Seabury House, Greenwich, Connecticut, March 1963. It was a remarkable sight and, to the liberal mainline clergy gathered for the occasion, a hopeful one. The National Conference Center of the Episcopal Church, better known as Seabury House, had played host to numerous religious gatherings over the years, but few such as this. Mingling with the leadership of the National Council of Churches and several mainline denominations were sixteen clerics from the Soviet Union, mostly Russian Orthodox and Protestant. They had spent the past month touring the United States, from Iowa to New York, on a visit of international goodwill and Christian unity. After harrowing crises over Berlin and Cuba that had twice brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, the Cold War was entering a period of reduced tension between the superpowers. Rejoicing at the new geopolitical climate, the NCC had taken it upon itself to further this cause. “If nations of the world are ever to enjoy orderly procedures and peaceful change,” Reverend Stewart Herman told his Soviet-American audience at Seabury House, “surely it is incumbent upon the Christian churches to furnish practical examples in the conduct of their own national and international affairs.” The NCC believed it was doing what churches do best: leading by example.1
However, the Soviets’ visit was not a product of détente so much as its forerunner, and it was actually the return leg of an exchange with their American counterparts. Half a year before, in the late summer of 1962, the National Council of Churches sent a delegation to tour the Soviet Union. That visit, the NCC said, was “held in a spirit of Christian mutual understanding, fraternity, and cordiality.” It was also intended to help “overcome some of the dangerous hostility and rigidity between our two nations” and to prove, Cold War tensions notwithstanding, that “God has not lost control of his world, which includes the Soviet Union.” Despite the prevailing climate of international hostility, the American ministers wanted to make contact with their Soviet colleagues as a way to build bridges and transcend the ideological competition between communism and capitalism. Most of all, the Protestant ministers wanted to humanize and demystify the Soviet Union, and to prove to the American people that the Soviets were not inherently evil but every bit as human as themselves. As Reverend Eugene Carson Blake put it, the “real reason for a trip like this” was simple: “There are people over there.”2
Through the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), the federal government had already made cultural exchange a Cold War priority. After all, in a global battle for hearts and minds, it was a lot cheaper and safer, and a lot less controversial, than nuclear brinkmanship. Initially, the Truman administration promoted tourism as a way to build transatlantic anticommunist solidarity. Subsequently, the Eisenhower administration set up a wide variety of cultural exchange programs, such as the People-to-People Program, that would bring foreigners to the United States and send Americans overseas. The idea, explained the USIA, was to make “every man an ambassador.” An ambassador, of course, represents his or her country and tries to advance its interests, and it was the government’s intention to use public funds to send private Americans around the world to spread, either implicitly or explicitly, a pro-American and anticommunist message. But this was not quite what the NCC had in mind. These apostles of progress tended to be almost as critical of the United States and capitalism as they were of the Soviet Union and communism. They did not seek or accept government funding for their cultural exchanges; nor would they accept official direction as to what they should say or do. They wanted an ecumenical peace in which each system could respect, tolerate, and live with the other. The exchange, explained the NCC, was neither “an isolated undertaking nor the product of a quixotic impulse.” Instead, it was “part of a long ecumenical process” of mutual and peaceful understanding that would hopefully contribute to an improved understanding between the superpowers. Later, the mainline churches hoped to expand their mission to include China and Cuba. Said one liberal Baptist minister in San Francisco, “We think things are changing. The world marches on. It’s a very realistic thing in today’s world. As Christians who believe in reconciliation, we believe God intends us to talk to Communists. We are interested in contacts of some kind. You must establish communications if you are going to reconcile.”3
Yet it was this very purpose, with its implications of moral equivalence between the United States and the communist world, that touched a nerve among many other American Christians. The Soviets, these conservative Christians argued during the 1963 visit, were not in fact ordinary people like themselves. They were evil, and did evil things in communism’s name. New York Times headlines like “Soviet Presses War on Religion,” which ran shortly before the Soviet clergy arrived in America, certainly did not help the liberals’ cause. Nor did the case of thirty-two Siberian Pentecostals, who stormed the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in hopes of finding political asylum and religious liberty only two months before the Soviet church tour of America. Nor especially did the involvement of the National Council of Churches, which the apostles of liberty reviled as an unrepresentative and apostate organization and which Carl McIntire accused of knowingly hosting KGB agents, not men of God. Whatever the reason, Christian conservatives reacted to the exchange, particularly the return visit of the Soviet clergy, with outrage. The solution, they said, was not ecumenical tolerance and dialogue, which only watered down faith to its lowest common denominator and bleached it of any true meaning. Instead, Americans must stand their ground and resist communism forever. One angry fundamentalist from Old Hickory, Tennessee, wrote that Americans needed “fewer organizations like the National Council of Churches if our Nation is to survive the onslaught of Communism.” After listing the evils of communist doctrine, he outlined the dangers of the NCC exchange. “Coexistence and peace are other advocated Communist policies. Coexistence in this case means our compliance to their demands; peace means our enslavement. If we maintain our Christian civilization, we’ll have to fight for it.” If the NCC wanted to help the Soviet people so much, it “could do its work better by transferring its head quarters to Russia. Such a course would also be a benefit to American Churches.” George McMillin, head of the Indiana Committee for Captive Nations, wondered if the NCC was “so naïve as to think that the good patriotic American does not know that the war has never ceased, either hot or cold, since its start in 1939.”4
Was America at war? This question spoke to a profound, unbridgeable difference between religious liberals and conservatives. For liberals, the Cold War was an abomination, an artificial construction of an unnecessary and misguided foreign policy. The Cold War could only be transcended, and then overcome, through peaceful endeavor, mutual understanding, and unfettered communication. For conservatives, however, the Cold War was a necessary, unavoidable struggle against the forces of godless tyranny. Dialogue would do nothing except weaken America’s vigilance. Such differences spoke to the religious, political, and cultural gap between liberals and conservatives—domestic differences that, we shall see, shaped their views of America’s role in the wider world. This domestic cold war within the global Cold War carried over into the new era of the Kennedy presidency, and intensified over the next three decades. But gradually, after Vietnam, irrepressible grassroots conservatives, armed with the doctrines of patriotism, true faith, and inviolable religious liberty, gained the upper hand. Following a period of blasphemous détente, these apostles of liberty ensured that America would resume its offensive, and that a second Cold War would begin. U.S. foreign policy would not be immune to forces of reformation and counterreformation that engulfed American religion and politics.