BY 1960, Americans had lived for three decades with presidents who had used religion to define their political values and foreign policies. When Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower needed to justify or explain the purposes of diplomacy, they found a ready answer in religious faith. Central to their messages, with only slight variations in tone, were the links between faith and freedom, especially between interfaith tolerance and democratic politics. Thus the election in 1960 of the nation’s first Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, was in many ways the logical culmination of their efforts. And at first, JFK seemed to continue promoting their presidential civil religion. “I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago,” he declared at the outset of his inaugural address. “And yet the same revolutionary beliefs … are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” The new president pledged his support for “those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share” and asked God for “His blessing and His help” while acknowledging that “here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”1
Slain by an assassin’s bullet in November 1963, Kennedy never lived to finish God’s work. The task was left to his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who used his 1965 inaugural address to share his vision of building a Great Society in America. Under a “covenant of justice, liberty, and union,” LBJ proclaimed, “we have become a nation—prosperous, great, and mighty.” Yet this did not mean God’s work was finished. Americans were a blessed people, but they had “no promise from God that our greatness will endure. We have been allowed by Him to seek greatness with the sweat of our hands and the strength of our spirit.” Americans had work ahead of them, hard work, even in a time of plenty. Johnson, in a prophetic mood, left them with no alternative. “If we fail now then we will have forgotten in abundance what we learned in hardship: that democracy rests on faith, that freedom asks more than it gives, and the judgment of God is harshest on those who are most favored.”2
Yet the religious rhetoric of Kennedy and Johnson marked a subtle but significant change. It seemed as pious as the language that had come before, but it was more ambivalent, less comfortable in the absolute certainties of faith. In pledging to do God’s work on earth, Kennedy signaled a more humanist, even secular, approach to solving the problems of the world. Johnson’s tone was even sharper, warning Americans against complacent exceptionalism and reminding them that God would not look kindly upon those who did not put their vast powers to good use. Perhaps without realizing it, Kennedy and Johnson reflected a shift that was taking place in religion’s influence on politics and especially on foreign policy. In a modernizing society that was both increasingly secular and pluralistic, religion’s role could never again be assumed. The presidents could look to faith, but they could not rely on it. As a result, neither Kennedy nor Johnson provided Americans with guidance on how to apply the teachings of religion to the practice of world politics.
However, religious Americans felt no such ambivalence or hesitation. In fact, under pressure from the same secular and pluralistic sources, people of faith on both the left and the right strengthened the application of their religious beliefs to public life. In an uncertain and constantly shifting world, religion seemed to provide the only remaining fixed points of moral reference. With no direction from the White House, they were left free to channel their religious energies and passions into whichever outlets they thought best. The result was chaotic. For the first time since the interwar period, the religious influence on American foreign relations, from both the left and the right, was mostly oppositional and rarely in concert with policymakers.
IT IS NO small irony that one of the least religious of presidents should have been the agent of such profound religious change. With his election in 1960, John F. Kennedy broke one of the oldest and strongest cultural prejudices in America, anti-Catholicism, simply because of his inherited faith. And yet it was this very faith that compelled him to deemphasize the role of faith in the presidency. Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary, recalled that Kennedy was “determined to lean over backward to disprove the suspicion that he would be a Catholic president.” Kennedy’s determination not to favor one religion meant that he would give favor to no religion.3
Kennedy was not irreligious, and he certainly was not an atheist. But neither was he devout—at least, not in a spiritual sense. He believed in God and the Catholic Church, but did not seek their counsel for guidance on earthly matters. On religion, his sister Eunice noted that “he was always a little less convinced about some things than the rest of us.” Raised in a strongly Irish Catholic household by a mother who was deeply devoted to the church, Kennedy was proud of his Catholic identity. In Boston, a city of deep sectarian divisions, it gave him a sense of solidarity with a community that would always remain loyal. But while he remained respectful of the church, he exhibited a humanist independence, and at times a skepticism, from a young age. Thus began a strongly pragmatic, problem-solving mindset that would later characterize his presidency. Ted Sorensen, his longtime speechwriter and confidant and perhaps his closest political adviser from the Senate to the White House, noted that Kennedy was a Catholic “by heritage, habit and conviction” but “did not believe that all virtue resided in the Catholic Church” or “believe that all non-Catholics would (or should) go to hell. He felt neither self-conscious nor superior about his religion but simply accepted it as part of his life.” Arthur Schlesinger, another White House aide and observer, agreed: “Kennedy’s religion was humane rather than doctrinal,” and he had “little knowledge of or interest in the Catholic dogmatic tradition.” Perhaps his strongest belief about religion was that it should be an entirely private and personal matter.4
