only on Van Kirk’s call for a world state but on the presumptuousness of his claims to unanimity.¹⁹

Rhetoric such as this marked only the latest round in a battle that had begun during World War I and continued during the Depression and World War II. Both modernists and fundamentalists, liberals and conservatives had regularly used world events to impugn the patriotism and religious fidelity of their opponents. But now, thanks to the Cold War, conservatives had the advantage. Liberals could of course be anticommunists, too. In 1948, Reinhold Niebuhr helped found the liberal anticommunist group Americans for Democratic Action, the logical culmination of his fiercely antitotalitarian worldview that had begun forming a decade earlier. Among liberal Democrats, Niebuhr’s views were becoming the mainstream, but among liberal Protestants, they were atypical. Most did not like Soviet communism, but they either contextualized its abuses or downplayed its danger. And of course, in the interwar period many liberal clergy had either embraced socialism or flirted with communism. Their subtleties and progressive politics were easy targets for religious conservatives.²⁰

As a result, liberal churches of the Social Gospel tradition came under furious attack in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Norman Vincent Peale, the Presbyterian pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church in New York and bestselling motivational author, warned as early as 1945 that the “campaign to swing American clergymen to collectivist programs is well organized” and “gaining ground.” Using Galatians 5:1 for scriptural guidance—“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage”—Peale told his congregation that the current crisis was just as serious at home as it was in Europe: “The present question is whether new philosophies or old philosophies in new form, calling themselves liberal, but actually reactionary, are not further imperiling freedom.” Communism in the churches represented the most dire threat to American freedom because it was in the church where children learned the stories of the Bible; it was there Americans learned their morals. For this reason, the Truman administration warned, in NSC-68, that as providers of “moral strength” the nation’s churches were one of communism’s “prime targets.” But conservatives went even further, charging the mainline churches with complicity. United Evangelical Action, the official magazine of the National Association of Evangelicals, accused many of the nation’s leading divinity schools and theological seminaries of teaching the ministers of tomorrow that “ ‘the profit motive’ and ‘corporate enterprise’ are sinful.”²¹

As they had in the antebellum period over slavery, Protestant denominations split into liberal and conservative factions, divided this time by the controversy over communism. Methodists were particularly riven. Conservative Methodist muckrakers attacked Bishop Bromley Oxnam and the Methodist Federation for Social Action for unwittingly helping the Soviets undermine the foundations of a free American society. One Methodist magazine denounced the Federation for Social Action as “subversive in character and dangerous to the future of our nation.” Another warned that Oxnam was at the head of a “Communist conspiracy in religion” that was “seeking to change our traditional, American economic order.” In 1953 Stanley High—once a seminary student training for the Methodist ministry, then an Eisenhower campaign strategist, now an editor at Reader’s Digest—published the results of his investigation into communism and the churches. The resulting article, “Methodism’s Pink Fringe,” plunged the church into the turmoil and recriminations of a religious civil war. Unfortunately for Bishop Oxnam, High’s article attracted the attentions of another Methodist layman, Congressman Harold H. Velde, an Illinois Republican who also happened to be chair of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. Even worse for Oxnam was the fact that one of HUAC’s most tenacious investigators, J. B. Matthews, was an ordained Methodist minister and had done mission work overseas. Velde hauled Oxnam before HUAC in 1953, doing incalculable damage to the church but finding no communists.²²

Ironically, despite the conservative assault on the FCC and NCC, splits such as the Methodists’ actually spurred a new kind of ecumenism in which interdenominational cooperation on political issues blurred traditional religious identity. Liberal Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians closed ranks together against a similarly interdenominational front of Christian anticommunists. As was becoming customary in the Cold War, the beneficiaries of this new ecumenism were large conservative organizations such as the National Association of Evangelicals. With numbers and unity came strength, and upon such strength Christian conservatives were able to construct a new platform for a very old style of religious politics.²³

COMMUNISM AT HOME seemed like such an imminent threat because it was seen as the tip of the Soviet spear. Even before Harry Truman and George Kennan had found it necessary to devise containment, many religious Americans were convinced of the need for an anticommunist, anti-Soviet foreign policy. Composed of an unstable coalition of Catholics, evangelicals and fundamentalists, and a handful of mainline liberals, they promoted an activist, global foreign policy, grounded in Christian values of sacrifice and responsibility. At the same time, the Truman administration appreciated such support and used religion in a battle not only of tanks and bombs, but for hearts and minds.

Once again leading the way was Reinhold Niebuhr, who saw his mission to rally the nation against Soviet communism as something of a reprise of his crusade against pacifism and Nazism in the 1930s. Now, as then, he had to convince the overwhelmingly peace-minded mainline Protestant clergy that vigilance was required before compromise. In 1946, after a tour of Europe, he wrote a major article for Life calling for the reconstruction of Germany and the containment of communism. A year before the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, then, Niebuhr had already outlined his own plan for political and economic containment. But Niebuhr also sought to strike a balance between sounding the alarm and sounding alarmist. In this, he was very much a realist, like Kennan, warning of the Soviet menace but also warning of the dangers of an American overreaction. And like Kennan, who later lamented that his refined theory of containment had been militarized, bluntly and brutally, in its implementation, Niebuhr had trouble convincing his fellow Cold Warriors of the need for balance in U.S. foreign policy.²⁴

As Truman was to Kennan, Henry Luce was to Niebuhr. Born in China to Presbyterian missionaries, the Time-Life publishing baron was a devout Christian, a committed believer in America’s worldwide manifest destiny, and a proponent of Judeo-Christian America’s duty to fend off the godless communist menace. His wife, the equally pious congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, had converted to Catholicism under the guidance of Bishop Fulton Sheen. Encouraged by Clare, Henry Luce’s abiding faith led him to espouse a particularly virulent strain of anticommunism. He was happy to publish Niebuhr’s anticommunist warnings but could not understand his ambivalence about U.S. foreign policy. Niebuhr spoke of a nation “confident and even over-confident in its ‘rightness,’ ” Luce wrote to the theologian, but “I see, at the moment, no such America.” Niebuhr saw America as “a powerful country on the offensive,” but to Luce it was communism that was on the march. “I think, on the contrary, that we are defensive,” guilty not of aggression but timidity and faithlessness in an age of increasing materialism. America, charged Luce, was “a powerful country dissipating its power, tragically, on a false and stultifying defensive.” For now, in the early Cold War, it was Luce’s mission rather than Niebuhr’s realism that won out.²⁵

