Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism

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Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares

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Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism

angel a m. l ahr

1

2007

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright Ó 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Excerpts from Billy Graham Evangelistic Association archival materials, located in the Billy Graham Center Archives, are reprinted with permission. ‘‘After the Bomb’’ by Charles Angoff and ‘‘Fallout’’ by William I. Elliott. Copyright Ó 1962 Christian Century. Reprinted by permission from the Oct. 24, 1962, issue of the Christian Century. ‘‘Halting Red Aggression in Vietnam,’’ April 23, 1965; ‘‘Is the United States Right in Bombing North Vietnam,’’ January 7, 1966; ‘‘Vietnam: Where Do We Go from Here?’’ January 7, 1966. Used by permission, Christianity Today, 1965 and 1966. ‘‘Atomic Cocktail.’’ Words and Music by Bulee ‘‘Slim’’ Gaillard. Ó 1945 EMI Mills Music, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc. Excerpts from His Land. Ó 1983 World Wide Pictures. Excerpts from the Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers are from the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. ‘‘Tavis Smiley: Falwell interview on presidential election.’’ Ó 2005 National Public Radio, Inc. ‘‘The Censure of a Bishop: Church and State in the McCarthy Era,’’ Methodist History. Used with permission of the General Commission on Archives and History. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lahr, Angela M. Millennial dreams and apocalyptic nightmares : the Cold War origins of political evangelicalism / Angela M. Lahr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-531448-9 1. Evangelicalism—United States—History—20th century. 2. Millennialism—Political aspects—United States—History—20th century. 3. Cold War—Religious aspects— Christianity—History of doctrines—20th century. 4. United States—Church history— 20th century. I. Title. BR1642.U5L34 2007 277.3'0825—dc22 2006102283 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Sheila and Gale Lahr


Acknowledgments

Numerous individuals aided my efforts toward this project in invaluable ways. I would like to thank the Interlibrary Loan Department and staff members at Northern Illinois University. The archivists at the Billy Graham Center Archives were especially patient and helpful on my frequent Friday visits. Those who worked with me at the Presbyterian Church in America Archives (St. Louis, Missouri), the American Jewish Archives (Cincinnati, Ohio), the Regional History Center (DeKalb, Illinois), and the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress all helped to make my research a pleasant experience. In its dissertation stage, this work was supported by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate School, Northern Illinois University. I am particularly indebted to David Kyvig, Jim Schmidt, Aaron Fogleman, J. D. Bowers, and Kate Wiegele for their advice, suggestions, criticism, and encouragement. Other faculty members at Northern Illinois University also aided me in this long, sometimes painful, but rewarding journey. I am thankful to all of my colleagues who patiently answered my sometimes tedious questions and provided me with invaluable guidance. I would also like to thank all of those who worked with me at Oxford University Press. To those individuals, organizations, and publishers who granted permission for the use of their material, I express my gratitude. Several students also became sources of inspiration and I would be remiss not to recognize them. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the love and prayers of my family and friends. For providing encouragement, support,

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acknowledgments

and diversion, I am grateful to Erin Lahr, Cierra Evans, Nicole and Tony Lahr, Rion and Andy Lahr, Katelyn and Ella Lahr, Mary and Wendall Lahr, Ethel Marie and Dorlan Wagner, Ruth Oldfather Wagner, He´manth Samuel, and especially my parents, Sheila and Gale Lahr. I thank you. I love you.

Contents

Abbreviations, xi Introduction, 3 1. ‘‘Bomb’’arding Evangelicals, 25 2. Praying in the End, 49 3. Putting the Trumpet to Their Lips, 75 4. The Cuban Climax, 101 5. Next Year in Jerusalem? 133 6. A Different Kind of Prophet, 169 Conclusion, 199 Notes, 205 Select Bibliography, 241 Index, 267


Abbreviations

ACCC ACCL AJC CACC CALCAV CCC CWS EFMA FCDA HUAC ICCC ICCL ICL MCC NAE NCC NSC PCC SBC SNCC USIA VNCS VOA WCC WEF ZOA

American Council of Christian Churches American Council of Christian Laymen American Jewish Committee Christian Anti-Communism Crusade Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam Campus Crusade for Christ Church World Service Evangelical Fellowship of Missions Agencies Federal Civil Defense Administration House Un-American Activities Committee International Council of Christian Churches International Council of Christian Leadership International Christian Leadership Mennonite Central Committee National Association of Evangelicals National Council of Churches National Security Council People’s Christian Coalition Southern Baptist Convention Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee United States Information Agency Vietnam Christian Service Voice of America World Council of Churches World Evangelical Fellowship Zionist Organization of America


Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares


Introduction

Let us pray that if it be the will of God, that some day the Iron Curtain will be cracked for Christ and that materialistic communism will be destroyed by the love, grace, and truth of the risen Christ, ladies and gentlemen; if that does not happen, these hydrogen bombs that can destroy whole cities and whole states with one blow may fall upon us in the next few years. Our only hope is a turning to Jesus Christ. —Billy Graham, ‘‘Christianity: The Answer to Communism,’’ The Hour of Decision (September 9, 1953) This statement, broadcast on the radio program of twentieth-century America’s most well-known and influential evangelist, illustrates a fusion of three creeds that became increasingly commonplace after World War II: Christianity, eschatology, and anticommunism. Graham articulated a fear of destruction that assumed the rhetorical uttering of evangelical eschatology, or the study of the end-times. Eschatology linked Christianity to a third creed of the period: anticommunism. Having just emerged from a war where people across the globe witnessed destruction on a scale not previously encountered, many American citizens turned to religion to try to heal their wounds. Simultaneously, the Cold War produced frightening world conflict and technologically advanced weaponry capable of annihilating the globe. American evangelicals were able to present an explanation of these confusing times that not only accounted for the alarming trends but that also appeared to offer some hope to believers.1

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millennial dreams and apocalyptic nightmares

Strain between the United States and the Soviet Union had grown even before the end of World War II, and by 1947 it had crystallized into the fullfledged Cold War. Defined chiefly by the threat each superpower perceived in the other, it dominated international politics for forty years. This Cold War tension influenced and was influenced by evangelical prophecy interpretations. Four key case studies—the introduction of nuclear weapons onto the world scene with the explosion of the first atomic bombs in 1945, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the evangelical fascination with the new state of Israel, and the Vietnam War—all demonstrate a clear connection between conservative Protestant theology, the Cold War, and the evolving national identity of the evangelical community. Conservative evangelicals employed their apocalyptic understanding of the world for political and religious ends, becoming staunch advocates of ‘‘Christian America’’ and opponents of ‘‘atheistic communism.’’ From the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, prophecy belief has molded evangelical worldviews in the United States. Paul Boyer’s influential history of premillennial dispensationalism, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, has argued convincingly that this belief system was not as marginal as many assume. He claims that by investigating apocalyptic beliefs we can determine the larger worldview of the believers.2 Boyer has done more than perhaps any other scholar in demonstrating the importance of dispensationalism for believers, and even closer investigations into the ways evangelicals adapted millenarian thought to a Cold War world shows that the subculture was able to use prophetic politics to renegotiate their national identity. Evangelicals became more accepted by an anticommunist mainstream culture,3 which set the stage for the movement to separate itself again from secular America in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of the culture wars. The evolution of Cold War evangelical self- and national identity was an intellectual, institutional, relational, and political process that characterized individuals and groups as ‘‘evangelicals’’ and as ‘‘Americans.’’ Prophetic symbols not only helped establish religious meaning; when paired with a Cold War ethos, these sacred symbols also crafted a particular political worldview that empowered evangelicals in the mainstream United States. The millennial/apocalyptic-inspired evangelical culture has exploded at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries with bestselling novels about the last days and Web sites dedicated to prophecy speculation. Authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins drew evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike to their Left Behind novels, which followed a group of born-again Christians through end-times adventures based on chiliastic scripture. They even offered an e-mail newsletter to keep fans abreast of the latest book release updates and other significant eschatological news.4 Today, talk of the end of the world engages both serious believers and scoffers and testifies to the legacy of the American apocalyptic narrative as well as the influence of Cold War millennialists. End-times fascination has a long history. Prophecy commenta-

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tors after World War II were able to utilize eschatological allure to make sense of an increasingly conflict-ridden world.

Definitions In 2004, National Public Radio host Tavis Smiley interviewed fundamentalist Jerry Falwell and Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners, an evangelical periodical that addresses issues of social justice. The three discussed the use of the term ‘‘values’’ in the 2004 presidential campaign. In what Smiley called a ‘‘spirited debate,’’ Falwell and Wallis wrangled over what it meant to be an evangelical. Falwell focused on the issues of same-sex marriage and abortion, while Wallis insisted that the values debate had to go beyond those questions and address poverty, the environment, and war and peace. Falwell responded by challenging Wallis’s voting record. ‘‘Did you vote for Al Gore last time? . . . Did you vote for Ronald Reagan? Did you vote for George Bush, Sr.?’’ When Wallis admitted that he did not vote for Falwell’s ‘‘Republican friends,’’ Falwell told him that he was ‘‘about as evangelical as an oak tree.’’5 Clearly these two leaders had developed definitions of evangelicalism that were poles apart. It is a slippery term that continues to be debated, but the evangelical subculture is undoubtedly a real part of America’s cultural landscape and has had a large impact on the U.S. past. Evangelicals generally define themselves as Christians who consider the scriptures essential guides for their personal and political lives. They profess to connect with Jesus Christ directly and individually through prayer, fellowship with other believers, and obedience to their own interpretations of God’s commands according to the Bible. Historian George Marsden characterizes them as Christians who hold to five basic beliefs: the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, the belief in the ‘‘real historical character’’ of God, the belief in eternal salvation through Jesus Christ, the emphasis on evangelism, and the belief in a ‘‘spiritually transformed life.’’ The problems associated with the implications of the broad character of this movement to a historian are obvious. Evangelicalism includes a wide range of believers, from members of holiness churches to fundamentalists to Pentecostals. Scholars and evangelicals disagree on which groups are and are not included in this community.6 While acknowledging that this issue remains contentious, this book considers anyone who accepts the above doctrines to be evangelical. Its primary subjects, though, are those individuals who apply their faith in politically conservative ways and who have accepted a premillennial worldview. Though the terms ‘‘liberal’’ and ‘‘conservative’’ are used here to distinguish between theological and political schools of thought, the intention is not to suggest that a kind of strict dichotomy exists within evangelicalism. The unfortunate limitations of the terminology may serve to disguise the complex, overlapping ideologies

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that characterize the faith. In fact, many ‘‘liberal’’ and ‘‘conservative’’ evangelicals have objected to these identifiers, preferring to think of their worldviews as ‘‘biblical.’’ I use these terms hesitantly to denote difference, but they should not obscure the intricacy of evangelical ideas. Not unlike the somewhat ambiguous nature of evangelicalism, the status of evangelical Protestants within the United States has fluctuated across time. One way to measure it is by examining how eschatological beliefs of ‘‘Biblebelieving’’ Christians have been accepted or rejected by American cultural, political, and social institutions. Apocalypticism, for example, is a broad term that is used here to refer to the belief in end-time destruction and judgments.7 In Christian eschatology, millennialism or millenarianism is the belief that a one thousand–year period of utopia, peace, and harmony will materialize in the end-times.8 Postmillennialists hold to the idea that Jesus will return to reign on earth after this period. Historically, because those who held this particular creed believed that the second coming of Jesus would occur only after the millennial age, they focused on working within society to perfect humanity and to establish the millennium on earth. Premillennialists, on the other hand, believe that Jesus will return to rule on earth before the millennium. They generally hold that this will occur only after a period of disaster and destruction known as the ‘‘great tribulation.’’ To further complicate matters, premillennialists are also divided between pretribulationists, who hold that true believers will be ‘‘raptured’’ off the earth before the tribulation, and posttribulationists, who believe that born-again believers will have to endure the hardships along with everyone else. According to premillennialists, the battle of Armageddon will immediately follow the tribulation, and at its conclusion Jesus will return to earth to rule over it. Premillennial dispensationalists divide world history into different ages. The end-times scenario of the rapture, the tribulation, Armageddon, and the millennium is the culmination of the dispensationalists’ faith and of world history. According to this belief, world disaster is inevitable and the situation will only worsen until the rapture. In the period after World War II, a majority of evangelicals had come to adopt a premillennial worldview. When combined with political conservatism, their eschatological paradigm vastly influenced their religious and national identities. In the process, they were able to draw on an apocalyptic tradition that had long influenced American culture.

The American Apocalyptic Narrative and Premillennial Dispensationalism An eschatological narrative, consisting of two defining and seemingly contradictory elements, has contributed to the discourse over the meaning of the history of the United States since before the country’s founding. On one hand,

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an apocalyptic component embodied the pessimistic belief that the world would end in a catastrophe of some kind. But coupled with this affinity for gloom was a millennial element, which represented the tendency toward utopian dreams of a future of harmony and peace. This more optimistic tradition was directly linked to the future of the United States itself. John Winthrop’s 1630 description of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony as a holy example, a ‘‘city on a hill,’’ for the entire world to see became a favorite expression of later Americans who continued to spread the millennial notion that envisioned the United States guiding the world into a better era. Numerous groups, cultures, and religions contributed to the eschatological narrative, which developed out of myriad prophetic Native American movements, European millenarian groups, and African traditions. Native American millennial beliefs demonstrated that apocalyptic influences did not always flow from Western Christianity to native traditions.9 In fact, some incidents have shown that the syncretism of evangelical and Native American millennialism that took place was much more complex and interesting. In the early 1920s, Tuwaletstiwa, a member of the Bow Clan of the Hopi Indians, considered the meaning of missionary John B. Frey and his message: ‘‘It is said that someone from the East should come to deliver us from our enemies and set us free. . . . He would be somebody who would have great power. So I began to think that the prophecy is like the Bible which says that when He comes, everybody would be free. . . . I also began to realize that this was the One the Hopis were waiting for.’’10 Tuwaletstiwa had become a Christian to fulfill a Hopi prophecy. As a result, he arranged a ceremonial burning of Hopi idols and altars. Using aspects of traditional ritual and song, he presided over this service as people sang ‘‘When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder’’ in Hopi: ‘‘When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more, and the morning breaks eternal, bright, and fair; When the saved of earth shall gather over on the other shore, and the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there.’’ Tuwaletstiwa had demolished part of his Hopi religious heritage in order to initiate the end-times, in fulfillment of both Hopi and Christian prophecy.11 From his conversion to his apocalypse-motivated bonfire ceremony, he blended Hopi and Christian traditions. The service’s inclusion of ‘‘When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,’’ a popular evangelical hymn, reveals both the pervasiveness and adaptability of evangelical millennialism. Tuwaletstiwa’s story reminds us that the American apocalyptic narrative encompassed aspects of Native American spirituality, but the Americanization of European eschatology was by far the most influential aspect of the narrative. Various threads of millenarianism had been present in Europe for centuries, and philosophizing on the apocalypse had become an intricate part of the identities of European Christians, mixing ‘‘superstition’’ and Christianity in numerous and often intriguing ways. Norman Cohn’s book The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages

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catalogued millennial influences in popular religion in medieval Europe, spurred on by the coming of the year 1000 and by the Crusades, among numerous other events.12 Joachim of Fiore, a monk who lived from 1135 to 1202, commented widely on millenarianism, rejecting Augustine’s denial of a future millennium. He taught that human history could be divided into three ages, each associated with figures of the Trinity. God the Father ruled over the Age of Law, the Age of Grace was linked to Jesus Christ and his crucifixion, and the Age of the Spirit would culminate with the defeat of the Antichrist and the fulfillment of mankind’s destined end. Joachim’s power was at its peak when he played a role in inciting the Crusades, telling Richard Coeur de Lion that Saladin was the Antichrist. Future prophecy promulgators—most prominently, Irish-born exAnglican John Nelson Darby—would expound on Joachim’s writings to create their own copious eschatological commentaries.13 Like Joachim, Darby claimed that history is divided into separate ‘‘ages,’’ or dispensations. After the present ‘‘Church Age,’’ the return of Christ will usher in the beginning of the end, as portrayed in the book of Revelation. Darby’s paradigm, introduced to the United States in the early nineteenth century, became known as premillennial dispensationalism and grew to dominate American evangelical eschatology by the beginning of the twentieth century.14 European apocalypticism took on many forms. The Muggletonians, for example, were followers of Lodowicke Muggleton (1609–1698), who taught that he and his cousin John Reeve were the two witnesses of the last days found in the book of Revelation. Though probably not very numerous, Muggletonians existed into the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries. The tendency of evangelical premillennialists to interpret natural disasters and political events as ‘‘signs of the end’’ also had its precursors in European Christianity. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the French Revolution convinced many in Europe and the Americas that the last days were approaching.15 Colonists in the Americas took this deep, diverse millenarian tradition with them. Historian J. F. C. Harrison illustrates the strong belief in prophets of the young printer Samuel Keimer, quoting his description of one incident: ‘‘Another time I have seen my sister [Mary Keimer], who is a lusty young woman, fling another prophetess upon the floor and under agitations, tread upon her breast, belly, legs, etc., walking several times backwards and forwards over her, and stamping upon her with violence. This was adjudged to be a sign of the fall of the whore of Babylon.’’ Later, Mr. Keimer immigrated to Philadelphia and brought along his expectations of the millennium: ‘‘I, with the rest of the believers, continued in great expectations of approaching changes, according to what the spirit had so often said . . . should happen.’’16 The most well-known example of the immigration of millenarian ideals to the United States, the Puritan ‘‘city on a hill’’ experiment, played a major role in defining and driving American history. By the mid-eighteenth century, American Puritans, in part

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influenced by the success of Great Awakening revivals, were increasingly convinced that the postmillennial kingdom of God was at hand. Leading theologian Jonathan Edwards wrote that Americans would probably be the first witnesses of the millennium.17 European millennial strands came not only from individuals from the British Isles such as Mr. Keimer. German and other European immigrants carried expectations of utopian communities to the Americas. Dreams of utopia spurred some German immigration between 1683 and 1709, and though religious experimentation motivated a small number of German immigrants in the later colonial period, radical pietist groups such as the Moravians moved to and within the colonies in part to attain missionary and ecumenical goals. These communities did not succeed in fulfilling their specific, immediate dreams of creating a righteous land, but one historian has argued that they nevertheless ‘‘established a hopeful, millenarian, activist religious style which has continually shaped and reshaped American religious culture from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.’’18 Apocalyptic and millennial expectations common in the colonial period extended into the revolutionary era and beyond. The nineteenth-century dissemination of Darby’s premillennial dispensationalism occurred in the same period that witnessed the rise of Mormonism, following Joseph Smith’s revelations in the early nineteenth century, and the Millerite movement. To Mormons, who had suffered persecution as religious outsiders from their inception, the search for a millennial Zion was a key ambition. Millerites were followers of the prophet William Miller, who predicted that Jesus would appear on March 21, 1843, and then March 21, 1844. The failure of Miller’s predictions became known as the ‘‘Great Disappointment,’’ but it nonetheless led to the foundation of the Seventh-Day Adventist movement, which centered on what believers hold is the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Prophecy conferences and eschatological ruminations, both formal and informal, abounded in the 1800s, making a strong place for eschatology in America’s cultural past.19 European and Native American millenarian rites and ideologies influenced and were influenced by African apocalyptic traditions that slaves brought to the Americas. One well-known slave demonstrated the significant impact of this complex millenarian paradigm in the United States and, in turn, created a new apocalyptic nightmare for many whites. Virginia slave and minister Nat Turner found himself at a crossroads of millennial significance in the antebellum United States. Believing at an early age that the Lord had called him to be a prophet and inheriting the African concept of a ‘‘magically gifted selfhood,’’ Turner had several revelations and visions: ‘‘As the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended to heaven for the salvation of sinners, and was now returning to earth again in the form of dew—and as the leaves on the trees bore the impression of the figures I had seen in the heavens, it was plain to me that the great day of judgment was at hand.’’20 Turner drew

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on both Christian and African spiritual elements to enact what he believed to be his divine obligation to massacre slaveholders. On August 21, 1831, he carried out his plan by murdering the Joseph Travis family, his own enslavers. His revolt was stopped only after more than fifty whites and more than forty blacks had been killed. He was captured six weeks later, tried, and executed.21 The repercussions of Turner’s millenarian rebellion against slavery and other similarly motivated revolts in the middle of the nineteenth century, including John Brown’s uprising at Harper’s Ferry, spurred reactionary apocalyptic upheavals of their own. Many slaveholders in the South feared that Turner’s rebellion signaled the beginning of slave revolts, which would mean the end of their world as they understood it. In a panic, they killed more than a hundred slaves. Apocalypticism of many kinds actively influenced social change and reinforced individual ideologies throughout American history, and they seemed to be particularly called upon in the antebellum period and during the Civil War. Julia Ward Howe’s ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’’ which shares its melody with ‘‘John Brown’s Body,’’ illustrates the nature of this apocalyptic age well. According to Richard H. Brodhead, it ‘‘registers what might be called the American routinization of apocalypse’’:22 He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His Judgment seat; Oh! Be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on. This type of language made sense to Americans who had a deep tradition of millenarian movements and who were faced with a major upheaval of their way of life. Together, Native American, European, and African components built up the apocalyptic narrative in the United States, but what connected the diverse prophetic elements? Two overarching features produced a common language that allowed evangelicals during the Cold War to apply their own unique theology to the narrative. First, a utopian conviction of hope for the future provided adherents with a way to deal with spiritual, political, economic, and personal disappointment or fear. Second, the threat of some kind of incomparable doom linked traditions as disparate as Hopi prophecy and John Nelson Darby’s theory of dispensationalism.23 Hope and doom were both vital aspects of post–World War II premillennialism. Moreover, these two elements of the apocalyptic narrative were intensified in the Cold War United States as fear of a communist takeover of the world mingled with bravado expressions of U.S. strength. As a result, evangelicals actually believed they were living in the last days. The

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apocalyptic narrative and the Cold War caused other Americans to suspect that they might be correct. Cold War premillennialists were able to build on the legitimacy their forbearers brought to their evangelical worldview. Ernest Sandeen’s The Roots of Fundamentalism (1970) catalogued the rise of premillennialism from Great Britain to the United States and its rapid acceptance among conservative evangelicals. In Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming (1979), Timothy Weber expanded on Sandeen’s interest in dispensationalists and examined their behavior from 1875 to 1925. He noted that premillennialists lived as though Christ could return within the next moment and, at the same time, as though he would not return for centuries. Premillennialism appealed to evangelicals because it allowed them to mitigate the fear of death, providing them with what Sandeen called a ‘‘psychology of deliverance’’ from trouble or pain. They had faith that dispensationalism was biblical, were attracted to its connection with other conservative doctrine, and believed that current events appeared to authenticate it.24 Evangelicals, who had often been leaders of reform movements like prohibition and abolitionism in the nineteenth century, emphasized these issues less and less as they increasingly embraced premillennialism after the Civil War. By contrast, what became known as the social gospel focused on alleviating the harmful effects of an unrestrained economy. These efforts mirrored the political Progressive emphasis on social reform and appropriated ideas of liberal theology that stressed a positive outlook on human nature and called for the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth as an expression of postmillennialism.25 As theological liberals adopted the social gospel, conservative Protestants focused on individual faith and the other-worldly. They argued that liberal Protestants had compromised biblical truth and had strayed from the belief that personal salvation should remain the core of the Christian faith. The rise of Progressivism and the renewed legitimacy of the authority of science and Darwinism in the United States, culminating in the Scopes ‘‘monkey trial’’ of the 1920s, struck a serious blow to the influence of conservative Protestants. Though fundamentalism remained a viable grassroots movement, its authority and legitimacy appeared to wane on a national scale. Historians of American Protestantism have tended to emphasize the correlation between liberal Protestants (who advocated social reform) and postmillennialism, while arguing that conservative evangelicals, who stressed the importance of salvation, were mostly premillennialists. Recently, however, scholars such as Stephen J. Stein have begun to point out the problems with such tidy divisions, using evidence that reveals a blending of pre- and postmillennial worldviews throughout U.S. history. Miller’s followers believed in their leader’s prediction that Jesus Christ would return in 1843 and then 1844. For this reason they have been characterized as premillennialists, but they nonetheless supported activist causes such as temperance and abolitionism