This emphasis on privacy, and by political extension on a firm separation of church and state, was to serve him well in the 1960 presidential election campaign. We may now realize that Protestant hostility to the Catholic Church had already begun its decline by 1960, but at the time the notion that a Catholic president could loyally serve the United States was controversial. Evangelicals and fundamentalists were particularly concerned, but mainline liberal Protestants expressed reservations as well. Could a Catholic avoid having two loyalties, one to church and one to state? The answer was unclear, even for racially tolerant Protestant leaders who were simultaneously championing the cause of African American civil rights. Charles Clayton Morrison, the former pacifist leader and longtime editor of Christian Century, charged that there were “two powerful monarchical” systems in the world, “the Communist Dictatorship and the Infallible Papacy,” and Americans had to resist both if they wanted to preserve their free way of life. “How do you feel about a Catholic candidate for President?” Look magazine asked two of the most prominent liberal ministers in the country, Methodist Bromley Oxnam and Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake. “Uneasy,” they answered, because Kennedy would find himself confronted with tough decisions in which he would have to choose between his Catholic faith and his presidential duties. A Catholic president would also provide the Church with a means to undermine the separation of church and state by, for example, using public money to fund parochial schools. The Kennedy campaign hired James Wine, a lawyer and active Presbyterian layman, to handle the religious issue, though many Protestants thought he had made a pact with the devil. “Had John Knox felt as you do, then perhaps we would all still be held in the throes of this ecclesiastical monster,” a Baptist pastor from Arkansas City, Kansas, complained to Wine. “[Y]ou are a traitor to the Protestant Religion and a contemptible scoundrel,” protested another.5
Kennedy allayed such fears by stressing, in the strongest possible terms, that religion was strictly a private matter. This represented something of a sea change from the public piety of the Truman and Eisenhower eras, but it quelled Protestant fears of a Catholic conspiracy to take over the U.S. government. Kennedy argued his case first in the Democratic primary in West Virginia, a state with few Catholics and many devout Protestants, and then in a famed speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a grouping of the kind of conservative Protestants who were most uneasy about Kennedy’s candidacy. In Houston, JFK declared his belief in the firmest possible separation between church and state. “I am not the Catholic candidate for president,” he told the skeptics in Houston. “I am the Democratic party’s candidate who happens also to be a Catholic.” His religion was a personal matter, irrelevant to the presidency. He won over both the West Virginians and the Houstonians, critical turning points not only in his own political career but in the increasing secularization of American religion, especially its division into private and public spheres. Predictably, his stance angered some Catholic priests and intellectuals, who wondered just what kind of Catholic Kennedy was if the Church’s values were personal and not applicable to politics.6
Most Catholics did not care about such matters on election day—at least, not as much as they hoped to send a Catholic to the White House. In fact, even though Kennedy’s religion damaged his showing in the popular vote, it increased Catholic turnout in key battleground states and contributed to his victory over Richard Nixon. After the election, most Protestants buried their suspicions of the Catholic Church. Baptists, traditionally among the staunchest defenders of the separation of church and state and the denomination that had probably caused Kennedy the most trouble during the campaign, eagerly approached the new president after his inauguration. They “want the President to know they consider him their President,” Bill Moyers reported to presidential adviser Kenneth O’Donnell. It was a widely shared sentiment that killed off anti-Catholicism as a major feature of American public life and, at least for now, effectively removed religion from presidential politics.7
Kennedy had helped usher in a new era. But in a strange and completely unintended way, Lyndon Johnson actually embodied the decade’s religious confusion, experimentation, and dynamism much better than Kennedy. Raised in a conservative religious town in the Texas Hill Country—one resident recalled that local churches tried to “out-Baptist the Baptists”—by a father who was religious but loathed fundamentalism and a mother who was a devout Southern Baptist, Johnson converted to the Disciples of Christ, a pious and evangelical but informal and liberal Protestant denomination, at the age of fifteen. Later, as president, he encouraged his daughter’s and wife’s own conversions (to the Episcopal Church). Johnson himself often dabbled in the services of other denominations, especially the Catholic Church (to which his other daughter converted), and would often carry a scriptural verse with him to suit the political moment. He was also extremely close to Billy Graham, the nation’s most prominent religious figure, and leaned heavily on the evangelist for emotional support and spiritual comfort during the worst years of race riots and Vietnam. Like Truman and Eisenhower before him, Johnson was an ecumenical president, deeply religious without believing that any one denomination had a monopoly on spiritual truth: he was devout without being doctrinaire. As Jack Valenti, one of his closest advisers, observed, LBJ “believed in God” but “simply detached himself from any dogma, indeed, found rigidly-fixed doctrine as unappetizing in religion as he disavowed it in politics.” As the difficulties of his presidency mounted, Johnson found solace in faith. “During his years in the White House,” recalled Joseph Califano, another close adviser, “Lyndon Johnson had become increasingly religious.” When confronted with issues of profound moral quandary and complexity, such as the impact of war upon Vietnamese civilians, Califano noticed that Johnson openly turned to the reassurances of religion. “Over time, the President talked more often about seeking guidance from the Almighty and praying. I had a sense that he found comfort in his relationship with God, particularly during his final year in office.”8
