Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960 / William Inboden

Inboden, William. Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 356 pages. ISBN: 978-0-521-51347-0

William Inboden earned his PhD in history at Yale while studying with Jon Butler, Paul Kennedy, and John Demos. He spent his career as a policy advisor for the State Department, for George W. Bush’s National Security Council, and for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He credits John Lewis Gaddis and Harry Stout for guiding him while writing Religion and American Foreign Policy. Stout’s influence is apparent in Inboden’s emphasis on lived religion and religious experience. Inboden also incorporates Gaddis’s focus on personalities, structuring several chapters of Religion and American Foreign Policy around vignettes of Truman, Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and H. Alexander Smith. Inboden wrote Religion and American Foreign Policy to fill a void in Cold War historiography. He believed that the religious aspect of the Cold War had been virtually ignored prior to 9/11 and what has been written since has focused on the Cold War origins of Islamic fundamentalism.

Inboden proposes that America’s war against communism was a religious war between a Christian America and the atheistic Soviet Union. In the introduction, Inboden explores the immediate roots of twentieth century American exceptionalism. Late nineteenth century Americans believed that their country was God’s chosen nation, a City set upon a Hill. Truman and Eisenhower blended that old Puritan idea with Woodrow Wilson’s “belief in America’s international mission.” Thus, fired by a perceived duty to defend humankind’s God-granted freedoms and rights, the United States set out to contain Soviet aggression.

Inboden argues that not only was religious ideology a cause of the Cold War, but also an instrument. He believes that the idea of containment was infused with religious purpose. Religion “strengthen[ed] resolve at home and undermin[ed] communism abroad.” With that end in mind, Truman attempted to build an alliance of all the major Christian churches to resist atheistic communism. This ecumenical goal failed because of deep divisions between mainline and evangelical Protestants, Catholicism, and the Orthodox churches. Instead, Eisenhower constructed a doctrinally-minimalist civil religion that Will Herberg described as “secular Puritanism.” Inboden notes that the religious values shared by policy makers like George Kennan, John Foster Dulles, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower did not create unanimity in policy. But their shared religious discourse did succeed in shaping a worldview hostile to both communism and compromise. Without this religious component, Inboden believes that the Cold War might have taken a very different course.

I believe that Inboden has written a needed corrective to revisionist Cold War historians who see religious rhetoric, if they discuss it at all, as merely cover for policy makers’ true motive: economic imperialism. But Inboden notes that Harry Truman was vocal about the religious nature of the Cold War in both public and private. Indeed, Truman attempted to reach out to the Vatican in spite of tremendous domestic opposition. Inboden provides us with a very different picture of Truman than that of many revisionists who accuse Truman of manipulating Cold War fears to aggrandize presidential power.

Inboden also unintentionally, yet significantly, clashes with Victoria De Grazia’s interpretation of Woodrow Wilson. De Grazia introduces Irresistible Empire with Wilson’s address to the World’s Salesmanship Congress, a speech in which Wilson called for the spread of liberty and justice through consumerism. Inboden instead includes Wilson’s 1905 speech to a religious conference where he declared it America’s mission to “to Christianize the world.” And while President, Wilson addressed the National Council of Churches on multiple occasions arguing that “we have got to save society…by the instrumentalisty of Christianity in this world.” This clash between De Grazia and Inboden is a reminder of how deeply historians emplot their work by choosing what information to make salient and what to leave silent.

I appreciated Inboden’s understanding of how religious modes of thinking pervade American culture. Richard Hofstadter’s concept of a “paranoid style” has become popular again among the chattering classes, but in a less famous passage of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life Hoftstadter also noted the “Manichean” tendency of American fundamentalists in the 1950s to see the world in black and white and to define the fight for right in apocalyptic terms. But Hofstadter was too restrained in applying his critique. Even though Truman, Eisenhower, Dulles, and Kennan were not fundamentalists, their religious beliefs encouraged them to cast the conflict between American and the Soviet Union as the ultimate battle between good and evil. Even exceptionalism was inescapeably infused with religious significance; Cold War Americans believed that they were citizens of a God-blessed, Christian nation defending freedom against an evil, atheistic Soviet Union (or as on talk radio today, an Islamic jihad). Inboden has introduced Cold War historiography to the “religious turn” with a sophisticated and well-researched work of religious and diplomatic history.