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| 23 1 Christianity and the Cold War, 1964–1968 Introduction In September 1964, Billy Graham held the Greater Omaha–Council Bluffs Crusade. Graham told the 16,100 participants that teenage rebellion, sexuality , and a collapse of law and order endangered the United States, and he emphasized that this situation paved the way for Communists, who were “just waiting until we get soft enough” with moral standards and anti-Communist vigilance to swoop in and conquer America. The Cold War continued to threaten America and demanded action from Christians to help defeat communism. A conservative Christianity during the 1960s undergirded U.S. public opinion about Cold War policy and thereby assisted the government in its continued faith in containment theory. Yet fellow Christians in the United Church of Christ disagreed. United Church Herald editors cautioned that “political zealots” in the United States who warned that the government and society did too little to protect against communism were the real domestic threat because they rejected the democratic system with “a fervid willingness to take the law” into their own hands. They argued that curtailing open debate and constantly promoting fear of communism harmed innocent citizens with false hysteria. Despite scholarship showing that the Vietnam War prompted some Americans to begin to question Cold War hostilities, such liberal Christian editorials demonstrate that a push against this worldview had been initiated even earlier. Religious standpoints played a role in shaping and reflecting public opinion, but they also teased out some of the tension and disagreement inherent in this culture war dialogue.1 By focusing our examination primarily on the periods August 1964– December 1964 and January 1968–December 1968, periods of time during presidential election years in which Christian Americans frequently voiced political opinions as they readied to vote with the rest of the nation, we can see how Christians addressed the Cold War in relation to their particular 24 | Christianity and the Cold War, 1964–1968 theological positions and historical legacies. Because most Christians felt that communism’s doctrine of atheism needed to be combated, religious institutions added important reflections to the national conversation. Government officials, anti-Communist organizations, and even popular culture sources were rife with language about fighting the “evil empire,” warnings against Communist atheism, and declarations that the “Democratic Christian world” had to combat this sinister force. Scholars have clearly demonstrated that this religiously charged language was used to mobilize U.S. society throughout the Cold War. For example, historian and former director for Strategic Planning on the National Security Council, William Inboden, has shown that Harry S. Truman spoke publicly at the beginning of the Cold War and throughout his presidency about using America’s spiritual strength to help defeat atheist Communists. Richard Nixon, too, added a religious component to his foreign policy when he utilized the evangelist Billy Graham ’s anti-Communist messages to justify the United States’ actions around the globe. Moreover, while histories of American Christianity have made clear that churches and religious leaders employed the language of a holy war when describing the Cold War, they have tended to focus on the 1950s and early 1960s, without pulling this important thread through the Vietnam War.2 Most studies have failed to look at Christian Americans’ viewpoints into the 1960s to see why and how they employed this language of a holy war and crafted a theology to fit this ideology well into the 1970s. In addition to shedding light on the religious component of this conservative message, this study’s examination of the religious rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s adds to our growing understanding of the conservative political resurgence that started in the 1960s by contributing a religious voice to the conversation.3 During the 1950s, many American religious institutions had supported U.S. antagonism toward all things Communist because of communism’s atheist ideology, though a minority (especially among Protestant leaders of the ecumenical movement) had resisted the arms race as antithetical to Christian ideals and dangerous for the world. This small group of committed opponents grew by the 1960s and generated a fuller Christian debate about the Cold War. Some conservative Christians continued to view communism as a monolithic Other wedded to expansionism and bent on oppressing its citizens and especially religious freedom, in line with the traditional Cold War viewpoint that called upon containment theory and a bold foreign policy to stop Communist aims, both political and religious. Other Christians questioned this worldview, and in increasing numbers. They argued that communism...

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