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generally associated with postmillennial ‘‘optimists.’’26 An examination of the ‘‘pessimistic,’’ premillennial nuclear age reveals similar holes in this neat categorical description of pre- versus postmillennialism. Premillennial evangelicals during the Cold War often mixed expressions of pessimistic and optimistic eschatology. Conservative religious beliefs sometimes blended with liberal and secular apocalyptic traditions to influence U.S. political culture during this period. The emergence of the religious right in more recent decades has obscured the diversity of evangelicalism. The last chapter of this book begins to address the complexities of evangelicalism following the Vietnam War, but my main focus is on the way that the politically conservative evangelical worldview, sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly, began to move into the American mainstream with the help of apocalyptic paradigms. The Cold War made it possible for conservative Protestants to form a new relationship with the larger American culture by embracing nationalism. The United States in the post–World War II era experienced a religious boom. Church membership from 1950 to 1959 grew from 57 percent to 63.3 percent of the population. By 1958, 97 percent of Americans claimed to believe in God. Poll respondents asserted that religious leaders were ‘‘doing the most good for the country’’ in 1947, bumping them up from third place in 1942. Simultaneously, the country lived under the cloud of McCarthyism, a phenomenon of vivid anticommunism characterized by an intense fear and hysteria that penetrated virtually every aspect of American society. Though recent Cold War historians have begun to question the extent of this frenzy in the everyday lives of Americans, to many people religion appeared a proper alternative to atheistic communism. Americans could fight the ‘‘godless’’ communists in the Soviet Union with nationalism characterized by capitalism and religion.27 The evolution of the relationship between Christianity and nationalism has been an important theme in U.S. history. Evangelicals from the colonial period through the twentieth century drew on an American eschatological narrative and their own prophetic traditions to create an image of the United States as a Christian nation. As industrialization, immigration, urbanization, and warfare ushered in vast changes at the end of the nineteenth century, evangelical reformers fought in various ways to ‘‘save’’ the country from the immorality, vice, and secularism that they believed threatened America’s soul. The evangelical integration into politics from the 1870s to the 1920s that resulted from their attempts to preserve their particular national vision was complex. Evangelicals campaigned against alcohol consumption, gambling, polygamy, obscenity, prostitution, cigarettes, prizefighting, Sabbath mail service, and pornography. They established their own Christian lobby in Washington. In some cases, their efforts were quite successful, particularly with the ratification of the prohibition amendment. Other campaigns succeeded as well; the Comstock law, passed by Congress in 1873, intended to curb the distribution of ‘‘lewd or lascivious’’

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materials. Despite these victories, evangelical political influence during this period was limited as American society became increasingly secular. Christian lobbyists could not convince Congress to pass a federal Sunday law or to pass legislation that would recognize God in the Constitution.28 These earlier evangelicals shared their image of the United Sates as a Christian nation with their Cold War counterparts. The ‘‘patriotic evangelicalism’’ that characterized anticommunist Protestants in the post–World War II period was also not new. Baseball player turned evangelist Billy Sunday proved to be one of the country’s most enthusiastic propagandists during the First World War as he called for swift victory over ‘‘that great pack of hungry, wolfish Huns, whose fangs drip with blood and gore.’’29 Precedents like this demonstrated continuity in twentieth-century evangelicalism. After World War II, the Cold War created a mainstream political culture more receptive to evangelical thought. Religion itself became a weapon against communism. Coupled with the increased perceived legitimacy of the prophetic worldview, this significantly affected the evangelical community’s relationship with the secular culture. Stephen Whitfield and Lisa McGirr have both shown how evangelicalism influenced culture and politics during the Cold War. Whitfield examines how the second Red Scare ‘‘politicized’’ American culture: ‘‘The values and perceptions, the forms of expressions, the symbolic patterns, the beliefs and myths that enabled Americans to make sense of reality—these constituents of culture were contaminated by an unseemly political interest in their roots and consequences.’’ The establishment of a cultural consensus within the confines of the Cold War meant that the relationship between culture and politics had taken on a new meaning. The Cold War justified both the restriction of civil liberties and the ‘‘subjugation of culture to politics.’’30 Because organized religion helps form the very beliefs and values that make up culture, evangelical anticommunism played a crucial part in this development. Lisa McGirr’s case study on the rise of the conservative right in Orange County, California, traces the emergence of the new right—from the activities of grassroots activists to its expanded national influence with Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy in 1980—through a ‘‘strange mixture of traditionalism and modernity.’’ Conservative Protestants proved important actors in this story: Fred Schwarz founded a School of AntiCommunism and ‘‘Fighting’’ Bob Wells preached messages against ‘‘liberal traitors.’’ The religious right’s new focus on ‘‘moral issues’’ drove the pro-life and pro-family movements in the early 1980s.31 Evangelicals, then, contributed both to the rise of conservatism and to the creation of a cultural consensus in the early Cold War. The post–World War II period marked the beginning of the reemergence of the evangelical community that eventually peaked in the 1980s. The increasing prominence of organizations such as Youth for Christ, the Billy Graham crusades, and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and the popularity of a number of evangelical radio programs all attested to this phenomenon.

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Historian Mark Noll calls this trend the ‘‘dramatic displacement of mainline to margins and margins to mainline.’’ In the last half of the twentieth century, mainline Protestant denominations lost members while born-again, evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal churches gained members. From 1960 to 2000, the Presbyterian Church (USA) lost 550,000 members, the Episcopal Church 900,000, and the United Methodist Church more than two million. At the same time, the Church of the Nazarene gained 300,000 members and the Assemblies of God and Black Pentecostal Church of God in Christ both added at least two million members.32 The NAE was established in 1942 to boost evangelicalism in the United States and to offer an evangelical ecumenical alternative to the mainstream Protestant National Council of Churches (NCC). Book sales also indicated that people were at least reading the prophetic speculations of premillennialists during the Cold War. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth was a best seller in the 1970s. By 1978, there were nine million copies in print.33 Lindsey began his career giving messages in the United States, Canada, and Mexico in the late 1950s, after the Korean War and at a time when the Cold War had gotten a chance to ‘‘heat up.’’34 He set out to convince his readers of the veracity of his faith and his prophetic interpretations by writing of the major ‘‘signs of the times.’’ Israel’s nationhood, the threat of the Soviet Union and Communist China, the Arab coalition against Israel, the European Common Market, the coming Antichrist, false religions, and the destructive potential of the nuclear age all gave Lindsey reason to trust in the feasibility of his eschatology. The amalgamation of religious and national identity was not unidirectional, influencing only how evangelicals saw themselves and were perceived by others. The government’s attitude toward religion also took a particular turn during the Cold War. Congress added the phrase ‘‘under God’’ to the pledge of allegiance on June 14, 1954, and evangelical apocalypticism provided the state with a rhetorical tool for fighting communism. While the United States was expanding its world role, McCarthyism drove Cold War fear directly into the lives of American citizens. Premillennialism proved effective in helping explain and channel this fear. As Americans recalculated their identities on national, local, and individual levels, issues of the Cold War abroad and at home interacted with the religious identifications of individual citizens in very specific ways, not the least of which included eschatological explanations of world events. Millennialism had significant implications on power relationships. Political scientist Michael Barkun has noted that ‘‘as politics becomes ‘millennialized’ by ultimate expectations, so the millennium becomes politicized. Its coming means a political reckoning, not merely a spiritual one.’’ In an attempt to categorize multiple kinds of expressions of millenarian thought, he identifies three styles of apocalypticism. The traditional or religious style encompassed those premillennial dispensationalists who looked for God’s ending to history,

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the secular style described the political ideological debate over the end that thrived during the Cold War, and the improvisational style combined religion, ideology, the occult, and the esoteric. According to Barkun, it was not until all of these styles began to accept the conception of ‘‘the New World Order’’ in the 1990s that they began to come together to form a common view of apocalyptic politics.35 Though Barkun acknowledges that overlap among the distinct styles exists (he allows, for example, for a range of political interests among religious millenarians from ‘‘passivity to activism’’), he exaggerates the distinctiveness of these ‘‘styles’’ and underestimates their commonalities. The evidence reveals instead a greater convergence of the secular and the religious, and even the ‘‘improvisational,’’ in the Cold War period. The meanings that people placed on events in the Cold War made their apocalypticism so polemical and intense. By arguing that dispensationalism should be conceived of as narrative, not doctrine, Susan Harding recognizes that dispensationalism is ‘‘not always political in the sense of advocating specific actions that count as political in American culture, but it is always political. It is political insofar as it constitutes not only current events for many born-again believers, but also their understanding of and place in history itself.’’ Harding distinguishes between dispensationalists before and after the 1980s. According to her paradigm, American premillennialists before the 1980s interacted with current history only by scrutinizing world events for indicators of the ‘‘last days,’’ because humans are powerless to interfere with God’s final plan for the earth. In the 1980s, however, dispensationalist authorities made room for a much more active political role for believers by opening up what Harding calls a ‘‘postmillennial window.’’ Bible-believing leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye argued that political action was crucial in America as they theorized about a ‘‘pre-tribulation tribulation’’ when God would judge and destroy the country if it continued down a path of immorality. Christians were called to actively oppose immorality in American society.36 Harding’s essay recognizes the permeable, imperfect lines between pre- and postmillennialism in the 1980s. Pre- and postmillennialism blended to create a political role for evangelical, Bible-believing Christians based on less rigid eschatological narratives. Yet in admitting that this occurred in the later part of the century, she ignores the subtle ways this happened earlier. Cold War millenarianism built a tighter bond between religious and political identities by drawing on a longer American eschatological narrative and utilizing Cold War incidents that ‘‘legitimized’’ evangelical prophecy. Some historians have questioned the extent to which a ‘‘cultural consensus’’ existed during the early Cold War. While Stephen Whitfield provides evidence for a mainstream cultural perspective, Margot Henriksen, in her study on the Beats and others, observes that a sizable culture of dissent was able to emerge in opposition to the Cold War consensus.37 These works add valuable

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perspective about the diverse character of American identity that must be taken into consideration. Similarly, premillennialism appears to have helped complicate the political identity of the American evangelical community. Though in many ways anticommunism blended with premillennialism to form a new ultrapatriotic evangelicalism, the community was far from homogeneous. Millennial interpretations motivated some evangelicals to challenge the U.S. government, whereas others supported it. Many evangelicals, for example, joined with mainstream Protestants to protest U.S. sanctions against Cuba. Their missionary motivations, spurred on by the urgency of prophecy, outweighed their allegiance to U.S. anticommunist policy. Though divergent cultural traditions in the United States continued to contend for position during the Cold War, a majority voice did emerge. This was the voice that held the most power, and in this case the power was fueled by fear and division produced by the Cold War and its progeny, anticommunism. Though Whitfield recognizes the role of evangelicalism in amplifying the mainstream voice, he does not really address how conservative Protestants assumed that role. McGirr begins to explain the rise of evangelical conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s by pointing out their rejection of the 1960s’ ‘‘permissive’’ counterculture and by noting their role in creating a larger ‘‘reworked conservative package.’’38 Yet, the way that conservative Christians were able to play such a large part in these later developments suggests that they were engaged even before the emergence of the counterculture. From the very beginning of the Cold War, evangelical premillennialists were more than an appendix to the dominant political culture. In essence, evangelicals in the Cold War became a ‘‘deputized’’ subculture for the power-propped discourse.39 A combination of their theology, eschatology, and increasing popularity intersected with episodes outside of their religious tradition—namely, the dawning of the nuclear age and the creation of the state of Israel—and made them useful allies of the state. Their deputization was not permanent or static, and the nature of the evangelical relationship to the secular, dominant culture changed during and after the period. Evangelicals were hardly without agency, being played by a stronger force. These Protestants sometimes disagreed with the prevailing American Cold War position and continued to participate in the dialogue on what it meant. Moreover, there seems to be no evidence that secular representatives of the dominant discourse consciously plotted to co-opt evangelical millennialism to further the ‘‘American’’ Cold War cause. Others have shown that some anticommunist government officials, Senator Joseph McCarthy being the most notorious example, were unscrupulous in their tactics and had self-interested motives. But there is no strong evidence that suggests, for example, that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) chairman Harold H. Velde sought to use evangelical rhetoric about morality to denounce communism solely for the purpose of self-advancement. Many government representatives of the dominant cultural position, John Foster

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Dulles for one, were openly religious and they believed in advancing the moralism, anticommunism, and apocalypticism that they proclaimed. Evangelicals’ role in linking religious culture and Cold War politics is reflected in a body of literature that demonstrates ways that foreign relations were directly connected to domestic life, including the spiritual sphere. Writing a culturalist diplomatic history of U.S.–South Asian relations from 1947 to 1954, Andrew J. Rotter added religion to the list of analytical categories that includes race, class, and gender. He showed that religion in the United States, as well as in Pakistan and India, affected U.S. policy abroad.40 In the same way, evangelical millenarianism provided a framework that connected the domestic and diplomatic spheres for Cold War Americans. Its apocalyptic message and good-versus-evil conceptualization fit in well with the U.S. government’s explanation of the world and gave the American people reason to pay attention to what was beyond the country’s borders.

The Nuclear Age and Premillennial Conceptions of Time According to one Gallup Poll in 1959, over half of the Americans polled admitted to believing that Jesus Christ would return to earth. When asked when they thought that would occur, the median average response fell within one hundred years.41 These numbers suggest that many Americans living in the nuclear age found it easy to accept evangelicalism’s eschatological explanations of world events. Examples of apocalyptic imagery mixed with expressions of the fear of God were strikingly prevalent in the Cold War United States, as when General Thomas F. Farrell described his shock upon witnessing the first nuclear bomb test: ‘‘Thirty seconds after, the explosion came, first the air blast pressing hard against people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the force heretofore reserved to The Almighty.’’42 Nuclear-age developments and world politics profoundly affected evangelical eschatology. Journalist A. G. Mojtabai’s 1982 case study of Amarillo, Texas, the home of Pantex, the final assembly plant for nuclear weapons, demonstrates the effects of both Christian eschatology and the nuclear threat on the lives of citizens. A theme of hope, resting on the millennial, apocalyptic tradition, allowed many Christian Amarillians to mitigate the fear of possible nuclear annihilation, of which Pantex was a constant reminder. Believers would be spared the affliction that nonbelievers would suffer if nuclear war was a catalyst of the end-times as foretold in scripture. Mojtabai shows that Christian premillennialists used prophecy to explain and alleviate potentially dangerous world situations.43 Secular Americans in the Cold War were also exposed to cultural expressions of the apocalyptic. Films such as Stanley Kubrick’s

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Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, literature, art, and even humor addressed the earth’s destruction in the nuclear age. Daniel Wojcik has pointed out that the difference between religious and secular visions of the apocalypse was the identification of the agent of destruction. In religious millenarianism, God is the initiator of the end of the world. In nonreligious apocalyptic belief, human beings bring about destruction.44 Premillennial evangelicals who drew on the apocalyptic narrative to reconfigure their identities after World War II had a very particular understanding of time. Secular treatments of history looked to the past to ascertain possible meanings of the present.45 But premillennial prophecy saw the present as a way of bringing meaning to and confirming its expectations of the future— more specifically, of the end of history. According to this line of thought, the atomic bomb was a sign of the end of the world that had been foretold long ago. Bruce Shelley of the Conservative Baptist Seminary explained that the center of history’s meaning to a Christian was God’s ‘‘final purpose’’: ‘‘In Judeo-Christian thought history is meaningful only in relation to some transcendent purpose. Therefore, to speak of meaning in history is to speak of a final purpose transcending actual events, whether that purpose impinges at every point, at an eschatological day, or at both’’46 (emphasis mine). Eschatology, the embodiment of the discourse about the fulfillment of divine will in the end, was closely intertwined with history. In a 1950 essay, historian Perry Miller noted that the differences between secular and prophetic forecasts of atomic destruction hinged on a framework of meaning. While prophecy writers who spoke and wrote in the beginning of the atomic age expounded on a future that had theological significance, secular Americans wrote of a meaningless future. For evangelical premillennialists, history as fulfilled prophecy proved a divine order and justified their belief system. As Paul Boyer explains, history had an ‘‘underlying unity and overall trajectory’’ predetermined by God for believers. Until the late nineteenth century, secular historians shared this view of the providential design of human events. George Bancroft’s nineteenth-century history of the United States was infused with suggestions of God. But as secular history began to lose its emphasis on God’s direction, many evangelicals turned to eschatology to find meaning.47 In the case of both secular history and premillennialism, how one interpreted history impacted one’s worldview and vice versa. At the same time, the Cold War injected meaning into the perceptions of evangelical and nonevangelical Americans alike by providing a political foundation on which varying apocalyptic expositions could come together. On this base, premillennial evangelicals were able to build a new religious and national identity within the American cultural landscape. How did the Cold War merge with millenarianism to impact the evangelical perception of history? The answer to this question demonstrates both the continuity over time and certain Cold War changes within evangelical

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thought. Some expressed an old Protestant fear of Catholicism, while other premillennialists were apprehensive about new trends toward world government, as embodied by the United Nations, and ecumenism, led by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and even the evangelical NAE. In a letter to Christianity Today in September 1959, Weldon Bedell of Massachusetts offered his thoughts on these dangers: ‘‘As Protestantism becomes more like its mother so do our times become more like the Dark Ages. Soon unheard of things will be suggested and we will see more plainly the design of the antichrist.’’48 The not-so-subtle suggestion connecting Catholicism to the Antichrist was not new or surprising, but what is most telling about Mr. Bedell’s letter is the way he described and reconfigured time to get his point across, using the past, present, and future. This evangelical magazine reader expounded on both history and prophecy to understand the present and to point to the future at the same time. At least three themes emerge when examining evangelical explanations of history during the Cold War: a prevalent sense of doom about the future of the world, a hope in the promises of faith, and a partitioned understanding of time. First, many stressed desperation about human history. In his Minneapolis– St. Paul crusade, Billy Graham quoted theologian Karl Barth, who claimed that there was no hope in history, only hope in Jesus Christ.49 This seemed commonsensical to individuals living under the shadow of nuclear weaponry. Human beings could never save themselves; only God provided the necessary hope and salvation. In Jesus Christ and History, professor of biblical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary George Eldon Ladd further clarified what this meant in light of the second coming of Jesus. Hopelessness pervaded human history, but when the second coming occurred, God would intervene and ‘‘break into’’ human history: ‘‘The second coming of Christ will not be an event arising out of history; nor will it be the result of other historical events. It will be a free act of God, breaking into history in the person of the glorified Christ, to redeem history from the evils of the centuries and to transform it into the kingdom of God.’’50 This characterization of ‘‘hopeless human history’’ rescued by divine intervention directly opposed the postmillennial view that Christians in history could bring about the kingdom of God on earth. Premillennialists caught up in religious anticommunism also ridiculed communist efforts to establish a utopian, classless ‘‘kingdom’’ because they believed that only God, working ‘‘beyond history’’ through Jesus’ second coming, could bring about such a thing.51 The assumption behind this philosophy was that history existed somewhat beyond the control of men and women. Speaking to a Berlin crowd in 1960, Reverend Graham emphasized the certain despair of the world’s population, a ‘‘doomed generation’’: ‘‘We stand at the center of history . . . and the border of two worlds. . . . It will depend on our faith in God as to where the world goes. . . . All that we know today will someday come to an end. . . . The gospel message is good news to a doomed generation. . . . God’s mighty judgment will fall

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on the world but you can be saved.’’52 One’s salvation depended on God. But this passage also suggests that human agency is not completely absent. Personal faith in God brought salvation. Though this emphasis on personal faith was not unusual in the brand of evangelicalism that Graham popularized in the years after World War II, he goes further here, depicting Berlin as the ‘‘center of history’’ and the ‘‘border of two worlds.’’ In the dichotomized atmosphere of the Cold War, Christian faith not only saved your soul, it also saved the world. From an eschatological point of view, the end of the world was assured, but Christians could utilize their faith to demonstrate God’s actions within history as well. One writer explained the concept this way: ‘‘The age is getting worse, but the course of history, by the grace of God, is moving forward.’’53 Faith could win the Cold War. In this sense, premillennialism and the Cold War impacted how evangelicals perceived history. The volatility of the Cold War brought the world into the ‘‘center’’ of history enmeshed between good and evil. Evangelicals who balanced a Calvinist belief in the inevitable doom of human history with hope in the power of their individual faith also perceived history as compartmentalized. Certain periods in time were considered more meaningful than others. In Berlin, Graham claimed that the world was now in the ‘‘center of history.’’ At the Greater Chicago Crusade in 1962, the evangelist discussed the ‘‘climax’’ of history, which would occur with the return of Jesus. Graham quite frequently stressed this consequence of the second coming of Jesus Christ on history. He told a Charlotte, North Carolina, audience in 1958, ‘‘God, by divine intervention and divine action in the coming of His Son, is going to snap history in two. The climactic point of history will be reached.’’54 Evangelicals believed that history had a center, a climax, and could be ‘‘snapped in two’’—a framework reminiscent of the dispensational characterization of time as divided into different ‘‘ages’’ until the second coming ushers in the beginning of the end. Furthermore, this kind of partitioning of time in order to understand it better came out of a larger, Western conception of history that also speaks of the world in terms of periods and ages: the Jurassic Period and the Stone and Iron Ages, for example. Evangelical ‘‘climaxes of history’’ in the dispensational tradition occurred when God directly intervened in human history. George Ladd explained that this would occur twice: first, in the incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ, and second when Christ returns to establish his kingdom.55 Premillennialism concerned itself with watching for the buildup of that second climax. The Cold War was not the first period when evangelical prophets warned of the coming of the center of history. In U.S. history alone, adherents claimed that the end was near during the Revolutionary War, after the Civil War, and at various points in between. After World War II, however, in the middle of a burgeoning conflict between two world superpowers with the capability to carry out widespread nuclear destruction, signs of the end took on added significance.

