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jonathan herzog
Americas Spiritual-Industrial Complex and the Policy of Revival in the Early Cold War
From the wide halls of Congress to the serpentine corridors of the corporate bureaucracy, from the Cabinet Room to the boardroom, government and business leaders during the late 1940s and 1950s adopted a policy of religious revival in the name of national security and societal well-being. Its optimism was unmatched. But, then again, the early Cold War era was rife with projects on grand scales. This policy benefited from the dawning of a new American age, the time of the other-directed individual and the organization mana time when, at least according to sociologists, the average citizen had devolved into a level of social malleability unthinkable in ages past.1 Similar partnerships had tamed the atom and delivered victory in historys most destructive war. Basking in the glow of this justified confidence, policymakers set their sights on the nations religious economy. For scholars interested in the influence of religion on American policymaking, few time periods are as rich in case studies. Between 1945 and 1960, religious concerns attained a rare degree of salience in the development and implementation of policy. There were specific legislative achievements, such as the addition of under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. But there were less visible, and as a consequence largely forgotten, policy adoptions regarding religion in the areas of foreign propaganda and psychological warfare, military training, statesponsored or state-supported national faith drives, and public education. For most of American history, government and corporate leaders were not in the business of religious revivals. To be sure, presidents periodically
the journal of policy history, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2010. Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S0898030610000138
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called the citizenry to prayer, and many of the nations industrial captains graced the pews of their local churches. But federal and corporate policy toward religion could long be categorized as one of general disengagement. As a result, American religious revivals typically were organic, democratic, sensitive to market forces, and, above all, innovative. From the preachers who fascinated Alexis de Tocqueville to the latest wave of evangelical leaders, revivals have regularly been movements from the bottom upproducts of the worlds foremost religious free market. Over time, a lack of government interference in the nations religious economy created incentives for competition and theological originality.2 But this changed in the early Cold War. When Eisenhower coined the phrase military industrial complex in his 1961 valedictory, it would have been equally appropriate for him to mention the spiritual-industrial complex, whose policies helped shape public life and private worship during the previous decade. Like its more famous cousin, the spiritual-industrial complex was born of assumption and urgency. It was unique among other Cold War entities, standing athwart two worldsone within the realm of policy decisions and the other within the realm of theological conjecture. It was the beneficiary of brassy state sanction and commercial talent. It was conceived in boardrooms rather than camp meetings, steered by Madison Avenue and Hollywood suits rather than traveling preachers, and measured with a statistical precision of which Charles Grandison Finney or Dwight Moody could only have dreamed. Its importance came not from the fact that for a brief time in the 1950s record numbers of Americans attended religious services but instead from those state and business interests who eagerly measured such statistics. In this case, the impulses of the saved were far less instructive than the motives of the saviors. What exactly was the spiritual-industrial complex? Most simply, it was the deliberate and carefully managed use of government rhetoric and corporate resources to stimulate a religious revival in the late 1940s and 1950s. More important, it signaled the drawing of a curious conclusion among American leaders: that secular institutions and beliefs alone were insufficient in meeting societys Cold War needs. American leaders built the spiritual-industrial complex to reendow religion with social, cultural, and political meaning. They formed an interlocking network of committees, organizations, and advisory boards, availing the vast resources of the American bureaucracy toward that end. They set out to create a religious citizenry that grounded material power in sacred wisdom and immunized itself to the atheistic, immoral, and corporeal siren song of Communism.
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The relationship between religion and policymaking continues to produce excellent historical investigations and policy studies by a growing number of dedicated scholars.3 In a first-rate, introductory article on religion and policy for this journal, Hugh Heclo identified three distinct levels at which this relationship can be studied: (1) the institutional, which focuses on the way organized structures of religion and government impinge on each other and together and society; (2) the behavioral, which is the idea that through religious attachments people are moved to act in public ways; and (3) the philosophical, which tries to capture the intersections of religion and policymaking that involve ideas and modes of thought bearing on the fundamental ordering of a societys public life.4 This article uses the spiritualindustrial complex of early Cold War America as an aperture through which to study the impact of religion on policy at all three levels. Using a case study of national faith drives in the 1940s and 1950s, it examines how policymakers identified a problem in need of a religious solution, the adoption and implementation of religious policies, and both intended and unintended policy effects.
assumptions
The spiritual-industrial complexs policymaking depended on two widely held assumptions: that Communism was itself a sinister religious system and that American society had atrophied spiritually. These fears created a wide canopy of necessity under which a host of projects, material and unworldly alike, found justification. Communist hostility toward religion had been well documented by journalists since Vladimir Lenins Bolsheviks stormed Petrograds Winter Palace in November 1917, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s the media fed Americans stories of executed priests, despoiled relics, unbaptized children, and spiritually browbeaten peasants.5 While Communisms antireligious nature was no doubt troubling, Americans studying it took this conclusion one step further. From the 1930s to the 1950s, journalists, theologians, and scholars saw in Communism a powerful religious system with martyrs, missionaries, dogma, heretics, saints, sinners, promises of redemption, and even a well-developed eschatology. Marxists or Communist sympathizers like Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, and Will Herberg made well-publicized conversions to more traditional religions. Theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr probed the tenets of the Communist faith, bandying about words like Marxianity, Collective Messiah, and Man-god to describe its religious foundation. American Catholics prayed en

masse for the safe release of religious leaders imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain. With these acts grew a powerful realization: if Communism was a dangerous pseudo-religion, then a powerful weapon in the anti-Communist arsenal was genuine religious faith.6 Perhaps more important, there was also a growing belief that power had both material and spiritual components. Those sharing this conviction agreed that America stood upon the summit of physical strength, but they warned that these victories of the flesh were purchased with retreats of the soul. Critics dubbed it psychic lethargy, spiritual bankruptcy, or just plain materialism. In the summer of 1946, John Foster Dulles urged his countrymen to show that our free land is not a spiritual lowland. One year later the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, halfway through his mammoth work A Study of History, embarked on an American tour heavily publicized by Time magazine, warning all who listened that the fall of civilizations began not with economic or military overreach but instead with a schism in the soul. Brigadier General C. T. Lanham, director of the Staff and Personnel Policy Board for the Defense Department, put it best in 1949. Over and over again, he wrote, gigantic concentrations of physical power have gone down in defeat before a lesser strength propelled by conviction. The Goliaths have perished at the hands of the Davids. Fellow military leaders agreed. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount, chided Army Chief of Staff Omar N. Bradley, The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience.7
the policy of revival

The spiritual-industrial complexs policies can be divided into two broad categories: tangible and tacit. Tangible policies included specific legislative action such as the establishment of a National Day of Prayer in 1952, the aforementioned act adding under God to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, the creation of In God We Trust postage stamps in 1954, the printing of that phrase on all currency in 1955, and its establishment as the national motto in 1956. Other tangible policies affected the military. In 1948, for instance, President Harry S. Truman created the Presidents Committee on Welfare and Religion in the Armed Forces (Weil Committee), charging it with encouraging and promoting the religious, moral, and recreational welfare and character guidance of persons in the armed forces and thereby enhancing the military preparedness and security of the nation. The Weil Committee was the first presidential commission devoted to an expressly religious purpose,
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and due to its recommendations, basic training in the military would include a religious component throughout the 1950s. The spiritual-industrial complexs tangible policies also governed American propaganda and psychological warfare efforts. Voice of America retained a director of religious programming, and the U.S. Informational and Educational Exchange mandated that each of its 165 worldwide information centers contained balanced collections of U.S. publications which portray Americas spiritual heritage and religious values in true perspective.8 Tacit policies fulfilled a far greater part of the spiritual-industrial complexs mission, but because they were not written into published documents or codified into law, the origins of their implementation are more difficult to trace. Leaders from Truman to Eisenhower strived to spiritually mobilize the American people through the use of speeches and highly visible actions. Religion is like freedom, Truman explained, We cannot take it for granted. Unless men live by their faith, and practice that faith in their daily lives, religion cannot be a living force in the world today. Eisenhowers inaugural parade began with Gods Float, an homage to the unifying power of faith across religious traditions, and annual prayer breakfasts sprung up within the halls of power in Washington.9 The most visible syntheses of tangible and tacit religious policies during the early Cold War were national faith drives. Between 1945 and 1960, America bore witness to a host of such efforts. Some were stand-alone operations. Others attached themselves to larger, often procrustean journeys into the heart of the American Way. The fortunate few, those campaigns backed by the right combination of organization, clout, timing, and purpose, could lay claim to the unforeseen and simultaneously unfolding religious revival. In scale and attention, five national faith drives stood out: the Freedom Train, the Religion in American Life campaign, the Crusade for Freedom, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty, and the Foundation for Religious Action. They sketch out the basic contours of the spiritual-industrial complexs unconventional policy implementation. Each urged citizens to develop, or deepen, a religious side to their lives, conflated religion with patriotism, and depended on the tangible and tacit policies of business and government. The tangible policy needs were largely met by business interests due to the constitutional limitations of state interference with religious matters. Business leaders controlled the drives boards of directors, and corporations footed the bills. But this is not to say that government actors did not participate in or tacitly direct these projects. Rather, they offered policy recommendations and afforded the projects crucial measures of legitimacy through the use of a state imprimatur. The drives

