Public Religion for and against the U.S. War Machine

One of the books under review here dramatizes how “God and Country” ideologies of the early Cold War gained public traction; the other shows how such ideologies lost credibility (at least for many people) across the 1960s and 1970s. One documents how mainline Protestant leaders moved toward pointed criticism of U.S. policies, after having offered broad support during the 1940s and 1950s; the other shows how government, business, and civic leaders mobilized their own religious campaigns, largely because they felt that churches were not supportive enough.

Jonathan Herzog agrees with his protagonists that the Cold War was a religious conflict—a battle between godly democracy and godless communism—and seems pleased to recycle well-known evidence about his fellow-combatants, along with some new findings he adds to the discussion. He marshals his evidence with flair, and if he has one fresh idea for scholars, it is about the role of civic leaders (as opposed to church professionals) in manufacturing the crusade. For anyone who has underestimated the Cold War’s religious-ideological dimensions—or, perhaps more likely, has discounted evidence about it marshaled by “mere church historians”—Herzog offers a wake-up call to reassess the weight of religious discourse amid the cultural, sociopolitical, and military factors that shaped these years.

Meanwhile, Jill Gill analyzes critics of U.S. foreign policy. Like Herzog, she traverses well-charted terrain; but her intervention is somewhat fresher since scholars have lately been noticing that reports of the death of liberal Protestantism are exaggerated, and she brings interesting evidence to this discussion. Indeed, insofar as it has become fashionable to notice how a Protestant impulse is hidden within “merely secular” liberalism, a study like Gill’s that sheds light on such liberalism may even earn her a few style points. However, her contribution is not primarily historiographical. She sticks close to the archives and offers a meticulous account of how a key part of the ecumenical Protestant network—the National Council of Churches—addressed the Vietnam conflict.

Herzog proceeds from two premises. First, the secularization of U.S. society was far advanced by the 1940s—and this was not a stage in an irreversible decline of religion, but rather signaled a need for “sacralization” as theorized by sociologist Rodney Stark. Second, there existed an urgent threat from the USSR, such that the arguments of Cold Warriors can be taken largely at face value rather than examined for signs of cynical demagoguery, sincere paranoia, or ideological cover for neocolonialism and a permanent war economy.

Herzog begins with an extended argument about secularization—not the currently influential theories about how the modern categories of “religious” and “secular” constitute each other under conditions of Protestant hegemony, but rather the old-fashioned secularization in which churches and religious teachings lose authority. Two ambitious but diffuse chapters offer historical context (with attention to the Scopes Trial and Helen and Robert Lynd’s Middletown study [1929]) and discuss how Arnold Toynbee, Whittaker Chambers, Martin Dies, Reinhold Niebuhr, and many others conceptualized communism in relation to secularism. They perceived two monolithic national cultures in conflict—each with a de facto religion—and they feared that, whereas Russia had unity of purpose (albeit behind a false god and totalitarian imagination), the U.S. had become soft, individualistic, and materialistic—a “Colossus of Straw” eroded from within and lacking spiritual power.

Herzog seems generally satisfied with this analysis. In this book, if someone “recognizes” that “we” are in a holy war, this has a positive valence. What is up for debate comes afterward: exactly how far the nation has backslidden from the consensus appropriate to such a war and how to respond. Herzog recalls how he asked a...