THE SIXTIES ARE rightly remembered as a decade of turmoil and instability resulting from rapid social change. In matters of race, gender, and sexuality, long-held traditions came under attack from a new generation of rights campaigners. The new role of the federal government, forged by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, was especially revolutionary, much more so even than Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whereas FDR sought merely to stabilize the economy and create conditions for economic growth, LBJ wanted to create a more egalitarian society by establishing a new set of ground rules for how people treated one another. Despite pleas from African Americans, the New Deal had mostly ignored race relations, while gender issues were never even considered. By tackling these most sensitive of social and cultural questions, then, the Great Society proved itself to be far more radical than the New Deal—or, for that matter, any other domestic reform program since Reconstruction. The monumental ambition of Johnson’s social engineering proved to be its key weakness as well as its main strength. But even though it was only a mixed success, the Great Society triggered a Rights Revolution in which the very fundamentals of American identity were no longer certain. From it spun a continuing series of subsequent “rights revolutions,” largely beyond LBJ’s control, on privacy, sexual orientation, and reproductive rights that lasted well into the next decade and beyond. America would never be the same again.9
Nor would its faith. “Nothing changed so profoundly in the United States during the 1960s as American religion,” claim two leading historians of the radical decade, and it is easy to see why. Judaism largely escaped the tumult, but American Christianity underwent its greatest period of strife and restructuring in forty years. Both Protestants and Catholics challenged the very basics of what it meant to be a practicing Christian. As a result, some changed the tenets or conventions of their faith completely; others, as we shall see, reaffirmed the traditional bases of their religion. Many switched sides, by breaking the shackles of conservatism or fleeing the chaos of liberal change into the comforting assurances of traditional faith. Others simply lost their faith entirely, or embraced the new religious pluralism that resulted from the arrival of a new generation of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim immigrants from Africa, India, and the Middle East. As a result, many Americans embraced foreign religions—Zen, Hare Krishna, and New Age spiritualism—that only a few years before would have tested the bounds of plausibility, let alone acceptability. All told, in the decades after 1960 American religion not only radicalized and polarized between contending forces of politicized religion but diversified into a wholly new mosaic of world faith.10
While religion was not necessarily on the Great Society’s agenda, the federal government was not inactive on matters of faith. In the early 1960s, in response to petitions by parents who were either religious minorities or atheists, the Supreme Court decided three cases that built an insurmountable wall of separation between religion and public education. In 1962, in the case of Engel v. Vitale, the Court decided that a nonsectarian prayer to “Almighty God,” approved by an advisory board comprised of ministers, priests, and rabbis, constituted a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause. In two cases the following year—Abington Township v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett—the Court upheld and widened the new prohibition on prayer in public schools. In hardening and raising the wall of separation between church and state, the Supreme Court was responding to but also accentuating the secularization of American public life, a profound change in itself that in turn stoked the fires of religious reformation and counterreformation.11
Protestantism changed more than at any other time since the emergence of Darwinism, biblical criticism, and modernism in the late nineteenth century. In 1960, the election of John Kennedy coincided with the waning of America’s Cold War great awakening. Public religiosity ebbed with the departure of Eisenhower and the acquiescence of his successor, who wanted to deemphasize the public role of his own Catholic religion. But the receding tide of religious revivalism left behind a new generation of innovative, imaginative Protestant theologians who believed their mission was to reconcile religion with the increasing pace of modern life. In doing so, they pushed the bounds of faith itself, with ramifications for U.S. foreign policy.
Protestant intellectuals advanced a radical version of Christianity that rejected its spiritualism but embraced its ethics. Philosophically burdened and emotionally troubled by the Cold War and its stalemate of nuclear terror, liberal Christians turned increasingly to existentialism. Many embraced the faith-based Christian existentialism of Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German minister who was executed by the Nazis at the end of World War II. But others incorporated secular ideas about death and the meaning of life, particularly from German (especially Friedrich Nietzsche) and French philosophers (Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre). In 1961, Gabriel Vahanian, a French-born and Princeton-educated theologian at Syracuse University, published The Death of God. The modern world, he argued, had overtaken the supernatural God of the Bible; to keep God relevant, Christians must adapt their faith to the times. The “mythological world-view of Christianity,” Vahanian wrote, “has been succeeded by a thoroughgoing scientific view of reality, in terms of which either God is no longer necessary, or he is neither necessary nor unnecessary: he is irrelevant—he is dead.” To Vahanian, this was a positive development. From here emerged the doctrine of “secular theology,” espoused by young Protestant theologians across the country. In 1963, Paul Van Buren of the University of Texas published The Secular Meaning of the Gospel; two years later, Harvard Divinity School’s Harvey Cox followed with The Secular City, which sold over a million copies; a year later came Radical Theology and the Death of God by Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton. Speaking for most of his fellow Protestant radicals, Cox attacked the spiritual bases of Christianity by declaring that “cultic worship is no longer necessary,” that “there is no otherworldliness in Jesus,” and that “the barrier between the sacred and the secular is not only abolished, but in many instances completely reversed.” In 1966, Time scandalized the nation by bringing the still-obscure notions of secular theology, and its roots in Nietzschean philosophy, to a wider public. “Is God Dead?” the establishment magazine asked in bold red letters against a stark black cover. To many disillusioned Protestants living in a paradoxical age of affluence and abundance, but also Holocaust memory, nuclear missiles, race riots, and the Vietnam War, the answer was no longer clear.12
