Onward, Christian Soldiers

Speaking to an assembly of the National Council of Churches in 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower inveighed against the dangers of communism and invoked the critical role of religion in securing American cultural values and political institutions. The East-West struggle and American spiritual strength, he argued, were inextricably linked. Eisenhower warned his audience that the United States' Cold War enemies embraced "a godless atheism . . . denying all human rights, any kind of human dignity," and he asserted that "every type of free government, is a political expression of some form of religious belief." Shared faith, he concluded, was "the strongest link that we have among the countries of the West" (p. 100). His words reveal the president's belief in the indispensability of a civil religion closely linked to a "diplomatic theology" in waging the Cold War. Clearly, the thirty-fourth president took religion seriously. So does William Inboden in his ambitious, engaging, and largely persuasive examination of the "soul of containment."

Until fairly recently, historians of American foreign relations found it difficult, perhaps even distasteful, to grapple with the influence of religious faith on the making of U.S. diplomacy. In Inboden's words, scholars tended "to shift uncomfortably in such cases and either shirk the subject or else probe even deeper, and often in ever more futility, for the 'real' motivation" behind U.S. policies (p. 224). Over the past two decades, though, many diplomatic historians have embraced the premises, tools, and methodologies of their colleagues who practice social and cultural history. Slowly at first, and then with increasing verve, they have worked to balance their concern with traditional forms of power and state relations with approaches that acknowledge the importance of the less tangible, but no less important, determinants of human relations.

By 2000, the so-called "cultural turn" in the history of American foreign relations was in full swing. Studies of subjects such as race, gender, class, pathology, emotion, and of the complex ways they shaped the context and content of American diplomacy filled the pages of the journal Diplomatic History, flew off the university presses, and became staples of the programs at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Andrew Rotter wrote approvingly that the "culture vultures" seemed to be taking over the discipline and that the study of U.S. foreign policy required a stronger engagement with the "webs of significance" that composed American culture. He identified religion as an important filament of those webs. ¹ Rotter's endorsement of religion as a valuable prism through which to assess American foreign relations was not without its skeptics. Patricia Hill noted the limits of such an approach and wrote that, although "religion certainly constitutes a category that ought to be considered in the writing of diplomatic history . . . [it] cannot easily be abstracted as a structural component of social order. It cannot therefore be deployed as a category of analysis in the same ways that scholars have wielded gender, class and race." ² But the door had been opened. In 2006 Andrew Preston called on historians to take up Rotter's challenge to pursue the study of religion's influence on American foreign policy. In what amounted to a manifesto, Preston lamented that "the influence of religion has been relatively neglected and generally unrecognized" by foreign relations historians. The reasons, he noted, were many, including fears of appearing partisan, a proclivity among scholars to explore secular issues, and empirical and methodological difficulties. Taking issue with Hill, Preston argued for a more systematic and sustained engagement with religious topics. He urged his colleagues to acknowledge "the continuing integral role of religion in the formation, execution, and justification of American foreign policy" and concluded that the history of modern American diplomacy demanded a respect for the role of religion, particularly recognition that "intangible, cultural, and value-laden factors were essential to the unfolding of the Cold War." ³

Enter William Inboden. A young member of the State...