God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War (review)

Few cultural histories of Cold War America can boast of cogently bringing together a historical cast of characters that includes Billy Graham and Flannery O'Connor, Reinhold Niebuhr and James Baldwin, Elmer Gantry and Shirley Jackson. And yet, that's exactly what Harvard University professor Jason W. Stevens does in God-Fearing and Free, his detailed, highly theoretical cultural history of American thought during the "long" post-war period. In the grand tradition of American studies, God-Fearing and Free seeks—in Stevens's own words—to account for "the American character" (2). Noting "the American propensity to conduct cultural life through religious symbols," (x) Stevens focuses on such meaning making during the Cold War era, with the ultimate goal of showing how the construction of the American character in that period drew considerably on the contributions of the nation's spiritual parents, Calvinist Puritans.

Central to Stevens's argument is the notion of innocence—or, more precisely, the loss of innocence. Stevens sees American innocence as a key theme of theological modernism, which made inroads into American thought and culture from the 1870s to the 1930s and contended that perfectible humankind might bring about the Christian millennium by means of civic reforms. Such unabashed optimism about human nature, Stevens concludes, could not survive past the 1930s. In the wake of the Great Depression, World War II, and the rise of totalitarianism, a "counter-modernist" impulse bubbled up in American public and intellectual discourse—an impulse that explicitly denied American innocence, exposing the depravity of both politics and people.

Key to this counter-modernist denial of innocence, in Stevens's treatment, was the recovery of a theology of sin. Popularly purveyed in the sermons of revivalist Billy Graham and given intellectual credence by socialist-cum-cold-warring-theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, this theology of sin echoed colonial-era Puritanism by reflecting contemporary concerns. By admitting their inherent sinfulness either through repentance and conversion (Graham's model) or through a clear-eyed evaluation of the "ironies" of national history (Niebuhr's model), Americans could divest themselves of the myth of innocence. Such innocence was (from the counter-modernist perspective) synonymous with "totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right and Communist left," and the "responsible citizen" should disabuse himself or herself from "any pretenses to freedom transcending sin" (3). Stevens traces such notions not only through popular and academic theology, but also through film, literature, psychoanalysis, and civil rights discourse.

While Stevens's close readings of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Connor offer some insightful gems, God-Fearing and Free's most fascinating conclusions come in Stevens's revisionist take on realist sage Niebuhr. Current scholarship situates Niebuhr's work as calling Americans to a watchful assessment of their present moral, ethical, and spiritual condition, while simultaneously shaking them out of a cynical stupor or apathetic inaction. Stevens disagrees with such accounts. Dismissing as hagiography those analyses that depict Niebuhr as a "courageously dissenting voice" (xi), he argues that Niebuhr's continual attention to evil and sin actually made him complicit in America's social and political crimes, both abroad and at home. The historiography, Stevens concludes, simply whitewashes Niebuhr's inattention to racial and socioeconomic justice as well as his justification of American imperialism. In other words, Stevens sees Niebuhr as an establishment apologist, a proponent of the status quo.

In an age when leading politicians and intellectuals continue to point to Niebuhr as a source of philosophical inspiration, Stevens's critique seems much needed (see David Brooks's oft-discussed 2007 interview with President Barack Obama for evidence of Niebuhr's ongoing significance to the country's political discourse). And yet, his book is not without its flaws. As a historian, I found myself continually frustrated by Stevens's inability to link his close readings of sermons, films, and novels to the realities of American life in the 1950s. Admittedly, intellectual history...