What was needed most was action by the United States, not the United Nations. In keeping with their anti-statist and ultrapatriotic worldview, evangelicals and fundamentalists were generally suspicious of a regulatory world government that would compromise American sovereignty, identity, and security for a greater, presumably socialist, good. “I am opposed to yielding to foreign dictation in regard to our own welfare,” cried Anson Gustavus Melton, a Baptist preacher in Ashland, Virginia. “Are we not in the middle of a bad fix in the so called UN? If I figure rightly it is a misnomer. In fact it is an Ununited Nations.” Melton found it particularly galling that the Soviets had “an honorable seat” in the UN “while they furnish arms to kill U.S. soldiers in Korea.” Other conservatives criticized the world body for their own reasons. Because it seemed so closely to resemble the armies of Satan in the prophetic books of the Bible, premillennial dispensationalists feared the UN as a harbinger of the apocalypse. But even neo-orthodox liberals warned that the UN was not an answer to the world’s prayers. Their concerns were grounded less in fears for U.S. sovereignty than in concerns over the UN’s efficacy. Though he was a staunch internationalist, Niebuhr was discovering just how unhelpful the Soviets could be in global governance. Americans should not expect too much of the United Nations, he cautioned, and certainly not a capacity to lead. Ironically, Niebuhr warned, attempts to expand the UN’s powers into something like the domestic authority of a national government were bound to lead directly to the very thing the UN was designed to avoid: war.²⁶

APOSTLES OF LIBERTY such as Henry Luce were concerned about China as much as they were about Europe, but there the story of Christian liberty and progress was complicated by the fact that the United States held a decidedly weaker hand. The morality tale for China was also much murkier than it was in Japan, where Americans had enforced unconditional surrender upon a demonstrably evil enemy. Under Mao Zedong, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held the genuine loyalty of many Chinese, while at the same time America’s corrupt and ineffectual Christian ally, Chiang Kai-shek, was steadily losing whatever support he had left. For the Chinese, World War II had begun not in 1941 or even 1939, but in 1937, with the Japanese invasion. The civil war between Nationalists and Communists was folded into this larger international war, and when it stopped in 1945 the factions of competing Chinese simply continued their own struggle. But though Americans were beset by a red scare at home and pursuing containment abroad, the Truman administration had had enough of Chiang and the Nationalists. In 1949, more than two years after George Marshall had failed to secure a truce and fed up with the Nationalists’ mounting political and military problems, Secretary of State Dean Acheson washed America’s hands of Chiang and published a thousand-page “white paper” illustrating that there was little Washington could do to avert a Communist victory.

American missionaries, however, did not find it so easy to walk away from China. It had been their biggest mission field—and, they believed, their most promising. For its size and prestige, the conversion of China was the missionary movement’s ultimate prize—hence their reluctance to just let it go as had the Truman administration. And once again, missionaries on the ground, many of whom were living in areas under CCP rule, helped form American impressions of the struggle for China. The “Chinese Communists are totalitarian, anti-religious, and anti-western,” warned an anonymous missionary in China; they were also powerful and probably unstoppable. By contrast, “the Christian Church is pitifully vulnerable.” “Communists are terrorizing the people and causing intense suffering and loss of life and property,” wrote Gertrude McCulloch, a Woman’s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society missionary based in Hangzhou, in a 1948 newsletter to friends and supporters in the United States. Hangzhou remained under Nationalist control for now, but the news from missionaries further north was not encouraging. “Christian work has been treated ruthlessly wherever they have come to stay,” McCulloch said of the Communists, “and we are fearful for our Chinese Christians.” For their part, these Chinese Christians stoked fears of a communist takeover, warning, as did one Beijing convert, of “a struggle between democracy and anti-democracy. No middle way out!” Luce thought of the Chinese Communists as the forces of the Antichrist. He was especially concerned for the fate of the American missionaries who continued to toil for Christian freedom and progress in China. So was the State Department, which had kept a close watch on CCP abuse of American missionaries since World War II. Under such conditions, the fundamentalist Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions cabled Truman, it was essential that the United States act quickly to prevent China “from falling into the complete dominance of godless communists” and enable Chiang “to preserve the nation for freedom and open doors for the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”²⁷

Both ordinary Americans and the U.S. government had long turned to missionaries to explain and interpret China and the Chinese. So it was not unusual for Truman to do the same, and in 1946 he appointed J. Leighton Stuart as America’s ambassador to China. As a missionary, Stuart had been issuing strong warnings against the growth of Chinese communism since the early 1930s. But despite his ties to Chiang Kai-shek, he was also a realist who recognized by 1947 that the Nationalists had virtually no chance of winning the civil war. Stuart did not believe that the Communists could reform or that they would convert to Christianity. Instead, he hoped that Mao would tolerate a missionary presence in China after the CCP took power. From there, missionaries would win over the Chinese people, and their Communist rulers, with a simple message of justice that was ideally suited to an Asia being transformed by decolonization, nationalism, and development. The “Christian faith,” Ambassador Stuart explained in 1949, “as a determined effort to realize the ideal social order which Jesus described as the kingdom of heaven on earth, as the most dynamic revolutionary movement of all time, cannot fail in its appeal to the Oriental peoples.”²⁸

