The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945

Paul Harvey, Philip Goff

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231510363
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: North American History

Of late, religion seems to be everywhere, suffusing U.S. politics and popular culture and acting as both a unifying and a divisive force. This collection of manifestos, Supreme Court decisions, congressional testimonies, speeches, articles, book excerpts, pastoral letters, interviews, song lyrics, memoirs, and poems reflects the vitality, diversity, and changing nature of religious belief and practice in American public and private life over the last half century. Encompassing a range of perspectives, this book illustrates the ways in which individuals from all along the religious and political spectrum have engaged religion and viewed it as a crucial aspect of society.

The anthology begins with documents that reflect the close relationship of religion, especially mainline Protestantism, to essential ideas undergirding Cold War America. Covering both the center and the margins of American religious life, this volume devotes extended attention to how issues of politics, race, gender, and sexuality have influenced the religious mainstream. A series of documents reflects the role of religion and theology in the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements as well as in conservative responses. Issues regarding religion and contemporary American culture are explored in documents about the rise of the evangelical movement and the religious right; the impact of "new" (post-1965) immigrant communities on the religious landscape; the popularity of alternative, New Age, and non-Western beliefs; and the relationship between religion and popular culture.

The editors conclude with selections exploring major themes of American religious life at the millennium, including both conservative and New Age millennialism, as well as excerpts that speculate on the future of religion in the United States.

The documents are grouped by theme into nine chapters and arranged chronologically therein. Each chapter features an extensive introduction providing context for and analysis of the critical issues raised by the primary sources.

Part 1

Religion in Cold War America:
Cultures and Countercultures

Chapter 1

Mainline Religion and the Cold War

WHEN THE “iron curtain” fell across Europe following World War II, it marked a new act on the stage of world events. Long suspicious of each other’s economic systems, the United States and the Soviet Union had put aside their differences long enough to defeat Adolf Hitler’s Axis powers. But now they returned to their earlier distrust with renewed vigor. The stakes of world domination had been raised considerably by the creation of atomic weaponry, which the United States had used to help end the war in the Pacific theater and which the USSR acquired soon thereafter. The “Cold War,” marked not by a physical battlefield but by frigid relations, an arms race, and a constant chess match on the world stage, was under way.

Not surprisingly, religion soon entered the picture, and it took many forms over the coming decades. Various chapters in this volume include themes that overlap considerably with the sort of religious responses often occasioned and sometimes even generated by the Cold War.

For instance, the rapid rise of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism is clearly connected to American fears surrounding the Cold War. Billy Graham, the foremost global evangelist of the twentieth century, earned his worldwide fame by catching the attention of virulently anticommunist publisher William Randolph Hearst through his attacks on communism’s spiritual bankruptcy. Hearst instructed his editors across the country to “puff Graham,” and soon the North Carolina preacher’s face covered Time magazine and other national publications. Speaking for evangelicals of all stripes, Graham taught that “Social sins are merely a large-scale projection of individual sins and need to be repented of by the offending segment of society.” By linking individual salvation to the politics of individualism through their rhetoric, evangelicals and Pentecostals worked their way into the mainstream discussions of the day, which were dominated by the fear of society taking control over individual freedoms.

Likewise, the Cold War affected policies regarding immigration. Since the 1910s, the number of immigrants from Asian countries had been miniscule. A law in 1917 had created an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that kept out those across the Pacific, most of whom belonged to very different faith traditions than most Americans. Things changed, however, when communist revolutions began occurring through Asia, starting with Mao’s successful revolution in China in 1949. Throughout the 1950s turmoil spread—first in Korea, dragging the United States back into war, and later in Vietnam as the French (who had colonized the nation in the nineteenth century) battled the China-backed forces of Ho Chi Minh. Recognizing defeat, the French agreed to divide the country in 1954; but within two years the North and South began hostilities. The United States entered the fray in 1959 and began building up a military presence in earnest by 1961. Soon, with the backing of China and North Vietnam, communist rebellions spread to Cambodia and Laos. With longtime business (as well as religious) allies in jeopardy of their lives, Congress could no longer live with the ban on Asian immigration. The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 opened the door to Asian immigrants and forever altered the ethnic landscape of the United States, as thousands—and eventually, millions—of Buddhist and Hindu (as well as some Christian) Asians entered the country and became citizens. The results of this migration are addressed in a different chapter, but the cause was the Cold War.

The Vietnam conflict, in fact, also helped bring about a powerful counterculture movement in the United States. The “peace movement” that grew through the 1960s and early 1970s, while often associated with the secularization of American culture, ironically had a deeply religious element. Jesus was embraced by the youth culture as a first-century “hippie” who taught a message of peace and earned the ire of the conservative government. Even the more “hard-core hippies,” who characterized the drug culture of the period, used religious language to describe their chemically induced experiences. Eschewing the materialism of American culture, many who participated in this youth-led criticism of the national culture found spiritual voice and sustenance in the folk music that highlighted peace and the treasure of the Earth rather than earthly treasures.