were not led by religious leaders but rather by leaders who were religious, and that was the surest hallmark of both the spiritual-industrial complex and Heclos behavioral relationship between religion and public policy.
the freedom train

Those sharing this vision first gathered at the White House on May 22, 1947, at the urging of Attorney General Tom C. Clark: government officials, CEOs, media moguls, and leaders of Americas best-known voluntary organizations. John Foster Dulles was there. So were the heads of Paramount Pictures, Standard Oil, General Electric, and U.S. Steel. Press lord Henry R. Luce sent a writer and editor from Time, Inc. to serve as his emissary. Harkening to the Justice Departments call, the group adopted the title of the National Heritage Foundation and approved an ambitious plan. They imagined a Freedom Traina traveling exhibition of Americas founding documents. From city to city, it would reinforce American conceptions of freedom and highlight the difference between American liberty and Communist slavery. Execution required unprecedented state and business cooperation. The U.S. government lent the foundation one hundred original documents, the nations railroads provided free transportation, corporations footed the bill, the National Advertising Council conducted a publicity blitz before the train arrived in each city, and the Luce family of publications covered the train in detail. The endeavor was conceived and forged as a Cold War weapon, ironically bearing eerie similarities to the Lenin Train of 1918 that distributed Soviet propaganda to rural Russia.10 The Freedom Train is often remembered as a secular endeavor, but it was also the spiritual-industrial complexs maiden venture. While businessmen filled its coffers, government leaders used their positions of authority to light its righteous path. Take the actions of Attorney General Tom C. Clark, whose Justice Department shepherded the Freedom Train project. In the months leading up to the trains launch, Clark began a nationwide speaking tourone mans throwback to the itinerant preachers and circuit riders at the nub of the Second Great Awakening. He hoped the train would be the springboard of a great crusade for reawakening faith in America. In Boston, he publicly wondered if instead of admonishing the Corinthians, Saint Paul might also have been warning Americans in May 1947 that strength was possible only through spiritual unity. In Washington, he assured an audience that America had grown in power and splendor under God. He told a throng in Cleveland that it is imperative that our people and our children return to God and walk in his ways.11
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Clarks crusade peaked in a crowded, sweltering Des Moines convention hall on July 25, 1947. That night at 8:30 he took the podium and electrified the sweaty multitude of five thousand. Clark laid out a divine model for human history, one that sharply contradicted both the Communist concept of economic determinism and the predominant American model of secular progress. His best evidence for so strong an assertion was America itself, since each great document in the nations history flowed from the wellspring of divine inspiration. Clark told the approving crowd that Christianity and democracy were synonymous, that it was impossible to separate religious teachings from the American form of government, and that true loyalty and patriotism received power and endurance from God. He ended with an audacious prescription for any secular official: Let us build for the future on the rock of religion.12 The thunderous applause that followed carried well beyond the Sunday-school teachers assembled in the hall. Associated press reporters were also in attendance, and major newspapers including the New York Times publicized the address. Clark considered religion implicit in the Freedom Trains mission, but the National Heritage Foundation made it explicit as well. The train itself housed a special exhibit of important American religious documents, including The Mayflower Compact, Roger Williamss The Bloody Tenet of Persecution, and the Bay Psalm Book.13 Prior to its arrival, organizers instructed each host community to hold a Rededication Week, of which an Inter-faith Day was an important component. On this day, communities invited local religious leaders to deliver speeches on the religious foundations of American democracy and freedom. Rededication weeks culminated with mass recitations of an oath developed by the American Heritage Foundation. The Freedom Pledge began: I am an American. A free American. Free to speakwithout fear, Free to worship God in my own way, Free to stand for what I think is right, Free to oppose what I believe is wrong. Americans at the dawn of the Cold War eagerly accepted this affirmation of Americanism. In the New Orleans Sugar Bowl alone, 75,000 people recited the Freedom Pledge in unison.14 But they were affirming a particular brand of freedomnot only the liberty of expression but also the entitlement to stand for what was morally right, and this freedom emanated from a belief in God, the lodestar of all moral compasses.

The train began its first twelve-month tour in September 1947 and was a rousing success, viewed by 3.5 million Americans in three hundred communities. An estimated 50 million participated in the Rededication Weeks.15 The American Heritage Foundation provided a workable template for future campaigns devoted to catalyzing a religious revival. It demonstrated the ability of government and business interests to work together toward a common policy goal in the field of social and cultural values. But most important, it proved the willingness of the public to heed the calls of Cold War affirmation.
religion in american life campaign

The spiritual-industrial complexs next major faith-drive venture came in 1949, when American elites began an advertising campaign without precedent. For three weeks beginning on November 1, they saturated radio, print, television, and billboards with messages urging citizens to religiously rededicate themselves. The public service advertisement (PSA) has become a common fixture in modern America, delivering messages on the importance of education, the dangers of drugs, and the reminder that Only YOU can prevent forest fires. But PSAs were newfangled in the late 1940s, as was their creator, the Advertising Council. Formed in 1942 to marshal the fresh powers of marketing behind World War II, both government and business considered the council an indispensable postwar mouthpiece for selling Americans on everything from the benefits of free enterprise to the promise of atomic energy. It was testament to the belief, expressed by one of the councils early presidents, that any societal problem could be solved or helped through the organized power of advertising.16 The Religion in American Life (RIAL) campaign set the advertisers power upon what was often considered the most private of matters. Its organizers adopted two policy goals: (1) to emphasize the importance of our religious institutions in our nation, and (2) to call upon every American to participate more actively in the church or synagogue of his choice. As with most successful ad campaigns, RIAL used celebrity endorsements to convince Americans that religious participation was a normative act. Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Betty Crocker, and J. Edgar Hoover appeared in print discussing the importance of religion. The ads varied. Some featured celebrities discussing their personal faith. Others focused on lonely people, those worried about the future, or children searching for security and meaning. The specter of Communism hung over the enterprise, providing a requisite sense of urgency. One print ad entitled Democracy Starts Here depicted a group of children singing in a choir, their cherubic faces illuminated by a light from above. The text followed:
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The way I see it, when youre a father youre automatically a founding father too. Totalitarian countries do a top-flight job of founding their philosophies, their nations, in the hearts of their youngsters. I think what they give them is faithfaith in false gods a burning, positive, dynamic faith which permeates their lives. Some folks think we can challenge that faith simply by being against it. But thats like scolding an atom bomb. The only force which can conquer faith is a greater and deeper faith.17 This was a crucial way station in the journey of an idea. Forged in the 1920s and 1930s by theologians and intellectuals whose inquiries concluded that Communism was a faith and fanned by politicians as they contemplated the Red menace, RIALs ad execs distilled decades of arguments into a terse, simple statement. The Advertising Council and its RIAL campaign were creatures of government and business symbiosis. Business lent money, organization, and conceptualization, advocating a position that the state could not. The councils official advisory board boasted executives from the Rockefeller Foundation and Studebaker along with the publisher of the Washington Post. General Electrics president Charles E. Wilson oversaw the RIAL campaign. The J. Walter Thompson Company, credited with inventing modern American advertising, developed the ads. American periodicals, radio networks, and budding television stations donated valuable space or time. Added up, these contributions exceeded $3 million over the initial three-week campaign.18 Government, by contrast, offered the project a warrant. The evening before the 1949 campaign began, President Truman endorsed RIAL in a live address. Each one of us can do his part by a renewed devotion to his religion, he spoke. If there is any danger to the religious life of our Nation, it lies in our taking our religious heritage too much for granted. The following year, as RIAL geared up for another campaign, Wilson called the program an effort toward spiritual rearmament. Truman once again endorsed the plan, noting: These are times that demand the vision and fortitude of men of faith such as never before in the history of the world. Impressed by RIALs success, Truman tapped Electric Charlie, as Wilson was known, to head the Office of Defense Mobilization in 1951. After all, once he had mustered the nations spirituality, mobilizing its material resources for the Korean War would be straightforward by comparison.19 The RIAL campaign ran for ten consecutive years from 1949 to 1958 and reached millions of Americans. In its first year, more than two thousand