“It is no longer possible for Protestantism to survive in its present form,” concluded Stephen E. Rose, a young religious intellectual who issued a “Manifesto for Protestant Renewal” in 1966. And for many Americans, it did not. As the supernatural foundations of liberal Protestant belief crumbled, its fixed moral bearings collapsed as well. Most famous was the advent of “relativism,” the idea that there are no moral absolutes but only a series of constantly shifting relative goods. Nobody, not even Christians, had a monopoly on truth and righteousness. In 1966, at the height of secular theology’s fame, Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopal divinity school professor from Massachusetts, published Situation Ethics. Carrying the provocative subtitle The New Morality, Fletcher’s book argued that it was simply impossible to reconcile traditional morality with the dynamism and pluralism of modern life. Christians should instead make moral decisions based on the circumstances and context of the situation immediately before them, not on the Bible or teachings of the church.13
Similarly, a new generation of black theologians, such as Union Theological Seminary’s James H. Cone, adapted Christianity to suit an assertive black identity that aimed for equality but not necessarily integration with whites. First in the provocative book Black Theology and Black Power, published in 1969, and then a year later in the equally provocative A Black Theology of Liberation, Cone presented Christ as a subaltern figure of African descent, a revolutionary who fought the wickedness of authority to ensure the salvation of the oppressed. “Black Power and Christianity have this in common: the liberation of man!” he argued. “And if Christ is present today actively risking all for the freedom of man, he must be acting through the most radical elements of Black Power.” Cone’s message was a blend of the decade’s most powerful religious ideologies of the oppressed: Black Power plus liberation theology incorporated from leftist and outright Marxist South American Catholics. It was a far cry from the more soothing message of Exodus preached by Martin Luther King, but by the end of the decade it was also a better reflection of how many African Americans felt. In books such as The Black Messiah and Black Power and White Protestants, other black Protestant intellectuals advanced similar arguments.14
American Catholics also underwent a process of wrenching change that was truly revolutionary. The terms of Catholicism had not changed much in the preceding century since the First Vatican Council established many of the modern Church’s ground rules, even under the pressures of immigration and assimilation to American society. But in a process initiated by no less an authority than Pope John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, initiated a reformation of the Catholic faith. Meeting intermittently from 1962 until 1965, the decisions made by worldwide Catholic authorities at Vatican II liberalized many of the practices of the Church, particularly concerning liturgy and worship. Ecumenism was also a central theme, epitomized by John XXIII’s promise to tolerate and cooperate with other Christian denominations. Moreover, the Church took a more progressive stand on social and political questions, such as on issues of race and war and peace. Although some reforms, such as the marriage of priests and the use of birth control, proved too much even for the reformers, it is difficult to overestimate the significance of the changes that were approved. Vatican II modernized a church that had long taken pride in resisting modernization. As a result, by 1970 many American Catholics, for better or worse, scarcely recognized the church of 1960.15
Yet further changes to American religious life were still to come. In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which lifted racist restrictions and quotas imposed by the 1924 National Origins Act. The result was a flood of new immigrants from Africa, India, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia who brought with them religious beliefs—traditional African faiths, Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism—that were completely new to the vast majority of Americans. In terms of sheer numbers, adherents to the new faiths were still dwarfed by the standard Protestant-Catholic-Jew composition of American religion. But their mere presence was a startling challenge to existing norms, and they became especially popular among a younger generation of Americans who were desperate to break free from the constraints of their Judeo-Christian heritage and willing to experiment with foreign alternatives. The popularity of Eastern and New Age spiritualities that began slowly in the 1950s blossomed into a religious phenomenon in the more philosophically curious, irreverent Sixties. Islam, conducive to Black Power ideology and the emerging pan-African movement and already practiced by American variants such as the Nation of Islam, caught on among African Americans who were less willing to embrace black Protestantism’s ethos of patient sacrifice and eventual salvation. The practice of traditional African faiths grew alongside the spread of Islam. As a result of this new immigration, American domestic life was quickly becoming globalized. Perhaps it was no coincidence that 1965 also marked the founding of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, and with it the Hare Krishna movement in America.16
UNSURPRISINGLY, the religious liberals who had been the apostles of progress during the staid 1950s flourished in the reformation Sixties. Their quests for progressive change in religion and politics mirrored and fueled each other to the extent that crusades against poverty and racism and crusades for inclusiveness and innovation in faith became opposite sides of the same coin. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations welcomed these reformers, but not without mixed feelings, for religious liberals wanted to push a reformist agenda, at home and abroad, much further and faster than government officials thought possible.