Stuart’s gospel of progress, however, failed to win over the conservative apostles of liberty who wanted to oppose Chinese Communism without any compromise. Many of them, not coincidentally, also had missionary experience in China. From the floor of Congress and his seat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Walter Judd had an insider’s view of U.S. foreign policy. As a former medical missionary with a decade of service in China, he also held an emotional stake in its unfolding drama. And he did not agree with Stuart about the prospects for Christian missions under CCP rule, or even on the legitimacy of working with Mao at the possible expense of Chiang. “If the Communists win in China,” Judd warned a missionary friend in Beijing, “there isn’t going to be any missionary work anywhere in areas they control.” As for Chiang, Judd accused the Truman administration of setting its expectations unreasonably high. Chiang was an anticommunist and a devoted Christian. He was the only hope for true democratic reform in China, even if prevailing conditions had made it impossible for him to fulfill this potential. Judd thought it incredible that Truman and Marshall demanded “perfection” from Chiang at a time when he was fighting for his life and China’s against Communist tyranny. How could the Nationalists govern China after fifteen years of war and insurrection? “Georgia didn’t recover from … Sherman for 50 years,” he later told an interviewer. “But Chiang had to recover from 8 years of Japanese occupation in 30 minutes, so to speak. It couldn’t be done.” These uncharitable, unchristian “blunders” by Truman were also unwise, for they paved the way for a Communist seizure of power in China and deepened American isolation in an increasingly godless world.²⁹

In June 1950, the outbreak of war in Korea seemed to confirm missionary predictions that the world’s future would be determined in Asia, not Europe. The North Korean invasion stunned most observers, including an off-guard Truman administration that had, said Billy Graham, “blundered” into the war by being too soft on Asian communism. Though U.S. officials had been sending strong signals that they would not go to war over Korea, Truman did not hesitate to do just that. He committed U.S. forces to stand and fight within a day of the North’s invasion, and then, with the Soviets boycotting the Security Council, quickly brought the United Nations alongside. The invasion stunned the American religious community, which reacted with rare unanimity to support Truman’s policy. Religious opinion at home either supported a war for the defense of Korea against communism or a war for the defense of the United Nations against abuse and irrelevance. Even the Federal Council, a most reluctant supporter of war in 1941, endorsed the Korean War. In his annual Thanksgiving sermon, Henry Sloane Coffin condemned the Soviets “who egged on the North Koreans, their puppets,” condemned also those in America who “little understood the men of the Kremlin,” and endorsed the war as a matter of self-defense much as he had World War II. Even Church Peace Union endorsed the war as an example of collective security in action. If Truman’s efforts “curb aggression and halt world war, then it follows that we must be ready to pay the price, specifically in Korea.” This was a far cry from interwar pacifist denunciations of collective security as just another form of unchristian warmongering.³⁰

In this, American religious opinion mirrored that in South Korea, where Christians, their faith and nationalism fired by American missionaries and Cold War evangelists like Graham, demanded that the faithful “Arise altogether for the emancipation of our northern brethren.” As one Korean evangelical exclaimed during the war,

We Koreans learned about liberty and the rights of man from American Christians, when they brought us the Word of God. With God’s help, we shall prove our faith. Marching arm in arm with our fellow defenders of the faith, we are determined to uproot this scourge, to destroy this blight. This is the crux of the conflict—light or darkness, good or evil. Let us pray for strength.³¹

With Syngman Rhee leading South Korea, trumpet calls such as this were not at all out of place. Raised in a Confucian household, Rhee converted to Methodism while serving a prison sentence for anti-Japanese activism. He later spent several years in exile in the United States, even earning a doctorate from Princeton. Christianity was a larger part of Rhee’s anticolonial nationalism than it was for Chiang Kai-shek, and it was integral to the anticommunist Korean national movement which Rhee led in the South. Like Chiang, Rhee was an autocrat, but for Americans his Christian faith and commitment to fighting communism overrode his dictatorial tendencies. His leadership was vital if the United States aimed to transform Korea into what Clare Boothe Luce called a “bulwark of Christian democracy” for a region threatened by communist domination.³²

The Korean War also drew the energies of a new generation of evangelical missionaries who wanted to retain the conservative emphasis on doctrinal purity while at the same time pursuing good works projects that had long been the preserve of liberal mainline missions. The primary emphasis remained, as it always had, on leading lost souls to the love and light of Christ. But now, improving daily lives on earth was increasingly seen as a way to prepare for eternal life in heaven. This represented something of a shift in American religion. While the nation as a whole was experiencing a great awakening, mainline missions were declining precipitously, soon be replaced by a vastly larger cohort of evangelical missionaries who possessed an increasingly rare ability to combine conservative religion with progressive geopolitics. Spurred by the proselytizing ambitions of groups like the National Association of Evangelicals and Youth for Christ, conservative Christians were determined to win the world to Christianity, and away from communism.

The largest and most successful of these new conservative missions was World Vision, founded by Bob Pierce, a Youth for Christ worker, as a way to further several goals simultaneously. Pierce wanted to spread true Christianity, unadulterated by liberalism, and alleviate the suffering and refugee crisis caused by the conflict in Korea. But perhaps above all, he wanted to mobilize religion against communism. “All over the world the Russians are outpreaching us, outsacrificing us, outworking us, outplanning us, outpropagandising us and outdying us in order to gain their ends,” he once said. The solution was for Americans to do a much better job in mobilizing their strongest resource: faith.³³

This new breed of evangelical missionary, eager to dispense material aid as well as the gospel, thrived in the Cold War. They promised to deliver a solution to instability and the expansion of communism because the two seemed fundamentally connected. Poor living conditions in the Third World, they argued, created the necessary conditions for the emergence and growth of communism, a point many American policymakers were forced to concede. “Hunger,” not communism, “is cause number one of the conditions that make wars,” wrote Frank C. Laubach, a prominent missionary who ran literacy programs throughout the developing world. Thus if hunger could be ended, so too could communism, especially if the word of Christ followed to counteract the atheism and immorality that communists spread. Laubach concluded that “the moment government, church, business, and philanthropy join hands in all-out sincere, unselfish effort, the whole world will love us …. And when we begin this, God will be on our side.” With the decline of mainline missionary enterprise, the Social Gospel’s global mission was moving sharply to the right.³⁴

CHRISTIAN CONSERVATISM WAS a source of crucial support for policymakers because it was not the only religious voice on foreign policy. Over the same period, religious liberals of almost all denominations formed a powerful critique of America’s role in the world and offered a compelling alternative. During the Truman era, they hesitated to support containment; during the Eisenhower presidency, they were outright critical of U.S. foreign policy and increasingly skeptical that the United States should be pursuing containment at all. And among liberals, support for rooting out communists at home was almost nonexistent.