communities participated by holding grassroots religious mobilization campaigns. Three thousand towns and cities joined in 1950. The Outdoor Advertising Agency donated 5,200 billboards across America, and 1,800 daily newspapers either published editorials supporting the program or carried RIAL advertisements. By 1956, more than three hundred television programs aired the calls for religious mobilization. If stacked upon one another, the RIAL posters alone would extend twelve miles into the sky.20
the crusade for freedom

The same cadre who made the Freedom Train and RIAL possible also turned their attention to international affairs. At the time, Cold War religious dimensions remained troubling but nonetheless hypothetical for most Americans. In Europe, however, the spiritual abstract had become all too tangible. General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor of Germany during the Berlin Airlift, worried that the Soviets were winning the ideological battle in Europe. In 1950, he conceived a plan to rally Americans behind their European allies. The United States had saved West Berlin from starvation by flying in crucial supplies, but Clay also envisioned a spiritual airlift. This belief led to the Crusade for Freedom with a national board of directors that included Luce and other media titans, twelve U.S. senators, the heads of Hollywoods largest studios, and other business executives.21 The crusade had a simple aim. Each American was asked to donate one dollar and sign a Freedom Scroll. The donations would pay for completion of a ninety-eight-inch, ten-ton bronze bell to be installed in West Berlin. Excess donations would be applied to the fledgling Radio Free Europe, a privately funded series of stations launched in July 1950 to combat Communist propaganda. Around its circumference, the Freedom Bell displayed figures representing the five races of humanity passing the torch of freedom. Etched beneath was the inscription: That this world under God shall have a new birth of freedom. By signing the Freedom Scroll, Americans accepted the pledge: I believe in the sacredness and dignity of the individual. I believe that all men derive the right to freedom equally from God. I pledge to resist aggression and tyranny wherever they appear on earth.22 The Crusade for Freedom enlisted thousands of volunteers across America to operate signature collection centers. In Washington, D.C., citizens could sign outside the District Building. In the boroughs of New York, they could contribute at their local firehouse. To generate publicity, organizers sent the
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Freedom Bell on a twenty-one-city tour, and the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times widely covered the crusade and supported it in editorials. On the evening of September 4, General Eisenhower delivered an address supporting the cause that was carried by all four of Americas major radio networks. He spoke of Communist godless depravity in government and asked Americans to declare their faith in freedom and in God. They responded in the millions.23 The crusade explained its mission in a straightforward statement of purpose: The soul of the world is sick, and the peoples of the world are looking to the United States for leadership. It beckoned Americans to light the lamps of spiritual guidance. And so they did. Twenty-five million signed the Freedom Scroll, raising $3.5 million for Radio Free Europe. Millions more went to their churches and synagogues on October 8 for Freedom Sunday. The Crusade for Freedom wrote to more than eighty thousand religious leaders requesting that they prepare sermons emphasizing the truth that all human rights are derived from God. New Yorks mayor Vincent Impellitteri urged residents to spend the day offering thanksgiving to the Almighty for safeguarding our way of life against the evil forces who would destroy it and by begging God to give hope and courage to the enslaved peoples of the world seeking to regain freedom and self-government.24
the committee to proclaim liberty

When church bells rang across America on July 4, 1951, it was no spontaneous outpouring of religious patriotism, but rather the culmination of another carefully orchestrated plan backed by the spiritual-industrial complex. Like RIAL, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty (CPL) used celebrity endorsements and glossy advertisements to hasten what by then appeared to be Americas coming religious revival. CPLs basic message made God the guarantor of true freedom, and to this end Independence Day seemed the perfect opportunity. It was the most secular of American holidaysa time of fireworks, parades, flags, and picnicswhen Americans celebrated the achievement of men rather than the contributions of the Almighty. But the CPL envisioned each July 4 as a day of solemn religious observation when church leaders would expound on the connection between religion and Americanism. James C. Ingebretsen, a retired Los Angeles attorney and the committees coordinator, contended that it is not only proper to give prayerful thanks to God for liberty but that it is only in this spiritual understanding of the true source of our liberty that our country will be able to survive.25

CPL was yet another creation of the spiritual-industrial complex, a combination of industrial resolve and government authority. Its leadership comprised fifty-six prominent Americans: Hollywood heavyweights like Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, and Ronald Reagan; media moguls including Luce; business tycoons like Conrad Hilton, James L. Craft, and J. C. Penney; and prominent religious figures like Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam. Major American newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times carried editorials lauding the proposal. The heads of Americas utility companies contributed as well. Customers of San Diego Gas & Electric, Detroit Edison, and Utah Power and Light received CPL flyers inserted into their monthly bills. The entire effort culminated at 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 1, when CBS broadcast the Freedom Under God program. Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby, and Gloria Swanson spoke during the eclectic half-hour event, which blended church choirs with military and religious speeches. They instructed all patriotic Americans to attend their places of worship on Independence Sabbath and to reread the Declaration of Independence as the church bells rang on July 4.26 The state held up its end of the bargain as well. Mayor Impellitteri applauded the CPLs attempt at emphasizing the sacred and spiritual foundations of our freedom. Thirty-one governors signed declarations instructing their electorates to use Independence Day for religious reflection. The question which must be determined is whether we and the other people of the free world, through faith in God and belief in the dignity of man, can match in fervor the fanaticism of atheistic and totalitarian communism, California governor Earl Warren proclaimed, The fate of the world is in the balance until this conflict is resolved. By choosing to emphasize July 4, government sent the unmistakable message that civic conceptions of freedom were inadequate in the Cold War. Simply calling oneself an America was not enough. As a good American, one pamphlet read, you believe that God is the Creator of all men your rights, and the rights of your fellow-men, are God-given [and that] as a personal creature of God, each of us is equal in the sight of God.27 A Los Angeles pastor, and CPL member, announced that firecrackers wont save freedom. The committee members argued that Independence Day began as a religious holiday only to become another casualty of secularization. On this point they were mistaken. The Fourth of July in the early republic was the noisiest and most raucous day on the American calendara time of parades, military musters, drinking, and civic speeches that were scarcely the embodiment of religious observation. If by chance the holiday fell on a Sunday, Americans put off their celebrations until Monday, a clear sign that
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they considered Independence Day a secular occasion.28 Yet on July 4, 1951, the opposite rang true, literally. Rather than serving as one of many props to the state, religious groups subordinated it. They asserted the preeminence of the sacred over the secular and continued to do so. As late as 1955, the mayor of Los Angeles was still declaring the Fourth a religious holiday.29
the foundation for religious action in social and civil disorder