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According to Graham, not only could history be partitioned, but it repeated itself. Although this conception of the nature of time was also common in secular Western thought, the key difference between the secular and evangelical views was the role of Jesus Christ. When the world comes to that moment of despair—that moment when it is about to blow itself apart, that moment when it seems there is no solution—at that moment the sun will rise. The kingdom of God shall come because we have the promise in the scripture that Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, is coming back to this earth again. He is going to set up his kingdom and then shall the prayer be answered as he taught in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘‘Thy kingdom come.’’ His kingdom shall rule.56 In other words, the moment of despair that accompanied the first time that Jesus came to earth for the crucifixion will be repeated before he returns. The nuclear age played a role in this drama, ushering in a period that made it possible for the world to ‘‘blow itself apart.’’ Nuclear capability, according to many premillennialists, meant that ‘‘history was about to reach an impasse.’’57 They believed that this would bring about the end of time, establishing God’s kingdom on earth. Alva McClain, founder of Grace Theological Seminary, told an audience in 1954, ‘‘The premillennial philosophy of history makes sense. We are encouraged in the midst of devilish opposition and appalling reverses by the assurance that help is on the way. Supernatural help—Jesus is coming! ‘Give the King thy judgments, O God. . . . In his days shall the righteous flourish. . . . All nations shall call him blessed’ (Psalm 72:1, 7, 17).’’58 Premillennial evangelicals shared a common apocalyptic narrative with the rest of the United States yet had a unique conception of time. According to their model, human history consisted of despair yet held out a possibility of hope. It repeated itself and was compartmentalized into periods of distinct spiritual meaning. As the outbreak of the Cold War intensified the evangelical focus on the end of the world, promises of hope and signs of despair became important to conservative Protestants who used them to cope with changes beyond their control. In Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham, D. G. Hart argues that in fact there is no evangelical identity. The evangelical movement was instead constructed by scholars, academics, and neo-evangelical leaders of the second half of the twentieth century who sought to distance themselves from both fundamentalism and liberalism. Devoid of unified ideas of ministry, theology, and worship, evangelicalism has deconstructed itself.59 Hart’s dismissal of evangelicalism as a scholarly category based on the absence of definable religious structures fails to acknowledge that evangelicalism as a tool of identity analysis is helpful for precisely that reason. It

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enables students of the movement to go beyond rigid religious doctrinal identity and to explore the interaction of religious, national, social, cultural, and political influences. During the Cold War, we see how premillennial concepts of time worked alongside anticommunism to move the evangelical subculture closer than perhaps ever before to the dominant national discourse. Evangelicals’ adherence to an apocalyptic theology made this relationship possible. If their identity as a religious community was in part self-contrived, as Hart argues, this move may have been more deliberate than previously thought. Whatever the case, during the Cold War a clearly defined millennial worldview guided a change in the way evangelicals perceived their place in national culture. Apocalypticism aided in tying the premillennial community into the secular mainstream in spite of differences between secular and evangelical ideas of time. Still, Hart’s contention that the evangelical movement lacked a unifying theology outside of what he calls a ‘‘minimalist account of the Christian faith’’ is partly validated in the case of eschatology. Not all evangelicals were premillennialists, and the varieties of interpretations about the last days are endless. Eschatological debates occurred within several denominations on both formal and informal levels. Even the ultraconservative Bible Presbyterian Church, which rejected the NAE as a compromise organization, divided over its position when the Columbus Synod denied the church’s rigid adherence to premillennialism in 1960: ‘‘We declare that subscription to the system of doctrine of our church upon the part of all presbyteries shall be understood as leaving them and our churches and members free to hold and to teach any eschatological view which includes the visible and personal return of our Lord to earth.’’ In response, members of the denomination’s Collingswood Synod criticized the declaration and claimed their own faithfulness to the ‘‘true’’ doctrine: ‘‘We are thankful to God that what is known as the Collingswood Synod and which continues in deed and in truth the Bible Presbyterian Church has made no changes whatsoever and stands as the Church has always stood from its first day holding up these blessed doctrines of the holy scriptures.’’60 But in spite of these disagreements, a definable evangelical worldview with a particular understanding of time could be found in the Cold War period. It came out of a larger American apocalyptic tradition and was profoundly influenced by a premillennial subtext that made central the belief in Jesus’ physical return, and it blended with a secular apocalypticism that allowed evangelicals to re-create their own national identity. The history of the United States includes a distinct evangelical millenarian movement and an American apocalyptic movement, but these have also highly influenced each other and have often converged. Both the continuity of this relationship and its particular character during the Cold War made it especially significant in forming the religious and national identity of thou-

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sands of Americans. The history of Cold War evangelicalism demonstrates either how an essential religious activity was affected by premillennial interpretations or how an important Cold War event was construed through a prophetic lens. Evangelical religious and national identities evolved as the Cold War collided with and engaged the premillennial worldview.


1 ‘‘Bomb’’arding Evangelicals

On July 16, 1961, popular evangelist Billy Graham delivered a message in Minnesota at his St. Paul Crusade. The title of his sermon was ‘‘Signs of the Times’’ and he used the twelfth chapter of Luke as his scriptural text. As in other crusades, the young preacher’s audience was large, magnified by previous advertising and promotional campaigns and accompanied by prayers from evangelicals across the country. The crowd, filling the outdoor stadium, listened to Cliff Barrows and Beverly Shea sing a duet. On this particular day, the sun was shining brightly, and Graham wore sunglasses at the podium. Concluding his message as he always did, the evangelist offered an invitation for audience members to come forward to turn their hearts and lives over to Jesus Christ. Hundreds streamed forward to do so. Graham expounded on a common theme that many evangelicals of the period addressed. The atomic age, originating with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, stimulated conversations and debates on the end of human history among Americans of all and no religious persuasions. In his message in 1961, Graham delivered an evangelical perspective on the importance of the atomic bomb. According to him, just before we ‘‘stand at the brink of history when man is about to blow himself to bits,’’ God will intervene and Jesus Christ will return.1 The atomic bomb played an indispensable role in the premillennial conception of the world in the Cold War. Premillennial dispensationalists conceptualized history as time partitioned into certain ages and with a definite end. Prophecy experts preached on what Martin Marty called the ‘‘future of no future.’’2 For Graham and other

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evangelicals who were living in the shadow of the atomic bomb, the nuclear age had brought humankind nearer and nearer to the end, or ‘‘the brink,’’ to use Cold War terminology. This was not so unusual or different from nonreligious, secular expounders on the meaning of the atomic bomb who produced works such as On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, and Fail-Safe, among others.3 In fact, the nuclear age brought these two strands of apocalypticism together. The Cold War created a hypertense world situation that made nuclear warfare a real possibility. How did these postwar developments, along with premillennialism, play a role in defining the place of evangelicalism in U.S. political culture? A combination of premillennialism and anticommunism blurred the distinctions that had helped to keep secular and evangelical America separated, while at the same time emphasizing the diversity within conservative Christianity. Far-right Christian organizations that took anticommunism to the extreme often criticized more moderate evangelicals, who in turn tried to distance themselves from fundamentalists. Even in light of these disparities, the combination of potential nuclear disaster and the Cold War weapon of anticommunism allowed evangelicals to construct a closer relational identity with the rest of the United States. Americans who ‘‘ducked and covered’’ together faced the end of the world together.

Science and the Evangelical The scenario of the end-times in which the atom bomb played a key role pointed to interesting developments in the evolution of the relationship between science and the evangelical faith. In Cold War premillennialism, the bomb, a product of science, served as a catalyst for the end. Divine intervention would then occur, saving true believers. What, then, was the value of science to dispensationalists? In the twenty-first century we sometimes think of science and religion as competing institutions; this was not always the case. There was a time in Western civilization when people considered the two congruent. Indeed, science and religion worked together in this way of thinking, and each confirmed the other. Many expected science to substantiate apocalyptic, prophetic visions of the future, and scientific proof was measured by biblical standards. Scientists as influential as Sir Isaac Newton believed in the amiability of science and religion, or ‘‘providence and progress.’’ Prophecy, according to Newton, proved the existence of God, and because progress culminated in the execution of God’s design for the world, the two were intricately intertwined. Newton had a strong interest in eschatology and wrote a treatise entitled Thoughts on the Apocalypse, published posthumously. He believed from his studies on the book of Daniel that the ‘‘reign of the papal Antichrist’’ would come to an end within one hundred years.4

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Charles Darwin’s theories in On the Origin of Species (1859), probably more than anything else, were used (by evangelicals and others) to untangle and separate the spheres of science and religion. In the early twentieth century, Darwin’s theory gripped the United States and the world just as the fundamentalist movement began to take shape. The Fundamentals, a series of writings published between 1905 and 1915, gave the movement its name, and theologians at Princeton’s seminary helped establish its formal theory, identifying biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, salvation through Christ, the resurrection, and the veracity of miracles as its major principles.5 Despite antagonism between evolution and fundamentalism that some would cite (and perhaps exploit) later, The Fundamentals treated evolution positively, suggesting that theistic evolution could be beneficial to proving the existence of a creator. Evolution ‘‘was coming to be recognized as but a new name for ‘creation.’’’6 But The Fundamentals distinguished between evolution and Darwinism, the theory of natural selection. Although conservative fundamentalists were willing to reconcile some science with Christianity, they rejected Darwinism, both the natural and the social (such as eugenics) dimensions of natural selection.7 The increasing (though complicated) tension between fundamentalists on one side and Darwinists and modernists on the other came to a head in the Scopes ‘‘monkey trial’’ in the summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. The local science teacher, John Scopes, had joined with the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the state of Tennessee’s Butler Act, which forbade teachers from presenting ‘‘any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.’’8 The renowned atheist lawyer Clarence Darrow argued for the defense, and the prosecution was represented by three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Considered by many a leading contender for the trial of the century, the outcome of the Scopes trial belies its significance. A colorful affair that took place in a circuslike atmosphere, the trial that ended with a guilty verdict (that was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court on a technicality) was portrayed as pitting fundamentalism against science. Bryan represented the fundamentalist side and Darrow the scientific. Despite the guilty verdict for Scopes, most noted a fundamentalist defeat. H. L. Mencken, the writer who covered the trial for the Baltimore Sun, described the death of William Jennings Bryan only a short time after the trial ended: ‘‘God aimed at Darrow, missed, and hit Bryan instead.’’ Mencken privately exclaimed, ‘‘We killed the son-of-abitch!’’9 Fundamentalism continued to flourish in some communities despite losing much of the credibility it had in the national culture and would reappear later in the century. Nevertheless, after the Scopes trial, as Edward Larson points out, fundamentalism ‘‘turned inward,’’ focusing on its own community rather than on those outside of it. The Scopes trial had in part served to disentangle science and religion for many Americans by setting up the two

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institutions as antagonists. This legacy would persist in the United States even after fundamentalism began to reemerge. ‘‘Many Americans perceived the relationship between science and religion in just such simple terms: either Darwin or the Bible was true.’’10 Then came the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the nuclear age, all adding new dimensions to the relationship between science, evangelicalism, and the national culture. Some Americans still drew sharp divisions between science and religion. The authors of Inherit the Wind, the Broadway play turned motion picture in 1960, dramatized the Scopes trial to a new generation in a new time, yet those involved with the play still perceived hostility between science and conservative Protestantism: ‘‘When we did Inherit the Wind in 1955, the religious right was a joke, a lunatic fringe.’’11 Like The Crucible, Inherit the Wind was a response to the excesses of the McCarthy era, and the authors saw similarities between McCarthyism and the Scopes trial. When many evangelicals and fundamentalists embraced the cause of anticommunism with gusto, they opened themselves up for this kind of criticism by liberals. Nonetheless, their anticommunism also provided them with greater access to national culture and politics in the Cold War. Though conservative Christians may have been considered a ‘‘lunatic fringe’’ by some liberals, this depiction powerfully distorts the way that evangelicals were able to go from an inwardly directed community to an outward-looking population that began to wield tremendous, if subtle, influence on the rest of the country. Simultaneously, a technological breakthrough, the atomic bomb, inserted new components into the scientific-religious relationship. As a weapon that fit snugly into the premillennialist time frame, the atomic bomb provided yet another means for conservative evangelicals to become more involved in the discourse over national political culture. Evangelical eschatological commentary on the significance of nuclear weapons was not sparse. Wilbur Smith wrote several articles and at least one book, The Atomic Bomb and the Word of God, on the topic.12 His material contained several themes of Cold War premillennial eschatology, not the least of which was an attempt to explain the science behind the atomic bomb. In a 1946 Religious Digest article, Smith spent time describing the nuclear makeup of atoms and the amount of energy that could be released by splitting them. He tried to make his readers understand the significance of this power: ‘‘Let us put it another way: One kilogram of coal when burned gives 8.5 kilowatt hours of heat energy; but one kilogram of matter, if its atomic energy is released, gives twenty-five billion kilowatt hours of energy.’’13 Evangelicals like Smith seemed to believe that understanding the basic science of nuclear energy not only communicated the awesome power of these new weapons to other believers but also helped them gain some credibility among nonbelievers about the prophetic destiny of the atomic age. Smith joined with others in speculating about the possible fulfillment of the prediction in 2 Peter 3:10 that the earth would be destroyed by ‘‘fervent heat.’’


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Some evangelicals were hesitant to specifically include nuclear destruction in their prophetic framework, but premillennialists usually acknowledged atomic warfare as a possibility. A 1954 pamphlet by Hyman J. Appelman explained that ‘‘the atomic bomb will be allowed to go on as it is, with nations racing against each other to see to it that not one of them has the advantage over the others. That is what probably will happen.’’ Appelman concluded, ‘‘[First,] the atomic bomb is a revelation of the failure of science. Second, the atomic bomb is a revelation of the faithfulness of scripture. Third, the atomic bomb is a revelation of the future of the saint and the sinner.’’14 Hal Lindsey wrote that the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel’s reference to God sending fire on Magog (Russia) ‘‘could be a direct judgment from God, or God could allow the various countries to launch a nuclear exchange of ballistic missiles upon each other.’’ Lindsey reiterated his point by interpreting the prophetic scriptures in Revelation: ‘‘The apostle John warns that when these two great forces meet in battle the greatest shock wave ever to hit the earth will occur. Whether by natural force of an earthquake or by some super weapon isn’t clear. John says that all the cities of the nations will be destroyed.’’15 Commentators into the 1980s and beyond would continue to make these connections. In a small booklet published in 1983, Jerry Falwell echoed Smith’s earlier words: ‘‘The Word of God teaches that this planet will someday be destroyed with fervent heat. This could imply a nuclear explosion.’’16 Despite what appeared to premillennialists to be very convincing links between scripture and reality, Cold War evangelical eschatologists had learned their lessons—for the most part—about firm date setting and precise predictions. Each seemed to deal in his own way with this delicate balance of noting a correlation and not sticking his neck out too far. Smith got around this problem by reminding his readers of God’s ultimate sovereignty: ‘‘I believe that tendencies predicted for the last days are increasing on every hand, yet if the Lord chose, He could postpone the end of this age by sending a glorious revival into our pagan world, which would for a time interrupt these evil tendencies.’’17 The complicated association between science and evangelicalism thus had a long history before the Cold War and the introduction of the most destructive weapon that science had yet created. The desire to find evidence of God in the natural world through the use of science was passed down from scientists like Newton to post–World War II evangelicals who were alive during a period that witnessed the creation of a truly apocalyptic weapon. What united them was a common ‘‘passion to hammer down history, to touch the transcendental, to earth the supernatural in the mundane.’’18 The nuclear weapon could do this in the Cold War by justifying premillennialism, but it was not the only way after World War II that evangelicals believed they were witnessing scientific proof of God’s truth revealed in the universe. Though Christians had believed for years that Noah’s ark rested on the top of Mount Ararat in northeastern Turkey, reported sightings renewed evangelicals’ hope and determination to discover

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evidence of the vessel. According to a 1948 Associated Press report, a Kurdish farmer spotted a piece of the ship in a canyon. This spawned numerous expeditions to Ararat in search of the ark, one of which was led by Aaron J. Smith, dean of a North Carolina Bible college, who believed finding the ark would restore the faith of unbelievers who had ‘‘fallen.’’ Like so much evangelical rhetoric during the Cold War, apocalyptic dread and expectation supplied the urgent tone: ‘‘We pray that those who have lost their faith in God and His Word will regain it before the impending judgment falls on this wicked generation.’’ Organized search parties to Ararat picked up during the 1950s and 1960s.19 The space race between the United States and the Soviet Union made science an employee of the Cold War on both sides. In the American evangelical community, as in the rest of the country, the race to the moon seemed to preoccupy everyone’s attention. For many evangelicals, this scientific advance was another indicator that the final days were near. Hal Lindsey, in The Late Great Planet Earth, wrote: On that historic Sunday in July we watched TV, laughing as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin loped on the moon’s surface. . . . Astounding as man’s trip to the moon is, there is another trip which many men, women, and children will take some day which will leave the rest of the world gasping. Those who remain on earth at that time will use every invention of the human mind to explain the sudden disappearance of millions of people.20 Many evangelicals interpreted moon travel as proof of God’s power. Dr. Harold John Ockenga, the first president of the NAE, wrote, ‘‘Space travel may well be a fulfillment of Acts 2:19 and Luke 21:25, which prophesy recognizable signs in the sun, moon, and stars before the second coming of the Lord. For the first time in history, these may be fulfilled.’’21 Billy Graham echoed Ockenga’s analysis. Scientific achievement in this form did make the possibility of the world’s end appear closer. At the same time, he minimized the human aspect of the science of space travel. In Graham’s estimation, ‘‘If we get to the moon, what have we done? We have not even started. Yet man walks around today saying, ‘Look what we are doing.’ It is a great scientific achievement, but in the midst of the oceans of immensities it is not very much.’’ In his Decision Magazine essay ‘‘Why I Believe in God,’’ Wisconsin teenager Randy Abraham suggested that this achievement had little to do with human effort at all. Instead, it was an example of the power of God.22 Space travel, along with nuclear weapons, produced for some another indication of the coming apocalypse, but it was also portrayed as a tool of God. Rather than a force opposing Christianity and God’s divine plan, science had again aided it. On the other hand, some argued that the drive to reach the moon was a distraction from more important, spiritual matters.23 Evangelicals who believed that spirituality and personal salvation should be the first priority of the


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Church typically charged others with straying from the Christian’s primary duty. The revered twentieth-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed up the opinions of many Christians when he told Christianity Today, ‘‘I don’t see any theological significance in a shot to the moon. Such an attempt is just part of a technical advance, which has recently been accelerating. The nuclear bomb is much more terrible.’’24 Niebuhr’s dismissal of the theological importance of the moon mission by comparing it to the development of the bomb brings us full circle in our discussion of evangelicalism and science in the Cold War. From one evangelical perspective, the atomic bomb materialized as evidence of biblical prophecy from a very unlikely source. It appeared that science, instead of disproving God’s existence, had helped to substantiate it. Science had produced a weapon that made the disastrous predictions of evangelical premillennialists reasonable.

The Atomic Bomb: Evangelicalism’s Bridge to the Mainstream As the relationship between science and evangelicalism continued to evolve in the atomic age, the combination of nuclear weapons and end-times conjectures impacted both foreign policy and popular culture in the United States. As a result, evangelicals continued to move smoothly toward greater assimilation into the Cold War mainstream. On the one hand, conservative Christians speculated and commented on atomic diplomacy extensively, believing that nuclear warfare would play a prophetic role in the future. On the other, evangelicals used their eschatology to join the dialogue on the bomb that was raging within popular culture. The atomic bomb functioned as a symbol of Cold War foreign relations. Policymakers used it to drive, shape, and justify their beliefs and actions. The catastrophic potential of the atomic bomb made foreign relations important to everyone, including evangelicals who believed it could be God’s catalyst to fulfilling prophecy. In the 1940s and 1950s the NAE passed at least twenty-two resolutions that directly related to U.S. foreign policy. These included resolutions that expressed ‘‘unalterable opposition to communism, its tactics and its dialectics’’; concern ‘‘for the trend toward internationalism, particularly when it was sustained by the somewhat utopian sops which attended the founding of the United Nations’’; concern that the UN Declaration of Human Rights failed to acknowledge God as the giver of human rights; and concern for religious persecution of Protestants in Colombia, Italy, Mexico, Canada, and Spain.25 Affecting diplomatic relations became a priority for evangelicals that was unprecedented during a time when the United States was not involved in a ‘‘hot’’ war. Simultaneously, evangelical writings that speculated on the foreign policy implications of the apocalyptic bomb accompanied despairing rhetoric on the

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evil, immoral disposition of the age. Many used the devastating implications of the atomic age to argue the importance of personal salvation in a world of evil. In the February 1947 edition of Moody Monthly, Earl B. Robinson wrote that Christians should make taking care of the depraved state of people’s souls their number-one priority. According to Robinson, though political actions such as writing to one’s congressperson or attending rallies about nuclear power may be necessary, ‘‘there is a far more important work for every Christian to do— that of witnessing for Christ and the gospel, in order to save souls, and to interpret the implications of the Atomic Age in terms of God’s Word.’’ This outlook on the period existed in the writing of commentators such as Robinson and Wilbur Smith, in Billy Graham’s crusades, and even in younger evangelicals’ understanding of the world. In one essay contest for young adults sponsored by Decision Magazine, scores of young evangelicals wrote about the world’s godlessness. Joan Andrews postulated that ‘‘with the world situation in such a godless turmoil as it balances precariously on a social, political, and economic tight-rope, anyone who is not a Christian must surely live with fear and anxiety.’’ Fifteen-year-old Robin M. Barnes’s thoughts sounded very similar to those of famous evangelists who contrasted immoral society with the promise of biblical prophecy: ‘‘The world’s upside down, evil and sick with sin but just watch and wait, Jesus Christ is coming again!’’ This characterization of the immorality of American society only added to the premillennial conviction that the last days were upon them. The world not only contained the potential of its own destruction; it also accounted for the necessary depravity that had been foretold in scripture.26 Popular culture’s adoption of nuclear themes also cleared the way for premillennial influence. Paul Boyer clarified the extent of the situation in his book on atomic-age culture: ‘‘Wherever I dipped into the early postwar cultural record, from any big glossy picture magazine to scholarly conferences to country music to the black press, I encountered the bomb. The problem was not finding material, but deciding when to turn off the tap. . . . The bomb had transformed not only military strategy and international relations, but the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness.’’27 Life magazine printed images of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki and speculated on life after a nuclear attack in ‘‘36 Hour War’’ in its November 1945 issue. Political cartoons and comic strips hypothesized on the bomb’s potential. Children with fifteen cents and a Kix cereal box top could send in for an ‘‘Atomic ‘Bomb’ Ring’’ in 1946. A 1945 Slim Gaillard Quartet song, ‘‘Atomic Cocktail,’’ described a ‘‘drink that you don’t pour. Now when you take one sip you won’t need anymore. You’re small as a beetle or big as a whale—boom—Atomic Cocktail.’’ Literature took up the theme of nuclear devastation in Neil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe (1962). These authors did what one of the main characters in Shute’s novel could not: ‘‘I suppose I haven’t got any imagination. It’s—It’s the end of the world. I’ve never had to imagine anything


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like that before.’’ Films, most famously Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, used nuclear warfare in a variety of genres, from satire to drama to science fiction. The Indiana University chapter of Alpha Delta Pi showed their school spirit in cheering on Indiana’s football team against the Nebraska Cornhuskers in 1945 by decorating ‘‘atom-ically.’’ The banner over the fraternity house read, ‘‘Let’s Give Nebraska Atomic-Ache!’’28 Scholars such as Daniel Wojcik have pointed out the differences between religious and secular apocalypticism during this period. Obviously, religious speculation on the impact of nuclear weapons had a place for God. A certain amount of hope also accompanied the rhetoric. Even in premillennial thought, believers held on to the promise that true born-again Christians would be spared nuclear holocaust. Christian imagery easily incorporated nuclear weaponry into its depictions. Warner Sallman’s 1951 painting entitled ‘‘Thine Is the Power’’ included an apocalyptic scene at the bottom with a prominent mushroom cloud at the left. Above it all a giant Christ figure emerges with a lamb in his left arm and a cross behind him. His right hand is raised, surrounded by lightning bolts.29 A clear message about the place of nuclear weapons in the last days, Sallman’s painting nonetheless incorporated the Christian’s hope that Jesus was in control of the world. In secular apocalypticism, God and hope were absent. Human beings and environmental disasters were the agents in these stories about the end. There was no ‘‘redemptive millennium,’’ so fatalism and despair often appeared.30 In reality, though, most apocalypticism during the Cold War contained some mixture of the religious and secular categories. On the Beach concludes with a suicide as the last vestiges of human life on earth are disappearing: ‘‘Presently she could see the submarine no longer; it had vanished in the mist. She looked at her little wrist watch; it showed one minute past ten. Her childhood religion came back to her in those last minutes; one ought to do something about that, she thought. A little alcoholically she murmured the Lord’s Prayer.’’31 Just as religion found its way into Moira Davidson’s thoughts in the last moments of the earth’s existence, secular and religious apocalypticism in the Cold War United States blended in subtle ways. Rhetoric about nuclear power and American understanding of agency have led some to argue that even the so-called secular apocalypticism focusing on the bomb implied supernatural jurisdiction. ‘‘Nukespeak’’ singularized nuclear weaponry into ‘‘the bomb,’’ defining it in terms of a power outside of human control. The discourse evoked images of God that sometimes condoned nuclear expansion.32 This analytical concept about the rhetoric of nukespeak can be applied to other areas of the Cold War. Although secular government did not often openly acknowledge—and sometimes even scorned—the importance of premillennialism in Cold War policies, its influence was real under the surface. Evangelical language proved convenient in defining the world in terms that

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appeared to underscore the true evil of the communist threat and what could happen if the United States did not take action. In this way, premillennialism became a crucial part of Cold War understanding. American culture did not react to the nuclear age the same way across time. Paul Boyer points out that the later years of the 1940s did not produce as much urgent discourse. A shift had occurred slowly and the nation had turned to a mood of ‘‘dulled acquiescence’’ concerning the bomb. As early as 1946, Bernard Baruch told a United Nations audience, ‘‘Time is two-edged. It not only forces us nearer to our doom, if we do not save ourselves, but, even more horrendous, it habituates us to existing conditions which, by familiarity, seem less and less threatening. Once our minds have been conditioned to that sort of thinking, the keen edge of danger is blunted, and we are no longer able to see the dark chasm on the brink of which we stand.’’ Eras of seemingly intense cultural awareness and urgency over nuclear weapons were often followed by periods of apparent apathy. Boyer argues that apprehension over nuclear fallout raised public awareness again in the mid-1950s, but by 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the country began to turn its attention elsewhere as a war in Vietnam developed into a more serious commitment for the United States and people began to envision positive outcomes of nuclear energy.33 These cultural shifts remind us that the impact of the nuclear age on American lives was often indirect and sometimes minimal. Nevertheless, the atomic bomb had crept into the fabric of American life. In the process, it cleared a way for a reformulation of the evangelical relationship with the national culture.