Instead, religious liberals offered a competing vision of America’s mission in the postwar world. In place of containment, they called for substantive and unconditional dialogue with the communist world, nuclear disarmament, and the promotion of human rights and genuinely equitable economic development even if it meant working with leftist and nationalist regimes that were hostile to short-term U.S. national interests. Only a foreign policy of diplomatic engagement, civil rights, and social justice, said these apostles of progress, could provide a workable alternative to communism. Like the conservatives, they promoted individual rights—freedom of worship, expression, conscience, and so forth—but they also pursued group rights, such as social justice and economic equality. As a result, they were more inclined to focus on foreign aid, decolonization, and international racial equality than on straightforward anticommunism.

Mainline Protestants comprised the largest of this dissenting contingent, but on most issues it also included leftist, social welfare Catholics. This ecumenical coalition established by the apostles of progress may not have been what Truman or Eisenhower had envisioned, but it represented an authentic alternative to the patriotic American civil religion championed by conservatives. The apostles of progress would contest the Cold War on this basis, not in moral opposition to the Soviet Union or China but their own government. Often such liberal clergy were out of step with their own congregations, and during the Cold War a large gap opened up between a liberal leadership and a more conservative laity on issues like civil rights and foreign policy.

From the very beginning of the Cold War, the apostles of progress criticized containment as excessively dogmatic and militaristic. Their view of Soviet communism was much more optimistic than that of the apostles of liberty, resembling Roosevelt’s wartime theory of convergence much more than Truman’s strategy of containment. In 1946, even the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Louie D. Newton, could travel to the Soviet Union and be impressed by its commitment to social progress as well as its wartime sacrifices. Just as importantly, Newton felt that Soviet society was becoming freer and more relaxed in its treatment of religion. He was allowed to preach in several Russian churches and meet with Russians of various denominations. They all assured him that they were as free to practice their religion as any American because the Soviet constitution enshrined the very same separation of church and state as the First Amendment. Newton was not only impressed, but convinced. He published a travelogue upon his return to the United States; Bishop Bromley Oxnam provided the introduction. “I have preached the Gospel in Soviet churches,” he told his undoubtedly shocked Southern Baptist flock. “I have seen and talked with the Soviet people at work, at play, and in worship; I have savored the war-born sorrows and the soaring hopes of the mighty people that first defeated Hitler.”³⁵

Religious liberals were unlikely to damn communism. Rather, while they criticized the Soviet Union’s political abuses, they also cautiously extolled communism’s social and economic virtues. Like Newton, they saw potential in the Soviet Union for religious reform and revival and did not believe the Russian Orthodox Church was merely an agent of the Kremlin. They refused to condemn communism while a very different set of evils within capitalism went unchecked. And they refused, most of all, to identify with crusades against either communism or capitalism, instead seeing them as two flawed systems whose potential for progress must be unlocked but made humane. “There are those who would mobilize the Church in a ‘holy war’ against communism,” Oxnam proclaimed in his 1946 presidential address to the Federal Council of Churches. “There are others who would mobilize similarly against capitalism. The Church must herald a new day but it must not become the voice of reaction nor the voice of revolution …. We refuse to identify the Christian gospel with an economic order, whether it be capitalist, communist, or socialist.” This neutralist doctrine of moral equivalence would land Oxnam in trouble with HUAC and other anticommunists, and a decade later his friend Dulles would call it immoral. But it expressed the dominant sentiment among the liberal Protestant clergy nonetheless.³⁶

Two years later, at its founding convention in Amsterdam, the World Council of Churches made a similar declaration of moral equivalence and refused, despite tremendous pressure from Truman and Myron Taylor, to join forces with Washington and the Vatican in an anticommunist crusade. Josef Hromadka, the Czech theologian who argued with Dulles over the nature of communism, proved to be an effective critic of the United States and its ambitions in Europe. The West was deluding itself, he argued in Amsterdam, “when it imagined it possessed freedom and others did not.” Instead of embracing containment, the architects of world Protestant unity essentially wanted to combine the individual rights of capitalism with the group rights of communism. But in doing so, the WCC acknowledged that communism was potentially redemptive. “Christians should ask why Communism in its modern totalitarian form makes so strong an appeal to great masses of people in many parts of the world,” stated a WCC report on world affairs. “They should recognize the work of God in the revolt of multitudes against injustice that gives Communism much of its strength. They should seek to recapture for the church the original Christian solidarity with the world’s distressed people.” Both liberty and progress were possible, but only if they were treated with equal respect and priority. The World Council then issued a stark critique of capitalism that infuriated the White House. “The Christian church should reject the ideologies of both Communism and capitalism, and should seek to draw men away from the false assumption that these are the only alternatives. Each has made promises which it could not redeem.” Instead, it was “the responsibility of Christians to seek new creative solutions which never allow either justice or freedom to destroy the other.”³⁷

This unflinching denunciation of national and ideological exceptionalism found broad appeal among liberal theologians. Even Niebuhr, also at Amsterdam and normally wary of communist political incursions, thought the WCC’s declaration was “quite right.” The Federal Council then used the impetus from Amsterdam to issue its own assessment of human rights. It was the churches’ duty, said the FCC, to promote both individual rights (mostly through religious liberty) and group rights (through the promotion of social and economic equality). Frederick Nolde, the veteran ecumenist who had contributed to the 1945 San Francisco Conference, continued his work with the UN and ensured that its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights included respect for religious liberty and struck a balance between individual and group rights.³⁸

The WCC’s equivalence of communism and capitalism, and mainline Protestantism’s enthusiasm for the WCC, reflected the perseverance of ecumenical internationalism in the United States. The United Nations was not simply a diplomatic meeting point where governments could present their own narrow, national self-interests, but a forum for all peoples of the world to meet, discuss issues of mutual importance, realize one another’s viewpoints on points of difference, and work toward peaceful solutions to world problems. And the WCC was not simply an ecumenical body for Protestants but the UN’s religious counterpart in a campaign for world peace. Without the UN, said the missionary and ecumenist Henry Smith Leiper, the world would experience another war, but without the WCC, the UN would lack a soul and a conscience. Similarly, in honor of the 1948 World Congress of Religion, Harry Emerson Fosdick epitomized the spirit of ecumenical internationalism, and its enduring pacifism, in a special prayer for the UN:

Eternal God, Father of All Souls: Grant unto us such clear vision of the sin of war that we may earnestly seek that cooperation between nations which alone can make war impossible. As man by his inventions has made the whole world into one neighborhood, grant that he may by his cooperation make the whole world into one brotherhood.

