Public Policy, Popular Culture, Celebrity, and the Making of a Spiritual-Industrial Marketplace in Postwar America

Several trends hallmark religion in postwar America. Scholars have identified several major forces including: the increased vitality of “world” religions, suburbanization, the decreasing significance of denominationalism, the political emergence of the religious right, and the increasing popularity of therapeutic spirituality and religious commodities. Traditional sources, including denominational figures and studies, church mapping and architecture, nationwide religion polls, and the activities of iconic figures and commodities such as revivalists Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and the success of the latter’s best seller, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), have been readily implored to describe how religion took shape during the era. However, recently scholars have increasingly turned to under-utilized sources in the study of postwar religion. Jonathan Herzog’s focus on government sources and the influence of public policy on religion following World War II and Kathryn Lofton’s study of the religious and spiritual affect of commercial icon Oprah are two intriguing examples of this trend.

It has long been noted that President Eisenhower’s administration was wedded to the Cold War and the military-industrial complex following World War II. In his Presidential Farewell Address, the military hero stated that the dangers of the postwar world required the nation to no longer depend on the “makers of plowshares . . . to make swords.” Rather, in Cold War America, the nation had to “create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions”: a military-industrial complex.¹ This pronouncement and the subsequent influence of the Cold War upon postwar American politics and foreign policy is well known. However, lesser known is the Cold War’s explicit influence in shaping America’s religious landscape.

In The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, Jonathan Herzog painstakingly chronicles how the Cold War influenced religion in postwar America via what he refers to as the “spiritual-industrial complex”: the collective and deliberate leveraging of state, federal, commercial, media, and celebrity resources for national religious revitalization. The ultimate goal of this political, commercial, and theological composite was to create a resurgence of religiosity and religious adherence as a means to combat and eventually defeat godless Communism (6). For Herzog, this spiritual mobilization was “sacralization,” not to be confused with “civil religion.” Herzog defines civil religion as the “use of the sacred to legitimatize the secular.” Spiritual “Cold War Warriors,” however, did the opposite; they “used the secular to legitimize the sacred” through a “deliberate and managed use of societal resources to stimulate a religious revival in the late 1940’s and 1950’s” (6, 179).

The author traces the genesis of this spiritual complex to the religious and political rhetoric of the successive presidential administrations of Truman and Eisenhower as well as a host of other political and cultural Cold War crusaders. These policy makers, religious professionals, and commercial icons boiled down the intricate nature of the Cold War between American and Soviet ideology into a series of simplistic dichotomies: American freedoms vs. communist slavery; good vs. evil; or faithful vs. faithless (81). Moreover, Communism was defined as a belief that was held by its communicants with “religious” fervor (197). As Herzog points out, President Truman aptly stated in one Christmas Eve address, “We are all joined in the fight against communism. Communism is godless . . . Democracy’s most powerful weapon is not a gun, a tank, or a bomb. It is faith—faith in the brotherhood and dignity of man under God” (79). Accordingly, Herzog displays how policy makers and clergy framed the Cold War not as an “economic and political struggle between the oppressed and the powerful,” but rather a holy war between traditional religious/Christian faith, freedoms, and American livelihoods in opposition to the godless religious zeal of Communism (81, 126). The Cold War, at heart, was a spiritual battle.

In 1933, President Hoover’s research committee noted, “The most fundamental change...