Premillennialism and the Language of Anticommunism Sun and Shadow, a film produced by the conservative Baptista Film Mission in 1955, told the story of Suzuki, a young Japanese man. In this story, Suzuki’s search for meaning leads him first to Marxism. Suzuki was quickly disillusioned, and the narrator explains that ‘‘[Suzuki wished to] escape forever from this dialectically confused ideology . . . set on world conquest and domination.’’ He reads the gospel message from a small tract a missionary gave him and accepts the Christian path. The film ends as Suzuki, now content, shares the Christian message with others.34 This ending was meant to show that not only was Suzuki’s quest for meaning fulfilled through evangelical Christianity, but that his future was also secure. The hero was offered two paths: one was ‘‘confused’’ and wicked; the other was good and life-giving and provided satisfaction. This ‘‘oppositional duality’’ between Christianity and communism was typical of both premillennial evangelicalism and Cold War rhetoric. Suzuki’s character represented citizens around the world who had to choose between good and evil. The onslaught of the nuclear age and the beginning of the Cold War brought with them an American worldview structured around simple dichot-


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omies. Dichotomization, particularly when it was conceptualized by the goodversus-evil paradigm, affected how Americans perceived both their environment and their identity. The Soviet Union and communism were evil; the United States and capitalism were good. This kind of rhetoric fit easily into the premillennial worldview, serving to interlock the evangelical community more comfortably into a larger national culture. The 1951 remarks of Senator Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont were typical: ‘‘Until the end of time we shall always be confronted with the great problem of good and evil—of choosing the good and fighting against the evil.’’35 Conservative Protestant leaders clearly characterized the ‘‘materialistic philosophy’’ as wicked. Ultraconservative Elizabeth Dilling, in a most extreme example, denounced communism and defended capitalism by claiming that it was validated by biblical scripture: ‘‘We are told in scripture, that in Christ’s millennial reign, each man will sit under his vine and fig tree. He is not to be collectivized like a herd animal.’’36 According to this view, capitalism was inspired by God, and communism, as its ideological opponent, could have come only from Satan. In his radio program Hour of Decision, Billy Graham drew an impenetrable line between communism and Christianity: ‘‘There will be an intensification between Christianity and communism for the minds and souls of men.’’ This competition was all the more important because, according to Graham, ‘‘the fanatical zeal with which they [communists] propagate their creed is little short of demon-inspired.’’37 This zero-sum struggle fit firmly into a premillennial worldview where the fight between good and evil intensified until the end, when good, not compromising, would prevail. The implications of the merger of the Cold War and premillennial worldviews meant that evangelicals could easily join the American anticommunist consensus. Perhaps more important, however, it meant that the national culture could more easily receive and adopt the evangelical subculture and its millennial interpretations. The carryover of the good-versus-evil paradigm from premillennial ideology to Cold War dichotomies occurred at every level of the evangelical community. Professional theologians and young students alike shared the conception. Papers of the Southern Section of the Evangelical Theological Society in 1954 described communism as ‘‘something that seems about to pounce on us, to bind us, to press us into one mould—something that has a leering face, a contemptuous lip, a pitiless eye—it is godless communism.’’38 In this depiction communism was not only evil, scorning God, but a very clear and genuine threat. Evangelicals and other Americans in the Cold War considered communists the dangerous ‘‘other.’’ They also fit into premillennialists’ end-times framework. One young man, writing to Decision Magazine, explained: The Bible and the prophets speak God’s Holy Word, they tell of the signs of the end of the world. The mental state of the world is one sign. . . . More people are falling away from God now than ever

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millennial dreams and apocalyptic nightmares before. . . . Communists and atheists are trying to make non-believers out of the whole human race. There are wars and rumors of wars just as the Bible predicts. . . . God’s warnings, which are happening before my very eyes, just as he predicted, show to me that there is a God.39

This young writer blended premillennialism with Cold War dichotomization in a fashion typical of the period, pervasive enough for a sixteen-year-old contest participant to use it to argue the existence of God. The U.S. government mirrored much of this premillennial, apocalyptic conceptualization of the Cold War world. The State Department’s National Security Council (NSC) Paper No. 68, drafted by Paul Nitze, the chief of the Policy Planning Staff, reveals the extent to which the Truman administration perceived the world in similar terms. According to the 1950 document, ‘‘The fulfillment or destruction not only of the Republic but of civilization itself’’ was at stake in the war against communism.40 In fact, NSC 68 mirrored the tactics of evangelical doomsayers in at least two ways. First, it stressed the Soviet Union’s devotion to communism, describing it as a ‘‘new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own.’’ This religious terminology contributed to the document’s ominous tone and was meant to exaggerate the threat of the Soviet bloc: ‘‘The system becomes God, and submission to the will of God becomes submission to the will of the system.’’ Second, NSC 68 colorfully explained, again and again, the apocalyptic capability of the Soviet Union. There was an ‘‘everpresent possibility of annihilation,’’ and ‘‘the integrity and vitality of our system [was] in greater jeopardy than ever before’’ because ‘‘the Kremlin [sought] to bring the free world under its dominion by the methods of the Cold War.’’41 Emily Rosenberg has pointed out that this document, though it remained classified until 1975, had a significant impact on American culture as government policy, statements, and propaganda came to be based on it. Using Foucault’s method of discourse analysis, she finds that NSC 68 attempted to build nationalism and consensus by relying on strategies that built up an evil ‘‘other.’’42 Premillennial, apocalyptic discourse provided an easy means to do so. It not only gave the document’s drafters a language to draw on but made their strategy easy to disseminate among an American public accustomed to recognizing dichotomization.43 President Truman launched a ‘‘Campaign of Truth’’ propaganda initiative in May 1950 after viewing NSC 68. This accompanied the administration’s Civil Defense Program, meant to educate and prepare American citizens for the possibility of a nuclear attack. As part of this larger effort, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) distributed a newsletter called The Civil Defense Alert. It featured articles about civil defense training schools and publications about educating people on the seriousness of civil defense. Staff members learned in the July–August 1951 issue that they could obtain new alert


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cards that included information on what individuals could do in case of an attack and that explained air-raid warning signals. More than twenty million of these cards were printed and distributed. The FCDA’s Religious Advisory Committee worked to get clergy involved by bringing key religious leaders together at a conference in Washington in June 1951. Conference organizers told them, ‘‘Certainly no greater single force than religion exists to sustain that intangible portion of man—his spirit—with the courage necessary for his survival in these trying times.’’ Religious leaders, according to the FCDA, played a considerable part in civil defense. They could distribute information to the public, and in case of attack, the administration reasoned that ‘‘upon [them] will fall the burden of ministering to the spiritual needs of the survivors, of assuring them that no matter what their individual losses were, the price was not too high to pay for our way of life, to help them keep alive their will to fight for a free world.’’44 The FCDA prepared for such attacks by organizing conferences, printing publications and posters, producing films and radio spots, and even setting up displays at state fairs. In one elaborate effort, the Alert America Campaign, the Office of Public Affairs created a major, complex initiative to educate people about ‘‘their grave danger.’’ Along with the devices already mentioned, this campaign utilized some creative ways to prepare people. The plan consisted of an ‘‘Alert America Convoy,’’ which included three caravans of trucks with painted ‘‘Alert America’’ signs. They carried portable drama exhibits that could be set up in auditoriums or civic centers along the East Coast, the Midwest, the South, and the West Coast.45 The urgency that underwrote NSC 68 and FCDA education campaigns matched that of premillennialists’ preaching about the end-times. Both secular initiatives to prepare the public for nuclear attack and evangelical warnings about the approaching tribulation used fatalistic language that stressed individual responsibility, whether that was responsibility for personal safety or for personal salvation. In some cases the secular and the evangelical intersected. One 1952 FCDA publication drew directly on a biblical prophetic allusion with the title ‘‘Signs of Our Times.’’46 Evangelical and secular polarization paradigms alike had eschatological connotations. An ‘‘evil force’’ lurked behind communism, which many claimed personified that force. According to Carl Vrooman, a man who advocated Christian leadership in government and who presented the ‘‘American Manifesto: An Alternative to the Communist Manifesto’’ in 1963, ‘‘Nothing is more certain than that this Arch-enemy is neither Russia nor China but the same Satanic-Evil-Force which, embodied in and operating through Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, gained for them temporary apparent success, and, by similarly operating today in and through Khrushchev and Mao Tse-tung, has won for them similar temporary apparent success.’’47 Vrooman’s description of a satanically motivated communism not only serves as an example of Cold War

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rhetoric that helped to canonize the U.S. position, but it is also a premillennial portrayal. His suggestion that communist gains would not last and were illusory fit into a prophetic framework that claimed that as the world neared the end, evil and destruction would appear to overpower humanity. The victory of good, nevertheless, would be assured when Jesus’ return ushered in the end-times. Rhetorically, evangelical leaders and laypeople used a variety of metaphors to refer to this dichotomous paradigm. The NAE used light versus darkness in a 1967 resolution: ‘‘In such a time as this, when godless materialism promises to dominate a society which once was described as Christian, we urge the strengthening of those things that remain before darkness comes. On this account we reaffirm our unalterable opposition to every form of atheistic communism.’’48 The director of the International Christian Leadership (ICL) called the Cold War a ‘‘bitter life-and-death struggle with atheistic communism.’’49 Several appropriated military rhetoric to describe the fight against communism. Often referring to the conflict as a ‘‘battle,’’ themselves as ‘‘fellow soldiers,’’ and the communist ‘‘aggression’’ as ‘‘attacks,’’ this language inundated far-right campaigns. On letterhead with ‘‘United Nations is Treason’’ at the top, World War II veteran John B. Keeve from Dayton, Ohio, wrote to the American Council of Christian Laymen (ACCL), a conservative Christian anticommunist organization, in 1952 to request information. In his letter, he explained his own recent revelations of ‘‘subversive elements right here in the States that would gladly stab us in the back and snatch away the fruits of our victory.’’ He expressed his desire to ‘‘get into the fight, too.’’50 Though Mr. Keeve’s World War II experiences probably informed his anticommunist rhetoric, he was not alone in using militaristic discourse to describe communism. An article in the Presbyterian Journal reminded Christians ‘‘of the fact that [they] were involved in a great warfare. Christ’s kingdom and Satan’s are locked in conflict. . . . He is coming in power and glory and will put down all His foes.’’ In his staunchly anticommunist book None Dare Call It Treason, John A. Stormer quotes Democratic Congressman Francis Walter: ‘‘Get the facts. Study communism. You can’t fight an enemy you don’t know. This is a fundamental rule of warfare. Learn communism’s basic doctrines, its strategy, its tactics; its line on current national and international affairs; the names of major communist fronts and leading communists and fellow travelers.’’51 Anticommunists’ use of ‘‘crusade’’ was prevalent among Christian and non-Christian groups. One baseball card company issued ‘‘Children’s Crusade Against Communism’’ cards in 1951. With pictures of shifty communist leaders and images of communist destruction, these cards spread the militarist message to young Americans.52 Sometimes the meaning of certain figures of speech that had implications in both Christianity and the Cold War were contested. The meaning of the


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‘‘kingdom of God,’’ with its millennial roots in the concept of a utopian society, was disputed by pre- and postmillennialists, who debated the timing of Christ’s reign on earth. But this phrase was significant for a much wider audience than evangelicals, demonstrating the pervasiveness of millennial ideas. Diversity coexisted with uniformity in U.S. Cold War culture in a massive web of intersecting but divergent ideas. Americans argued about the meaning of the ‘‘kingdom.’’ The Christian far right struck at postmillennialists and communists, who both appeared to acknowledge that the kingdom could be created on earth. Moderate evangelicals such as Billy Graham also claimed that communists were ‘‘counterfeiting Christianity’’ by appropriating this concept:53 The communist says, ‘‘We are going to rebuild the world. We are going to bring the kingdom in without God.’’ But Jesus says the kingdom will never come until the Prince of Peace has His rightful place as King of kings and Lord of lords in the hearts of men. Communism will never bring it. The United Nations will never bring it. It will come only at the climactic point in history when Christ Himself shall take over and take control. Then shall the kingdom of God come.54 Other groups had a slightly different concept of what the ‘‘kingdom of God’’ meant. World Day of Prayer committees during the Cold War, principally administered by women, operated on a postmillennial vision of God’s kingdom. As supporters of the United Nations, active participants in their governments, and advocates for peace, these women who ‘‘prayed together also worked together to help bring His kingdom here on earth.’’55 The rapture did not play a role in the World Day of Prayer effort. In fact, the apocalyptic descriptions of the world that organizers, leaders, and publicizers did use pertained to the current Cold War world. With God’s help, they believed that they could overcome war, poverty, and fear. Furthermore, rather than emphasizing nationalism, they downplayed it, appealing to a global community instead. In the words of a 1949 ‘‘Daily Prayer of High Resolve,’’ as Christians they needed to ‘‘expand their caring from narrow domestic and national walls to the vast human family.’’ They asked God to ‘‘change their behavior, that wars may cease and His Kingdom come.’’56 To the Christian far right, of course, this smacked of communism and proved that the NCC, the ecumenical Christian organization founded in 1950 that sponsored the World Day of Prayer committees, had been infiltrated. Millennialism, as it was expressed through interpretations of the ‘‘kingdom concept,’’ was a crucial sculptor of Christian worldviews. It divided American Protestants and was also used as a test of loyalty. In reality, premillennialism and postmillennialism were mixed at the grassroots level. Although the extreme Christian right and moderate evangelicals criticized any idea of a kingdom that did not include a premillennial understanding of the second coming, the implied intent behind their anticommunist

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rhetoric suggested that in many ways they, too, were working toward a kingdom of God on earth. Evangelicals’ anticommunist language and their frequent references to the end-times in light of the destructive capabilities of the atomic bomb and other signs of the apocalypse fell into the premillennial paradigm. But their pseudo-militaristic calls for America to step up to the challenge was reminiscent of postmillennialism. If the Cold War was really the beginning of the end and the United States won the Cold War, would God’s kingdom be established on the earth before Christ’s return, as postmillennialists claimed? The implications of such rhetoric contradicted evangelical contentions that only God could end the Cold War, and the application of millenarian ideas to real life sometimes demonstrated a mixture of pre- and postmillennialism. The Cold War example further shows that evangelical thought was influenced by secular positions as some evangelicals took up the anticommunist battle cry, which in turn helped to inform and perhaps alter their own millenarianism. A complex web of ideological interconnectedness broke down clear-cut distinctions between pre- and postmillennialism and to some extent between evangelical and secular thought.

Blurring Definitions in the Apocalyptic Cold War: The Far Right, Anticommunism, and Religion Several figures on the extreme right in the Protestant community played key roles in the anticommunist movement. Dr. Fred Schwarz, creator of the School of Anti-Communism, was one. An Australian physician and lay pastor, Schwarz gave up his practice to warn Americans of the communist threat full time. His crusade was characteristically apocalyptic, claiming that Soviet communists had plans to overtake every American city by 1973.57 In his 1960 book You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists), Schwarz spelled out the danger in a manner typical of both conservative religious anticommunists and more mainstream American anticommunists. An amalgamation of apocalypticism, religious moralism, and descriptions of communist deceit, Schwarz’s rhetoric demonstrates how these concepts came together to help define an ‘‘American’’ identity: ‘‘Emerging from its lair of godless materialism, dressed in garments of science, communism seduces the young and utilizes their perverted religious enthusiasm to conquer the world.’’58 Schwarz’s efforts combined with the crusades of other conservative Christians, including Billy James Hargis of the Christian Crusade and Carl McIntire of the American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC). They joined with various local and national organizations and personalities, of which HUAC, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and Senator Joseph McCarthy are only some of the most well known. The foundation of the ACCC, which had formed in 1941 in direct response to the NCC’s ‘‘modernist’’ positions, demonstrates


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particularly well the parallels between the anticommunism of the religious far right and that of the secular far right. The Reverend Carl McIntire, in explaining the ACCC’s purpose, used language that appeared to predate by a decade the prose of an even more infamous American anticommunist, Senator Joseph McCarthy: ‘‘I hold in my hand a copy of an address delivered by the present president of the Federal Council [of Churches], Dr. Luther A. Weigle, Dean of Yale University Divinity School. Here is a denial of the very basic foundations of the Protestant citadel.’’59 Though McIntire targeted the Federal Council of Churches (which later became the NCC) and McCarthy aimed at the State Department in his 1950 Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, the similarities in style that these men used were striking. Both relied on Cold War fear to legitimize their positions. Anticommunist language such as McIntire’s, loyalty oaths, and investigations of former Communist Party members and alleged communist front organizations became commonplace during this period. To cite only one of many examples, in 1954 the conservative Rockford Institute, located in Rockford, Illinois, claimed that there seemed to be ‘‘a great deal of evidence that universities generally, and some colleges, have been ‘infiltrated’ with the doctrines of socialism.’’60 Made to appear more urgent in light of the atomic bomb and the world’s new capacity to destroy itself in a matter of minutes, anticommunism’s framework paralleled evangelical premillennialism, allowing believers to form a new relationship with the mainstream culture. Just as the evangelical population in the postwar United States was diverse in structure and ideology, the anticommunism of the evangelical community was complex rather than monolithic. Though most evangelicals in the Cold War would probably have agreed with Pentecostal evangelist Gordon Lindsay that communism was a ‘‘blight,’’ bringing ‘‘the darkness of a great eclipse passing over the land,’’61 not all evangelicals made anticommunism their personal crusades, as Fred Schwarz, Billy Hargis, and others on the far right did. Billy Graham, for example, though he did preach against communism, emphasized a message of personal salvation and faith. Those evangelicals who took a more moderate stance, such as Graham and the NAE, often criticized and competed with the extreme conservative anticommunists. In the summer of 1952, Verne P. Kaub of the National Council of American Education and the ACCL, organizations dedicated to purging the United States of the threat of communism, received a letter containing instructions for a game called Are You a Communist? that was ‘‘to be played at social or other occasions in the home [in order] to stimulate the thinking of the participants and thus alert them to the evil forces which would destroy our American institutions.’’ Because, according to the explanation of the game, all of us are ‘‘communistic in some areas of our thoughts and actions,’’ answering a list of questions could indicate whether or not you had strong ‘‘leanings toward

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communism.’’ Players answered yes or no to questions about federal aid, the ‘‘profit system,’’ disarmament, the United Nations, foreign policy, and even segregation. An explanation of the game’s outcome ended with two questions: ‘‘Does the American tradition represent a living faith to you? Are you willing to live and die for that faith?’’62 Linking the United States with religion was typical of far-right religious organizations that crusaded against communism. The form and distribution of this game, which guaranteed a ‘‘thoroughly stimulating evening for guests,’’ demonstrated the commitment of such groups. It also showed that organizations like Kaub’s ACCL believed wholeheartedly in what they saw as a very real and dangerous threat that was infiltrating the homes of ordinary Americans. Their crusades were not sneaky attempts to dupe the American public into granting them power. However extreme and distasteful their belief system, they sincerely imagined that Americans were in harm’s way because of a communist threat. This is not to say that some of the far right’s tactics were not conspiratorial in any sense. When E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India and one of the first who sought to disentangle Western culture from the message of Christianity,63 launched a speaking tour in 1950, W. Harllee Bordeaux, general secretary of the ACCC, wrote to Kaub about how he might be opposed. Having his secretary write to Jones for a copy of his itinerary, Bordeaux instructed her to tell Jones that she had friends who would be ‘‘interested in his appearances.’’ Bordeaux explained to Kaub, ‘‘We did not say how they would be interested, you will observe.’’ Carrying out their ulterior motive to plant dissenters in Jones’s audience was quite clearly deceitful. But to Bordeaux, the ends justified the means, as the danger of socialism was so powerful. ‘‘Let’s do all we can to have our men blow the lid off wherever E. Stanley Jones goes, even though the foul smell of socialism is sure to smite men’s nostrils.’’64 The tactics of these groups were objectionable, but they seemed to believe that these kinds of measures were necessary. Several components of the religious far-right anticommunist movement could be identified. Most obvious, these groups portrayed communism as purely evil. Billy Hargis called communism a ‘‘mental coma’’ caused by the ‘‘devil’s brew, mixed by the Moscow clinic.’’65 Communism, according to this view, was a product of Satan. One publication by the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC), the world affiliate of the ACCC, presented an ‘‘allegory in Chinese style’’ that told a story of the spiritual ‘‘unseen world,’’ where Satan was revealed as the true source of communism’s power. In this tale, a host of demons descend on the city of Beijing, the center of Communist China, where the Prince of Darkness presides. Communist victories in China and the Soviet Union proved that the ‘‘conspiracies forged in the unseen world had been successful in every respect.’’ Examples of the far right’s depictions of what they believed to be communism’s malevolence go on and on. Giving it a wicked persona, extreme-right anticommunists argued that communism was


