Peripheral visions: American mainline Protestants and the global Cold War

Abstract

This essay challenges the underlying assumption that American religion in the Cold War was nationalistic, militant, and blindly obsessed with anti-communism. Instead, it draws attention to liberal mainline Protestants who, from their experience in the ecumenical and missionary movements, called for decolonisation, nuclear and conventional disarmament, and unconditional dialogue with the Soviets and recognition of China; they were also concerned with racism, poverty, and disease. In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, these religious Americans not only represented the first serious challenge to containment from within, they also anticipated the global nature of the Cold War and the dominant transnational concerns of the post-1960 international system.

Notes

63 Latourette to Richard Fagley, 1 June 1946, Box 40, Folder 8, FCC-PHS.

62 David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 107–108.

61 ‘Point 4 Aid Is Urged By Literary Leader’, NYT, 5 January 1951. Laubach expanded on these themes in his books Wake Up or Blow Up! America: Lift the World or Lose It! (New York: Revell, 1951) and The World is Learning Compassion (Westwood, NJ: Revell, 1958).

60 Grace Wilson newsletters, 9 February 1950, and 6 March 1950, both in Emery E. Andrews papers, Box 1, Folder 37, Special Collections, Allen Library South, University of Washington, Seattle.

59 Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 179–187.

58 Rowland M. Cross to Walter Van Kirk, 4 November 1949, with enclosed Foreign Missions Conference statement, ‘The Churches and American Policy in the Far East’, Box 40, FCC-PHS.

57 On Jones, see Stephen A. Graham, Ordinary Man, Extraordinary Mission: The Life and Work of E. Stanley Jones (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005); and, for his own account of Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, E. Stanley Jones, Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1948). On Eddy, see Rick Nutt, ‘G. Sherwood Eddy and the Attitudes of Protestants in the United States toward Global Mission’, Church History 66 (September 1997), 502–521; and Rick L. Nutt, The Whole Gospel for the Whole World: Sherwood Eddy and the American Protestant Mission (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997). The Truman administration's ‘lesser evil’ decision to reluctantly back European power against communist-led national liberation movements is best explored in Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

56 M. Searle Bates, Half of Humanity: Far Eastern Peoples and Problems (New York: Church Peace Union, 1942), 3.

55 ‘Missions Show the Way’, Christian Century, 3 February 1943, 126.

54 Foreign Policy Commission of Christian Action draft policy statement, ‘The People's Republic of China and the United Nations’, 28 October 1955, Niebuhr papers, Box 2, LOC.

53 Conference of Church People on World Peace pamphlet, ‘Instead of Rearmament and War’, Washington, DC, 6–7 April 1948, Box 27, Folder 11, FCC-PHS.

52 Church Peace Union pamphlet, ‘United Nations Week’ 14–20 September 1947, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace records, Box 225, Folder 4, Manuscripts and Archives, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York. The Church Peace Union was later renamed the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs; this is the organisation's current name.

51 ‘Means To Promote Christian Social Ideals’, The Times of India, 1 January 1953.

50 Harry Truman to Bess Truman, 2 October 1947, in Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910–1959 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 551. On Truman's plans for the summit, see Dianne Kirby, ‘Harry Truman's Religious Legacy: The Holy Alliance, Containment, and the Cold War’, in Religion and the Cold War, ed. Dianne Kirby (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 77–102; and Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 119–155.

49 ‘Secretary Dulles’ News Conference of November 26’, Department of State Bulletin, 15 December 1958, 951.

48 See, for example, ‘A Fresh Appraisal: The Cleveland Report on Red China’ Christianity Today, 25 April 1960, 3–6.

47 ‘Protestants Ask Bids To Red China’, NYT, 22 November 1958.

46 James H. Smylie, ‘Mackay and McCarthyism, 1953–54’, Journal of Church and State 6 (August 1964), 352–364; Hollinger, ‘After Cloven Tongues of Fire’, 35.

45 ‘A Church Mission To China Is Urged’, NYT, 11 December 1956.

44 Statement adopted by the Executive Committee of the FCC, ‘The Churches and American Policy in the Far East’, 6 December 1949, Box 32, Folder 4, FCC-PHS. On the FCC/NCC and civil rights, see James F. Findlay, Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

43 Kenneth Scott Latourette, et al, ‘Problems of Peace in East Asia’, September 1947, Box 26, Folder 9, FCC-PHS. Latourette subsequently expanded on these ideas in his books The China That Is To Be (Eugene, OR: Oregon State System of Higher Education, 1949), The American Record in the Far East, 1945–1951 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), and The Christian World Mission In Our Day (New York: Harper, 1954).

42 Commission on a Just and Durable Peace pamphlet, ‘Towards Peace in the Far East’, December 1946, Box 32, Folder 10, FCC-PHS.

