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11 Symbolic History in the Cold War Era Alan Scot Willis In February 1945, the Southern Bap­ tist Training Union, an or­ ga­ ni­ za­ tion dedicated to training Bap­ tists to live their faith in their daily lives, provided a carefully planned “tea party” social for Juniors, who were typically between the ages of nine and eleven. The evening’s festivities unfolded around the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, followed by the story of the Boston Tea Party, and closed with a “George Washington Tea Party.”1 In this program, Southern Bap­ tists manipulated two great symbols of Ameri­ can freedom—the Boston Tea Party and George­ Washington—in an effort to encourage youngsters to have an abiding affection for their nation. George Washington was not, of course, at the Boston Tea Party, but the program fit perfectly with the symbolic history of the United States that Southern Bap­ tist leaders wished to teach, one that focused on the great truth of Ameri­ can history: America was a Christian and a chosen nation, shaped by great men acting according to God’s will. As World War II ended and the Cold War took shape, Southern Bap­ tists saw an aggressively expanding, and avowedly atheistic, communism become an archenemy of Goliath proportions, threatening to stamp out Christianity and religious freedom everywhere. Only a truly Christian nation could counter such a menace. Within that context, Bap­ tist leaders intensified their patriotic efforts and constructed an Ameri­ can history that demonstrated the Christian and the chosen nature of the United States. Bap­ tist leaders, however, intended to do much more than teach history. By manipulating patriotic and religious symbols, Bap­ tist leaders sought to meld the national and religious destinies of the United States and build an abiding affection for the nation’s Christian past. They also sought to Symbolic History in Cold War Era 273 fill Southern Bap­ tist youth with a desire to fulfill the nation’s destiny to spread Christianity throughout the world. As the Cold War subsided and the Culture Wars emerged, the New Christian Right tapped into that same desire, in an effort to reclaim the wayward nation from the clutches of secularism. Historians—including historians of the Southern Bap­ tists—have offered surprisingly few insights into how history was taught within religious institutions. As Jeremy Black argues in Using History, religion is “one of the most significant non-­ governmental spheres for the creation and presentation of historical views.” Nevertheless, Black contends that historians have overlooked the significance of religion in shaping people’s views of history. He claims that the history taught by religious institutions engages in two types of analy­ sis that professional historians typically eschew : It sees divine intervention as not only legitimate causality but as the ultimate cause of the course of history, and it engages an “eschatological dimension” that compresses the timeline of history and links the past with the present, and the future.2 The Southern Bap­ tists’ construction of Ameri­ can history clearly fits within Black’s paradigm for history taught by religious institutions, and it offered a very different narrative of Ameri­ can history than the ones that came to dominate professional historical scholarship during and, especially since, the Cold War era.The history Southern Bap­ tists taught made God the central causal agent in history and clearly linked the nation’s past with its present and the future, showing America to be on a specific, divinely ordained path. America was a Christian nation because of its past, and a chosen nation because of its future. As each generation fulfilled its Christian destiny, it provided a Christian heritage for future generations to build on. The Bap­ tist teaching of history in Training Union and mission education or­ ga­ ni­ za­ tions sponsored by the Woman’s Missionary Union—the Sunbeam Band (for preschool children), the Girl’s Auxiliary (approximately 8 through 12 years of age), the Young Woman’s Auxiliary (teenagers, but always unmarried), and the Royal Ambassadors for boys (Juniors roughly age 8 through 12 and teenagers in the Intermediates)—clearly employed both religious symbols and symbols of national freedom to create among their youth a fervent patriotism and an affection for the nation’s Christian heritage. America’s stature as a Christian nation was of critical importance in both the Cold War and the later Culture Wars. As Courts Redford of 274 Alan Scot Willis the Home Mission Board put it, America was “God...

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