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‘‘infiltrating with most pernicious results.’’ It was ‘‘enslaving the whole world’’ and dooming those who fell under its grip to destruction. One publication by the American Russian Mission included a picture of the figure of death with ‘‘Communism’’ written on its tattered cloak. In a graveyard, the figure stood among headstones that read ‘‘Russia,’’ ‘‘Poland,’’ ‘‘Freedom,’’ and ‘‘Here lay 1,815,000 peasants.’’66 In a period marked by political dichotomization, a second characterization of this type of extreme religious anticommunism contrasted evil communism with a righteous United States. In this view, America became a new Israel, a gift from God, divinely appointed to stand against evil. This battle played out in the Cold War. The blending of Christianity and nationalism in the United States became most clearly pronounced in these more militant groups. One advertisement for McIntire’s anticommunist radio program, The 20th Century Reformation Hour, defined the purpose of the broadcast in a blend of Christian principles and patriotism. The program was intended to ‘‘exalt Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, honor the scriptures as the inerrant Word of God, stand for the historic American heritage of freedom, promote personal righteousness and patriotism, warn of threats to our faith and freedom, and inspire enthusiastic service to our Lord and land.’’ Letters of support addressed to Verne Kaub and the ACCL further illustrated this ‘‘cult of patriotism.’’ The stationery of several contained symbols of the nation accompanied with phrases that glorified the United States. A letter from Marilyn Allen of Salt Lake City showed a picture of the statue of liberty with ‘‘For Christ and Freedom in America’’ underneath. Several included small flags. W. E. Lyon wrote to Kaub in 1952, ‘‘As a descendant of early Americans who fought to make this country great, my sacred privilege is to give my time and effort to the protection of our constitution and freedoms. I will oppose any influence attempting to change our American ideals and any attempt to create religious, racial or class hatred. I will strive to promote unity and attempt to bring truth to the confused.’’67 According to Billy Hargis, America had always been a Christian nation. His campaign to promote ‘‘Christian-Americanism’’ illustrated the most extreme way in which the nuclear age stimulated the blending of religion and the state. Hargis and former general Edwin Walker toured the country advocating the concept in a series of lectures that accompanied other print publications and radio efforts.68 The religious far right’s insistence on the evil of communism and the virtue of the United States did not differ markedly from the stance of moderate evangelicals or secular anticommunists. Though these organizations took this Cold War dichotomy to its extreme, the language they used was common in the postwar period. Furthermore, although the nuclear age and the Cold War did create an atmosphere in which the notion of a divinely inspired United States could thrive, it certainly did not originate the conception. That tradition can be traced back to descriptions of the nation as a city on a hill and to ideas of manifest destiny. In the Cold War the discourse that considered the United

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States blessed by God, reinforced by the urgency and divisiveness of the nuclear age, fashioned an idea of a Christian America that many shared. The atomic bomb provided the exigency to push it forward, anticommunism provided the tool, and premillennialism provided the interpretive framework. Although the militant Christian right held up the image of a holy United States, deifying the state, their view of the government was not always so rosy. They opposed federal aid to schools—even free lunches and textbooks—and advocated decreasing the power of the federal government. Sometimes particular officials were targeted. Eighty-four-year-old Margaret Hopkins Worrell, a personal friend of Kaub’s, wrote to President Truman in July 1950, urging him to get rid of Secretary of State Dean Acheson and to kill the United Nations in the same paragraph: I have just finished a tour of twenty-six states and our citizens cannot understand why you retain Acheson. It is probably through his advice that the United States has fallen into the trap set by Stalin. It was Stalin’s plan that we should lose China and fight a third World War on the ground, through which he hopes to abolish the United States and rule the world. In no sense will the United Nations be of much value to the United States and the sooner we scrap the U.N., as suggested by Mr. Hoover, the better for us.69 Worrell made a clear distinction between government and the United States. According to her, the country fell into a ‘‘trap’’ conjured up by communist plots, corrupt officials, and irrelevant world government. The menacing, apocalyptic tone she used to demonstrate the dangers of these threats was balanced by the hope that as a ‘‘Christian nation and with God on our side we need have no fear of defeat.’’ The United Nations and world government were particular targets of the Christian far right. Hargis called them ‘‘severe threats’’ and claimed that the UN charter was ‘‘taken almost entirely from the phony constitution of the Soviet Union.’’70 In May 1953, the Grace Episcopal Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, held a debate they called ‘‘United Nations: Hope or Danger?’’ In an argument typical of the Christian far right, Madalon Dingloy Leetoh outlined the dangers: a ‘‘booby trap’’ that threatened the sovereignty of the United States, the United Nations was also a lot of ‘‘cleverly contrived double talk to make a socialist satellite of the United States.’’71 To Leetoh and those like her, the United Nations and world government were dangerous not only from the perspective of a loss of American sovereignty or from the threat of communism. Opponents often cited biblical prophecy that made world government the instrument of the Antichrist’s rise to power.72 In fact, charges of ‘‘antichristism’’ were often leveled at communists, the World and National Council of Churches, and the United Nations all at the same time. One conservative minister went even further by suggesting that all Bible believers who did not


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openly oppose these ‘‘forces’’ would be doing Satan’s work: ‘‘Satan does not want any world-wide attack on his world-wide false church and beastly government. Would it not be actually doing Satan’s will, doing what he wants (whether wittingly or unwittingly), to refrain from any world-wide attack on his two prime objectives in his latter-day program?’’73 The belief that the end-times were upon them helped to increase fundamentalists’ suspicion of the United Nations and the NCC. Organizations like the ACCL attracted individuals who used racism as a tool of opposition to the UN. Warnings of Jewish plots of world takeovers crept into many of their critiques. This racism was reminiscent of earlier organizations led by William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts, Gerald B. Winrod’s Defenders of the Christian Faith, popular Catholic radio priest Father Charles E. Coughlin, and Gerald L. K. Smith, who founded the magazine The Cross and the Flag. The threat of an international Jewish conspiracy that the Silver Shirts concocted before World War II claimed that Jewish capitalists and radicals were working to eliminate Christian civilization.74 Although World War II and the fear of native fascism led to the ostracism of many of these individuals (and imprisonment for Pelley) after the war, the anticommunism of the Christian far right often included anti-Semitic rhetoric. One letter writer to the ACCL in 1950 wrote: I regard that [the Zionists] have control of every group, political, religious, educational, financial, all means for the transmission of intelligence except our few publications and pamphlets, etc. The only remaining force they do not have is the mass of the people of this remaining Christian nation. This they are fast taking over by one or more of the world schemes, world government, United Nations, world police force, all schemes of which are originated by, financed and backing the thousand and one fronts with the gold and power grasping frontiers, Crusade for Freedom, United Nation’s Day.75 Thus, in many ways, earlier anti-Semitic groups were the predecessors of Cold War anticommunist Christian conservatives. Remnants of anti-Semitism that survived World War II sharply distinguished far-right groups from other moderate evangelicals, who increasingly embraced Jews and Israel after the horrors of the Holocaust. This significant ideological diversity within the conservative Protestant subculture illustrates how evangelicals used the millennial framework in a variety of ways. But that diversity was not well regarded by the far right, as their criticism of other Protestants, especially the liberal ecumenical movement, confirmed. The WCC and the NCC, leaders of the ‘‘liberal,’’ ecumenical Christian community, especially came under fire. One of the first actions taken by the ACCL was publishing How Red Is the National (Federal) Council

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of Churches? This was its most popular publication. In 1950, a doctor from Louisville, Kentucky, wrote the ACCL to request two dozen copies for his waiting room. The NCC, according to these critics, had been infiltrated by subversive communist elements and its ministers preached apostasy and socialism. Kaub wrote to J. Howard Pew in 1951 about the impact of the ACCL’s efforts: ‘‘A Wisconsin resident wrote us that he believed our materials came to him as an answer to prayer. He had prayed for materials to use in combating apostasy and pro-communism in the churches of his small city, and a few days later got a letter from an Alabama man, not known to him, who advised that he write to us. Later he came to call on us, making a 300 mile trip for that particular purpose.’’76 Clearly, Kaub believed that God was blessing the crusade. The Christian far right was not alone in accusing the liberal Protestant clergy in the NCC of supporting communism. In 1948 HUAC published 100 Things You Should Know about Communism and Religion, identifying ‘‘suspicious’’ religious organizations. Joseph B. Matthews, who had recently been named chief investigator of Senator McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, claimed in a 1953 article that ‘‘the largest single group supporting the communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen. . . . Clergymen outnumber professors two to one in supporting the communist-front apparatus of the Kremlin conspiracy.’’77 The authenticity of anticommunism in the mainstream discourse in the United States allowed farright Christian organizations run by Hargis, Kaub, and others to relate more easily to secular anticommunists. John E. Haynes has noted that extreme Christian anticommunists tried to convince their adherents to become involved in these secular groups and support anticommunist politicians.78 Anticommunism had made possible a certain cultural space that religious and secular anticommunists shared, however extreme or moderate one’s anticommunism happened to be. The tactics that secular individuals and organizations utilized in the name of anticommunism often seemed strikingly similar to Christian far-right attacks. In 1953 a Methodist bishop, G. Bromley Oxnam, voluntarily went before HUAC to defend himself from accusations by California Representative Donald L. Jackson that he had ‘‘been to the communist front what Man O’War was to thoroughbred horse racing.’’79 Oxnam’s hearing served as a venue to test Americans’ definitions of and allegiance to the principle of the separation of church and state in an era of heightened anticommunism. The public reaction to the HUAC hearing demonstrated that McCarthyism affected but did not destroy how people viewed the principle of separation. Some argued that the danger of communist subversion warranted government checks on clergy. At the same time, however, HUAC’s apparent violation of the principle of the separation of church and state, with its investigation of the bishop and other church officials, undermined the committee’s credibility.


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In his statement before the committee, Oxnam defended himself against accusations that he had harbored communist sympathies and had been a part of communist front organizations. ‘‘When I declare, ‘I believe in God, the Father, Almighty,’ I affirm the theistic faith and strike at the fundamental fallacy of communism, which is atheism.’’80 The bishop’s hearing attracted national attention. The media coverage and public response to Oxnam’s hearing indicated that most of the nation supported him and condemned HUAC’s attacks. Oxnam supporters collected newspaper articles on the hearing in a scrapbook and presented it to the bishop with the words ‘‘To a Happy Warrior . . . Whose strength is as the strength of ten.’’81 The scrapbook lists the states alphabetically, each accompanied by various local news clippings concerning the event. Media response overwhelmingly favored Bishop Oxnam. According to Robert Moats Miller, Oxnam’s biographer, 80 percent of the editorials covering the hearing backed the bishop.82 Though some Americans criticized HUAC for unfairly accusing Bishop Oxnam of having communist sympathies, they did not go so far as to question the government’s right to investigate the churches because communism was seen as too great a threat. Others, however, did not ignore the implications of the Oxnam hearing for the nature of the relationship between religion and the state, and these critics pointed out the flagrant violation of the principle in HUAC’s investigation of the political ideals of a clergyman. One letter printed in the Chicago Daily Sun-Times claimed, ‘‘Every honest man knows that even to insinuate that any clergyman of standing in America, whether Jewish, Protestant or Catholic, is a communist or sympathetic with communism, is not only nonsense but dangerous to our cherished freedoms of thought and religion.’’83 Though reaction to the hearing overwhelmingly supported Oxnam, critics of the bishop also existed. At one extreme were those anticommunists who detested Oxnam’s affiliation with groups and organizations with communist leanings and tended to side with HUAC. Conservative Christian and far-right groups led by Carl McIntire and others fell into this category. Other critics claimed that the bishop had conceded too much to anticommunist forces. The wide spectrum of responses to Oxnam’s hearing shows a hallowed American principle in flux. Ironically, both Oxnam’s harshest critics of his loose affiliations with communist front organizations and those supporters who praised his courage in combating HUAC’s shoddy tactics shared the belief that proper investigation was essential to destroying communism in the United States. On the other hand, several people did note the implications the hearing had for the principle of the separation of church and state, demonstrating how jealously Americans guarded the code. American Protestants were not the only ones who took up the anticommunist cause in the United States. The Christian far right had a complicated

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relationship with Catholic anticommunist crusaders. Vestiges of anti-Catholicism remained evident in the Protestant extreme right. One pastor from Madison, Wisconsin, wrote to Kaub, ‘‘We are in a struggle not only against communism but against Romanism.’’ Others railed against the ‘‘totalitarian practices’’ of the Catholic Church.84 Simultaneously, many perceived themselves united with Catholic anticommunists such as Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who wrote that ‘‘because communism denies freedom of choice it substitutes for God, Who alone can give freedom of perfection.’’ The American Catholic leader made other arguments that replicated far-right Protestant fundamentalists, particularly when he criticized communists for subverting patriotism: ‘‘Communism lacks one of the fundamental virtues that even the pagans had, namely, the virtue of piety. Pietas was understood as reverence for one’s God, family and fatherland, because they are united. Once people lose reverence for God, they begin to lose reverence for their own country.’’ In Communism and the Conscience of the West, Sheen added his voice to the chorus of Cold War prophetic speculation by listing the ‘‘signs of the times’’: ‘‘Because the signs of our times point to a struggle between absolutes we may expect the future to be a time of trials and catastrophes.’’85 Despite the confused relationship between the fundamentalist right and Catholicism, those from both traditions cited a blend of anticommunism and Christian eschatology. The anticommunist movement encompassed a great many groups, ranging from secular Americans to moderate evangelicals to far-right fundamentalists. This heterogeneous anticommunist crusade meant that even the far-right segment’s image as unsophisticated and naı¨ve extremists was tempered somewhat. Moderate evangelicals who used less militant language benefited from their embrace of anticommunism as well, attracting Americans who came to accept the premillennial dispensationalist framework in order to comprehend the destructive potential of the atomic bomb. Government officials and premillennialists alike spoke of the possibility of the end of the world. Premillennialism provided a framework to comprehend the destructive potential of the atomic bomb. As a result, evangelicals of varying ideologies blended their world perspectives with secular ones, transforming their political identities in the process.

2 Praying in the End

One day after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, an associate of the Baptista Film Mission wrote in his diary an evangelical perspective on one of the most defining events of the twentieth century: ‘‘At morning devotions we spoke of the new atom bomb and of the tremendous implications of this new discovery in releasing the forces of God’s created nature in an inconceivably greater way than ever before since the world began. We thanked our heavenly Father that He saved us and that we are His children. We acknowledged that this seems to be a clear indication of the soon return of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ.’’1 Seven years later, on February 25, 1952, a DeKalb, Illinois, newspaper urged Christians of the community to attend World Day of Prayer services sponsored by the DeKalb Council of Church Women. The article cited the need for divine protection in the midst of tumultuous times: ‘‘So if you believe in God, now is a most appropriate time to join with other Christians in supplication for divine aid and guidance in these troubled days when at times it appears that our great nation is rocking on its foundation and faces grave danger. God brought our country into existence and He will bring us through safely if we kneel in worship and implore Him to save us.’’2 On Independence Day of that same year, a poem entitled ‘‘The American Prayer’’ appeared in newspapers under the heading ‘‘America on Its Knees.’’ It was accompanied by a depiction of Uncle Sam praying and described a collective fear of pestilence, darkness, and destruction. The poem ended with a plea for God’s salvation.3

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Concern for national well-being in the midst of crisis was yet again illustrated in a telegram to the newly elected president John F. Kennedy from F. Ray Keyser Jr., then governor of Vermont: ‘‘In the green mountains of Vermont the power of prayer is no stranger. Always in the hearts of its people has flamed the desire for peace and freedom. Let me assure you then of the sincerity of our prayers for your welfare and guidance as you lead our nation in this crisis of Christianity.’’4 In each of these statements, interpretations of world events and the state of the nation were followed by pleas for prayer and divine intervention. Evangelicals considered events such as the dropping of the atomic bomb ‘‘indications of the soon return’’ of Jesus Christ, and they joined journalists, government officials, and poets in their use of apocalyptic descriptors of fear and destruction. Prayer had always been important to Christians in the United States. In conversion experiences, prayer is the bridge where one travels from an old life to a ‘‘new life in Christ.’’ In his study Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, professor of religion Randall Balmer notes the centrality of prayer to the evangelical selfdefinition of Christianity: ‘‘Christian, in the vernacular of my evangelical subculture, was an exclusive, elitist term reserved for someone who had ‘prayed the prayer,’ had acknowledged personal sinfulness and the need for salvation, and ‘accepted Jesus into his heart.’ ’’5 Furthermore, in evangelical chiliastic beliefs in the Cold War United States, prayer played an important role in interpreting and preparing for the end-times. It also aided evangelicals as they redefined their national identity. The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale called prayer ‘‘the most tremendous power in the world.’’6 Congressional and Presidential Prayer Breakfasts were first organized during World War II and in the Cold War by the ICL. Local committees, made up predominantly of women, increasingly participated in World Day of Prayer events to pray for guidance in those ‘‘troubled days.’’ Simply defined, prayer is the means of communication with God. For evangelicals, though, prayer served multiple purposes. It was a religious ritual, an affirmation of faith, and a life management tool. Many Christians claimed that prayer alleviated stress and helped them to prioritize their everyday routines. Evangelicals prayed with the understanding that they would receive an answer, though they admitted that the answer might not be the one they desired. Expecting results, these Christians nevertheless insisted that ‘‘God’s will’’ should be respected. Prayer for them stimulated individual camaraderie with God and they believed that group prayer could build bonds among fellow Christians. Evangelicals differentiated among types of prayer. There were prayers of supplication, or appeals to God for mercy or aid; prayers of petition; and prayers of intercession for other people. There were prayers that made promises to God, prayers of thanksgiving, and prayers meant to worship God. The extensive time born-again Christians spent discussing, analyzing, and contemplating

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prayer—whether through sermons, books, or prayer groups—denoted its fundamental position within the evangelical belief system. The juxtaposition of prophecy and prayer in the spiritual and political ideologies of evangelicals shows how two seemingly opposing concepts came together during this time. Prophetic speculation pessimistically predicted the world’s catastrophic end. Prayer, on the other hand, was an optimistic effort to appeal to God for aid. But for evangelicals, whereas prophecy interpreted events in an uncertain age, prayer was the means to act on that interpretation, spiritually and politically. Similarly, U.S. Cold War language and policies mirrored the evangelical tendency to combine the expectation of imminent annihilation with active attempts to prevent it. Rhetoric about the potential destructive power of the atomic bomb accompanied efforts to contain the communist threat both abroad and at home. It was during this period that Christian evangelicals and other leaders formed prayer groups, culminating in the Congressional and Presidential Prayer Breakfasts and their various auxiliaries. World Day of Prayer events stirred Christians (particularly Protestants) locally and nationally to work together to harness the power of prayer. As evangelicals young and old utilized prayer to act in the midst of what they believed to be fulfilled prophecy, they expressed their citizenship and their religious faith through the practice. Simultaneously, politicians and other Americans adopted prayer as a manifestation of national identity. But while the Cold War and apocalypticism raised the significance of prayer in the political culture, that new relationship was not without controversy. The Supreme Court prayer cases stirred up a storm of debate about the relationship between church and state, and their consequences had implications for the emerging culture wars.

Prayer as an American Tradition Prayer’s association with U.S. national culture has been evident from the early days of the republic. New Jersey Presbyterian minister turned self-proclaimed prophet David Austin called for one of the country’s first national days of prayer in the early 1800s. His ‘‘concert of prayer’’ suggestion called on Americans to pray simultaneously, wherever they might be, on a chosen day and hour. Early national primers included depictions of George Washington on his knees in prayer. The Illuminated American Primer of 1844 contained such an image accompanied by a short verse that read, ‘‘Prayer is the simplest form of speech that infant lips can try; Prayer, the sublimest strains that reach the majesty on high.’’ Such representations certainly meant to foster national piety, but they were also part of a national dialogue that sought to define what it meant to be American.7 From the country’s inception, Americans have been fascinated

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with the founding fathers, holding up their values as good and pure. The specific significance ascribed to the republic’s early leaders, however, was often contrived and said more about the attributors’ credos. In this sense, the presentation of Washington as a pious man seeking guidance from an almighty God, whether accurate or not, clearly indicated the importance of prayer in the early nation’s conception of itself. Prophetic imagery, in conjunction with prayer, was so prevalent in the United States that even those who attacked Christianity drew on it. One 1835 satirical print from the Southern District of New York, called the ‘‘Mystery of Babylon,’’ used scripture from Revelation to mock Catholics, Episcopalians, Calvinists, Universalists, Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers. A creature with seven heads, each representing one of the denominations, was pictured above the lines ‘‘The Beast that was, and is not, and yet is.’’ Each of the heads spoke in the print. The Calvinist head said, ‘‘The degree of fate has fixed our destinies.’’ The Methodist head pronounced, ‘‘Glory! We ha’nt got much larnin. Glory.’’ The Universalist proclaimed, ‘‘God will not punish us for what he does therefore we shall all be saved.’’8 Eschatology, even when it was doubted, had permeated deeply into American society. Even marriage vows reflected this state of affairs. In one 1879 ceremony, which the couple conducted on their own without a member of the clergy present, Henry Munson of Missouri and Martha Eaton of Massachusetts each cited chiliastic expectations in their vows to each other. Munson declared, ‘‘In the presence of God and of these witnesses, I now take this woman whom I hold by the right hand to be my lawful wedded wife, to love and to cherish, till the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’’ Evidently, Munson believed the second coming to be much more imminent than death. Eaton’s vow allowed for the possibility of death but was more descriptive in its millennialism: ‘‘And I now take this man to be my lawfully wedded husband, to love, reverence and obey him until the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout and the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God, or till death shall us sever.’’9 Munson and Eaton were not alone in considering millennial visions an important part of their lives. Eschatology had influenced American culture to the point that though evangelicalism, tied as it was to fundamentalism, would in the early twentieth century lose some legitimacy, millennialism would remain a part of American culture. When conservative Protestantism began to make a comeback on the national stage during the Cold War, it picked up on continuing strands of American millennialism. The pervasiveness of both prayer and prophecy in the country’s past created a place for them in the debate over civil religion in the United States. Robert Bellah’s article ‘‘Civil Religion in America’’ initiated a series of discussions on the interpretation of religion in American society. Bellah claimed that a ‘‘public religious dimension’’ contained its own ‘‘set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals.’’ This American civil religion coexisted but was apart from the churches.

