The White House, Washington, D.C., August 1947. Wherever President Harry Truman surveyed the world scene, he saw communism on the march. In eastern Europe, occupied by the Red Army, the Soviet Union had spent the previous two years installing pliant communist governments. In Iran and Turkey, the Soviets had demanded access to strategically vital shipping lanes and oil fields. From the Kremlin, Stalin had declared that capitalism and communism could not peacefully coexist and had even predicted the outbreak of a third world war. In China, Mao Zedong and the Communist Party kept up their relentless advance against Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists. Even in Vietnam, the French were finding it difficult to suppress an anticolonial uprising led by an obscure communist revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh. If the United States was to avoid getting dragged into another major European war, if it was to prevent the emergence of an anarchic world that would give rise to new threats, then Truman and his advisers were sure they had to act. U.S. foreign policy had stumbled along uncertainly in the immediate postwar period, lurching from anticommunist belligerence to a willingness to negotiate. But now, in the summer of 1947, convinced that the United States must assert some control over an increasingly hostile world, Truman put the United States on the offensive.
By August, the most important parts of Truman’s new Cold War strategy, known as containment for its intention to stop the spread of communism, were already in place. In March, in the Truman Doctrine, he had announced American aid to Greece and Turkey, who were then fighting communist movements of their own. In June, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced the creation of the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, which delivered billions of dollars of unconditional financial aid to help Europe rebuild from World War II. And in July, Truman signed the National Security Act, which established the Department of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council—and with them, a national security state that could compete with the Soviets on something close to a permanent wartime footing. Politically, diplomatically, ideologically, economically, and militarily, the Truman administration was ready to do battle with communism.
Yet something was missing. Economic power and military might were considered necessary, and they played to certain American strengths. But to Truman, what ultimately distinguished the United States from the Soviet Union was not prosperity or power, but their political systems, in particular their differing attitudes toward individual freedom. And the key difference between Americans and Soviets, he concluded, the one thing that neither system could claim in common with the other, was religious faith. Truman, like Franklin Roosevelt before him, saw religion as a source of democracy because it protected freedom of conscience, and thus the individual’s autonomy from the state. The Soviets, avowedly atheist and materialist, rejected faith completely. Both sides of the Cold War claimed to want peace, progress, and prosperity for the world. But only one side could claim God.
And so to politics, diplomacy, economics, and military power, Truman added religion. It was, he believed, the missing element in U.S. foreign policy, and potentially its secret weapon. When “the sages and the scientists, the economists and the statesmen have exhausted their resources in the search for peace and security in this troubled world,” he explained, “one solution and only one solution will remain—the substitution of conscience for force in the government of man. The alternative is the annihilation of civilization …. Religion alone has the answer to humanity’s twentieth century cry of despair.”1
To wage this spiritual Cold War, Truman hoped to rally the forces of world religion—not just Protestants, not even just Christians and Jews, but all people of faith. That August, he and his advisers drafted a letter to one of the unquestioned leaders of global faith, Pope Pius XII. Pius was not only the head of the Roman Catholic Church with influential protégés in America—not least Francis Cardinal Spellman—he was also an ardent anticommunist himself. (Two years later, in 1949, the pontiff threatened to excommunicate any Catholic who belonged to or aided the Communist Party.) He was, in short, an ideal partner to demonstrate the ecumenical vitality of the religious forces arrayed against communism. “I believe that the greatest need of the world today, fundamental to all else, is a renewal of faith,” the president wrote to the pope. “I seek to encourage renewed faith in the dignity and worth of the human person in all lands, to the end that the individual’s sacred rights, inherent in his relationship to God and his fellows, will be respected in every land.” Truman then professed “with heartfelt conviction” his belief that “those who do not recognize their responsibility to Almighty God cannot meet their full duty toward their fellow men.” Later that month, Pius responded warmly to Truman’s overture. The foundations of “a lasting peace among nations,” he agreed, “can be secure only if they rest on bedrock faith in the One, True God, the Creator of all men.” Was Truman “over-sanguine in hoping to find men throughout the world ready to cooperate for such a worthy enterprise?” the pope asked rhetorically. “We think not.”2