The Kennedy administration generally shared the liberals’ goals but not necessarily their moral passion or sense of urgency. The apostles of progress kept alive the internationalist Social Gospel tradition by calling for the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation, to help cure socioeconomic problems around the world. Americans needed to share their wealth and lift starving billions out of destitution, but doing so would require sacrifice for the good of all humanity. “A fat and complacent and luxury-loving America can never preach Christ persuasively to a starving, struggling world,” declared Reverend John M. Krumm, chaplain of Columbia University, after a 1960 tour through Asia. Instead, Americans must find solutions, “perhaps even through higher taxes,” to level the global economic playing field and “lift the level of life around the world to something approaching our own incredible level.” Reflecting widespread concerns about the domestic poor, in 1962 the National Council of Churches told Kennedy that “it is no longer necessary to tolerate poverty” and demanded that the president commit the nation to “an all-out effort to abolish it, both at home and abroad.”17
Kennedy did not disagree, illustrated by the fact that foreign aid and development stood at the heart of his foreign policy, even if his efforts were not exactly all-out. Through programs such as the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, he aimed to inoculate the Third World against communism by stimulating economic growth that would lead to political stability. Exiled to the banks of the Charles River during the Eisenhower administration, modernization theorists flocked to Kennedy’s Washington and filled the ranks of the State Department and National Security Council. Led by Walt Rostow, who in 1960 wrote The Stages of Economic Growth, an avowedly “non-communist manifesto,” modernization theorists believed they had unlocked the political and economic secret to steering the world toward capitalism and, in the process, winning the Cold War peacefully. As Rostow would discover in Vietnam, however, the road to modernization was not so straightforward.18
Neither was the role of faith. Kennedy and his advisers were committed to a reformist agenda abroad, but they remained unsure about the role religion should play. For one thing, modernization theory presupposed the fading away of religion. For another, it was not an altruistic means of delivering charity to the world’s poor but a weapon in the Cold War. Thus at a basic level, modernization theory and religious reformism were incompatible, perhaps even contradictory. Moreover, Kennedy was concerned not to let it appear that his faith was determining his policies, including his foreign policy. Religious faith marked an essential difference between East and West, he acknowledged to a 1961 prayer breakfast held by the International Christian Leadership, but it was no more than that: “I do not regard religion as a weapon in the cold war.” In case the assembled evangelists and apostles of liberty did not understand him the first time, he repeated himself the following year. “I do not suggest that religion is an instrument of the cold war,” he declared at the 1962 prayer breakfast before largely the same audience. “Rather it is the basis of the issue which separates us from those who make themselves our adversary. And at the heart of the matter, of course, is the position of the individual—his importance, his sanctity, his relationship to his fellow men, his relationship to his country and his state.” Thus it was left to the individual, not the state, to promote religious solutions to international problems.19
Yet religion could not be purged so easily from U.S. foreign policy, much less from American public life. As Kennedy would soon discover, voluntarist activity could not always be easily separated from public policy—at least, not without rancor. The Kennedy administration may have had a special interest in development, but it also happened to be a field in which America’s large contingent of overseas missionaries and faith-based relief agencies—Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon—had tremendous experience and expertise. Missionaries from the Southern Baptist Convention and relief workers from Church World Service and Catholic Relief Services approached the Kennedy administration as partners in a global war on poverty. Some officials, such as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs Harlan Cleveland, called for a more formal partnership between government and religious organizations, especially mission boards, but on the whole they were lonely voices in an administration preoccupied with social science and problem solving. “This is a group we need to cultivate,” said Bill Moyers, an aide to then vice president Johnson, of the Southern Baptist missionaries. Few paid him any heed.20
Characteristically, religious groups pushed on regardless. The NCC and mainline Protestant denominations were active, but more surprising was the leading role taken by the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican II reforms ushered in sweeping changes to the life and worship of Catholics, but it also renewed an activist mission of worldwide peace and social justice that had in recent decades been subsumed by the demands of the Church’s anticommunist holy war. Now, the Vatican called for a more equitable world order and for ecumenical cooperation with Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Muslims—even, to a degree, communists. In May 1961, Pope John XXIII issued Mater et Magistra, a progressive encyclical on economic life in the modern world. Rather than unfettered capitalism, John enjoined that “all forms of economic enterprise must be governed by the principles of social justice and charity.” Rather than engaging in economic and political competition, “man’s aim must be to achieve in social justice a national and international juridical order … in which all economic activity can be conducted not merely for private gain but also in the interests of the common good.” The pope pointed out that the world was in the midst of being re-created by decolonization and globalization, in which “nations are becoming daily more interdependent,” which in turn created the imperative for international cooperation across religious and ideological lines. The encyclical focused on economics, national and international, and John stressed one theme above all: “Economic progress must be accompanied by a corresponding social progress, so that all classes of citizens can participate in the increased productivity. The utmost vigilance and effort is needed to ensure that social inequalities, so far from increasing, are reduced to a minimum.” In other words, “the economic prosperity of a nation is not so much its total assets in terms of wealth and property, as the equitable division and distribution of this wealth.”21