The final major faith drive was the Foundation for Religious Action in Social and Civil Disorder, the closest the spiritual-industrial complex came to crossing the line between church and state. Co-founded in 1954 by Eisenhowers personal pastor, its national advisory council included religious leaders like Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale, former politicians like Herbert Hoover, businessmen like Luce and Henry Ford III, and government officials like former Psychological Strategy Board director Gordon Gray. Its self-professed mission was to make religious truth an effective force for ordered freedom and the common good, though the foundations more specific aim was to unite all believers in God in the struggle between the free world and atheistic Communism. By mid-1954, its leaders had settled upon a three-pronged plan of attack involving a national conference, media programs, and the dissemination of literature.30 The signature program of the foundation was the National Conference on the Spiritual Foundations of American Democracy, held in annually in Washington, D.C., beginning in November 1954. To meet the crisis of our time, the foundation warned, an ideological and spiritual counteroffensive is needed. The conferences, which were publicized by the domestic media and recorded by United States Information Agency cameras for propagandistic distribution overseas, brought together religious, business, and political leaders who spoke variations of one basic theme: America was winning the Cold War militarily but not spiritually. The answer according to many was a closer relationship between church and state. Conference participants heard sociologist Will Herberg speak on the biblical basis of American democracy, Missouri senator Stuart Symington declare that the current crisis demanded a major reworking of the relationship between religion and government, and conservative intellectual Russell Kirk decry the dangers of removing faith from public education.31 Like its fellow spiritual-industrial-complex programs, the Foundation for Religious Action enjoyed a government imprimatur, though at times the

organization served less as the states ally and more as its mouthpiece. Shortly after the foundations incorporation in June 1954, Eisenhower gave it a public endorsement. The following month in a private meeting with the foundations co-founder, the Episcopalian theologian Charles W. Lowry, Vice President Richard Nixon voiced the need for taking the issue of Communism to the church members and religious-minded people of America. Nixon also promised the foundation full support, even offering to help it secure whatever financial backing necessary. The vice president became sufficiently comfortable working with the foundations board of directors, so relaxed, in fact, that by September 1954 he was including them in covert religious operations in Vietnam.32 Of course the best support the Eisenhower administration could offer the foundation domestically came in the form of endorsement and participation. Eisenhower attended the inaugural National Conference on the Spiritual Foundations of American Democracy, telling the assembled dignitaries, and through newspaper accounts the rest of the nation, that democracy is nothing in the world but a spiritual conviction. Nixon arrived the following year and shook his head at the harsh fact that religious truth is not yet a controlling force in world affairs. Laments like these carried farther than the conference centers of Washington, D.C. The commanding officer of Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, for instance, after hearing of the first conference, designated one Sunday on his base as Foundation for Religious Action Day, bidding his men not only to attend church but also to donate money to religious groups affiliated with the foundation.33
intended and unintended policy effects

Why do these national faith drives and the spiritual-industrial complex behind them matter? Imagine an average American in 1954: middle thirties and middle class. She may have thumbed through literature produced by the Foundation for Religious Action or been one of the millions who viewed the Freedom Train in the late 1940s, more likely participating in the Interfaith Day of her communitys Rededication Week. Chances are better that she signed the Freedom Scroll at a local firehouse or shopping center, pledging her belief in God, her unflinching patriotism, and her disdain for atheistic Communism. She may not make it a habit of attending religious services on Independence Day, but she probably hears the church bells ringing on July 4. Even if there are no churches nearby, she may have received a CPL flyer in the utility bill. And if she reads a newspaper, listens
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to the radio, watches television, or looks at highway billboards, she cannot avoid noticing the RIAL advertising campaigns each year that beseech her to find God. As a matter of simple probabilities, chances are best of all that this ordinary American will participate in the postwar religious revival then in full stride. In fact, at no other point in history did higher percentages of Americans pray, belong to churches, and believe in God. By the mid-1950s, the engineers of the spiritual-industrial complex could celebrate efforts that had corresponded with one of Americas most statistically significant periods of religious renewal. They had, at least in numerical evaluations, achieved their intended policy effects. Eisenhowers personal pastor declared the nation to be in the midst of the greatest moral resurgence and spiritual awakening in the history of our land. Sales of the Bible doubled that of the previous decade, seminaries operated at full capacity, the rabbinate boasted record enrollments, and religious titles accounted at times for up to half of the national bestseller list.34 From the classroom to the living room, Americans during the 1950s prayed more visibly than ever before. Such expressions of piety had been part of American life since the beginning, but during Eisenhowers first term, prayer became an exercise in social acceptance and public duty. The president prayed before cabinet meetings, athletes prayed before events, followers of Norman Vincent Peale prayed for wealth, celebrities prayed for continued popularity, schoolchildren prayed for protection, and the obese prayed for weight loss. Popular magazines featured articles on proper prayer technique. Prayer guides like Pray Your Weight Away and Go with God made their way to the bestseller list. Those too busy or uncreative to conceive their own entreaties to the Almighty could pick up the phone and call Dial-A-Prayer. Public opinion polling revealed the magnitude of the praying 1950s: 94 percent of Americans believed in the power of prayer, and 82 percent reported praying often or occasionally.35 Unlike some previous religious renewals, Americas growth in church membership in the 1950s can be closely measured. In 1951, American religious groups claimed a total of 88 million members. By 1961, these same denominations and faiths claimed more than 116 million, an impressive increase of 31 percent, especially since the U.S. population grew only 19 percent during the decade. The percentage of Americans who belonged to a church or synagogue rose steadily, setting records throughout the decade, from 57 percent in 1952 to 60.3 percent in 1955. While Protestants grew a healthy 23 percent, Catholics could claim an explosive 46 percent increase.36 Because such figures

depended upon the calculations and, in many cases, estimations of religious leaders, they are inexact, but one cannot deny that something statistically extraordinary occurred during the 1950s. Church attendance swelled as well. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Gallup pollsters routinely measured rates of attendance by asking Americans if they happened to attend religious services the previous week. Attendance sank slowly through the 1930s, reaching a nadir of 35 percent in 1942. By 1957, reported attendance had climbed steadily to approximately 50 percent. Recent studies conducted by sociologists suggest that Americans tend to exaggerate rates of attendance in opinion polls, but whether or not church attendance actually increased substantially during the 1950s, the polls reflected the normative values of religious participation. Another measure of this effect can be detected in the rate of people professing belief in a higher power. Undoubtedly, overwhelming majorities of Americans have always believed in God. In a 1947 survey, 94 percent of respondents admitted as much. But by early 1953, more than 99 percent professed a similar belief. It seems doubtful that nonbelievers disappeared altogether.37 Rather, during the height of Cold War spiritual mobilization, as religious belief became tantamount to patriotism, atheists and agnostics most likely chose to bury their doubts.38 Perhaps the most notable aspects of Americas postwar revival were not its religious accomplishments but, rather, the enemies they createdenemies drawn primarily from within the religious community. Religious critics did not necessarily object to the thought of the religious revival itself, but they did little to hide their contempt for the spiritual-industrial complex behind it. A Methodist pastor in Queens frowned upon the revival by slogan and easy formula. A Presbyterian church official bemoaned the fact that most people seem to want God as you want a hot water bottle in the nightto get you over a temporary discomfort. Seventh-Day Adventists called it juke box religion. Others began wondering if the construction of the Cold War as a spiritual strugglethe Worship God so we can lick communism effect, as Union Theological Seminary professor Robert McAfee Brown described it had produced side effects. A Unitarian minister from San Francisco worried that if making belief in God a test of proper hatred of communism had in the end reduced notions of the Almighty to the level of the fierce tribal deity of the early Old Testament.39 In different words and phrases, the critics shared one inescapable conclusion: Americas postwar revival was no revival at all. And whether they called it the worship of worshipping, the growth of faith in faith, or the exaltation of mere attitudes to ultimacy, they pointed to the same sad fact. For
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them, the spiritual-industrial complex, that joint effort of government and business, had privileged visible acts over internal beliefs. It had created a broad umbrella of religious acceptance under which Americans could shelter themselves without troubling themselves, and this sucked valuable oxygen from the fires of what might have been a true national awakening. Eisenhower had warned his countrymen of the military-industrial complex, the concentration of power made necessary by postwar exigency, but he had also presided over the work of an equally tenuous religious collaboration. Whereas the former threatened liberty, the latter imperiled the vitality of American religiosity.
policy changes
By the early 1960s, much of the spiritual-industrial complex had become a casualty, first of growing disinterest and then of conscious policy changes. Religious revival proved unsustainable over a long period of time. In the late 1950s, the signs were unmistakable that the crest was already receding. In 1957, a year often considered the apex of the postwar religious renewal, 69 percent of Americans believed that religion was increasing its influence on American life. Five years later, only 45 percent believed that religion was still expanding in influence. This percentage continued to fall, reaching a low of 33 percent by 1965. Questions like these were value-neutral. They did not ask Americans whether or not they approved of religions declining influence on society. Were that the case, most Americans would have deplored the return of secularization. But the renewal began shrinking in other statistical measures, too. Between 1960 and 1962, the percentage of Americans who were members of religious groups fell, as did the number of ordained clergy.40 By the time of John F. Kennedys inaugural, the Freedom Train was a distant memory, and the Freedom Scrolls were collecting dust. Church bells no longer rang in unison across the nation on July 4, the RIAL campaigns ten-year run had ended (though a tamer version would reappear in future decades), and the Foundation for Religious Action was but a shadow of its former glory. Why, then, did these ongoing faith drives and the spiritual-industrial complex behind them break down? There is no single, convincing answer. Rather, a change in the policy of religious revival was the combined result of several developments: altered Cold War assumptions, electoral calculations, the politicization of anticommunism, and policy constraints imposed by the courts. As with all policies, Americas spiritual-industrial complex built its plan of action on changeable assumptions. What the urgency of the early