Thus began Truman’s quest to unite the forces of faith against the threat of “godless” communism. To make it happen, he renewed and expanded the otherwise completed wartime mission of Myron C. Taylor, presidential envoy to the Holy See. Roosevelt had toyed with the idea of assembling a religious front against Nazism, but he abandoned the idea and instead concentrated on Taylor’s diplomacy with the Vatican. Now, in the midst of a global Cold War, Truman revived Roosevelt’s plan and charged Taylor with putting it together. Truman and Taylor were both devout Protestants who shared a deep commitment to basic interfaith tolerance. Both saw communism as an ultimate menace to faith and democracy, and both envisioned world religion as the antidote to the poison of communism. At first, Truman wanted Taylor to form an anticommunist alliance with only the Vatican, but he quickly expanded the mission to include all the religious forces of the world with the immediate goal of gathering them all together for a spiritual summit in Washington. “Looks as if he and I may get the morals of the world on our side,” the president boasted. “We are talking to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop at the head of the Lutheran Church, the Metropolitan of the Greek Church at Istanbul,” even “the top Buddhist and the Grand Lama of Tibet. If I can mobilize the people who believe in a moral world against the Bolshevik materialists … we can win this fight.”3
However, they met with some unexpected opposition. Though it was politically motivated, Truman’s plan represented one of the most ambitious ecumenical initiatives since the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions. It would also be the crowning symbol atop his vigorous promotion of America’s Judeo-Christian civil religion. Yet ironically, it all proved a step too far for some of the nation’s leading ecumenists, especially the normally tolerant Protestants of the Federal Council of Churches. America may have been in the throes of its Judeo-Christian moment, but Protestants of almost all denominations still feared the Catholic Church. Catholicism, they charged, was too hierarchical, too authoritarian, and too beholden to the Vatican. They agreed with Paul Blanshard, formerly one of their own but now an avowed atheist, whose bestseller American Freedom and Catholic Power warned of the authoritarian Catholic Church’s unrivaled power to dictate the terms of American politics and government policy. The liberal Protestants of the FCC especially disliked the pope’s extreme anticommunism, which threatened to stir up tensions that could lead to war, and they disliked even more the Catholic Church’s oppression of Protestants in Spain and Latin America. Truman’s goal was to bring “all believers in God and human liberty to join together to bring pressure of a common desire for peace upon the atheistic communistic government of Russia,” but this proved too much for a modernist establishment that felt that containment was already too aggressive and that the Vatican was no partner for peace. Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, one of the leading mainline voices in the country, told Truman that opening official relations with the Vatican would “precipitate a tremendous flood of unhappy controversies.” Truman and Taylor were especially shocked by the opposition from the World Council of Churches. Taylor complained that the organization’s title, which reflected its ambitions to the world’s ecumenical voice, was a “mis-nomer” and “deceptive,” but to no avail.4
Reluctantly, Truman and Taylor abandoned their plans for a religious world summit. But Truman was still determined to solidify the closer bonds Taylor had formed with the Vatican. In 1951, after Taylor decided to retire for good, Truman announced that he would establish official diplomatic relations with the Holy See and replace Taylor, a personal envoy, with a permanent ambassador. But the establishment of relations with the Vatican had been expressly prohibited by an act of Congress during Reconstruction; recognition would require a change in law, and thus the inevitably arduous passage of congressional legislation. Secretary of State Dean Acheson—son of an Episcopal bishop and alumnus of the staunchly Anglican Groton School—had an intuitive sense of Protestant sensibilities even if his faith was no longer as strong as his father’s, and he warned Truman of the firestorm of controversy that awaited him. But most others in the State Department were eager to establish official ties with the Vatican, indeed, with all major world religions. Taylor was particularly insistent, and Truman pushed forward. To avoid controversy, he appointed a war hero, Army General Mark Clark, who was a prominent Episcopalian and Mason.5
American Protestants from across the theological spectrum united in opposition, ostensibly because official ties with the Vatican violated the separation of church and state but in reality out of fear and loathing of the Catholic Church. Nothing united fundamentalists and modernists, evangelicals and liberals, more since the crusade for Prohibition. After Clark’s nomination, the White House received its heaviest volume of mail on record, with passionate opposition outnumbering support by more than six-to-one. Acheson recalled that Senator Tom Connally was “incoherent with rage” at the news of such a controversial appointment. Edwin T. Dahlberg, president of the Northern Baptist Convention and a renowned pacifist, complained that the United States would be “thrown into opposition to Russia” by allying with the “ecclesiastic totalitarianism” of the Vatican. Even Harry Emerson Fosdick, the lion of tolerant modernism, leader of pacifism, and champion of black civil rights, wrote Truman to protest the “tragic blunder” of Clark’s appointment. Though Truman wanted to persevere, Clark wilted under the pressure and withdrew his name from consideration. Truman could not quite believe it. He was convinced that containment was a necessity, but he was also concerned that it lacked a moral and spiritual foundation. With the demise of the Clark nomination, thanks to “violently bigoted” American Protestants, Truman felt that the nation had missed an opportunity to put its religious divisions behind it once and for all. And he feared that U.S. foreign policy would suffer as a result.6
Faith seemed to be an obvious ideological, rhetorical, and political—and at times even diplomatic—weapon in the Cold War. More surprising was its ability to spark division as well as foster unity. On foreign policy as in domestic politics, the religious impulse did not lead only in one, presumably anticommunist, direction. Instead, the burgeoning influence of Cold War faith created several competing visions of America’s proper role in the postwar world.