Two years later, at the height of Vatican II, John XXIII extended such thinking from economics to the realm of world politics. Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”), an encyclical addressed “to all men of good will,” argued that the preservation of peace was the duty of all humanity in an age of nuclear weapons. Human rights, based upon a careful balancing of individual rights with collective social justice, must be the basis of international relations. There would naturally be differences among people over how best to achieve such a balance. Everyone, not only Catholics, had to remember that people who believed in “erroneous doctrines” such as communism were fellow human beings who sought the same objectives: peace, stability, justice, prosperity, equality. It did no good to condemn communists or damn them to the eternal fires of hell; denunciations such as these only fueled the Cold War without offering constructive solutions for its end. “Besides,” asked the pope, “who can deny that those movements, in so far as they conform to the dictates of right reason and are interpreters of the lawful aspirations of the human person, contain elements that are positive and deserving of approval?” Because peace was essential, tolerance was now also essential. The pope led by example by meeting with Soviet officials, much to the consternation of the State Department.22
The Vatican’s next step was to seek a partnership on international social justice with the world’s most powerful nation. Aware that the usual American sensitivities about undue Catholic influence would be heightened during a Catholic presidency, Vatican officials and allies made discreet contact with Kennedy administration officials to see if some sort of alliance could be struck. This marked a change from Harry Truman and Myron Taylor’s approaches to Pius XII, in which the United States sought an anticommunist alliance of all religious believers against the Soviet Union. Now, it was John XXIII’s turn to solicit American cooperation in establishing an ecumenical peace of all peoples, communists included. Norman Cousins, the editor of Saturday Review and an intimate of several Kennedy administration officials, was granted a papal audience in 1962 with the knowledge that the conversation would be passed along to the White House. The pope suggested that 1962 could be a “Geo-Humanistic Year” in which the United States and the Soviet Union embarked upon a “Peace Race” that would not only ensure the “absence of nuclear conflict” but also “provide adequate education for the world’s young” and “develop the creative potential of every child.” Yet John’s vision of peace caused concern in Washington, not hope. Kennedy officials told reporters they were “puzzled” by the Vatican peace offensive; others expressed “concern.” The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded that the Vatican’s new diplomacy “could conceivably be a dialogue and even collaboration” with regimes behind the Iron Curtain, while a CIA analysis warned that the Vatican was creating a geopolitical atmosphere that was “permissive rather than positive.” By 1963, Kennedy himself was pursuing a détente of sorts with Moscow, but he and his advisers worried that the Vatican was pushing the process too quickly, and in ways that would not always be conducive to American interests.23
In Catholic America, the pursuit of peace had been dominated by left-liberals, such as Father John Ryan and the Catholic Association for International Peace, and radicals, such as Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. The hierarchy took social justice seriously, but when it came to international relations anticommunism took precedence over all else. But now, with the impetus of Vatican II, many bishops and priests embraced a peace crusade that sought the extension of global social justice to all. “Our moral responsibility,” proclaimed the National Catholic Welfare Conference in 1961, “transcends the limited circle of our individual lives and the confining borders of our country. Our interests and our obligations are world-wide,” especially in the developing world, which might begin with material aid but must also include “a recognition of their dignity.” Other Catholic leaders were willing to go even further.24
Mainline Protestants, particularly those who debated the “death of God” and “situation ethics,” were for the most part even more radical than Catholics. They believed that not only was the church in revolution, but the whole world was. And according to Princeton Theological Seminary’s Richard Shaull, as both Christians and Americans “we may feel quite at home in the midst of revolution.” Often this revolutionary critique of the Cold War was also a critique of the United States, especially on the American record on perpetuating racial and economic inequalities at home and around the world. In fact, Americans were so morally compromised, so used to tolerating human rights abuses by their own government and people, that they were no longer a truly Christian people. “We live in the time of the invalidation of the Christian gospel by Christians themselves,” lamented Harvey Cox in 1963. “We have managed to prove to most of the world’s people that we don’t really mean what we say.” Cox called for a renewal of America’s belief in Christian ethics by tackling racism in all America—not just in the South—and curtailing its imperial ambitions abroad. The “first thing the church must always do,” he urged his fellow Christians, “is to find out where God is on the move in his world today, and then make all possible haste to be there with him.” For Cox, God’s locations were obvious: Mississippi, Harlem, Latin America, Indochina, and other places where poverty and injustice thrived.25
While reformist Catholics and liberal Protestants cheered Kennedy’s policies of international uplift, such as the Peace Corps, they despaired of his more traditional use of force. Foremost among liberal concerns was America’s continuing strategic reliance on nuclear weapons—indeed, for many liberal ministers and theologians, many sins flowed from the looming shadow of nuclear terror. Because nuclear weapons threatened all life on earth, placed in human hands the power that should be God’s alone, cost so much, and seemed so illogical and unnecessary, religious liberals believed that further reform was not possible unless the United States committed itself to nuclear disarmament. The Friends Witness for World Order, a Quaker peace group, sent Kennedy a petition that called for unequivocal support of the United Nations, foreign aid, and recognition of communist China, but above all pressed for a general disarmament to begin with nuclear weapons. The Central Conference of American Rabbis made a similar plea to JFK, this time linking nuclear disarmament to civil rights and support for Israel. After the Soviets resumed atmospheric nuclear testing in 1961, Kennedy felt the United States could not afford to fall behind and authorized new American tests in the spring of 1962. An incensed Thomas Merton, the celebrated American Catholic intellectual, antinuclear activist, and perhaps the world’s most famous Trappist monk, typified the shock and anger of religious liberals. Merton was “convinced,” he wrote not long after the resumption of testing, that America “is not only capable of starting a preemptive nuclear war but is perhaps on the way to doing it.” “Is peace possible?” Church Women United asked on World Community Day in 1964. Not without disarmament. “To build international peace with justice and freedom,” liberal church women across America prayed, “nations in community must not trust in armed might as their greatest resource for strength.”26