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Its major symbols and archetypes had developed after three ‘‘times of trials’’: the question of independence, the issue of slavery, and the establishment of a new world order. Though Bellah argued that American civil religion was separate from the Christian tradition, he also acknowledged that it ‘‘borrowed selectively’’ from the Church.10 Still, Bellah did not fully investigate how U.S. civil religion disseminated among the general public. Prayer was a key part of that process. In the Cold War, as apocalypticism aided in the interpretation of the age, prayer turned out to be an acceptable response. Analyzing two manifestations of prayer, the ICL prayer breakfasts and the World Day of Prayer, shows that this religious ritual proved an advantageous way to redefine national, religious, and even gender identities. Americans reassessed mainstream national identity during the Cold War. Whether or not the fear of potential conflict with the Soviet Union was warranted, U.S. citizens believed that they were facing a clear, well-defined enemy that inevitably was linked to evil. In a world dichotomized into good and evil, national identity not only became a crucial concept, but its very nature became a topic of debate. Ironically, however, these same polarizing forces that opened up discussion on U.S. national identity also closed down the possibility for genuine discourse about its meaning. Diversity, along with racial, class, and gender tensions, were discounted and McCarthyism allowed for the restriction of civil liberties in the name of anticommunism. Despite these obstacles, the increased attention to national identity did initiate a process of reconfiguration over the relationship between religion— Christianity in particular—and the state. The association of Christianity with national identity was partially based on the country’s portrayal as an antithesis to the communist Soviet Union, and some questioned the devotional sincerity of those who identified themselves as Christians. In the early 1950s, for example, while only around 5 percent of Americans did not consider themselves religious at all, a Gallup Poll showed that only 35 percent of those surveyed could name all four gospels and 53 percent could not name any.11 But compared to the ‘‘godless communists’’ in the Soviet Union, many Americans pointed to a long history of claiming divine favor through appeals of manifest destiny. In 1952, Justice William O. Douglas commented on the interconnections between American nationalism and religion when he said that Americans were ‘‘a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.’’12 Whatever the real spiritual commitment to Christianity, the fact that Americans linked nationalism so closely with that faith gave evangelicals a new venue from which to negotiate their own place within the Cold War state. Associated with the temperance and abolition movements, the Scopes trial, and conservative fundamentalism in the past, the evangelical subculture had begun to build a different relationship with the rest of the country. Cold War evangelicals, caught up in the anticommunist tide, found common apocalyptical

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ground, so to speak, with secular Americans. Ironically, the ground on which both groups stood appeared to be breaking apart, as that commonality was based on a mutual apprehension of destruction. Evangelical premillennialism and secular apocalypticism shared a language that blended with Cold War anticommunism and an increasing tendency to equate U.S. identity with Christianity. This development paved the way toward a patriotic evangelicalism, and prayer eased that transition. In 1934, Methodist evangelist Abraham Vereide organized a group of prayer breakfasts for business leaders in San Francisco. A year later, Vereide moved his efforts to Seattle, where concern was growing over the perceived influence of socialists in the city government. A loose-knit organization began to encourage such meetings. In 1944, it changed its name to the International Christian Leadership (ICL), and by 1945, the idea of business and government leaders praying in breakfast meetings had spread to Washington, DC, and Congress. Not stopping there, ICL groups formed in other countries, and the International Council of Christian Leadership (ICCL) was created as an umbrella organization. The first Presidential Prayer Breakfast, which eventually became known as the National Prayer Breakfast, took place on February 5, 1953.13 The efforts of this movement, which picked up right at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, accentuated the significance of prayer in the United States. While prayer became increasingly important to politicians at home, it also ultimately played a small role in establishing diplomatic channels in the Cold War. As ICL chapters spread to nations around the world, Christian leaders everywhere developed stronger connections with each other. Religious identities, aided by ICL prayer groups, grew alongside national ones. Speaking to ICL crowds in Germany, Wallace Bird argued for an end to religious divisions: ‘‘One of the great lessons of history: when the world is dying and the Church is dying, God sends a man. We stand ashamed before the world—we are divided. The answer to a divided world is a united Church.’’14 Bird’s apocalyptic description of the state of the world corresponded with a call to unity in faith. In a world dichotomized as good (the religious, democratic United States) and evil (the atheist, communist Soviet Union), foreign political and religious leaders who demonstrated a commitment to Christianity affirmed their virtue in the eyes of evangelicals at home. Prayer was both a symbol of shared identity and a way to communicate with religious leaders abroad. In a 1958 letter to the executive director of the ICL Abraham Vereide, Le Van Vien offered a ‘‘special prayer’’ from ‘‘many Christian friends in Free Vietnam.’’15 A few years later, as U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated, Saigon’s director of technical education Nguyen-quan-Huot also wrote a letter to Vereide. In it, he expressed his hope that Vereide would forward correspondence to President Johnson about a possible visit to brief the president on ‘‘the actual resistance of the Vietnamese population against the

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communists.’’ Nguyen-quan-Huot employed both apocalyptic language, ‘‘the Kingdom of God is near at hand,’’ and pleas for prayer in his letter.16 Prayer served as a utilitarian means to strengthen global relationships, but this correspondence also indicated a sincere belief in the efficacy of prayer. Christians everywhere trusted that the power of prayer was a real, important spiritual and diplomatic endeavor in an apocalyptic world. The strong belief in the effectiveness of prayer was not limited to evangelical Christians. The National Council of Churches (NCC), founded in 1950 as an ecumenical organization for several mainstream denominations in the United States, was considered too liberal and modernist for many evangelicals. Nonetheless, the NCC shared with more conservative Christians an emphasis on the importance of prayer. The NCC’s World Day of Prayer Committee of the General Department of United Church Women sponsored World Day of Prayer observances that emerged out of the efforts of denominational women’s organizations in the nineteenth century. By 1955, the event had grown to encompass 134 countries as participants observed the first Friday in Lent with shared worship services and prayer requests.17 Many of the programs and proclamations that accompanied the World Day of Prayer paralleled conservative evangelical portrayals of the state of the world, insisting that the global situation existed within the ‘‘threat of depression,’’ was surrounded by ‘‘forces of evil,’’ and was beset by the ‘‘agonies of overpopulation, undernourishment, and unprecedented capacities for destruction.’’18 Liberal and conservative Protestants shared certain assertions about the importance of prayer and the apocalyptic world condition, but they also often participated together in organizing World Day of Prayer services. A planning committee meeting in DeKalb, Illinois, in 1951 included representatives from the Advent Christian Church, First Baptist, First Lutheran, Mission Covenant, St. Paul’s Episcopal, First Church of Christ– Scientist, the Congregational Church, and the Salvation Army.19 The goal of eliciting prayer for a nation in turmoil was able to bring denominations together when other issues had separated them. World Day of Prayer observances illustrated the gendered construction of Protestant practices in the Cold War. Prayer had been a chief part of the religious identity of Christian women in the United States. Although women had been denied other leadership roles in evangelical circles, they were often encouraged to direct in matters of prayer. For example, in a 1981 meeting of Project Look Up, a conservative religious television broadcast organization, Norma Neal Gause was elected to establish ‘‘prayer warriors’’ as an extension of her weekly women’s prayer circle.20 In her study of the charismatic Women’s Aglow Fellowship International, R. Marie Griffith argues that women’s prayer groups often developed ‘‘potentially radical renegotiations of power.’’21 Evangelicals believed that prayer produced authority, so women who participated in and led

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prayer networks asserted power according to gender barometers that combined with the religious ideals of the subculture. The power negotiations instigated in these circles may have influenced the national gender debate of the post– World War II period led by Gloria Steinem and others. Because prayer was also closely connected to how many perceived national identity in the United States, it influenced how women understood their own citizenship. By leading World Day of Prayer ceremonies, women were able to participate in domestic and international politics through religion when other, traditional means were dominated by men. The apocalypticism that pervaded the national spirit also made women’s (and men’s) prayers all the more vital. Prayer both challenged and reinforced traditional gender roles in the Cold War. It did provide a means for women to participate in the cultural discourse about the meaning of national identity. But it also siphoned women into more traditional arenas of political participation, preventing them from challenging male-dominated positions, from evangelical religious leaders to local and national officeholders. The establishment of the Congressional Wives Prayer Breakfast illustrated how prayer served to reinforce gender roles. Not only were the prayer breakfasts segregated by gender, but also the very name spoke volumes about power relations in the United States: it was not called the Congressional Spouses Prayer Breakfast. The way the prayer breakfasts sustained gender roles was not merely nominal. The goals of the wives’ breakfast differed in subtle ways. In a letter to Mrs. Len B. Jordan dated February 16, 1965, Miss Marge Neufeld noted the ‘‘far reaching impact’’ of the Congressional Wives Prayer Breakfast: ‘‘Many women across the nation have been challenged and have banded together in small groups to pray and to discuss the relevancy of the Bible to their own lives.’’22 On one hand, the women’s prayer groups that Neufeld described suggested an assemblage of women that could be considered the precursors of the consciousness-raising groups of the feminist movement in the 1970s. In a small way, these women exhibited a kind of gender consciousness when they gathered to discuss their daily experiences. They used religion and prayer to do so. On the other hand, unlike the consciousness-raising groups, these women did not seem implicitly to recognize or seek to question gender roles. Rather, by praying and ‘‘discussing the relevancy of the Bible to their own lives,’’ they used religion to legitimize the gendered limitations that defined them largely as ‘‘congressional wives’’ instead of congresswomen.

Prayer as Action Chaplain Reverend Frederick Brown Harris’s prayers regularly opened the daily sessions of the Senate from 1942 to 1947 and again from 1949 to 1969. As the pastor of Washington’s Foundry Methodist Church, Harris did not hail

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from an evangelical denomination, yet his prayers in Congress demonstrated the combination of apocalypticism and prayer that pervaded the conservative Protestant community. There was a clear pattern to Harris’s style that included a description of the dire nature of the world in almost every prayer. That is not to say that the chaplain did not come up with new ways to verbalize the calamitous times. In one week in early January 1961, he referred to ‘‘the stormy blast of these tumultuous days,’’ to ‘‘these testing times,’’ to ‘‘a world where the very foundations seem to be shaken,’’ to ‘‘a violent day swept by angry forces,’’ and to ‘‘the seething strife that mars the earth which could be so fair.’’23 Harris’s prayers demonstrate that evangelicals and nonevangelicals alike appealed to God to deliver the United States from a fate of disastrous proportions. Premillennialists prayed as they increasingly identified prophetic signs of the end of the world. They participated in prayer meetings, prayed for missionaries, and prayed for their government officials as citizens. Politicians paid tribute to the place of prayer in the nation’s civil religious tradition. Organizations such as the American Legion tried to promote prayer as a function of patriotism. For all of these Americans caught in an apocalyptic Cold War, prayer was an act. The everyday lives of American laypeople were saturated with prayer. In the course of one week in 1944, Moody Memorial Church in Chicago offered four formal opportunities for people in the congregation to come and pray together. There was an ushers’ prayer meeting Sunday morning, a ‘‘Special Prayer Meeting’’ Sunday evening for the service that followed, a Wednesday night prayer meeting, and ‘‘Prayer Circle’’ on Saturday.24 Preparations for a Graham crusade frequently included grassroots prayer meetings. The Graham organization’s ‘‘Crusade Calendar,’’ published for the 1962 Chicago Crusade, noted daily prayer meetings and ‘‘Prayertime’’ broadcasts Monday through Friday on at least seven area radio stations in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Decision Magazine reported prayer for the crusade from a variety of venues, including a meeting in London, office prayer groups at Westinghouse and United Airlines, and a total of 9,750 home-based prayer meetings.25 Evangelicals believed that prayer and what they called biblical truth were the answers to the country’s problems. A Moody Monthly reader wrote to the publication in 1947 to plead for churches and families to remember not to neglect to pray for public officials.26 The books evangelicals read also emphasized the importance of prayer. A page of book advertisements in the February 1946 issue of Moody Monthly included two of five books on the matter of prayer: The Bible Way to Answer Prayer and Pray the Bible Way. Spiritually, prayer was a key way for evangelicals to live out the Christian faith. Born-again Christians believed that prayer brought results and that it was more than a ritual. At a press conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, Billy Graham elaborated on the power of prayer in his ministry: ‘‘I believe that one of the secrets of these Crusades is the fact that people are asked to pray in almost

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every country in the world. You’ll have a wall of prayer and you’ll feel it.’’27 Graham’s evangelist team joined with local churches and Christians to pray for his crusades because they believed that those prayers would make a difference. In 1969, a Christian radio station in Black Mountain, North Carolina, conducted a survey of its listeners. In response to a question about the primary needs of the community, Mrs. J. D. Styles answered simply, ‘‘More prayer.’’ Another respondent, associating the community’s identity with a larger, national one, offered a similar response: ‘‘I need to know what’s going on in the country so I can pray for it more intelligently.’’28 In all of these cases, conservative Christians considered prayer an essential piece of personal and collective identity. It was also a political tool, an active response to the surrounding world. Using prayer to make a difference, evangelicals struggled to affect power relations on earth by involving what to them was the source of all power: God. Praying to enact change was not a new phenomenon in the Cold War. Evangelicals had always considered prayer an important part of their identity and a significant instrument of transformation. What was unique about evangelical prayers in this period was the urgency that accompanied them due to the validity and strength of premillennial interpretations of world events. Because they believed that Jesus Christ was the only hope, their duty was to intercede through prayer on behalf of the world. In this sense, evangelicals saw themselves as the ultimate Cold Warriors. Prayer was their weapon. Premillennial dispensationalists during the Cold War saw signs of the end-times everywhere they looked. Gazing through prophecy-tinted glasses, their interpretations of events took on particular meanings. The atomic and hydrogen bombs appeared to fit the description of the day of the Lord in 2 Peter 3: ‘‘The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.’’29 As the world came to realize the terrifying potentials of the new weapons, these scriptures seemed more and more ominous. Premillennialists also interpreted the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 as a fulfillment of the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who foretold God’s restoration of Palestine to the Israelites.30 Societal immorality proved another clue to the proximity of the end-times, according to many born-again Christians. Evangelical magazines, letters to the editor, and evangelists vigorously lamented the lax moral standards of the nation. One table in the July 1959 issue of Moody Monthly, while describing the United States as a ‘‘church-minded nation,’’ also cited statistics on high alcohol consumption and an increase in crime and juvenile delinquency.31 Toronto minister Oswald Smith echoed the alarm expressed by other evangelicals over ‘‘lawlessness and crime’’: ‘‘I used to tell people about the days that would be coming upon the world. I never dreamed that my predictions based on the Word of God would be fulfilled in my lifetime. I never thought we could have degenerated so rapidly and that we could have sunk so low.’’32

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Smith was not alone in turning to God with descriptions of the dire nature of the time. Calls for prayer often accompanied prophetic rhetoric concerning the meaning of the state of the nation and the world. At the 1959 Presidential Prayer Breakfast, Virginia Senator A. Willis Robertson, father of the future Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, evoked apocalyptic imagery of nuclear warfare while citing the need for divine intervention: ‘‘In meeting the threat of nuclear destruction we, like our forefathers, should pray daily for God’s help.’’33 Signs of the end-times proved the need for prayer, and fulfilled prophecy validated ‘‘God’s righteousness and willingness to hear prayer,’’ according to one 1947 Moody Monthly article.34 Premillennialists clearly believed a connection existed between prophecy and prayer. While they used prophecy to interpret and analyze their surroundings, they were convinced that prayer was the way to react to the world and was an impetus for change. The purposeful, active exercise of prayer incited by prophecy operated in three major ways. First, evangelicals prayed for strength as participants in an ultimate battle between good and evil that took on particular significance during the Cold War. Conservative Christians painted communism in an unequivocally dark fashion. In You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists), Fred Schwarz, founder of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC), wrote, ‘‘The difficult, devious, and dangerous dialectic became the tool with which Stalin justified the murder of millions. Unless we understand it, it is probable that it may be used historically to justify the demise of all free peoples.’’35 Evangelicals in other parts of the world shared a similar perspective. One Korean speaker at the 1953 ICL Far Eastern Conference annual meeting said this about the Korean War: ‘‘We Koreans learned about liberty and the rights of man from American Christians, when they brought us the Word of God. With God’s help, we shall prove our faith. Marching arm in arm with our fellow defenders of the faith, we are determined to uproot this scourge, to destroy this blight. This is the crux of the conflict—light or darkness, good or evil. Let us pray for strength.’’36 The speaker utilized the familiar apocalyptic framework of good versus evil. As biblical prophecy helped make the black-and-white distinctions of the Cold War understandable, many evangelicals saw prayer as a tool for victory. Second, because many held that the signs pointed to the end, prayer was an instrument of intercession for nonbelievers, whom evangelicals judged were lost. Premillennial popularizer Hal Lindsey wrote that the proper response to the ever-nearing end was ‘‘far from being pessimistic and dropping out of life. We should be rejoicing in the knowledge that Christ may return any moment for us. This should spur us on to share the good news of salvation in Christ with as many as possible.’’37 The agenda for a September 14, 1945, meeting of the ICL noted, ‘‘The alarming trends of the present day call for sober thinking and earnest praying.’’38 Billy Graham and Gordon Lindsay agreed. In

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a 1970 press conference, Graham commented, ‘‘The prospects of man reaching 2000 a.d. are very dim without God’s intervention. . . . God will have to intervene to save us from ourselves.’’39 On a similar note, Lindsay emphasized the importance of postponing the end for revival: ‘‘There’s work to be done yet. There is a great revival to take place on the earth. But it’s the prayers of the saints and the people of God that’s going to hold this thing off because our prayers play a part in it.’’40 In the shadow of Armageddon, evangelicals used prayer to actively seek the evangelization of the world. Finally, believers used prayer to accelerate the coming of the end. In his book Re-entry: Striking Parallels between Today’s News Events and Christ’s Second Coming, Billy Graham associate John Wesley White urged prayer for the coming of the Lord.41 Somewhat paradoxically, for evangelists the sooner the end-times arrived, the sooner Christians would receive their eternal reward. In this way, prophecy provided believers hope in a period marked by fear and uncertainty. According to Graham, ‘‘No matter how foreboding the future, the Christian knows the end of the story of history. We are heading toward a glorious climax.’’42 Praying for the end, many believed, brought them that much closer to this promise. The contradictions between praying for a postponement of the end and praying for its acceleration are glaringly obvious. On the other hand, these inconsistencies seemed to make sense to the believer. How did evangelicals account for them? Many probably did not see them or were content to live with them. On one level, though, believers’ acceptance of the inconsistencies is understandable if the goals of these seemingly antithetical prayers are examined together. In both, the authors longed for their eternal reward. Many believed religious revival and evangelism were necessary before the end could occur. Some may also have prayed out of compassion for their nonbeliever neighbors, friends, family members, and even enemies; prayer for the second coming did not necessarily mean that premillennialists wanted the end to come without revival. Contradictions abounded in the Cold War United States. Racial tension bubbled underneath American claims of democratic world leadership. Generational conflict, increasingly evident with the beginnings of a deviant youth culture, cut across images of Leave It to Beaver households. Speaking at a prayer breakfast at the 1968 National Governors’ Conference, Senator Frank Carlson noted another paradox of the period, which ‘‘produced our greatest progress in the material world [and] has also produced—at the same time—an environment and forces which threaten the complete destruction . . . of all we have created.’’43 In this context, the evangelical emphasis on apocalyptic prophecy juxtaposed with prayer does not seem so out of the ordinary. It was common to see, for example, a Moody Monthly editorial call for Christian Americans to ‘‘pray for our country’’ and simultaneously to ‘‘remember that at best we live in a dying world that is marked for judgment, and look daily for the coming of the

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Lord.’’44 Expectant evangelical premillennialists generally did not respond by sitting back and waiting for the trumpet of the Lord to sound. Instead, they took particular action; most commonly, they prayed. Evangelical attention to mission work illustrated the utilization of prayer as action while demonstrating more of the contradictory balancing act evangelicals achieved between apocalypticism on one hand and hope in the power of God to enact change on the other. Missionaries like Paul and Lois Steward, working in Bolivia in 1963, continuously cited Christ’s Great Commission to ‘‘go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.’’ At the same time, Reverend George R. Warner, president of the World Gospel Mission, wrote, ‘‘This is the time for a vigorous advance on all fronts. The deep, dark desperate needs of today’s world and the shortness of time demand it.’’45 Other missionaries blended visions of despair with those of hope. Missionary Devee Brown wrote that ‘‘even in ‘times like these’ when the world is in a state of turmoil, we are thankful that we have ‘an anchor that is sure,’ even the Lord Jesus Christ.’’46 Millennial urgency, in part spurred by the expansion of world evangelism that many interpreted as a sign of the end in itself, helped to inspire missionaries who were actively seeking to save the world through conversion. Evangelical missions thus undermined the premillennial idea that the world would only get worse as time passed. Prayer was a crucial part of the mission experience. Those evangelical missionaries working abroad continuously called for prayer support from Christians at home, and churches across the United States made prayer for missionaries a priority. The name of the monthly publication of the World Gospel Mission, Call to Prayer . . . For Missions, clearly demonstrates that link. The serial included stories and articles of missionaries around the world and listed ‘‘prayer bands’’ that enumerated specific answers to prayer and continued needs. The long, heterogeneous list of concerns and participating bands shows the widespread importance of these efforts. At the same time that evangelicals’ prayers were reinforcing and strengthening religious identity, they were also shaping national identity, mixing prophetic interpretations with patriotism and spiritual engagement. Many Americans during the Cold War, both religious and nonreligious, stressed the connection between God and the nation. Unlike the ‘‘heathen communists,’’ these Americans were convinced that divine favor had fallen on the United States. Reverend S. M. Shoemaker of Calvary Church in New York spoke of that association in 1949: ‘‘I believe that the heart of the ‘American Way’ is the Christian Way. . . . Let us continually pray to God to ‘strengthen that which He has wrought for us.’ ’’47 According to Billy Graham, prayer was a crucial part of ‘‘Christian citizenship.’’ He argued in World Aflame that ‘‘the Christian is a citizen of two worlds. In view of this dual citizenship, he is told in the scriptures not only to pray for those in political authority but to participate and serve his government.’’48 As evangelical

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millennialism was becoming more and more acceptable to the larger national culture, prayer blurred the line of the separation between church and state for those who believed it was vital to pray for the country and the country’s leaders. Using prayer as an expression of citizenship gave agency to those who believed in the power of prayer to change things. By praying for their leaders, Americans not in a position to directly affect government policy judged that they could do so indirectly. In a 1953 publication of the Koinonia Foundation, an article that called on Christians to pray for their senators and representatives was accompanied by a drawing of an enlarged Christ hovering behind and looking down on the Capitol building, his hands outstretched. By offering up prayers for U.S. political leaders, citizens could call down the protection and guidance of God.49 Even young citizens could pray. In an effort to get young people to learn to express their personal faith, Decision Magazine, the publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, sponsored an essay contest for readers twenty-five and younger in 1969. In eight hundred words or less, participants were to write on ‘‘Why I Believe in God.’’ The first prize was a trip to Israel, second prize was a scholarship to the School of Christian Writing, and third prize was a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to a Christian bookstore. Several hundred young people entered the contest, submitting their pictures, birthdates, and addresses with their essays. These compositions, which the magazine retained, give insight into the religious experiences and beliefs of young evangelicals, as well as older readers who sent in essays in spite of being over the age limit. Because of the deluge of prophecy material by evangelical leaders and clergy, it is easy to concentrate on their commentaries and neglect the views of laypeople that are less easily attained. These essays are an excellent source for understanding the beliefs of the evangelical general public, especially of young Christians. They show that the young contestants shared their older coreligionists’ use of prayer as a way to act on prophecy and reveals their faith in the efficacy of prayer in advancing mission efforts and in making them better citizens. The majority of the essays focused on personal testimonies: how the writers had perceived God’s actions in their individual lives. Participants mentioned everything from incidents of healing to intellectual struggles to personal feelings of religious peace and forgiveness. Many wrote of seeing proof of God in nature and several professed to witnessing God’s answers to prayers. A young woman from Houston wrote, ‘‘[God] answers prayers. He is the creator, sustainer, and end of all things.’’ Twenty-five-year-old Billy Genet of Kentucky elaborated on this sentiment and made it personal: ‘‘I talk with God through prayer and he hears my prayers and proves it by answering them.’’ A Springfield, Oregon, teen reasoned that though we may not understand God’s plan until the end, his existence was proven because answered prayers

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outnumbered unanswered ones. In all of these cases, prayer was seen as a key to understanding and believing in God.50 Though the content of these essays varied, certain patterns and commonalities persisted, including evidence of a deep-seated confidence in prophecy. One nineteen-year-old from Roanoke, Virginia, listed three reasons for his belief: ‘‘Yes, I believe in God. Answered prayer is proof of Him. An orderly and beautiful universe is proof of Him. The wisdom, truth and fulfilled prophecies in the Bible are proof of Him!’’ The majority of the essays echoed one or more of these three explanations of God’s existence: answered prayer, an orderly universe, and fulfilled biblical prophecy. Many of the entries not only mentioned fulfilled prophecy but used it to explain current world events, just as many evangelical leaders did. Israel was an especially favorite topic, it being only a few years after the 1967 War and in light of the fact that the contest winners would receive a free trip to the region. A sixteen-year-old from Ohio wrote, ‘‘I believe in God because of what is happening in the land of Israel. . . . Since 1947 [sic] when Israel became a nation this prophecy is being fulfilled. The short war of June 5 through 11, 1967 shows that God is still making it possible for His people to have the land promised them.’’ A ninety-year-old writer to the magazine agreed with the assertion that Cold War incidents demonstrated the active presence of the divine on earth: ‘‘World events are unfolding exactly according to Bible prophecy, proving that God is; and is in control of history.’’ Several essays went a step beyond using prophecy as proof of divine providence and interpreted current events such as the 1967 War as indicators of the second coming of Christ. Those who did so often followed the example of evangelical speakers and leaders by using prophecy as a tool to understand the world and reacting to those interpretations through prayer and by emphasizing mission work. Fifteen-year-old Marla Jean Burger of Mason City, Illinois, wrote, ‘‘You might ask what we who are Christians are doing to tell others about his second coming that we are so certain of. As Christians, we must take advantage of all opportunities to witness and be in constant prayer.’’ This young writer saw the proximity of the second coming as a call for Christians to carry out two main duties: evangelizing nonbelievers and prayer. Seventeen-year-old Rita Hingson perceived the connection of the second coming and prayer differently: ‘‘I believe the second coming of Christ will move many of the nonbelievers. I pray that it comes very soon so others will have the sensational feeling when they believe in God as I do.’’ Instead of seeing prayer as a way to ‘‘win the world’’ for Jesus before his return, Hingson prayed for Jesus Christ’s return in order to convert nonbelievers. In both cases, these young women identified prayer as action. Both also linked prayer to the second coming, arguing that Jesus’ return was near because of prophetic interpretations of current events. The expressions of faith that these young evangelicals exhibited accompanied culturally informed impressions of citizenship and national identity.