Cold War afforded the policy of revival in 1950, the conflicts increasingly quotidian nature would take away a decade later. Nonbelievers did not become vessels of Communist spiritual domination, and the statistically impressive growth in American religiosity did not make victory in the Cold War any more attainable. When the torch passed to a new generation of Americans in 1961, it signaled also the demise of those fears articulated by Clark, Dulles, and Eisenhowerfears that America was too spiritually weak to lead the Free World in combat against a pseudo-religious foe. John F. Kennedy evinced no such worry. By then, policymakers were more concerned about the missile gap than the religious chasm. Material strength became the centerpiece of his general election campaign. There would be no firm delineations of the Communist faithno cautionary tales of materialism gone sourbut rather a battery of observed Soviet accomplishments and American failures. Communist power has been, and is now, growing faster than is our own, Kennedy informed the attendees of the VFWs 1960 national convention, And by Communist power I mean military power, economic power, scientific and educational power, and political power.41 The spiritual toll of material strength, best articulated with the pen of Toynbee, seemed a necessary risk in the shadow of Sputnik. Changes in assumptions explain in part why American leaders began to de-emphasize spiritual solutions to the Cold War in favor of more concrete, material approaches, but Kennedys personal faith was also a factor. The antiCatholic sentiment stirred by Alfred Smiths 1928 campaign for the presidency hung like a specter over the Kennedy campaign. As the first Catholic nominee since Smith, Kennedy and his advisers had to walk a fine line between demonstrating faith on the one hand and assuaging fears that the Democratic nominee was too Catholic on the other. Kennedy was politically sensitized to the so-called religious issue. In his watershed address before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960, he argued that there were real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues. He decried any president who would accept instructions on public policy from religious organizations. He promised to make decisions based on his personal conscience rather than his religious convictions.42 Kennedy would not and could not continue in the role of high priest as Truman and Eisenhower had before him. The office of the presidency, so integral to the spiritual-industrial complex through the first fifteen years of the Cold War, terminated its leadership role. Politicization also contributed to a change in American policy as anticommunism became more of a contentious issue throughout the 1950s. In
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short, the spiritual-industrial complex became a casualty of politics. Policymakers began objecting more stridently to politicians insincere appropriation of religion in the name of anticommunisma trend that journalist William Lee Miller cynically labeled piety along the Potomac. One of the first major politicians to speak out against the public displays of religiosity then at the center of the spiritual-industrial complex was Matthew Neely, the eightyyear-old senator from West Virginia. On March 28, 1955, in a speech before the United Autoworkers Convention in Cleveland, Neely questioned Eisenhowers public use of religion. Eisenhower never joined a church until after he became President, Neely observed, Next Monday, I dont want to have to see in the papers a picture of the President and a story that he attended this or that church. And then the kicker: Any man who tries to parade his religion that way before the public is ungodly. Neelys colleagues in the Senate were quick to repudiate his criticisms of Eisenhower, but he augured the reintroduction of partisan politics back into government-sponsored religious anticommunism.43 In the wake of McCarthyism, some well-established policies of the spiritual-industrial complex also came under fire. In June 1955, for instance, army intelligence released the ill-fated pamphlet How to Spot a Communist, which was designed to give troops the tools of detection necessary to purge their ranks of Marxist traitors. Still in the heyday of its spiritually-centered character guidance program, the army devoted one-third of the booklet to religion. While it is generally believed that Communists are atheists as a result of their political indoctrination, it declared, it appears likely that many find in Marxist philosophy a substitute for religion in which they had previously lost faith.44 Arguments like these were common in years past, but influential newspapers like the New York Times lampooned the enterprise. One doesnt know whether to laugh or cry at the contents of the pamphlet, opined the papers editorial board. The ACLU worried that it would encourage Americans to spy on one another, and rather than making a stand, the army confiscated and quickly destroyed all pamphlet copies.45 More instrumental in policy changes was the growing conclusion among liberal politicians and journalists that virulent anticommunism was becoming a weapon of the American right. Worries about the fusion of anticommunism, politics, and religion in the military intensified over the next several years and culminated in the summer of 1961 after Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a widely publicized letter to President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The twenty-two-page missive, which became known as the