Writing for Church Peace Union, Justin Wroe Nixon said Christ would have approved of the UN because it was a worldwide mechanism for “bearing one another’s burdens.”³⁹

Support for the UN was broad as well as deep. The United Church Women repeatedly announced it would “pray for the success” of the world body because it was the only vehicle that could truly express the hopes and fears of an entire planet. In 1948, the Federal Council–sponsored United Nations Sunday was widely observed across the nation. In November 1950—after the outbreak of the Korean War—the International Convention of the Disciples of Christ, meeting in Oklahoma City, called for the United States to join with others “to move by constitutional means as rapidly as possible toward a limited world federal government with democratically held and exercised powers.” Spurred by the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the Catholic Association for International Peace, and a new UN office dedicated to Catholic concerns, American Catholics placed their faith in the UN even as they continued their anticommunist crusade. In 1956, the NCWC pronounced that the UN, despite its flaws, embodied “the hope of humankind” and offered “the only present promise we have for sustained peace in our time; peace with any approximation of justice.” Throughout the era, overwhelming majorities of liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews expressed support for a UN that would shepherd a truly ecumenical world peace.⁴⁰

By contrast, support for policies that were driven by American leadership, especially military leadership, or that did not reflect the ecumenists’ absolute internationalism, was tepid at best. The Truman Doctrine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were the two main examples. Both divided the world into West and East, good and evil, free and enslaved, and both pledged to combat communist tyranny in the name of democratic liberty. As we have seen, religious anticommunists such as Dulles and Niebuhr supported NATO because they had concluded that the Soviets would always sabotage designs for a truly ecumenical new world order. But liberals would not abandon their vision so easily. In pursuing such aggressive, particularistic policies, they charged Truman with jeopardizing any chance for peaceful, universalistic solutions. He was also making Soviet intransigence a self-fulfilling prophecy, for why would Moscow ever trust Washington when the president was adopting such a hard line? No wonder the Soviets were troubled by NATO, remarked the FCC, just as surely as Americans would be by a communist alliance of Latin American republics. The Truman administration met with similar obstacles in its domestic campaign for congressional ratification of NATO. After the State Department’s Charles Bohlen spent hours explaining it to the FCC’s 1949 National Study Conference, after Dulles pleaded with his fellow delegates not to condemn U.S. foreign policy, and after an hour of what the New York Times called “heated debate,” the conference would only vote “neither to endorse nor oppose” NATO.⁴¹

The best place to begin practicing international control was nuclear energy. Until 1949, the United States maintained an atomic monopoly. Though in reality it proved to be ineffectual, the monopoly provided American leaders with a potentially enormous source of power and leverage. Nonetheless, many Catholics, Jews, and liberal Protestants denounced nuclear weapons and called upon Truman to begin disbanding the nation’s atomic arsenal. In a typical episode, a Protestant missionary in Japan challenged her fellow Americans to take a quick tour of Hiroshima and see for themselves the immoral effects of nuclear weapons. For Catholics, only the existential angst caused by nuclear arms could mitigate their hostility for communism. The nuclear monopoly was not only ineffective, said three leading Catholic just war theorists, it was provocative, and therefore dangerous. Even those charged with maintaining America’s nuclear might were troubled by its power. David Lilienthal, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, was so repelled by nuclear weapons and perplexed by their spiritual challenge that he sought the counsel of Bishop Oxnam several times in 1948. Most religious opponents of the bomb realized that the nuclear genie could not simply be rebottled, and so rather than call for the abolition of nuclear energy they urged Truman to place it under international control. Only the UN’s involvement could lead to both nuclear disarmament and the harnessing of nuclear energy’s almost unlimited potential. Because war had become “total and diabolical,” declared A. J. Muste, the United States must no longer be a part of it.⁴²

That Muste could continue his career as a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy revealed much about the endurance of pacifism and the widespread unease with the onset of the Cold War. In the first years after the war, when internationalism flourished widely, Christian pacifism enjoyed something of a revival. But even during the dark days of McCarthyism and the Korean War, pacifists maintained their critique of the abuses of American power. Not even the munificent Marshall Plan could win their affections: the best thing Muste had to say was that Truman’s plan to fend off destitution and communism presented pacifists with “a bitter dilemma.” He was also a trenchant critic of his fellow Protestants, particularly liberal Christian realists, who gave support and spiritual guidance to the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.⁴³

Muste’s Cold War pacifism was an important precursor to the more widespread dissent of the Vietnam era, but even in the depths of the early Cold War he was not alone in calling for a pacifist foreign policy. In 1948, the Baptist Council for Christian Social Progress organized an interdenominational Conference of Church People on World Peace that called for peace through negotiations, nuclear disarmament, the UN, decolonization, foreign aid, and the permanent abolition of the draft. In classically pacifist terms, the Conference condemned war as unchristian and concluded that if Americans only acted sensibly, “war need not be either imminent or inevitable.” That same year, the General Conference of the Methodist Church, which met every four years, acted as if nothing had changed in two tumultuous decades and pronounced the “sinfulness” of war and that Christianity was “utterly opposed” to it. “The task of the Church is healing, reconciliation, the removal of prejudice and hate, the cementing of bonds of brotherhood, the exalting of God as the Father and Ruler of all mankind and Christ as the Savior of all.” This task could not be completed if the church supported aggressive policies such as the Truman Doctrine. Instead, only dialogue with the Soviets and a willingness to make sacrifices and compromises would bring about peace; the Methodists vowed to support nothing else.⁴⁴