But the Cold War did more than open the playing field—or, better, the praying field—to more people, different from mainline Protestants. It set in motion a more traditional revival of religion across the land. By 1960, 65 percent of Americans were members of a church or synagogue, the highest level in the country’s history. Just as amazing is the fact that 96 percent of the population claimed adherence to a specific group, which indicates the level of public expectation that individuals have a religious affiliation, even if they only rarely or never attended services. While the numbers would slip somewhat from their 1960 high mark, religious membership remained at historically high levels in the second half of the twentieth century.

That upsurge in church membership paralleled the increased public role of religion in national life. At times, this attempt to sacralize the nation’s history and purpose appeared in official ways, as in the 1950s when the words “In God We Trust” were first emblazoned on American currency and “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. But it was most evident in a long-standing form of rhetoric that blended political and religious ideas and terms in such a way that America’s goals were equated with God’s purposes for the world. Expressions of American destiny under God—American mythology that could nearly deify leaders within a generation of their deaths—dated back to Puritan days, before the establishment of the American political state. Consisting of official statements and collectively accepted sacred stories of America’s past, this “civil religion” affirmed and renewed in a changing world Americans’ religious understanding of themselves as a people. The Cold War was but one powerful and long-lasting example of its effects.

If anyone could be called a “high priest” of civil religion during the Cold War, Dwight Eisenhower would be a powerful nominee. His speeches and actions as president during its early days set the pace for the nation in multiple ways. First, by tying religion to political freedoms, he created a fateful distinction between the United States and the growing number of communist nations. “Democracy,” he would later explain, “is the political expression of a deeply felt religion.” That theory became part of the nation’s mentality for decades without any real debate of its merits. Further, by using his “bully pulpit” to encourage Americans to attend church—he refused to offer an opinion as to which one was best—Eisenhower extended what had been traditionally understood as religious behavior to an act of patriotism and national virtue. In public service television commercials during the mid-1950s, he promoted the role of religion in the nation’s overall health. Signing into law congressional acts to place explicitly religious expressions on the federal currency and in the national pledge solidified his significant role as shaper of the culture’s rhetoric and behavior.

That sort of positive reinforcement, when coupled with growing anxieties over the expanding power of communist regimes, made a powerful combination. School drills that taught public safety measures to implement during an atomic strike accompanied vehement anticommunist preaching in the daily lives of Americans. Ever watchful of trends toward collectivist thinking or action, religious leaders Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen, and Norman Vincent Peale told people to look inside their souls to root out sinful ways. The religious answer to the frightening threat of communism, according to the most popular preachers of the day, lay in the individual. A more American message cannot be imagined. Religion and democracy were as wed in the minds of citizens as atheism and communism. “If you would be a true patriot, then become a Christian,” preached Graham. “If you would be a loyal American, then become a loyal Christian.”

That sort of language did not end in the 1950s. While Graham eventually moderated his tone and began to give religious credence to dealing with social ills beyond the concerns of the individual, the combination of religious and political language had become part of daily life. It was used most effectively by President Ronald Reagan, who sought (and received) the support of conservative Christians who preached the value of political and spiritual individualism. His appropriation of religious terminology to explain the political standoff—the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” is an apt example—brought civil religion to a new generation, one born during the Cold War and in need of an explanation for the state of their world.

If conservative politics and religion were the beneficiaries of Cold War civil religion, then mainstream Protestants and socially engaged religious liberals were the losers. In its early days, Cold War fears brought millions of newcomers to the staid, old Protestant traditions. The amount of money spent nationally on new church buildings increased by 4,000 percent between 1945 and 1960, with mainline Protestants paying the lion’s share. These traditions were solid, familiar. If American history was sacred, then these were the books on which it was written. No one saw what was to come.

The “individualism” that tied conservative politics to conservative faith was not the concern of mainline Protestants. As the purveyors of the national culture—or so they believed themselves to be—they held a corporate view of the nation. Either everyone shared in American liberties or no one truly did. Their backing of the civil rights movement is but one example of their commitment to the larger social concerns that troubled the country, problems that they felt could not be addressed by appeals to individual salvation. This community understanding of sin and redemption—social situations shape the individual, not vice versa—was part of their heritage dating back to the nineteenth century.