Fulbright Memorandum, charged that military education programs carried out under the aegis of anticommunism were becoming platforms for Radical Right-Wing political propaganda. When the memo leaked, conservative political leaders howled in protest, framing the issue in terms of both security and liberty. But the Department of Defense immediately issued a directive that restrained officers from championing conservative policies during public duties and appearances.46 The spiritual-industrial complex began as a bipartisan endeavor with contributors drawn from across Americas political spectrum, but the national emphasis on faith and the evils of Communism provided fertile soil for the recrudescence of conservatism and evangelicalism. Conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk grounded their ideology firmly within a religious framework. Meanwhile, conservative writers like Whittaker Chambers and Clare Boothe Luce helped to fashion the anticommunist zeitgeist into a weapon by which liberalism could be bludgeoned. Communism was evil, they reasoned, because it put too much faith in the improvement of human nature and the creation of a heaven on earth. So too did liberalism. In a clear swipe at the New Deal, Luce once quipped that no Christian saint ever had more faith in the power of Gods grace to transfigure his own nature, than a Communist has in the power of State [sic] ownership of electricity and plumbing to transfigure all human nature. These intellectuals were joined by conservative Christian leaders, who often mixed religious elucidation with political instruction. In the early 1950s, evangelist Billy James Hargis fashioned his anticommunist Christian Crusade into a radio and direct-mail empire. Similarly, Australian-born psychiatrist turned lay preacher Fred Schwarz operated a traveling anticommunist school, which became a favorite networking site for suburban conservatives.47 The spiritual-industrial complex was the product of remarkable consensus among the powerbrokers of American society. When that widely held agreement frayed under the weight of political debates, so too did the policy of religious revival. The courts provided the spiritual-industrial complex with its coup de grce. The policy constraints of state-sponsored religious revival were too great. Though state actors were ever cognizant of the First Amendment, often choosing tacit rather than tangible policies, it was a matter of time until the courts evaluated the spiritual-industrial complex through the lens of the Establishment Clause. In its most contentious and publicized decisions since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Supreme Court pulled the constitutional rug out from underneath the entire endeavor. In Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and in Abington School District v. Schempp a year later, the court specifically
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invalidated prayer and Bible reading in public schools. The precedent carried beyond the nations public schools, serving as a shot across the bow of state promotion of religion. The military, for instance, abandoned the religious components of its character guidance program in the wake of the Supreme Courts decisions. When asked about the Engel decision in a press conference, Kennedy noted that people were divided in their reactions, but that if they truly supported their Constitution, they would follow the Supreme Court decisions even when we may not agree with them. Then, in a savvy political pivot, he argued that by removing prayer from public schools, the court had given parents an opportunity to reinforce their childrens religious development at home.48 It was an argument for the re-privatization of spirituality.
conclusion
Historians and contemporary policymakers alike can benefit from studying Americas policy of revival in the early Cold War. For historians, the period illuminates the fluid relationship between religion and society during the twentieth century and documents a spiritual facet of Americas domestic Cold War that is too often underdeveloped in major narratives of the conflict. For policymakers, the spiritual-industrial complex carried a maxim widely held by American leaders from George Washington to George W. Bushthat a more religious society is a stronger societyto its logical (and illogical) conclusion. One should not learn from history, for it never repeats itself, but, nonetheless, this episode in managed religiosity offered up several important insights. Americas Cold War policy of revival demonstrated the consequences of interference in the nations religious economy. Put simply, religion is most robust when it exists in tension with society and exacts a high cost of participation. This, of course, seems counterintuitive. When it comes to attracting and maintaining religious followers, one might think the blander and more accessible forms of religious expression enjoy a certain advantage. Sociologists of religion have been able to put more flesh on these bones of contention thanks to detailed explorations of sect growth and denominational decline. In his groundbreaking and controversial 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, Dean M. Kelley called the widely held belief that blander is better a recipe for the failure of the religious enterprise. The more demanding religious groups, in this case those of the proliferating fundamentalist and evangelical movements, were flourishing at the expense of the mainstream denominations.49 The lessons learned from denominational growth and decline can also be applied to the spiritual-industrial complex. In its quest for the lowest

common spiritual denominatora religious system of belief guaranteed not to upset all but the most ardent atheists and seculariststhe spiritual-industrial complex spawned a sometimes mild and largely evanescent religiosity. Americans joined its campaigns because the cost of participation was cheap. For a dollar and a sermon, they received the self-assurance of religious duty and a warm, patriotic satisfaction. Historians and sociologists may be tempted to use the term civil religion to describe this facet of the spiritualindustrial complex. Though he did not invent the concept, sociologist Robert N. Bellah popularized it in the late 1960s, arguing that civil religion represented those common elements of religious orientation that the great majority of Americans share. He believed that this set of symbols, rituals, and beliefs could be studied much like any other religion.50 As a process, civil religion often signifies the use of the sacred to legitimize the secular. Thus, for example, did providence justify American expansionism or Franklin Roosevelt use biblical allusion to support his New Deal. But early Cold War leaders did the opposite. Rather than seeing religion as a means simply to buttress the state, they considered spiritual renewal an end to itself. They used the secular to legitimize the sacred, and in doing so they released much of what tension still remained between society and many religious institutions.51 There is a great but sometimes muddled difference between resurrection and rejuvenation. That the spiritual-industrial complex helped to resurrect a once-diminished interest in religion cannot be doubted. But it did not produce a theologically or socially innovative revival like the Second Great Awakening. Rather, its effect was closer to an orchestrated makeovera veneer of faith painted across the social and cultural landscapeand its curious wake speaks as much to the secret recipe of American religiosity as it does to the particular circumstances of the postwar period. Paradoxically, the religious rejuvenation of the 1960s and 1970s, an age corresponding to the reemergence of evangelicalism as a social, political, and cultural force, arrived only after Americas spiritual-industrial complex sputtered out. That breakdown may have been one of the greatest gifts ever given to religion by industry and the state. It was too late for some denominations of the old Protestant order, whose memberships would erode significantly in the following decades. But new sects would fashion secularism into a rallying cry and make the deregulation of the religious marketplace into a spiritual bonanza. Sometimes revivals matter more because of what they fail to achieve.52 Stanford University
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notes
1. The two specific works I allude to are David Riesman, in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, 1950), and William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City, N.Y., 1957). 2. For works that examine how religious revivals reflect social, cultural, and economic changes as movements from the bottom up, see Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 16901765 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989); and Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997). Bushman told not so much a story of the Great Awakening as a tale of how a revival could challenge and eventually attenuate the law and authority of the colonys governing institutions. For his part, Hatch studied the Second Great Awakening and saw reected a host of larger societal issues, such as democratization, populism, class, and, as did Bushman, a crisis of authority. Likewise, in her exploration of evangelical culture during the Second Great Awakening, Christine Leigh Heyrman used religion to explore questions of class, order, gender, and social compromise. For the single best study of Americas religious economy that traces the rise and fall of denominations across time, see Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 17762005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, 2005). 3. In a gesture underscoring the important relationship between religion and policy, the Journal of Policy History devoted a special issue to this topic in 2001. For religion and welfare policy, see Stanley W. Carlson-Thies, Charitable Choice: Bringing Religion Back in American Welfare, Journal of Policy History 13, no. 1 (2001): 10932; John Aloysius Coleman, American Catholicism, Catholic Charities U.S.A., and Welfare Reform, Journal of Policy History 13, no. 1 (2001): 73108; and Kimberly J. Morgan, Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and Politics in Work-Family Policies in Western Europe and the United States (Stanford, 2006). For work on policy and faith-based organizations, see Maria Roberts-DeGennaro, Executive Orders for the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Journal of Policy Practice 5, no. 4 (2006): 5568; and Michael R. Sosin and Steven Rathgeb, New Responsibilities of Faith-Related Agencies, Policy Studies Journal 34, no. 4 (2006): 53362. For religion and foreign policy, see William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 19451960: The Soul of Containment (New York, 2008); Jody C. Baumgartner, Peter L. Francia, and Jonathan S. Morris, A Clash of Civilizations? The Inuence of Religion on Public Opinion of U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East, Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2008): 17179; and Paul Froese and Carson F. Mencken, A U.S. Holy War? The Effects of Religion on Iraq War Policy Attitudes, Social Science Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2009): 10316. For the inuence of religious ideas or institutions on the making of public policy, see D. G. Hart, Mainstream Protestantism, Conservative Religion, and Civil Society, Journal of Policy History 13, no. 1 (2001): 1939; A. James Reichley, Faith in Politics, Journal of Policy History 1, no. 1 (2001): 15780; Joe Micon, Limestone Prophets: Gauging the Effectiveness of Religious Political Action Organizations that Lobby State Legislatures, Sociology of Religion 69, no. 4 (2008): 397413; and Simon Fink, Politics as Usual or Bringing Religion Back In? The