41 Quoted in Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 240. Niebuhr, it should be said, did not share his mainline colleagues' views on nuclear weapons because he did not think the weapons in themselves were necessarily immoral. For a subtle and persuasive analysis of Niebuhr's views on the nuclear revolution in world politics, see Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 32–53, 74–92.

40 On such hopes mixed with fears, with an excellent sustained discussion of the liberal churches, see David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade for a “Free Russia” since 1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

39 George A. Buttrick, et al., ‘A Christian Approach To Nuclear War’, n.d. [1959], Box 3, Folder 44, IWPPC-YDS.

38 Statement adopted by the Executive Committee of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, ‘The Churches and the Hydrogen Bomb’, 21 March 1950, Niebuhr papers, Box 5, LOC.

37 Notes from the Conference of Theologians on Atomic Energy, drafted by John Courtney Murray, Ahron Opher, and Richard Fagley, 20 January 1946, Issues of War and Peace Pamphlet Collection, Box 4, Folder 71, Special Collections, Yale Divinity School, New Haven (hereafter IWPPC-YDS). In general, the Christian clergy provided the majority of opposition to the dropping of the bomb on Japan. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 200.

36 Cavert to Truman, 9 August 1945, Box 3, Folder 20, FCC-PHS. See also ‘Truman Is Urged To Bar Atom Bomb’, NYT, 20 August 1945.

35 The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches (London: SCM Press, 1949), 91. For Dulles's reaction, see ‘Argument at Amsterdam’, Time, 6 September 1948. Dulles was given the opportunity to lodge an official counterpoint, which is found in his essay ‘The Christian Citizen in a Changing World’, in The Church and the International Disorder, ed. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft (London: SCM Press, 1948), 73–114.

34 Bennett statement to the Department of the Church and Economic Life, ‘Christian Principles and Perspectives in Regard to the Economic Order’, 3 October 1947, Reinhold Niebuhr papers, Box 5, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter LOC). Emphasis in original. See also, in more detail, John C. Bennett, Christian Ethics and Social Policy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946).

33 ‘Handling Point 4 Aid Through U.N. Asked’, Washington Post, 4 April 1950.

32 ‘Cleric Sees Peril To Point 4 Efforts’, NYT, 6 January 1952.

31 Department of International Justice and Goodwill pamphlet, ‘The Churches and the European Recovery Program’, 13 January 1948, Box 31, Folder 19, FCC-PHS.

30 FCC news release, 17 March 1949, Box 18, Folder 17, FCC-PHS.

29 Oxnam to Cavert, 19 February 1947, Box 7, Folder 13, FCC-PHS.

28 ‘A Cooperative Approach to Security’, n.d. [1946], Box 24, Folder 9, FCC-PHS.

27 James A. Crain to Walter W. Van Kirk, June 14, 1946, Federal Council of Churches Records, Record Group 18, Box 40, Folder 14, Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter FCC-PHS). For the Dulles articles, see ‘Thoughts on Soviet Foreign Policy and What to Do About It’, Life, June 3 1946, 112–126, and June 10 1946, 119–130. For a perceptive analysis, see Ronald W. Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York: Free Press, 1982), 264–267.

26 Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace, Six Pillars of Peace: A Study Guide Based on “A Statement of Political Propositions” (New York: Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, 1943); the conclusions are summarised on 1–3, 81–82. On FDR's more realistic approach to world order, especially his lukewarm attitude towards the UN, that stemmed from his belief that it was necessary to base the postwar world order on American–Soviet cooperation, see John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 27–29; Robert Dallek, Franklin Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 283–284, 358–359; and Wilson D. Miscamble, From Roosevelt to Truman: Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39–42.

25 On the political gap between the liberal clergy and the more conservative laity, see Hollinger, ‘After Cloven Tongues of Fire’, 29–30, 33, 41–42.

24 Hollinger, ‘After Cloven Tongues of Fire’, 23. On foreign policy in general, see Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy. For specific examples, on Vietnam see Jacobs, America's Miracle Man; and on South Asia, see Andrew J. Rotter, ‘Christians, Muslims, and Hindus: Religion and U.S.-South Asian Relations, 1947–1954’, Diplomatic History 24 (Fall 2000), 593–613.

23 On the surge, see Wuthnow, Restructuring of American Religion, 35–37; and Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 83.

22 Jill K. Gill, ‘The Politics of Ecumenical Disunity: The Troubled Marriage of Church World Service and the National Council of Churches’, Religion and American Culture 14 (Summer 2004), 175–212. Something similar happened in Canada, which was an important bellwether for the United States because there was very little difference between liberal Protestantism in the two countries, and their mainline churches shared integrated mission boards, ecumenical councils, and denominational conferences. On the decline of Canadian mainline missions, see Ruth Compton Brouwer, ‘When Missions Became Development: Ironies of “NGOization” in Mainstream Canadian Churches in the 1960s’, Canadian Historical Review 91 (December 2010), 661–693.

