Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (review)

William Inboden's Religion and American Foreign Policy is a noteworthy contribution to scholarship on religion and politics during the Cold War era. As an intervention into patterns of scholarly interpretation, Inboden adds relatively little to longstanding common sense about the prevalence of "God and country" civil religious discourse in the 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, his argument dovetails with longstanding efforts by religious neoconservatives to valorize the more anti-communist and pro-imperial aspects of this discourse and carry forward the idea that a central divide falls between secularism and "godless" communism, on one side, and spiritually-grounded democracy on the other.

However, against this background, Inboden does a good job of mining the historical archives for details of his story that have been unknown or underappreciated. He offers stimulating accounts of such things as the activities of Eisenhower's minister Edward Elson, secret diplomatic negotiations with the Vatican and other anti-communist religious leaders in Europe, and the role of former China missionaries in US politics (for example, J. Leighton Stuart became the ambassador to China and Walter Judd became a Congressman). A lengthy opening section traces the stances of Christian leaders toward foreign policy from 1945 to 1960, and subsequent chapters explore the religious-political ideas of politicians including Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and Senator H. Alexander Smith, who as a devotee of the Moral Rearmament movement wrote extensive journal entries about how God was guiding his political decisions. Inboden is especially interested in Truman's and Eisenhower's diplomacy vis-à-vis domestic ecumenical groups like the National Council of Churches, as well as on an international stage that included the Vatican, Orthodox bishops in the Soviet sphere of interest, and selected Muslims in the Middle East. Through such examples, Inboden adds rich texture to long-appreciated themes and bolsters his case that religious factors in the decade after World War II were more significant—both as motives of US policies and as part of a package of tactics to pursue these policies—than many historians have assumed.

More than most scholars from beyond Inboden's neoconservative precincts (he thanks sources such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Smith Richardson Foundation for supporting his research, and he worked as a policy planner for the National Security Council in the Bush/Cheney White House), Inboden presupposes the moral, political, and rhetorical centrality of a conflict between godless Communism and a Western democracy seen to have spiritual underpinnings. As he documents how leaders spoke in such terms and mobilized religious sentiments as Cold War tactics, he remains fairly uninterested in exploring how much of their rhetoric was mere propagandistic window-dressing, ideological (in a sense of exhibiting some form of false consciousness), and/or limited in political weight compared to other drivers of policy. On balance, he tends to sympathize with his protagonists' rhetoric and take it at face value. He writes that the fall of the Soviet Union "vindicated the essential insight that Truman, Eisenhower, Dulles, and others had first grasped: Soviet communism's atheism was one of its greatest weaknesses" (313). In short, the "Cold War was a religious war" (321) and the US was on the right side.

Inboden documents how Truman and Eisenhower (along with their allies like Dulles and Elson) came to believe that they should build their own religious-political networks to compensate for the limits of existing religious groups. They felt such groups were too weak, disorganized, and/or unwilling to align themselves unambiguously with US policies. Both presidents sought to strengthen diplomatic ties with the Vatican, while Elson worked with Eisenhower's White House to create FRASCO, or the Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order, a more inclusive and politically congenial alternative to the National Council of Churches. Since mainline churches were unwilling to fight communism with the enthusiasm the White House desired, while evangelicals who were eager to fight like Billy Graham and his father-in...