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Many echoed evangelical leaders such as Billy Graham and commented on the ‘‘national immorality’’ of the United States. Others repeated the general national aversion to communism and warned of the doom that would result if the nation refused to turn to God and allowed communism to overrun the country. One young essayist quoted the Supreme Court’s characterization of the United States as ‘‘religious people who presuppose a Supreme Being.’’ According to him, ‘‘The question facing Americans today concerns the accuracy of this statement. We must do some soul searching in this most pressing period of history!’’ The tone of many of the essays followed a similar vein. The nation was facing a pivotal point and must choose God to prosper or apocalyptic doom was inevitable. Prayer, of course, was not merely confined to the evangelical community. Other groups in the United States, both religious and secular, accepted prayer as a component of American culture and adapted it as a means of action. A Ladies’ Home Journal poll in 1948 found that 90 percent of respondents said that they prayed; 56 percent prayed ‘‘frequently.’’ In a 1953 Catholic Digest query, 92 percent said that they prayed every day.51 Prayer’s universality made it an important device in securing the role of religion as a defining measure of national identity. Ironically, as it assumed a variety of symbolic meanings to different religious, ethnic, regional, and cultural groups, prayer became a larger expression of American cohesion. Politicians themselves paid tribute to prayer’s efficacy. In a 1968 speech at the National Governors’ Conference in Cincinnati, Senator Frank Carlson articulated the connection between the country’s leadership and prayer: ‘‘Go through the pages of history and you will note that all the really great leaders of the world were praying men and women. They learned early its power of renourishing the spirit and giving to the mind both its courage and its daring— for prayer brushes away so much that is irrelevant and so much that is dross.’’52 Carlson’s comments echoed those of Minnesota Congressman Roy W. Wier, who wrote to Christianity Today editor Carl Henry twelve years earlier: ‘‘In these troublesome days and world chaos, I think all of us should give a little time to meditation and prayer and ask for divine guidance in our efforts for peace among all nations. With fervent prayer and God’s help we will win this great struggle with honor to our own country and all the peoples of this stricken earth.’’53 Prayer fit squarely into the American cultural landscape as JudeoChristian leaders believed it was an essential duty—not just a spiritual duty, but a political one. As Americans prayed for their leaders, government officials asked for God’s help and intervention in the nation’s affairs. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s office sent out at least thirty letters to individuals and groups across the United States in February 1953 thanking them for their prayer support.

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Dulles’s letter to one eighth-grade class at St. Anthony’s School in Atkinson, Illinois, illustrated his apparent dedication to prayer: ‘‘Thank you for your recent letter concerning the need for prayer in the conduct of our national affairs. I have always felt that our goal of peace can be won only if we seek spiritual guidance and assistance.’’54 President Eisenhower’s actions and rhetoric substantiated the traditional presidential commitment to prayer in spite of doubts regarding the real intensity of Ike’s personal faith. (At one point Eisenhower insisted that religion was important and added, ‘‘I don’t care what it is.’’) The president’s leadership mirrored the nation’s nominal recognition of and reliance on prayer and religion during this period. Eisenhower kept a Bible on his bedside table throughout both terms and continually noted the place of religion in American society in public addresses. In 1954, signing the bill that added the phrase ‘‘under God’’ to the pledge of allegiance, the president revealed his pleasure that the country, under the threat of nuclear war, would now be giving credit to the ‘‘Almighty.’’ Inviting Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, an elder of the Mormon Church, to give a prayer at the first cabinet meeting, Eisenhower and his cabinet opened with prayer at all subsequent meetings.55 As a Mormon, Benson and his religious role in Ike’s cabinet meetings demonstrated both the universal nature of prayer and its place in the trend toward ecumenism in the United States. All of the Protestant denominations, as well as the Catholic Church and many non-Christian faiths, understood and accepted the practice of prayer. As a means to action in a period filled with apocalyptic signs, prayer served as a shared exercise that brought people of various faiths and creeds together to combat perceived and real threats. Catholic organizations like the Family Life Bureau, established in 1931 to promote Christian families, helped archdioceses such as the Archdiocese of San Francisco develop educational programs for families that emphasized prayer in the home.56 The first Catholic president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, followed in President Eisenhower’s footsteps by participating in and speaking at prayer breakfasts in Washington. At the First Lady Breakfast in 1961, held by the Congressional Wives Prayer Group, President Kennedy reiterated the understood connection between religion and the United States: ‘‘I do not regard religion as a weapon in the Cold War. I regard it as the essence of the differences which separate those on the other side of the Iron Curtain and ourselves.’’57 In a press conference following Engel v. Vitale, the controversial 1962 Supreme Court case that banned official prayers in public schools, the president tried to create a balance between two acknowledged pieces of American civil religion that appeared to many to be at odds with each other: ‘‘We have a very easy remedy here, and that is to pray ourselves. We can pray a good deal more at home and attend our churches with fidelity, and emphasize the true meaning of prayer in the lives of our children.’’58 While the president pleaded

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with people to abide by the Supreme Court decision in this statement, his words made clear that he understood the deep reverence for prayer that existed in the United States. The significance of prayer in American political culture was illustrated again by President Lyndon Johnson’s proposal in 1964 to establish a ‘‘memorial to God’’ in Washington, DC. Some noted that Johnson’s use of the word ‘‘memorial’’ unwittingly implied that God was dead; the president’s statements, on the contrary, emphasized that the idea of God and religion was alive and well in the United States. This monument, according to Johnson, would be ‘‘a center of prayer,’’ acknowledging the ‘‘God who made us all’’ in the capital of the ‘‘great nation.’’ It would serve to demonstrate that ‘‘the true image of Washington is not that of power or pomp or plenty. It is, rather, that of a prayerful capital of good and God-fearing people.’’ The NAE endorsed the president’s plan. In a letter to Johnson, NAE President Dr. Robert A. Cook argued that such a memorial would recognize that ‘‘the God of our American heritage is the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible.’’59 Perhaps nothing reveals more clearly the way that religion, and in particular Christianity, penetrated American culture and defined national identity than this proposal. Johnson’s proposition did not go unchallenged by evangelicals. The editors of the Capital Baptist, a publication of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention, claimed that the conception of a memorial to God would only cause disagreement and confusion, similar to the building of the Tower of Babel. Instead, they argued that the kind of ‘‘memorial that God wants is a changed life, not a statue or a building made by the hands of man.’’60 In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, Virginia ministerial student William T. Price had similar objections: ‘‘I heartily agree to erect a monument to God, but let it not be one created with human hands. Let it be a monument of flesh and blood, of love and concern, of duty and devotion to God and country. Let the nation see examples of our leaders praying.’’61 Whether evangelicals and others supported or opposed the memorial to God, prayer appeared to be the accepted means of demonstrating and acting on one’s faith. It was the understood duty of America’s leaders and citizens. The association of prayer and leadership had existed in the United States since the country’s inception. What made this period unique was the supplementary willingness of the mainstream culture to accept the evangelical apocalyptic vision. In a world that seemed to be falling apart, prayer as action appeared all the more important. Furthermore, as prayer became more and more accepted in the larger culture, it also served to legitimize political leaders who claimed to harness its power. Politicians utilized prayer to establish an American identity in opposition to a communist one, as when a 1959 congressional resolution, the Captive Nations Declaration, announced a week of prayer for the people of Eastern Europe, who were ‘‘enslaved’’ under the

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Soviet system.62 The possibility exists that prayer may have simply been a way for politicians to avoid taking a meaningful position on religion. But even if this were the case, it proves that prayer was a significant part of American civil religion. It had become subtly entrenched in American political culture. A traveler down a number of U.S. highways in 2007 may encounter a message from God in the form of a giant billboard: ‘‘You know that love your neighbor thing? I meant that,’’ one reads. Usually in simple black and white and signed by ‘‘God,’’ these signs loom large above thousands of vehicles spewing carbon monoxide and may be next to advertisements for those icons of American consumerism telling Americans to have it their way. This minor attempt to bring God back into the nation’s day-to-day activities has a long history. Fifty years earlier, the American Legion sponsored a ‘‘Back to God’’ program as part of their service ‘‘for God and Country.’’ One principal part of the agenda included a drive to encourage an increase in the nation’s prayer life. Billboards, prayer cards, radio and television scripts, editorials, films, and postcards all carried the theme. One billboard displayed a picture of a ‘‘typical’’ nuclear family— white, with a husband, wife, and two children—sitting around the dinner table in prayer. It urged Americans to ‘‘Pray at Mealtime . . . for a better America and home life.’’ Another emphasized the link between God, faithful Americans, and U.S. safety: ‘‘America’s First Line of Defense—God and His Church— Attend Every Sunday.’’ Yet another proclaimed the importance of children’s prayers with a picture of a young girl with two hair ribbons folding her hands in front of a stained glass window. ‘‘Teach Children to Have Faith in God,’’ it exhorted. The Legion made ‘‘Back to God’’ kits available from its national headquarters upon request, offered suggested programs for religious services, distributed lists of ‘‘approved prayers’’ for meetings and ceremonies, and designated the Sunday immediately preceding or following February 3 as Four Chaplains Day, in honor of four chaplains of different faiths who died when the World War II ship Dorchester sank.63 According to the Legion, prayer was an essential ingredient in guiding the United States ‘‘back to God.’’ One aspect of the program was the distribution of ‘‘grace-before-meal cards.’’ Placed on tables in hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and railroad dining cars, the cards displayed prayers approved by Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious leaders. Pleased that the cards frequently disappeared, the Legion claimed that the cards ‘‘swept the nation.’’ Accompanied by the other efforts, the ‘‘Back to God’’ agenda was a clear attempt to infuse religion into the U.S. national character. Prayer, as a means to seek reliance on divine grace, was a way ‘‘to arm our people in a time of peril with the ageless and unanswerable weapons of moral and spiritual might,’’ according to National Commander Arthur J. Connell. President Eisenhower’s message to the Legion echoed these sentiments: ‘‘Common faith in God is a common bond

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among us. In our fundamental faith, we are all one. Together we thank the Power that has made and preserved us as a nation. By the millions, we speak prayers, we sing hymns—and no matter what their words may be, their spirit is the same—‘In God is our trust.’’’64 In spite of the pervasiveness of prayer in government rhetoric and on patriotic agendas, the notion of the importance of faith in God was not shared by all Americans. In fact, many scorned religious commitment or questioned its relevance. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl challenged the authority and inhibitions of traditional society, within which Judeo-Christianity in the United States was tightly interwoven, in favor of the freer spirituality of the Beat generation. The anti-authoritarian spirit of 1960s America culminated in the death-of-God theology. Time magazine asked the famous question on its April 8, 1966, cover, ‘‘Is God Dead?’’ The appearance of ‘‘Christian atheists,’’ who believed in faith without ‘‘God the Father,’’ and the spread of ‘‘practical atheists,’’ who simply did not have time for God, led the Time feature to conclude that many Americans had even taken to questioning conventional ideas about God. For others, the level of commitment to their faith remained less than nominal. Pollsters found that in 1965, although 97 percent of Americans believed that God exists, only 27 percent called themselves truly religious.65 Nonetheless, the way secular institutions and political figures in the Cold War embraced Judeo-Christianity publicly by connecting national integrity with religion inculcated God in the dominant national identity. In part because of this understanding of what it meant to be American, evangelicals were able to reshape their relationship with the mainstream culture, identifying with it more closely. In many cases, grassroots Americans deliberately set out to merge evangelical and national identities. In the mid-1960s, just outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, a self-proclaimed ‘‘group of Bible believing, freedom loving, University students, who after several weeks of prayer ha[d] been burdened for lost souls, and a dying land,’’ combed the area with ‘‘patriotic as well as Gospel literature combined with personal testimony.’’ In their explanatory tract, the creators of ‘‘Operation Patriot’’ insisted that they were not sponsored by any official organization. The group’s purpose and ideology mixed Cold War apocalypticism, patriotism, faith, and prayer in a familiar way. The motivation was fear of the future ‘‘as a result of our disarmament while the enemy is still arming with the intent of a surprise nuclear attack.’’ The solution was increased patriotism and faith: ‘‘If America is to be saved from the disaster to which it is headed, it will only be as the Christians rally under the banner of the Cross and take the Gospel to their fellow Americans in restorative power.’’ The way to the solution was prayer. Operation Patriot urged Christians to pray for Christians in ‘‘Satan-oppressed areas,’’ for more missionaries, for wisdom for leaders, for more literature, for transportation for Operation Patriot workers, and for God’s blessing on the campaign. ‘‘Our God can be the god of our salvation even in this hour. But if we fail in our part there is only defeat and slavery ahead. It is

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true that we live in the last days of this age, but we believe God will perform miracles of deliverance even in these days. It’s up to you and to me.’’66

Prayer as Controversy As tools of interpretation and action, apocalypticism and prayer played important roles in promoting a spirit of ecumenism within the Christian Church in the United States. At the same time, prayer served as a divisive force, separating conservative evangelicals from other Christians and from secular America. This became especially evident in the early 1960s when the Supreme Court prohibited sponsored prayer in public schools in Engel v. Vitale and devotional Bible reading in Abington School District v. Schempp.67 When the school district in New Hyde Park, New York, instructed schools to administer the recitation of a prayer recommended by the New York State Board of Regents, a group of parents (two Jewish, one Unitarian, one member of the Ethical Culture Society, and one ‘‘unbeliever’’) complained. The prayer, to be repeated at the commencement of the school day, avowed, ‘‘Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.’’ The parents objected to the prayer as a violation of their own beliefs and as an infringement of their First Amendment rights, which guaranteed freedom from ‘‘an establishment of religion.’’ In its 1962 decision the Supreme Court agreed: ‘‘We think that by using its public school system to encourage recitation of the Regents’ prayer, the State of New York has adopted a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause.’’ Justice Black, delivering the opinion of the Court, concluded that ‘‘it is neither sacrilegious nor antireligious to say that each separate government in this country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the people themselves and to those the people choose to look to for religious guidance.’’68 The reaction to this case illustrated the controversial and divisive aspects of prayer in the United States. Evangelical and other Americans considered prayer an important part of national culture, but this period witnessed an intense dialogue over the proper place of such religious observances. According to a 1964 University of Michigan Survey Research Center poll of 1,571 people, 63 percent responded negatively to the Supreme Court, and the prayer question warranted more negative reactions than any other. But some individuals and organizations—including the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, the Christian Century, and several Jewish groups—applauded the Court’s decision. When New York Representative Frank J. Becker, leading the congressional movement to overturn the Supreme Court school devotional decisions, proposed a constitutional amendment that would have allowed voluntary prayer in public schools, the House Judiciary Committee received twelve cartons of

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mail. Eight thousand of the thirteen thousand personal responses supported an amendment and five thousand opposed it.69 The Engel and Schempp cases had produced enough controversy to initiate a new chapter in the national debate over the proper meaning of the separation of church and state. Though some evangelical groups, most notably the American Baptist Convention, supported Engel,70 the majority reacted to the decision as an attack on prayer and religion. Charles E. Rice, author of The Supreme Court and Public Prayer: The Need for Restraint, placed the debate over prayer in public schools within the apocalyptic Cold War paradigm, associating what he saw as an attempt to ‘‘erect agnosticism as the official religion of American public life’’ with communism: If the school prayer cases have the effect of erecting agnosticism as the official religion of American public life, the event will have consequences beyond the violence done to the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. The United States of America are locked in a struggle which can issue in the triumph or extinction of liberty throughout the world. The conflict, moreover, is one of spiritual as well as material dimensions. Indeed, the apocalyptic nature of the Cold War follows from the fact that it involves a collision of irreconcilably contradictory philosophies as to the nature of man himself.71 Among conservative Christians, opposition to the Supreme Court decisions was fierce. In one example, the school board in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, moved to disobey the ruling, choosing instead to follow a 137-year-old state law that required prayer in schools. Explaining their decision, board members made clear what they considered to be the direct connection between America’s historic struggle for independence and the community’s defiance of the Supreme Court, ‘‘challenging and defying the world movement toward atheism.’’ According to board member Lawrence Delude, as the ‘‘cradle of liberty,’’ Massachusetts would be ‘‘where the first shots are going to be fired.’’72 Engel and Schempp did decrease the number of schools across the country with devotional exercises, but others reported continued practices in spite of the Supreme Court. Two surveys, one in 1962 and one in 1965, showed a significant drop in Bible readings in public schools. The approximately 67 percent of schools reportedly holding Bible devotionals in the East in 1962 fell to a little over 4 percent by 1965. Nonetheless, polls of school administrators continued to confirm strong personal opposition to the rulings. Resistance sometimes was a result of ignorance of the decisions but other times was open and deliberate.73 Evangelicals who opposed the rulings expressed their objections by citing their own conceptions of the national past that were infused with God and Christianity. The Brookfield Board of Education believed that they were continuing to advance the struggle for liberty with their defiance. Others warned

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that the Supreme Court distorted American history. In a Los Angeles news conference, Billy Graham voiced his opposition: I am opposed to the ruling of the Supreme Court. . . . I think that this is a nation under God, and I think that we must recognize God in our national life. I believe that we should maintain our religious freedoms in separation of church and state, but I don’t think that this does violence to the church and state relationship to have Bible reading and prayer in the schools and I rather think that there will be a constitutional amendment at some point.74 Some did fight the Supreme Court decisions by proposing numerous constitutional amendments to allow for school prayer, first holding hearings before the House Committee on the Judiciary in April 1964. New York Representative Frank J. Becker led the legislative appeal to amend the Constitution in response to the Engel decision. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler resisted calls by Becker and others to hold hearings on such an amendment but eventually gave in when Becker threatened to discharge the resolution from the committee. The language of the 150 proposed amendments was similar to that of H.J. Resolution 918: ‘‘Nothing in this Constitution shall be deemed to prohibit the offering, reading from, or listening to prayers or biblical scriptures, if participation therein is on a voluntary basis, in any governmental or public school, institution, or place.’’ Celler began by acknowledging the thirty-five different forms of the prayer amendment: ‘‘Their number and variety attest to the widespread interest and the many schools of thought on this important subject.’’ The testimony and prepared statements that followed for eighteen days further validated the veracity of Celler’s remark.75 Representative Becker made his case for the prayer amendment by emphasizing what he believed were the apocalyptic consequences of the Supreme Court rulings: ‘‘It is my deep, personal and humble opinion that nothing could be more important. The welfare and the entire future of our beloved America depends upon how we handle the most dynamic tradition in our national life— dependence upon Almighty God.’’ He continued by adding that no problem that the United States had faced would compare with ‘‘the destitution which would befall America if we ever permit ourselves to officially outlaw the name of God in our public institutions.’’ Becker claimed that at least one thousand U.S. organizations had notified him of their support for a prayer amendment and cited letters by individuals such as Robert L. Turk from American University, who elaborated on the theme of an apocalyptic threat: ‘‘But even more serious is what they have done by denying our children the exposure to God which is essential for the development of strong and moral character of which the leaders of tomorrow must be built. Without this spiritual guidance we cannot endure.’’76 A plethora of government officials, religious leaders, and prepared statements by religious and educational organizations came before the committee,

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both in support of and in opposition to a constitutional amendment. Some, such as the editors of the Jesuit publication America, stood against ‘‘amending the [First] amendment,’’ in spite of retaining reservations about the Supreme Court decisions. Along with the Baptist Message, others believed that Becker’s amendment opened the door for ‘‘serious religious conflicts in our land’’ as they recognized the complications of endorsing prayer in pluralistic communities.77 The hearings had highlighted the divisive, complicated nature of the prayer issue. After they ended, the Judiciary Committee and the House failed to act on the amendment proposals further. But two years later, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments debated another amendment. This time, Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen presented a resolution that would have permitted public officials to conduct voluntary prayer but would disallow authorization of a prayer’s ‘‘form and content.’’ Dirksen believed that the House Judiciary Committee hearings two years earlier had neglected to acknowledge the opinions of ‘‘the common man’’: ‘‘As I went through that, it occurred to me that somehow we had had every sophisticated argument except an argument from the common man of this country, who was defined as one who works and prays and pays his bills and goes to church, rears a family in decency as law-abiding children. Strange, in all this, we have not heard from any of those, and we are beginning to hear from him by the millions, and he is going to have his say.’’ Apocalyptic notions about the consequences of removing prayer from schools were repeated in these hearings. Carl McIntire, head of the ACCC, told the Committee, ‘‘A nation whose youth cannot pray in school is doomed to disaster.’’78 But arguments opposing any constitutional amendment on prayer also resurfaced, and Dirksen eventually failed to garner the necessary votes in the Senate. Other attempts to pass a prayer amendment continued to pop up over the years. In the end, the debate over the amendments displayed the pervasiveness of prayer in U.S. culture and underscored the controversy over the meaning of prayer in the national political arena. The conversation over prayer in public schools continued in the courts as well. In 1965, the U.S. Court of Appeals heard a case involving the rights of kindergarten students who had been prohibited from reciting ‘‘God is Great, God is Good and We Thank Him for our Food’’ before eating their milk and cookies. In Stein v. Oshinsky, the court ruled that a state (in this case, the principal) could not be compelled to allow people to pray in public facilities ‘‘wherever and whenever they desire.’’ In the same year, though, a Michigan federal district court granted public school students the right to pray and read the Bible before and after school.79 Clearly, the dialogue that Engel and Schempp had intensified had not ended. The conservative opposition to the Supreme Court rulings and the debate over a constitutional amendment that followed demonstrated the contested meaning of prayer in America. While prayer, blended with apocalypticism,

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brought Christians and non-Christians together in some respects, Americans disagreed on the ‘‘proper’’ use of prayer as responsive action. Even though differences over a prayer amendment were vigorous, the House of Representatives’ willingness to debate it formally was, nonetheless, an acknowledgment of the permanence and importance of prayer in American culture. Evangelicals continued to react with alarm to what they believed were signs of the eradication of prayer from the national political culture. The Supreme Court prayer decisions were followed by lower court rulings such as that of a federal appeals court in 1980, which stated that North Carolina could not include ‘‘official’’ prayers on road maps.80 Born-again Christians considered these serious blows and the apocalyptic language they often used to describe the consequences of these decisions to the health of the country reflected the high value of prayer to evangelicals. These various ‘‘prayer decisions’’ were indicators of the evolution of mainstream national identity from the Cold War into the late 1970s. As the period progressed, the fear that brought together the apocalypticism of secular America and the premillennialism of the evangelical community began to taper off. Within that time, however, evangelicals had established a new relationship with the larger national culture that associated Judeo-Christianity with national identity. Prayer enabled that transition for political and religious leaders and for the American public. Although it opened up ways for evangelicals to participate in the discourse over national identity, it also limited that participation by channeling it into particular accepted means.