When Cold War religious rhetoric took hold in Washington in the 1950s, mainline Protestants committed to the “Social Gospel” were among the first casualties. “Could it be,” asked J. B. Matthews, chief investigator of the congressional committee on un-American activities, “that these pro-Communist clergy have allowed their zeal for social justice to run away with their better judgment and patriotism?” Placed on the defensive—social justice versus patriotism—leaders of religious social programs were nonplussed. How could they answer a question that made them either hypocrites or communists? Ultimately, the Cold War sounded the death knell for the progressive Social Gospel movement within mainline Protestantism.

For instance, the United Methodist Church sat at the top of the Protestant ladder with 10.6 million members in 1960. A poll later that decade indicated that it was the religious group most liked by those in other denominations—it was the “middle of the road” dominant mainline church. Its positions on social issues, however, were beginning to take their toll, especially in the South. By 1996, the United Methodist Church had shrunk to 8.5 million members, despite a general rise in the nation’s population. The more conservative Southern Baptists, meanwhile, had grown from 9.7 million members to nearly 16 million, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.

Others followed the same path. The Disciples of Christ lost approximately half their members during the same period, dropping from 1.8 million to just over 900,000. While Lutherans held their ground, Presbyterians (4.1 million to 3.1 million), United Church of Christ (2.2 million to 1.7 million), and the Episcopal Church (3.3 million to 2.5 million) all lost ground. And this during a time when the U.S. population had increased by 85 million people.

But the story of mainline Protestantism in the second half of the twentieth century cannot be fully told by the loss of cultural capital it once enjoyed. Indeed, the fact that it lost such power means that it once held it—and used it to shape the nation in multiple ways in the postwar era. While historians and sociologists today highlight the rise of more conservative and varied religious traditions, to emphasize the decline of mainline Protestantism overlooks just how much influence it had and its present role in American society.

Various events led to the decline of the mainline Protestant denominations. Their advocacy for racial equality, women’s rights, world peace, and disarmament was seen by some Americans as following in the great train of Christian activists who worked for abolition of slavery, suffrage for women, and the minimum wage. To others, however, especially those who felt themselves to be outside the halls of power, the intentions of the well-heeled Protestant mainline smacked of paternalism, too-big government, and anti-individualism.

The Protestant mainline could probably have weathered that sort of difference of opinion, but it came at a particularly bad time. The defensive Cold War mindset, with its growing distrust of attacks on capitalism, did irreparable harm to Protestantism’s image. Those who had helped improve the lot of the American worker were dragged before congressional inquiries into their activities and associates. Bromley Oxnam, Methodist bishop and president of the Federal Council of Churches, requested the opportunity to defend himself after constant vilification by congressmen. He survived the incident with his reputation somewhat intact. Others were not so lucky. Harry Ward, perhaps the most liberal of the activists, had been a leading theorist of political systems as well as a devout Protestant, for years both president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a seminary professor. After his hearing, his longtime friends cut off communications and rarely spoke of him again.

With its prophetic message against the war in Vietnam as immoral, the mainline further divided itself from large portions of American culture. With its leadership on behalf of civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and, in many cases, the right of a woman to choose an abortion, that was the recipe for its descent from glory during an era of distrust of foreigners (especially communists), emphasis on individual sin over social conditions, and freedom from burdensome taxes. The growing national economy further decentered power from the East Coast, giving the growing Southern Baptists and mountain Mormons greater say in political affairs.

Like many of the themes visited here, those stories are told more fully in other chapters. But it is clear that many significant developments in postwar America—from the growth of some movements and the decline of others to changes in immigration, the flowering of a counterculture, and the conservatives’ mastery of the language of democracy in both politics and religion—were occasioned by the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union dissolved the following year, the iron curtain lifted, and revealed a very different religious America.

1. HAROLD JOHN OCKENGA, “CONVOCATION ADDRESS FOR FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY” (1947)

The founding address of Fuller Theological Seminary, given on October 1, 1947 by one of its founders, Harold John Ockenga, directly reflects the common fear at the time that communism was a threat to Christianity and thus to western culture, particularly American culture. Ockenga, most famous as the pastor of the historic Park Street Church in Boston and the first President of the National Association of Evangelicals, in 1947 co-founded Fuller Theological Seminary with radio evangelist Charles E. Fuller in Pasadena, California. He chose the occasion of its inauguration to place the school, evangelicalism, and western culture in ever-expanding circles in order to indicate the gravity of this moment in history, as the Cold War between western Christianity and godless communism commenced.

Beginning with the Renaissance, Ockenga holds secular Europe responsible for the upheaval faced by the world in recent centuries, and goes so far as to say that the destruction wrought by World War II was a “punishment for the intellectual, moral and spiritu...

Índice

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction: Religion and American Life Since World War II
• Editors’ Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Religion in Cold War America: Cultures and Countercultures
• Part 2: Gender, Race, and Politics in American Religion Since 1945
• Part 3: Religion and American Life in the United States: To the Millennium
• Acknowledgments
• Index