21 Re-thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry after One Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932).

20 ‘Say Christianity Sweeps Far East’, New York Times, 30 January 1925 (hereafter NYT).

19 Milton T. Stauffer, ed., Christian Students and World Problems: Report of the Ninth International Convention of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Indianapolis, Indiana, December 28, 1923, to January 1, 1924 (New York: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1924). More generally, see also Michael Parker, The Kingdom of Character: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, 1886–1926 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998).

18 George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 165–168; Hutchison, Errand to the World, 138–145. Conservative Protestants at this time were in fact equally hostile to liberal internationalism and mainline ecumenism, and passionately opposed not only the FCC but also the League of Nations. See Markku Ruotsila, The Origins of Christian Anti-Internationalism: Conservative Evangelicals and the League of Nations (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008).

17 On the progressivism of mainline missions, see William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

16 See especially Ryan Dunch, ‘Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity’, History and Theory 41 (October 2002), 301–325.

15 On the links between ecumenism and internationalism, see, in general, Preston, Sword of the Spirit. More specifically, for the World War I era see Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003); and, for World War II and the early Cold War, see Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967); Heather A. Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and John S. Nurser, For All Peoples and All Nations: The Ecumenical Church and Human Rights (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005).

14 See Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, vol. 2: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003); and Doug Rossinow, ‘The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898’, Religion and American Culture 15 (Winter 2005), 63–106.

13 There is a burgeoning literature on transnationalism and the emergence of a global civil society, but for an introduction see Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Iriye mentions the WCC only in passing and ignores the FCC and NCC. For another example of the neglect of religious organisations in the new literature on the history of transnational movements and global civil society, see Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

12 Robert T. Handy, Undermined Establishment: Church-State Relations in America, 1880–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 166–167; Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), 307. American ecumenism, especially its relationship to politics and policy, remains woefully understudied. But for introductions to the ecumenical movement in the United States up to the founding of the National Council of Churches in 1950, see John Alexander Hutchison, We Are Not Divided: A Critical and Historical Study of The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America (New York: Round Table Press, 1941); Robert Lee, The Social Sources of Church Unity: An Interpretation of Unitive Movements in American Protestantism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1960); John Abernathy Smith, ‘Ecclesiastical Politics and the Founding of the Federal Council of Churches’, Church History 43 (September 1974), 350–365; Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 1, The Irony of It All, 1893–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 269–282; idem, Modern American Religion, vol. 3, Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 110–112, 142–150, 248–273; Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 80–83; Robert A. Schneider, ‘Voice of Many Waters: Church Federation in the Twentieth Century’, in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900–1960, ed. William R. Hutchison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 95–121; Theodore Louis Trost, Douglas Horton and the Ecumenical Impulse in American Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School, 2002); Hollinger, ‘After Cloven Tongues of Fire’; and Jill K. Gill, Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011). For an overview of international ecumenical history and theology, see Thomas E. FitzGerald, The Ecumenical Movement: An Introductory History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

11 Joseph Kip Kosek, Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). On Muste, see Nat Hentoff, Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J. Muste (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson, Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A.J. Muste (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); and Leilah C. Danielson, ‘Christianity, Dissent, and the Cold War: A.J. Muste's Challenge to Realism and US Empire’, Diplomatic History 30 (September 2006), 645–669. On Day, see William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982); Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Robert Coles, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987); and American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, Anne Klejment and Nancy L. Roberts, eds. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996).

10 A similar point is made in David A. Hollinger, ‘After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity’, Journal of American History 98 (June 2011), 22. For the exceptions that discuss tensions between conservative and liberal Christians, especially Protestants, see Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America since World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 87–107; Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 465–495.

9 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 72–73. On Catholic anti-communism in the early Cold War, see also Donald F. Crosby, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950–1957 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Whitefield, Culture of the Cold War, 91–99; and Jacobs, America's Miracle Man.

8 Martin, With God On Our Side; James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 329; Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Daniel K. Williams, God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

7 Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 152–180; Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 195–246; Angela M. Lahr, Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

6 Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower's Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006); Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

5 Seth Jacobs, America's Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 18. Emphasis in original.

4 Anders Stephanson, ‘Liberty or Death: The Cold War as US Ideology’, in Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, ed. Odd Arne Westad (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 81–100.

3 M.J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 167–190; see 170–173 for religion.

2 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 87; T. Jeremy Gunn, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009).

1 Graham quoted in William Martin, With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 33–34. For Niebuhr, see ‘The Soviet Threat’, in Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics: His Political Philosophy and Its Application to Our Age as Expressed in His Writings, ed. Harry R. Davis and Robert C. Good (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 261–262. Spellman quoted in John Cooney, The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman (New York: Times Books, 1984), 148. For Dulles, see speech in Watertown, NY, ‘The Power of Moral Forces’, 11 October 1953, in The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles: Selections from His Articles and Addresses, ed. Henry P. Van Dusen (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 223.