Just as the anticommunism of Christian conservatives and liberal realists gained in strength during the Truman years, religious dissent gained momentum by feeding off the energy generated by the intense fears and emotions of the early Cold War. With allies in high politics, such as former vice president and presidential aspirant Henry Wallace, the apostles of progress posed a real threat to the domestic supports that were essential for the pursuit of containment. By the winter of 1947, Niebuhr was alarmed enough to use a leader in his magazine, Christianity and Crisis, to attack the dissenters. In it, he relied on all the credibility he had gained in being the lonely voice to warn against Nazism and used it on his modernist colleagues without restraint. “We are told that a policy of firmness must inevitably lead to war, while conciliation could guarantee peace,” Niebuhr wrote caustically. “In the Nazi days this was called appeasement.” It was a blunt, harsh message that he would repeat often, with great effect, over the next few years.⁴⁵

Despite the apparent wickedness and anti-Christian zealotry of the Chinese Communists, despite even the outbreak of the Korean War, a Cold War consensus was just as elusive on Asia as it was on Europe. Protestants were especially divided, with liberals criticizing the excessive anticommunist zeal of Catholics and conservative Protestants as well as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. To mainline modernists, China was a classic example not of the expansionism of communism, but of the political consequences of despair. Poverty, malnutrition, a lack of education, and Nationalist tyranny and corruption were the true evils that had enabled communism to thrive. In classically Progressive, Social Gospel fashion, liberals saw the malfunctioning of Chinese society, and not the CCP, as the source of China’s problems. The Communists had simply taken advantage of the situation, not created it, said the FCC in 1947. The “dynamic” was not political, but “the pressure of poverty” and the “negative and repressive measures used by the Government” of Chiang Kai-shek. Alleviate poverty, hunger, and other societal ills, and communism would cease to be a problem. While the CCP’s consolidation of power in October 1949 electrified American opinion, it did nothing to change the FCC’s opinion. “The fear that Russia might control Asia must not tempt us into a reliance upon military strategy when it is obvious that Communist influence cannot be arrested apart from a general effort to further the economic betterment and growing independence of Asiatic peoples,” its Executive Committee explained in a December 1949 statement. “The real issue is whether or not our government is prepared to advance the greater welfare of the peoples of Asia, with higher standards of living, and with cultural, social, and political institutions which will accord with the free choice of the peoples directly concerned.”⁴⁶

American missionaries had been brutalized and harassed, and eventually deported, and many of them used their bitter experience to push for a hard-line U.S. approach to China. But interestingly, in 1948–49, as a CCP victory in the civil war seemed inevitable, many mainline missionaries continued to believe in engagement, dialogue, and forgiveness. Above all, they continued to believe that the solution to China’s problems, and thus to America’s problems in China, were development and national self-determination. Liberal hopes persisted even after the Communists came to power in October 1949. Only a month after the establishment of the People’s Republic, the Foreign Missions Conference concluded that because the struggle for China “is not primarily a test of arms” but rather “a social and political convulsion of revolutionary proportions,” the Truman administration “should promote in every way the economic well-being of the peoples of the Far East.” Beijing, not Taipei, should represent China on the UN Security Council. Through the United Nations, the United States “should labor incessantly for the observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for the peoples of Asia.” Just as important was racial justice. “The status of inferiority thus far imposed upon these people by the West must come to an end. Asiatics, no less than ourselves, are children of the Heavenly Father and, as such, are entitled to be dealt with on the basis of racial equality.”⁴⁷

Above all, the apostles of progress assumed that admitting China to the United Nations would unravel Sino-American tensions and prevent future wars such as Korea. Even during the Korean War, liberal Protestants called for the seating of China at the UN. According to the Peace Council of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, a mission set up by Union Theological Seminary, it was a step that would not only end the war but “restore the United Nations as an effective agency of mediation.” After the war, the Foreign Policy Commission of Christian Action kept up the pressure, arguing that Chinese inclusion in the UN would make the world body “an even more effective instrument for peace.” Throughout the 1950s, the National Council of Churches joined these calls for the admission of the People’s Republic to the UN. And when secular leaders such as Eleanor Roosevelt made similar appeals, they knew they would find a receptive audience among groups like the United Church Women, a national organization she described to Truman as politically important. Progress could only happen, the church women believed, when the United States admitted China into the family of nations.⁴⁸

…

AS THE COLD War matured in the Eisenhower years, religious dissent matured with it. Indeed, many of the themes that observers found new and startling in the protest movements of the 1960s had been repeatedly tried and tested in the Truman and Eisenhower eras, and not only by radicals on the margins of American political life. The mainline churches, from a wide variety of denominations, joined Protestant and Catholic pacifists in calling for a more humane foreign policy based not on military strength but compassion and charity. The world system’s increasingly globalized nature—indeed, the emergence of something akin to an international society—required the leading religious nation, the United States, to play a commensurately leading political and economic role. “If ever there were a time to beg God’s help,” a Catholic order wrote Eisenhower in 1956, “it is now, for the affliction of our fellow men across the ocean has become our own affliction.” Social problems in one part of the world could not be kept isolated from another, and so had to be dealt with by all. And this was not simply a matter of doing good works. It also made for smart policy, because poverty, hunger, and disease were also assumed to be leading causes of communism and tyranny the world over.⁴⁹

True to his contradictory, quarrelsome nature, Reinhold Niebuhr was one of the leading apostles of progress. The anticommunist gospel of liberty still motivated him, but by the 1950s it became clear that his anticommunism was actually a much more specific anti-Sovietism. He still had no time for communist ideology, but what he saw emerging in the Third World was not Soviet expansionism, nor even the ideological rapacity of Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism, but a socialist means to several ends: decolonization, development, and national self-determination. Calling the North Vietnamese “communist” simply distorted the meaning of the Cold War and drew attention and precious resources away from the very real struggle with the Soviet Union.