The liberal critique of American foreign policy accelerated as the tumultuous decade wore on, race relations deteriorated, and the war in Vietnam escalated. By continuing to rely on brute force, Lyndon Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, seemed determined to block the historical changes sweeping the world into the postmodern age. If the Soviet-American clashes over Berlin and Cuba in 1961–62 had appeared to be the product of mutual hostility, American interventions in the Dominican Republic (1965) and Chile (1973) seemed to be a more clearly one-sided case of wanton aggression. And they were only the most obvious cases of American imperialism. “Repression has intensified,” Cox reported to friends after a 1970 tour of Latin America, due mostly to the rise of “right-wing dictatorships that often seized power with American encouragement.” Cox promised that “hope is still alive,” thanks not to the United States but to local grassroots resistance movements of “workers and farmers, students and intellectuals, priests and ministers.” These people’s movements “are trying to wrench the future of their continent away from the ruling cliques and their American sponsors,” and they were succeeding due to the galvanizing effects of their “buoyant religious vision.” Cox was witnessing the growth of liberation theology, a popular movement that started in Colombia in 1968 with the aim of resisting war, authoritarianism, and the United States through a powerful blend of Marxism and Catholicism.27
By the end of the 1960s, the renewal of the global Social Gospel was in full swing. Believing that their own society and the world at large were in the midst of revolution, liberal clergy called for immediate action producing immediate results. Like Cox, they saw their efforts as existing in opposition to the policies of the U.S. government. Though they might disagree on some issues, such as the use of birth control to slow world population growth, Protestants and Catholics promoted a global agenda of peace, human rights, and equitable economic development with equal vigor. A 1969 report on Christian missions by the United Methodist Church summed it up best: “Poverty, health, race relations, peace—you name it,” said Bishop Lloyd C. Wicke. “These are the concerns of the whole church; these are the gospel’s concern, the concern of the entire family of man.” American Catholics launched a similar mission drive, while Catholic writers, such as Michael Novak (later a neoconservative), affirmed the radical critique of American politics and society. Pope John VI joined in with a 1967 encyclical, Populorum Progressio, that blasted the developed nations for hoarding their wealth and keeping the Third World in a state of dependency and destitution. The World Council of Churches, led by an American Presbyterian, Eugene Carson Blake, reaffirmed in 1968 that in “the struggle for peace and justice, the Church must bear witness” and that the clergy “must speak out where no one else dares to, or where truth is not respected, where human lives or human dignity are endangered, and where opportunities for a better future are neglected” to bring about the “application of social justice to all human relations.” The following year, the WCC swore to do all it could to end racism throughout the world, even if it meant supporting leftist “national liberation” movements. Perhaps most significant was the fact that liberal Protestants and Catholics now saw each other as allies rather than competitors. In 1968, Francis Sweeney, an American priest with intimate papal ties, even invited Blake to the Vatican to present a united front in the “establishment of international order.”28
THE MARKED AMBIVALENCE that characterized the relationship between Democratic officials and religious liberals meant that there was little synergy, or even cooperation, between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the apostles of progress on foreign policy. This was in stark contrast to the mostly warm relations the Eisenhower administration had enjoyed with the apostles of liberty. Kennedy was not interested in deploying religion while Johnson, who was more willing to work with religious leaders, found himself sharply at odds with liberals over the Vietnam War. But also crucial was the fact that neither Kennedy nor Johnson, nor most of their advisers, understood the new American religious landscape or grasped the importance of religious pluralism in a globalizing world. From the beginning, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s adviser and in-house historian, noted the difference with Eisenhower in both style and substance. “The John Foster Dulles contrast between the God-anointed apostles of free enterprise and the regimented hordes of atheistic communism bored him,” Schlesinger wrote of Kennedy. “Seeing the world as an historian rather than as a moralist, he could not utter without embarrassment the self-serving platitudes about the total virtue of one side and the total evil of the other.”29
Accordingly, the attitude of Kennedy administration officials toward religion’s place in world politics ranged from indifferent to hostile. Whether Americans protested the harsh treatment of Catholics in Poland, Jews in the Soviet Union, or Protestants in Spain, they received little encouragement from Washington. As the Kennedy State Department aridly informed Congressman Walter Rogers of Texas, angered by the treatment of American Protestants in Catholic South America, the U.S. government was “obliged to recognize that these are primarily internal matters under the jurisdiction of other sovereign governments.” Advocates of Soviet Jews received a similarly lukewarm response. Religious persecution of Soviet Jews was regrettable, the National Security Council wrote to one concerned individual in 1963, but “it is believed that formal United States Government representations would not be in their best interests.” To Congressman Steven Derounian of New York, the State Department questioned whether persecution of Soviet Jews “has its actual basis in anti-Semitism” and, veering into anti-Semitic territory itself, suggested that Jews were simply targets of “the presently intensified campaign of the Soviet authorities to stamp out black marketeering, speculation and other economic crimes involving illegal manufacturing, theft or misappropriation of state property, bribery of officials, and other economic abuses.” In any event, life in the Soviet Union was hard for everyone. Even if Soviet Jews were being persecuted simply for being Jewish, it was doubtful they were being subjected to “a disproportionate amount of condemnation and victimization.”30