Inuence of Parties, Institutions, Economic Interests, and Religion on Embryo Research, Comparative Political Studies 41, no. 12 (2008): 163156. 4. Hugh Heclo, Religion and Public Policy: An Introduction, Journal of Policy History 1, no. 1 (2001): 46. 5. Harold Denny, Slowly Religion Is Starving in Russia, New York Times, 12 May 1935, SM7. For studies of American attitudes toward Bolshevik Russia, including its persecution of religion, see Peter G. Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 19171933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); Peter G. Filene, American Views of Soviet Russia, 19171965 (Homewood, Ill., 1968); Richard J. Cooke, Religion in Russia Under the Soviets (New York, 1924); and George Mecklenburg, Russia Challenges Religion (New York, 1934). Isaac F. Marcosson, After LenineWhat? The Future of Russia, Saturday Evening Post, 14 February 1925, 31, 129, 133. 6. For examples of these peculiar conversion narratives, see Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York, 1952); Elizabeth Bentley, Out of Bondage (New York, 1951); Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York, 1949); Louis F. Budenz, This Is My Story (New York, 1947); Reinhold Niebuhr, The Religion of Communism, Atlantic Monthly, April 1931, 46270; Abba Gordin, Communism Unmasked (New York, 1940), 31, 5051, 5557; Eugene Kevane, The Depths of Bolshevism, Commonweal, 3 September 1937, 43335. For examinations of the American Catholic response to early Cold War events in Europe, see Peter C. Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII (Montreal, 2002); Thomas A. Kselman and Steven Avella, Marian Piety and the Cold War in the United States, Catholic Historical Review 72, no. 3 (1986): 40324; Thomas B. Morgan, Faith Is a Weapon (New York, 1952); and David L. OConnor, Defenders of the Faith: American Catholic Lay Organizations and Anticommunism, 19171975 (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2000). 7. John Foster Dulles, Thoughts on Soviet Policy and What to Do About It, Life, 10 June 1946, 120; The Challenge, Time, 17 March 1947, 7179; C. T. Lanham, The Moral Core of Military Strength, 16 February 1949, Box 33, Folder 2-c, Records of the Presidents Committee on Religion and Welfare in the Armed Forces (Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo.), hereafter cited as PCRW Papers; Science Without Conscience Menaces Man, Bradley Says, Washington Post, 11 November 1948, 1. 8. Harry S. Truman, Statement by the President, 16 September 1948, Box 1, Folder 2-b; Press Release, 27 October 1948, PCRW Papers, Box 1, Folder 2-a. For more detail on the Weil Committee and its effect on military training, see Anne C. Loveland, Character Education in the U.S. Army, 19471977, Journal of Military History 64 (July 2000): 795 818; and Lori Lyn Bogle, The Pentagons Battle for the American Mind (College Station, Tex., 2004). 9. Harry S. Truman, Religion in American Life, 30 October 1949, Religion 76, Official File (Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo.); Press Release, 16 January 1953, Box 8, Inaugural Committee of 1953 Records (Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kans.); Gods Float Will Lead the Inaugural Parade, New York Times, 19 January 1953. For an accounting of these tacit policies, see David S. Foglesong, The American Mission and the Evil Empire (New York, 2007); T. Jeremy Gunn, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion (Westport, Conn., 2009); Stephen J. Whiteld, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, 1991); Dianne Kirby, ed., Religion and the Cold War (New York, 2003).
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10. Board of Trustees of the American Heritage Foundation, brochure, 27 May 1947, Box 22, Folder 10, Henry R. Luce Papers (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.), hereafter cited as Luce Papers; American Heritage Program, brochure, n.d., Box 18, Tom C. Clark Papers (Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo.), hereafter cited as Clark Papers; American Heritage Foundation, Documents of the Freedom Train, brochure, Box 22, Folder 10, Luce Papers; Robert T. Elson to Allen Grover, 27 May 1947, Box 22, Folder 10, Luce Papers. The most comprehensive examination of the Freedom Train is found in Wendy Lynn Wall, Inventing the American Way: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2008), 20140. Wall argues that the project was supported by businessmen for the purpose of reselling Americans in the postwar period on the promise of free enterprise. See also Stuart J. Little, The Freedom Train: Citizenship and Postwar Culture, 19461949, American Studies 34, no. 1 (1993): 3567. 11. Tom C. Clark, Address to the National Heritage Foundation, 22 May 1947, Box 18, Clark Papers; Tom C. Clark, Address to the Second National Conference on Citizenship, 10 May 1947, Box 18, Clark Papers; Tom C. Clark, Address on the 215th Anniversary of George Washingtons Birth, 22 February 1947, Box 18, Clark Papers; Tom C. Clark, Address Before the National Conference on Catholic Youth Work, 21 May 1947, Box 18, Clark Papers. 12. Tom C. Clark, Address Before the International Sunday School Convention, 24 July 1947, Box 18, Clark Papers. 13. Freedom Train Dedicated Amid Attack on Reds, Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 September 1947, 7; American Heritage Foundation, American Heritage Program. 14. American Heritage Foundation, Highlights of the National Rededication Program of the American Heritage Foundation, brochure, 1947, Box 22, Folder 10, Luce Papers. 15. Ibid.; Wall, Inventing the American Way, 222. 16. Ad Council Turns to Housing Issue, New York Times, 3 January 1946, 30. 17. Advertising Council, Advertising Proofs, 1949, Box 52, Folder 11, Luce Papers. 18. Advertising Group Sets Peace Drives, New York Times, 6 June 1946, 42. Advertising Council, The Advertising Council: What It Is and What It Does, brochure, 1950, Box 52, Folder 11, Luce Papers. Go-to-Church Ads Win Wide Support, New York Times, 5 December 1949, F5. 19. Truman, Religion in American Life. For a detailed description of the Advertising Councils various Cold War campaigns, including RIAL, see Daniel L. Lykins, From Total War to Total Diplomacy: The Advertising Council and the Construction of the Cold War Consensus (Westport, Conn., 2003). Religions Revival Sought for Nation, New York Times, 29 October 1950, 45; Wilson Is Praised for Religious Gain, New York Times, 19 January 1951, 5. 20. Church Advertising Raises Attendance, New York Times, 8 February 1952, 15; Committee on Religion in American Life, Annual Report, 1956, James M. Lambie Papers, Box 38, Folder R (Eisenhower Library). 21. A Spiritual Airlift, New York Times, 22 October 1950, 23; National Crusade for Freedom Council, Report, 24 July 1950, Box 33, Folder 11, Luce Papers. 22. Radio Free Europe was formed by a splinter group of the American Heritage Foundation called the National Committee for a Free Europe. It was funded by a coterie of powerful businessmen disillusioned with the governments Voice of America. See