Americans, Niebuhr wrote in a 1955 statement for Americans for Democratic Action, were dangerously blind to the “continued weight of the inheritance of ‘colonialism.’ ” Despite the independence of the Philippines in 1946, colonialism was part of the American inheritance just as much as the European—if, that is, Americans wanted to consider themselves leaders of the West and the free world. Decolonization was a problem, partly because of its slow pace and partly because the West still acted as if it was the rest of the world’s master. Niebuhr warned that instead of instilling gratitude, the “emancipation” of colonial peoples “has frequently aggravated their resentments because their new freedom did not cure them of all the ills” attributed to colonialism. Liberty was important, but so too was progress; development must follow independence. Yet Eisenhower and Dulles, who continued to fold every complex world crisis into the simplistic binary of the Soviet-American Cold War, did not seem to be able to grasp this very basic point. They instead fostered a “persistent illusion,” Niebuhr complained, by giving “military strategy a false priority in our total strategy” that merely “veiled the social and political realities with which we must come to terms.” The Soviets recognized what the Eisenhower administration did not, which was why they were winning the global battle for hearts and minds. Though they had once been ecumenical allies, the secretary of state particularly galled Niebuhr. “Mr. Dulles has confused the picture by his simple moral preachments and distinctions,” he said elsewhere to a friend, “and thus the whole non-committed world of Asia and Africa have been alienated.”⁵⁰

Niebuhr’s message—that geopolitics could not be defined simply in terms of a struggle between East and West—epitomized the liberal approach to the Cold War. No longer did world politics turn on Europe and the United States; others were now just as important and had to be considered as equals in the international system. Praising the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which gathered dozens of noncommunist, non-Western nations to form a neutral, “nonaligned” movement, one liberal Protestant rejoiced that “the nineteenth century was decently buried, and the twentieth century was proclaimed for Africa and Asia!” “NOW is the time,” declared the American Baptist Women two years later, to welcome “that rising Asian-African bloc” that was neither East nor West. “Will we make every effort to understand their fears, their needs, their ambitions, so that together we may make the world safe for the survival of ideas and way of life we hold dear?” That the Third World’s fears, needs, and ambitions centered as much on such basic issues as food, water, and education made the West’s preoccupation with communism seem wasteful and selfish, even perverse. The world needed more food and better access to clean drinking water, not nuclear weapons. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish organizations all scrambled to facilitate development in the Third World, and all lent vocal support to Truman’s Point Four program to increase U.S. development aid. Mission boards were particularly well-placed to inculcate modernization.⁵¹

Race—or more specifically, racism—in international relations was another liberal preoccupation, closely connected to global poverty and decolonization because most of the world’s nonwhites constituted most of the world’s poor and colonized. In the United States, Judeo-Christian appeals to tolerance had arisen out of a need to distinguish Americanism from anti-Semitism, fascism, and Nazism. But in the context of the Cold War, religious tolerance was broadened to include racial tolerance as well. It is important to remember, for example, that Truman’s 1948 Executive Order desegregating the military also prohibited religious prejudice. Most of the major white liberal Protestant organizations mobilized behind the cause of racial tolerance, at home and worldwide. Since 1928, the Federal Council of Churches had sponsored Race Relations Sunday, an annual event that highlighted the evil of racial prejudice in America. These special services continued into the Cold War but assumed a new urgency. Tolerance, religious and racial, declared one minister in 1949, was the key to conflict resolution and thus “the only real hope for the world.” This was a message all Christians must heed. After all, preached the pastor of the Parkchester Baptist Church in Brooklyn, if “God created anyone, He must have created everyone.” The United Church Women issued a similar appeal on the World Day of Prayer in 1954 and drafted prayers for the UN, for poverty relief, and for racial tolerance. “Let us pray for those in areas of racial tension,” appealed the church women, and “that the love of God may fill their hearts so that love of all men as brothers must follow.”⁵²

To further this goal, white mainline churches allied with African American Protestants campaigning for racial justice at home. Mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics, and many Jews had long sympathized with the plight of African Americans, but until now they had done little about it. Aside from large, symbolic gestures such as Race Relations Sunday, before the 1950s only radical pacifists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Catholic Worker movement had actually mobilized to advance the cause of civil rights. But in the 1950s, in a development critical for the eventual success of the civil rights movement, white mainline liberals began to team up with blacks. The ideological climate of the Cold War, pitting the “free world” against communist enslavement, gave them confidence. With the Soviets and the Third World nonaligned movement able to use Jim Crow to undermine America’s claims to be the leader of the free world, it was becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain segregation at home while pursuing “freedom” abroad.⁵³

The most significant figure in these early bridge-building initiatives was Benjamin E. Mays, a renowned black Baptist preacher, president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, and founding member of the World Council of Churches. Mays was a commanding presence in the black community and had nurtured several generations of civil rights leaders—including one of his former students at Morehouse, Martin Luther King Jr., who called him “one of the great influences in my life.” Mays had also been one of the leading thinkers of liberal Protestant theology in America, mixing company and sharing ideas with both the neo-orthodox crowd and the pacifists of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In 1954, in Evanston, Illinois, the WCC held its first assembly since its founding in Amsterdam in 1948. This summit of world Protestantism, now including many Eastern Orthodox churches as well, featured Mays as one of its keynote speakers. Addressing the assembly in a country that still respected legally sanctioned racial persecution, Reverend Mays called for all churches, white and black, to live up to the demands of their Christian witness, unite as one, and dismantle racism everywhere in the world—including America.⁵⁴

Blacks had of course already been campaigning for their civil rights for decades. Activists aimed to recapture the gains of Reconstruction that had been consumed by the hatred and persecution of Jim Crow. Organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (founded in 1909) agitated for black freedom with little success. At the same time, African Americans had fought with distinction in each of the nation’s foreign wars since 1898—so that foreigners could have access to the same rights denied to them at home. This cruel discrepancy fed the fires of the black freedom struggle, and as the scale and ideological stakes of the conflicts escalated from the Spanish-American War to World War I to the conflicts of the 1940s, so too did the intensity of the African Americans’ struggle at home. The Cold War both hindered and helped the civil rights movement. While anticommunist red baiting could be wielded to delegitimize domestic causes as antithetical to Americanism, the stridency of Washington’s Cold War claims to moral legitimacy made the gap between Cold War rhetoric and American reality too large to ignore and impossible to sustain.⁵⁵