It is also doubtful whether the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had much of a clue about the majority of the world’s people who were not Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. Given that U.S. foreign policy would become less preoccupied with Europe and more entangled with parts of the world that were highly religious, this was not an entirely auspicious development. In South Vietnam, for example, the 1963 Buddhist uprising caught the Kennedy administration completely flatfooted. “How could this have happened?” a perplexed JFK asked his advisers about the Buddhists. “Who are these people? Why didn’t we know about them before?” They were merely the people who made up almost 90 percent of South Vietnam’s population, and the fact that Kennedy and his advisers found their presence shocking is shocking in itself.31
Vietnamese religion was not an exception. In similar fashion, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who served throughout both the entire Kennedy and Johnson administrations, tried to separate religion from politics in the Middle East but was only left more perplexed as a result. Rusk had been raised in a poor Georgia farming family but rose, by dint of education, hard work, and a knack for making the right connections, to become a pillar of the American establishment. His father was an ordained Presbyterian minister who had been trained at Louisville Theological Seminary, one of the South’s premier centers of religious learning. A chronic throat problem prevented him from becoming a full-time preacher, but he nonetheless ensured that his children received a religious upbringing that included daily Bible lessons and regular church services and Sunday school. He also took young Dean to see the famed evangelist Billy Sunday. It seemed as if Dean would follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a career in the ministry or become a missionary to China. At the age of eleven, he became statewide president of the Junior Christian Endeavor, a major honor for any young Southern Presbyterian. Later, as a senior at Davidson College—which he described as having “the religious core of a Presbyterian school” where there was “considerable evangelical pressure”—he served as president of the college’s YMCA affiliate. But he was not destined for a religious life. He “became skeptical” while at Davidson and shed his religious belief; he retained Christianity’s ethical core and ideals, its doctrine of works, and willingness to confront evil, but not its spirituality. “I gradually lost interest in questions of that sort,” he later noted, and “abandoned the idea of the ministry.” As a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, where he wryly admitted that he “fell from grace,” Rusk lived the carefree, alcohol-fueled life of a typical undergraduate. As an adult with a successful career in the Truman administration and then as president of the Rockefeller Foundation, he politely condescended to his relatives, some of whom had become Jehovah’s Witnesses and wanted to convert him to the Christian faith.32
By the time Rusk became secretary of state, then, he was ill-disposed to linking religion to politics or diplomacy, even if the foreigners he dealt with viewed the world through a religious lens he had broken long ago. For Rusk, faith was either irrelevant or unfathomably enigmatic. This meant that the Middle East was a mystery to him, just as Vietnam was a mystery to Kennedy. The “intractable nature of the divisions between Jews and Arabs … almost defy solution,” Rusk later remarked. “They involve deeply human passions, the holy war psychology of the Arabs and the sense of apocalypse of the Jews.” For Rusk, secretary of state at the time of the 1967 Six Day War, this made diplomacy especially difficult, if not impossible:
I never knew anybody in our government, including myself, who felt he had the answer to peace in the Middle East. When both Jews and Arabs are convinced they’re speaking for God, that makes for a tough negotiation. I’ve been at the table when Arabs quoted the Koran while Jews quoted the Book of Moses. And I couldn’t say, “Oh, come on now, don’t give me any of that stuff!”
Perhaps a better understanding of the Holy Land’s religious psychology would not have resolved the impasse between Muslim and Jew, but it certainly would have given Rusk a better insight into the nature of the Middle East’s political problems.33
The issue of religious liberty, moreover, once a major and uncomplicated part of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations’ anticommunism, was no longer a weapon in America’s ideological arsenal. Race and civil rights, not religion, now set the agenda for national discussions on individual and collective freedom. The objectives of foreign policy had also changed. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were committed to a policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Now remembered as the policy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, détente actually began, albeit fitfully and with little success, under Kennedy and Johnson. Protestations about Soviet atheism or violations of religious freedom threatened to scuttle the emergence of détente, and so were ignored.34
But perhaps most important was the fact that in Vietnam, the United States itself became a party to religious persecution. South Vietnam, an American ally, was governed by the Roman Catholic Ngo family even though the vast majority of its people were Buddhist. This in itself would not necessarily have posed a problem had President Ngo Dinh Diem not been so undemocratic and unrepresentative. Buddhists responded politically with two major uprisings, in 1963 and 1966, that criticized American support for a regime that infringed upon the freedom of worship. In 1967, Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist poet from Saigon, published Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, an antiwar screed that criticized the United States for not respecting Vietnam’s rights to freedom of religion and national self-determination; Thomas Merton provided an elegiac preface. Against such a backdrop, it was decidedly not in Washington’s interest to promote religious liberty as an antidote to godless communist tyranny.35
Overall, neither Kennedy nor Johnson really knew what to make of the religious changes of the 1960s, much less what to do with them. For the first time in three decades, faith acted as a complication rather than a complement to foreign policy. In retrospect, perhaps their only saving grace was that their successors would not fare much better.