Sig Mickelson, Americas Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (New York, 1983). Freedom Crusade Will Begin September 4, New York Times, 28 July 1950, 23; National Crusade for Freedom Council, Join the Crusade for Freedom, 1950, Box 33, Folder 11, Luce Papers. 23. Freedom Crusade Seeks Volunteers, New York Times, 31 August 1950, 35; Crusade For Freedom Petitions Draw Area Signatures, Washington Post, 3 October 1950, B1; Scrolls at Fire Houses, New York Times, 13 October 1950, 41; Editorial, Crusade for Freedom, New York Times, 28 July 1950, 20; Editorial, Crusade for Freedom, Washington Post, 13 August 1950, B4; Editorial, Enlist in the Crusade for Freedom, Los Angeles Times, 23 August 1950, A4. Text of Eisenhower Call for Crusade, New York Times, 5 September 1950, 14. 24. Crusade for Freedom, Crusade for Freedom Statement of Purpose, report, 1950, Box 33, Folder 11, Luce Papers; Crusade for Freedom Fact Sheet, report, 1950, Box 33, Folder 11, Luce Papers; Sermons to Stress Religious Liberty, New York Times, 8 October 1950, 50; Freedom Sunday Is Set, New York Times, 6 October 1950, 22. 25. So. Cal Set for July Fourth Dedication to Liberty, Los Angeles Herald-Express, 2 July 1951, B1; Committee to Proclaim Liberty, Proclaim Liberty, brochure, 1953, Box 737, Folder 144-F (1), Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers, Ofcial File (Eisenhower Library); James C. Ingebretsen, Hailing Freedom Under God, Los Angeles Times, 18 June 1951, A4; Committee to Proclaim Liberty Formed to Celebrate July 4, Los Angeles Times, 8 June 1951, A1. 26. The Committee to Proclaim Liberty also included university administrators from Notre Dame, Harvard, and Southern Methodist. See Committee to Proclaim Liberty, Proclaim Liberty. Earl Warren, Proclamation, 29 June 1953, Box 737, Folder 144-F (1), Eisenhower Papers Official File. 27. Committee to Proclaim Liberty, Proclaim Liberty; Ingebretsen, Hailing Freedom Under God. 28. See Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 10754. One could make the case that the Fourth of July was an example of civil religion, but still this conception carried a different meaning than that proposed by CPL. See Diana Karter Appelbaum, The Glorious Fourth: An American Holiday, An American History (New York, 1989), 20. 29. Mayor Proclaims Week of Freedom Under God, Los Angeles Times, 17 June 1955, A8. 30. Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Disorder, brochure, 1954, Box 37, Folder 1, Luce Papers; Foundation for Religious Action, report, 1954, Box 738, Folder 144-G-1, Eisenhower Papers Official File. 31. Moral Revival Pushed, New York Times, 10 June 1954, 33; President Urges Self-Discipline, New York Times, 10 November 1954, 24; Edward L. Elson to Eisenhower, 3 October 1954, Box 738, Folder 144-G-1, Eisenhower Papers Official File; Highlight of the First National Conference on the Spiritual Foundations of American Democracy, report, 1954, Box 738, Folder 144-G-1, Eisenhower Papers Official File; Foundation for Religious Action, Things You May Remember from the Second National Conference on Spiritual Foundations, brochure, 1955, Box 37, Folder 1, Luce Papers. 32. Kenneth Dole, News of the Churches, Washington Post and Times Herald, 12 June 1954, 9; Charles W. Lowry to Henry R. Luce, 22 July 1954, Box 37, Folder 1, Luce Papers; Richard M. Nixon to Walter B. Smith, 10 September 1954, Box 2, Folder 000.3, Operations
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Coordinating Board Central Files (Eisenhower Library); Foundation for Religious Action, Proposal to OCB, report, 1954, Box 2, Folder 000.3, Operations Coordinating Board Central Files. 33. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks to the First National Conference on the Spiritual Foundations of American Democracy, 9 November 1954, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Eisenhower, 1954 (Washington, D.C., 1961), 327; George Dugan, Moslem Leader Asks Moral Gain, New York Times, 25 October 1955, 34; Laurence S. Kuter to Charles W. Lowry, 11 January 1955, Box 37, Folder 1, Luce Papers. 34. Churchmen See Spiritual Gains, Washington Post and Times Herald, 12 January 1955, 15; George Dugan, American Data on Organized Faiths Emphasizes New Widespread Growth in This Country, New York Times, 12 April 1954, A1. 35. For a good overview of prayer during the 1950s, see James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945 1965 (New Brunswick, 1994), 4447; Gerald Weales, A Family That Prays Together Weighs Together, New Republic, 25 March 1957, 1920; Phone Devotions Shared by Thousands, Washington Post and Times Herald, 25 February 1956, 23; Survey by Gallup Organization, 16 June21 June 1951, available at iPoll Databank, University of Connecticut, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/ipoll.html (accessed 15 January 2010). 36. George Dugan, American Data on Organized Faiths Emphasize New Widespread Growth in This Country; Report Church Membership at All-Time High, Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 September 1955, A1. 37. Surveys by the Gallup Organization, 24 February1 March 1939; 21 November26 November 1940; 17 June June 1942; 2 May7 May 1954; 15 March20 March 1957, available at iPoll Databank. One should note that the results of such polls vary according to the time they were taken. But despite these minor variations, it is clear when examining the polls from 1939 to 1958 that self-reporting of religious attendance among Americans climbs by 1015 percent. For the tendency of Americans to exaggerate attendance, see C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, Overreporting Church Attendance: Evidence That Demands the Same Verdict, American Sociological Review 63 (February 1998): 12230; and Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, What the Polls Dont Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance, American Sociological Review 58 (December 1993): 74152. Surveys by the Gallup Organization, 7 November12 November 1947; 28 March2 April 1953, available at iPoll Databank. 38. Indeed, in 1954, when researchers returned to Plainville, a pseudonym given to an anonymous Missouri farming community, they noticed that the nonbelievers had gone underground. During the first round of research there from 1939 to 1941, social scientists detected a sizable group of agnostics, atheists, and irreligious inhabitants. In their follow-up thirteen years later, researchers concluded that the number of nonbelievers in Plainville had probably remained constant, but that many agnostics do not declare their belief, and at the same time advocate support of local churches, arguing that they stand for moral right as opposed to wrong. James West, Plainville, U.S.A. (New York, 1945), 142; Art Gallagher, Jr. Plainville: Fifteen Years Later (New York, 1961), 169. 39. Clergy Skeptical over Revivalism, New York Times, 12 September 1955, 18; Church Leader Says Revival Isnt Genuine, Washington Post and Times Herald, 19 May 1955, 21; Juke Box Religion Hit by Adventist Speaker, Washington Post and Times

Herald, 9 June 1956, 18; Kenneth Dole, News of the Churches, Washington Post and Times Herald, 19 February 1955, 13; Harry C. Meserve, The New Piety, Atlantic Monthly, June 1955, 35. 40. George Gallup, Religious Revival May Be Losing Surge, Los Angeles Times, 18 April 1962, 17; Survey by the Gallup Organization, 1924 February 1965, available at iPoll Databank. For example, when polled in 1966, 70 percent of Americans opposed the Supreme Courts ruling against school prayer. Survey by Louis Harris & Associates, November 1966, available at iPoll Databank. Paul L. Montgomery, Religion Revival Found Leveling, New York Times, 27 December 1963, 13. 41. John F. Kennedy, Speech at the VFW Convention, 26 August 1960, John Wooley and Gerhard Peters, eds., The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ (accessed 15 January 2010), hereafter cited as APP. 42. John F. Kennedy, Address Before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, 12 September 1960, APP. 43. William Lee Miller, Piety Along the Potomac: Notes on Politics and Morals in the Fifties (Boston, 1964) 34, 4142, 44; Hes Unqualied for Top Job, Says Neely, Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 March 1955, 12; Senator Neely Lashes Out at Eisenhower, Los Angeles Times, 29 March 1955, 12; Ike Denounced for Golng, Church Going; Two G.O.P Senators Reply to Criticism, Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 March 1955, 12. 44. Congressional Record, 84 Cong., 1 sess., 22 June 1955, A445657. 45. Editorial, Spotting Communists, New York Times, 14 June 1955, 28; Army Cancels Booklet Linking Words to Reds, New York Times, 15 June 1955, 7. 46. For a more detailed analysis of the Fulbright Memorandum and its political context, see Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Womans Crusade (Princeton, 2005), 96103; Cabell Phillips, Right-Wing Talks by Ofcers Curbed, New York Times, 21 July 1961, 1. 47. The centrality of religion to conservative thought is well displayed in the seminal works of conservative intellectuals during the early Cold War. See Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago, 1953); Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1949); William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Chicago, 1951); Clare Boothe Luce, Is Communism Compatible with Christianity? (New York, 1946), Catholic Pamphlet Collection, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.; Frederick Schwarz, Beating the Unbeatable Foe: One Mans Victory Over Communism, Leviathan, and the Last Enemy (Washington, D.C., 1996); Billy James Hargis, Communist America Must It Be? (Tulsa, 1960); Billy James Hargis, The Far Left (Tulsa, 1964). 48. For examples of Kennedys differing approach to the relationship between religion and society, see John F. Kennedy, Speech at the VFW Convention, 26 August 1960, APP; John F. Kennedy, Speech in Portland, OR, 7 September 1960, APP; John F. Kennedy, Address Before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, 12 September 1960, APP; and John F. Kennedy, Speech in Bowling Green, KY, 8 October 1960, APP; John F. Kennedy, The Presidents News Conference of June 27, 1962, APP. 49. Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (New York, 1972), viii. Stark and Finke argue that when the cost of membership increases, the net gains of membership increase as well, and such religious traditions grow,
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though they do warn that costs alone do not determine growth or failure. See Stark and Finke, The Churching of America, 25051. 50. Robert N. Bellah, Civil Religion in America, Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 121. Will Herberg agreed with Bellah insofar as he believed civil religion was synonymous with the American Way of Life. See Will Herberg, Americas Civil Religion: What It Is and Whence It Comes, in American Civil Religion, ed. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones (New York, 1974), 7688. 51. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke call this process sacralization, which they define as a breakdown of differentiation between sacred and secular and the suffusion of basic societal functions with religious symbols and belief. See Stark and Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000), 193217. 52. For the best-known account of structural denominational change in the postwar period, see Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, 1988).
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