African Americans were thus able to use the Cold War to achieve progress in civil rights, with black churches and organizations such as King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference leading the way. But they also applied the same moral pressures to U.S. foreign policy. Beyond the United States, the Cold War world was a place of “agonized scarcity” populated by the “hungry, homeless, destitute,” declared the Synod of Catawba, North Carolina, an African American body of the Presbyterian Church (USA). These were threats to world peace every bit as much as communist expansionism. But of “all the factors in the world today that militate against Christian brotherhood, race prejudice is one of the most outstanding, and the most dangerous. Out of race prejudice has grown the race problem, which is one of the most perplexing problems in the world.” Without racial justice, there could be no racial peace; and without racial peace, there could be no world peace.⁵⁶

With this in mind, American Protestants, both black and white, brought pressure to bear on the apartheid regime in South Africa at the same time they campaigned against segregation in the South. With Africa’s position in world politics taking on “new significance,” the AME Church focused attention on apartheid. Not unlike the segregated American South, white South Africans claimed that separate was not necessarily unequal. But just as in the South, apartheid was “not applied Justly. There are two different communities not side by side, but one which enforces its will upon the other.” This was precisely the evil that Americans, of all faiths and races, had fought to eradicate in the war. It was now time to finish the job, though this time peacefully. Liberal white Protestants agreed. “The churches,” declared the New York–based International Missionary Council in a 1954 report on Africa, “have a responsibility to find solutions for inter-racial conflict.”⁵⁷

But of all the liberal causes of the early Cold War, nothing earned such widespread support as the campaign against nuclear weapons. It was not yet the broad-based popular movement it would become in later decades, especially the 1960s and 1980s. But it was already a cause that earned widespread sympathy among religious liberals. And for pacifists, nuclear weapons sustained their cause in an otherwise unsympathetic age of Christian realism and anticommunist containment.

In fact, opposition to nuclear weapons was the main cause that could unite mainline liberals and pacifist radicals. Mainline Protestants were forming a fairly solid consensus on a number of foreign policy issues that would sustain a powerful moral critique not of communism, but of the U.S. government. Some, such as Reverend Robert J. McMullen of the Presbyterian Church of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, called for “the outlawing of such destructive forces and the mass annihilation of peoples and nations that can be caused by them.” Others advanced slightly different proposals that included unilateral disarmament by the United States. Liberal Congregationalists acknowledged that the secret of atomic energy could not be simply unlearned or forgotten, but they suggested that the U.S. government cooperate with the Soviet Union to ensure only civilian uses prevailed. More important, they unequivocally condemned the military applications of nuclear power. “The security of the United States is a very precious thing,” conceded the United Church of Christ magazine Social Action. “But the Christian conscience should not dare attempt to protect that security at the price of the atomized cities of another nation—even if we could prevent the same thing happening to our country.” Some did not go quite so far—the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, a Reform Jewish organization, urged Eisenhower to embark upon prudent disarmament through the UN while also pushing him to embrace quicker desegregation policies at home—but overall, liberals were united in their desire for the United States to begin dismantling its awesome nuclear arsenal.⁵⁸

And of course, pacifist opposition to nuclear weapons—and to U.S. foreign policy in general—remained even more resolute. Whereas the mainline Protestant churches could oscillate between support for some policies and opposition to others—could applaud, for example, the Korean War while criticizing its tactics—Christian pacifists were steadfast in their conviction that the United States government was perhaps the world’s single greatest purveyor of violence. Nuclear arms had something to do with this, but the pacifist critique was rooted much deeper in a sense that U.S. officials had betrayed, and were continuing to betray, America’s true calling in the world. Any form of containment was repugnant, any use of force an affront to God. While some veteran pacifists—most prominently Norman Thomas—lost their way after the Holocaust had vindicated military intervention and communism had vindicated containment, others kept the faith. A. J. Muste certainly did so, as did Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers. They were a small minority, to be sure, but they were a noisy minority who raised troubling questions about America’s role in the world. And just as Christian pacifists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation had teamed up with civil rights campaigners Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and A. Philip Randolph during the war, Muste and the FOR would link up with a new generation of leaders in the black freedom struggle. In 1950, Martin Luther King Jr., still a divinity student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, was “deeply moved” by a Muste lecture on nonviolence. Though initially skeptical, the young King had been introduced to pacifism, a significant turning point encouraged by the religious activists in the FOR who linked nonviolent resistance against imperialism abroad to the fight against segregation at home.⁵⁹

As Muste, Day, and King illustrated, just as a shared anticommunism was bringing conservative Protestants and Catholics closer together, leftist dissent could also lead to ecumenical cooperation. The Cold War, then, blurred denominational boundaries on the left as well as the right. For example, when Day and other Catholic Workers deliberately got themselves arrested by refusing to participate in New York air-raid drills and nuclear shelter exercises—which contravened state law—the American Friends Service Committee stepped in to pay for their legal defense. On other occasions, Catholic Workers and Quakers worked together to protest air-raid drills as provocative to the Soviets and corrosive to American life. This hinted at the broad-based peace coalitions that would come in the following decade, not only over nuclear weapons but also civil rights and the war in Vietnam.⁶⁰

By the 1950s, the unsettling realities of thermonuclear warfare had even stirred the consciences of the Christian realists. Once again, Niebuhr proved to be an important bellwether. Niebuhr had previously been more accepting of atomic weapons than his mainline colleagues. But the hydrogen bomb, which represented a quantum leap in destructive capacity, pushed him away from perceiving nuclear arms as simply another weapon. Especially repugnant were the strategists, like Herman Kahn and Henry Kissinger, who had declared nuclear war to be winnable. Kahn had even contemplated the number of “acceptable” American deaths in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union—anything under so many tens of millions of dead would be considered a success because it would likely mean greater Soviet casualties and thus a U.S. victory. Niebuhr had little patience for those, like Kissinger, who considered nuclear arms “tactical rather than strategic” and thus available for use like a conventional weapon. “I think this is monstrous,” he complained to John C. Bennett after Eisenhower had likened a nuclear bomb to conventional weapons, such as a bullet or a tank, “and I am saying so.”⁶¹

In saying so, time and again, as both an apostle of liberty and an apostle of progress, Niebuhr epitomized the contradictions and tensions of an era falsely remembered for its homogeneity. Yet these tensions were but rumblings compared to the earthquake that would hit the United States—and its foreign policy—in the decades to come.