3 Putting the Trumpet to Their Lips

The sound of our trumpets should be heard round the world. If our silver instrument is unused and silent, the hands that hold it will bear the blood of those who should have been warned of God’s promised judgment. If, however, we sound out the clarion call to repentance . . . we shall have delivered our souls. —‘‘The Trumpet,’’ Biblical Missions, February 1960 In evangelical culture the trumpet evokes biblical images of celebration, tumbling walls, battle preparation, and the rapture to come, the moment when Jesus returns to the earth to rescue believers in the end-times. The trumpet holds a symbolic place in premillennial expectations. Before Christ returns to rapture the saints, ‘‘the trumpet call of God’’ will sound. Evangelical writer Hyman J. Appelman claimed that he could ‘‘see the angel with the platinum trumpet studded with diamonds in his hand, looking at Jesus, ready for the signal, the blowing of the trumpet of the first resurrection.’’1 Others used the image of the trumpet to urge Christians on to missionary work. In this sense, evangelicals saw themselves as God’s ‘‘instruments,’’ warning the world against sin and alerting people to the earth’s approaching end. At least one evangelical publication in the early 1960s used the theme of the trumpet to emphasize the importance of mission activity. Biblical Missions, a publication of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, frequently used the trumpet to connect the imminent end of the world with the ‘‘Great Commission.’’ Evangelicals considered the Great Commission, a reference to Jesus

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Christ’s instructions to his disciples before he ascended into heaven, to be of primary importance in Christianity: ‘‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’’2 The emphasis on mission work thus became linked to increased millennial speculation during the Cold War. The trumpet was a convenient symbol because it incorporated multiple meanings, synchronizing missionary and millennial notions. Biblical Missions offered trumpet imagery frequently during the early 1960s to highlight the importance of and the impetus for mission activity. According to one author, ‘‘It is most fitting in the present religious situation that the Lord’s trumpeters sound an alarm.’’3 These references, like the dialogue surrounding missionary and millennial discourse in general, often took on a political tone. One such article appeared in a weekly paper in Taiwan called The Trumpet, a publication established by the Taiwan Council of Christian Churches. Robert McGill, missionary to Taiwan in 1961, described the process of getting permission to print the paper: ‘‘We have just received the Ministry of Interior’s approval for the licensure of The Trumpet. . . . We are confident that they have granted us approval because the testimony of the [ICCC] has consistently upheld the purposes and ideals of the Republic of China.’’4 As a conservative, anticommunist organization, the ICCC benefited from its political support of the Republic of China (ROC) and its condemnation of the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland. The ROC’s patronage allowed the ICCC division in Taiwan to produce religious literature that spread both its missionary and millennial ideology by utilizing trumpet imagery. In this case, the ICCC’s political and religious identity worked in concert to advance a particular ideology that was enforced and spread by the Cold War. Conservative evangelical missionaries shared their methods and much of their message with American government propagandists. Government agencies such as Voice of America (VOA) and other organizations not formally connected with religious institutions (the Committee of One Million, for example) became ‘‘Cold War missionaries,’’ spreading the American ‘‘gospel’’ and defining it at the same time. That message included a vague adherence to religion, to faith in God, and to anticommunism. A ‘‘culture of urgency,’’ drawn from premillennial prophecy and Cold War anticommunism, induced both evangelical missionary efforts and U.S. propaganda. This urgency built an ideological bridge that aligned the evangelical community more closely with the secular Cold War dominant discourse. Premillennialists’ particular end-times theology held that the world would continue to deteriorate until the culmination of the final battle of Armageddon, followed by the return of Jesus Christ. As Cold War events appeared to fulfill biblical descriptions of certain ‘‘signs of the times,’’ mission work took on added significance. Evangelicals believed that increased missionary effort was a ‘‘sign of the end in itself,’’ so engaging in mission work became a self-fulfillment of

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the evangelical subculture’s eschatology. Furthermore, missionaries who supposed that the world would end very soon were in a rush to ‘‘save’’ the unbeliever before it was ‘‘too late.’’ At the same time, certain specific secular and government institutions undertook their own Cold War ‘‘mission’’ activities. Committee of One Million members, State Department officials who relied on evangelical missionaries as informal diplomats, VOA broadcasts, and the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow all played a role in advancing the U.S. Cold War message. These government pursuits shared with evangelical mission efforts a sense of urgency that had been generated by the Cold War.

Evangelical Cold War Missionaries Dana L. Robert has noted a lack of thorough, scholarly analysis of missionary mediators in the mid-twentieth century. The ‘‘missionary factor,’’ according to Robert, has not been adequately considered in examinations of anticommunism in the United States.5 Research has focused largely on the strong missionary associations of some diplomats and experts in China. John Leighton Stuart, a southern Presbyterian missionary, became U.S. ambassador to China in 1946. Other Chinese specialists, including John Davies and John Service, were children of missionaries. Studies of these missionary-diplomatic connections suggest that a sense of duty and service developed among missionaries and their children. Furthermore, duty to faith paralleled duty to country. Donald Davies described this in 1963: ‘‘This frightful missionary complex really does things to a person. I had a strong feeling of wanting to be of service to my nation. Perhaps it’s because when you’re born abroad, and brought up largely with foreign children, you tend to become a super-patriot. And then there was also the ethical feeling that a missionary son has: It is not only a duty to serve others, but an honor.’’6 But if missions connected an evangelical worldview with political action during this period, how did they do so? Although these studies demonstrate the association in individual political leaders, they do not sufficiently explain the reason behind the larger movement. Analyzing missionary expressions of evangelical millenarian thought that complemented secular apocalypticism shows that a ‘‘culture of urgency’’ developed during the Cold War. This generated among evangelical missionaries and U.S. government officials the sense that time was running out and that their proselytizing and anticommunist efforts were of great, immediate importance. The resulting common anxiety in the evangelical and secular communities created a shared identity that joined the two groups together. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Protestant missionary movement in the United States had become increasingly dominated by evangelicals. One estimate has the number of North American Protestant

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missionaries in the 1930s at approximately twelve thousand, with 40 percent of that number consisting of evangelical organizations. By the early 1950s, about half of the 18,500 missionaries were evangelical, and by the early 1990s, that proportion had increased to 90 percent.7 The 1962 edition of the Directory of Foreign Mission Agencies in North America listed forty-six member associations and six associate members of the Evangelical Fellowship of Missions Agencies (EFMA), an organization commissioned by the NAE in 1945 to unite various denominational and nondenominational mission boards. The directory also recorded thirty-eight members and thirteen associates of the evangelical Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association. Even the ultraconservative Associated Missions, International Council of Christian Churches allowed the liberal NCC-connected manual to publish a partial list of eleven of its members. The mission organizations of these three evangelical associations together compare to the fifty societies that reportedly belonged to the Division of Foreign Missions of the NCC. They all sent representatives across the globe. In 1962, they collectively sent a total of 21,520 missionaries. Japan, India, Brazil, and Congo were the top four fields with the most North American Christians.8 These figures raise two important questions that address both motive and method. First, why were the numbers of evangelical missionaries increasing, especially in comparison to those of the mainline Protestant churches? In part, this can be explained through church membership numbers. Conservative evangelical churches witnessed a rise in membership from 400 to 700 percent in the two decades after the Second World War. Other Protestant denominations grew by 75 to 90 percent.9 The premillennial urgency of the Cold War impelled many evangelicals into the mission field. They were motivated out of a conviction that the prophetic end was approaching. Second, how did the theology of these new missionaries impact the message itself ? What were evangelical missionaries saying? What did they believe? How evangelicals perceived mission work spoke to both their motivations and their approach. Reverend Robert S. Rapp, missionary to Brazil in 1962, defined biblical missions as ‘‘the carrying forth of God’s truth to those who are in spiritual darkness.’’ The ‘‘heathen,’’ according to evangelicals, needed the gospel message. Without it they were ‘‘lost and on their way to hell.’’10 This theological outlook created a deep sense of commitment and urgency among evangelical missionaries. They placed a high value on missionary service, particularly when it was coupled with the understanding that the apocalypse was rapidly approaching. Scores of magazines and newsletters focused on missions. They included updates from mission fields combined with attempts to generate financial support for individual missionaries and organizations. Many of them sought prayers for missionaries around the world. Though foreign missions were an important part of their faith, evangelicals did not always direct their missionary activity abroad. Children’s educational programs brought the Christian message to a younger audience and they


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also stressed the importance of eschatology, teaching young evangelicals about Jesus’ second coming. Children for Christ created one example of the kind of curriculum that was typical. Stella Beckley’s teaching manual offered a lesson in educating children on the second coming and why it was important to be ready. The manual gave teachers an object lesson using a magnet (representing Jesus) and pins (representing people on earth) to help their students better understand the concept of the rapture. The suggested script advised teachers to explain the lesson by saying: We will imagine that Jesus is now coming, and let us look closely to see what takes place. (Bring magnet down to the pins in the box.) See, boys and girls, the people who are going with Jesus. They are going right up to heaven with the Lord Jesus. They responded to Him because He was living in their hearts. They loved Him and had taken Him as their Savior. Let’s look in the box and see if it is empty. Oh no, there are lots left. A lot of people did not go with Jesus when He came. I wonder why they did not go. Who can tell me? Yes, that’s right. They were not ready. Why were they not ready? Because they would not believe in Jesus as their Savior and let Him save them from their sins. Only those who have Jesus in their hearts can go with Him when He comes. Let us remember this lesson about Jesus coming again and when the devil tries to get us to do something which we know is wrong, let us pray to Jesus to help us that we might be ready when He comes.11 Whether they were spreading Christianity to the next generation or to the next country, evangelicals considered mission work a key aspect of executing their faith. Eschatology was closely interwoven into this endeavor. Missionaries’ methodology changed over time. When technology made it possiblefor organizationstoutilize communicationsatellites,evangelicalsslowly began to take advantage of them. By 1980, an early satellite program described an age-old target in new language: ‘‘International satellite delivery systems are a reality. Tremendous strides in the utilization of these systems by project look up for the spreading of the Good News of Jesus Christ have been and are being accomplished by the grace of God. Mission control is in heaven, and the paralysis of human analysis must never be allowed to interrupt the guiding signal.’’12 Technological advances allowed evangelical missionaries to alter how their message was distributed, but the impetus for the message and the message itself remained fairly consistent. That message accentuated the need for the salvation of the lost by whatever means necessary. As American Christianity was so closely entwined with U.S. culture, evangelical missionaries brought their own biases with them. Just as the Cold War had blended with millenarianism to produce an evangelical identity that spiritualized and glorified the American nation at home, missionaries who went

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abroad mixed their religious message with the belief in the superiority of white, conservative, American culture. Many expected converts or potential converts to abandon parts of their own culture. In some cases, a convert’s acceptance of Christianity was contingent upon this requirement. In the minds of many evangelical missionaries during the period, Christian identity was closely linked to cultural identity. Letters that missionaries sent home to supporters often included anecdotes that clearly reflected the authors’ cultural biases. These descriptions were derived from the premise of cultural and religious superiority as demonstrated by a 1962 editorial in Biblical Missions: ‘‘Saved men will establish cultures in other lands that agree with the Word of God, which had so much to do with the shaping of our own culture in the early days of American colonization. Christ will not leaven a culture which has a heathen religion as its crystallizing nucleus.’’13 The author’s words show a belief in the connection between culture and ‘‘true’’ faith. American civilization was portrayed as the epitome of the kind of culture that ‘‘agreed with the Word of God’’ and was contrasted with others that did not. One missionary to Korea in 1959 wrote: The country of Korea is full of superstition and darkness and people are ignorant and very dull of understanding in this area in which we are working. The old neighbor next door to us had a falcon. He took the falcon outside his home to a hill near our house and erected a table in front of it. The table was filled with different kinds of food and various grains. The old man and his whole family got down and worshiped the old falcon. He knew no better. That falcon helped to catch pheasant and pheasant could be sold. So they thought they had to pray to that falcon and take good care of it so it would bring them good luck.14 Missionaries around the world provided examples of people who could not give up ‘‘heathen traditions.’’ A missionary to Japan, Reverend Malcolm Frehn, explained his frustration with the Japanese people’s reluctance to abandon Shinto in a 1962 letter: ‘‘Unless a person gives up his family Shinto idolatry we just will not baptize him. Any Christian we make must unload this Shinto. It costs them much to do so and many who showed concern as to Shinto paganism have been dropped. They surely do cling to this old idolatry.’’15 Sometimes, missionaries did not consider converts completely saved until they had eradicated partsof their formerlife according tothe evangelicals’ ownstandards.Miss Louisa Lee wrote to the readers of Biblical Missions in 1962 of a Hindu holy man who had shown signs of openness to Christianity: ‘‘He says, vehemently, ‘I believe, I believe, I believe,’ beating his breast. He has scattered his little stone gods, but not yet destroyed them. But he has confessed the sinful practices of his particular sect in which he took part. . . . We pray that he may go all the way and be saved.’’16


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Signs that missionaries’ targets were starting to pay attention to American Christian criticism of their culture were celebrated by missionaries and their supporters. In the Middle East, Dr. Sarah Hosman openly preached against the Arab practice of polygamy in the early 1960s. She wrote that resistance to Bible lessons had decreased and was encouraged that her patients seemed more interested in them, for she could then show them that ‘‘God hates polygamy which Arabs continue in.’’17 Despite Dr. Hosman’s optimism, her story illustrates that the missionaries’ audiences did resist Christian attacks on their cultural practices. Missionary concerns that converts were not abandoning completely their old traditions—not giving up their Shinto idols in Japan, for instance—are further evidence of this resistance. Clinging to ethnocentric notions of cultural superiority may have hampered the missionary attempts to spread their religious message. In many cases, the details of premillennial interpretation went beyond missionary ethnocentrism and were explicitly racist. The most obvious example of this is found in Hal Lindsey’s best-selling book The Late Great Planet Earth. In a chapter entitled ‘‘The Yellow Peril,’’ Lindsey chronicled the prophetic destiny of what he called the ‘‘Asian horde’’ that would wipe out a third of the world’s population according to the ninth chapter of the book of Revelation: ‘‘For centuries Asia has had a tradition of backwardness. . . . Though the living conditions of the eight hundred million or more people of Red China are still basically like the nineteenth century, they have made remarkable progress in the production of weapons for war.’’18 For Lindsey, communist China’s nuclear capabilities appeared to coalesce with the racist assumptions evident in language such as ‘‘yellow peril’’ and ‘‘Asian horde’’ to form a kind of double apocalyptic threat. Though Lindsey may not have deliberately sought to invoke xenophobic, racist descriptions, he nonetheless used them to intensify fear in his readers.19 Premillennialism during the Cold War both encouraged missionary activity informed by biblical prophecy and aided McCarthyism and anticommunism by creating an evangelical identity that lauded patriotism and cultural bias. Paradoxically, this bias also hindered the success of missionary activity around the world. ‘‘Take up your trumpet!’’ a Moody Monthly article told its readers in 1947. ‘‘Our assignment is given, not by government, but by our Lord’s great commission unto the evangelization of the world! Watchmen He appoints us, to proclaim the grace of God and to warn of danger.’’20 As evangelists, the missionaries’ duties were to both tell the world of God’s love and warn people of impending disaster. Increased missionary activity was a sign of the nearness of the end of the world. Evangelists consistently cited Matthew 24:14 as proof that proselytizing the world was an indication of the soon-coming fulfillment of prophecy: ‘‘And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.’’21 When he gave sermons on eschatology,

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Billy Graham often claimed unprecedented growth in evangelization: ‘‘The gospel today is being preached for the first time in history to all the nations.’’ In one crusade, he not only alluded to an increase in the number of missionaries but also cited thriving Bible translator teams working in different languages and the successful broadcasting of his radio program, Hour of Decision, in countries around the world.22 These were indicators, according to Graham, of the greater distribution of the Christian message, which in turn was an indicator of the endtimes. After World War II, evangelicals believed that the scriptures’ foretelling of the arrival of the apocalyptic four horsemen—representing war, death, famine, and pestilence—might soon take place and terrorize the world. Some nonetheless pointed to an increase in mission activity as an indication that revival was near.23 To evangelicals, missionaries were both evidence of a spiritual renewal on earth and a means to initiate the beginning of the end of the world. The multiple implications of evangelizing often included contradictions. While greater missionary activity was cheered, evangelicals continued to speak of the world’s immorality and the need for still more missionaries. The closer the end appeared, the more urgent the need for evangelism. The film The Rapture warned its audience, ‘‘After the rapture there’ll be no more opportunity to pass out tracts, to preach about the Lord Jesus, to give to missions, or to pray for the lost.’’24 Premillennial prophecy was cyclically beneficial for evangelical missions. As they decried the world’s immorality and its lost state, they boosted missionary activity. As evangelism became more and more successful, they believed that the end of the world was near. The proximity of the apocalypse, in turn, spurred on mission work. Missions provided followers with a purpose to fulfill until Jesus Christ’s return, as evangelicals believed that God expected them not to remain idle. Instead, they were to ‘‘occupy till [Christ] came.’’ Reverend Irwin W. Steele claimed that it was ‘‘the paramount obligation of every true child of God and certainly of us, the missionaries, to get the gospel to every creature.’’25 This call to missions while waiting for the end of the dispensation served two objectives. First, it demonstrated the individual missionary’s personal devotion to God. The January 1958 Biblical Missions newsletter printed a poem by Fanny J. Crosby that effectively demonstrated this: When Jesus comes to reward His servants, Whether it be noon or night, Faithful to Him will He find us watching, With our lamps all trimmed and bright? Blessed are those whom the Lord finds watching, In His glory they shall share; If He shall come at the dawn or midnight, Will He find us watching there?26


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To be sure, a desire to obey God was accompanied, mostly unconsciously, by a fear of retribution. Evangelicals who perceived the nearness of the complete fulfillment of God’s prophecies feared the consequences of not carrying out God’s commandment in the Great Commission. Second, missionaries showed Christian concern for their audiences around the world, despite their often ethnocentric and condescending actions. Evangelicals believed that unless a person became a born-again Christian he or she was destined to perish for eternity. Therefore, the widespread Cold War assumption that the end-times were fast approaching made missionary work all the more urgent. Missionaries continually cited statistics and shared stories to remind their coreligionists of the magnitude of their work: ‘‘[There are] a total of 2,654,700,000 or over two and a half billion people in the world. What a pitifully small segment of these millions of souls has ever even heard of God’s love in Christ Jesus! Does this go deeper than the mind with you? Does it reach your heart? What a tremendous number are born to face eternity—but where?’’27 Often decried by contemporaries and historians for exhibiting cultural bias, missionaries were motivated nonetheless by a real apprehension for people who they feared were lost. Despite consensus on the importance of evangelism, not all evangelicals agreed on the way to go about it. The complex role that prophecy played in their faith allowed them to explore and debate different strategies for missions. Even the wisdom of converting the Jewish people was questioned by some. One reviewer in 1958 suggested, ‘‘It might be better to increase efforts for converting the hundreds of millions of heathens still left in the world than to spend time in the attempt (bound to be almost fruitless . . . ) to make Christians of a people already submitted to God.’’28 This is a remarkable statement in light of the key place that the conversion of the Jews played in prophecy, but it demonstrates the complexity and urgency of evangelical apocalypticism. The suggestion that it might be better to abandon attempts to convert Jews and Muslims to get the Christian message out to those who have never heard about God was rejected by most through other commentary and through the actions of missionaries who continued to proselytize these groups. Nevertheless, it was broached—however half heartedly. The synthesis of evangelism and prophecy led some to redefine mission work. One subscriber to the Berean Searchlight wrote to the editors to comment on the importance of eschatology to Christians: ‘‘Many, many thanks for the Berean Searchlight. [It] opened my spiritual eyes. I was doing work among nonChristians, but after reading the Berean literature, I find it my burden to tell the present dispensation of Christ to even Christians.’’29 In this case, the writer broadened the definition of mission work to include Christians who did not accept dispensationalism, the premillennial belief that the history of mankind was divided into different ages.

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More extensive study needs to be done to determine how effective evangelical missionaries were in spreading their dual Cold War message: the eschatological gospel and anticommunism. Some evidence does indicate that the message got out. Fundamentalist Salem Kirban’s premillennial organization Second Coming, Inc., bragged of requests abroad for prophecy books such as Guide to Survival, 666, Revelation Visualized, and I Predict. One letter writer from the Philippines in 1971 told Kirban’s organization, ‘‘I highly appreciate your works and will be praying to the Lord that each and every one of us will see each other in the Rapture.’’ Another letter from a director of a Peruvian orphanage requested copies of a filmstrip on the Holy Land, an Armageddon filmstrip, and three books on prophecy. Second Coming, Inc., sent literature to Israel, India, Holland, Japan, China, and to the military and students.30 American evangelicals also heard reports from Christians associated with international organizations that mirrored their own anticommunist eschatology. At the sixth plenary congress of the ICCC in August 1965, the president of the Republic of China Council of Christian Churches, Samuel W. S. Cheng, repeated the familiar connection between communism and the Antichrist: ‘‘Communism is an evil ideology; therefore, it brings forth evil fruits on political issues, social theories and religious groups. Because communism is a kind of satanic philosophy belonging to the Antichrist’s line, we can say they are two in one; also we could say that the Communist Party is the agent of the spirit of the Antichrist.’’31 In 1948 a social worker in Frankfurt, Germany, wrote to Abraham Vereide, executive director of the ICL, ‘‘The signs of the times show quite clearly and there is no going back. The times of comfort and reflection are over and the storm bells ring loudly.’’ In another letter from Germany in 1958, Friedrich von der Ropp wrote, ‘‘We are facing the most dreadful spiritual power [Russian communism]. Let us shroud our hearts in prayer so that we may not be fettered from within. Time is short.’’32 We cannot conclude from these few examples that evangelical anticommunist eschatology was a significant force outside of the United States, particularly as much of this information was filtered through and interpreted by American evangelical groups. Salem Kirban’s organization, for example, used the letters cited earlier to solicit donations. Nevertheless, this evidence does indicate that premillennial Cold War speculation common in the United States also existed on some level internationally. For evangelists, godless communism proved a convenient symbol to adapt their message more readily to secular political culture. Communism was ‘‘a strange uneasiness, ill-defined, subtle, an almost nameless fear, [an] evil thing.’’ Missionaries who perceived communism as a competing ideology spread the anticommunist message both at home and abroad, making them valuable U.S. Cold Warriors. Christianity and communism vied for the attention of the world audience, so missionaries and their organizations found it easy to believe in the destructive power of communism emphasized so


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strongly in the Cold War. Groups such as the ICL referred to ‘‘combating’’ communism, using language that clearly demonstrated aggressive competition: ‘‘We feel that our nation’s greatest need today is to send technically qualified Christian men and women to the foreign lands as representatives of Jesus Christ and of America. . . . In this way alone can we effectively combat communism and help the backward peoples of the world to help themselves.’’ The anticommunist campaign enhanced evangelical missionaries’ cultural superiority as many saw themselves as the saviors of ‘‘backwards’’ nations potentially ‘‘duped’’ by evil communism.33 The rhetoric suggested that many missionaries acted as unofficial ambassadors of the United States in a Cold War ideological battle. Their weapon was Christianity. Compared to the vague, abstract enemy of sin or even Satan, evangelicals could point to communism as a clear, definable opponent, and its universality aided their mission efforts. Because communism was portrayed as a world threat, missionaries who decried its evils pleaded with a large audience. People not necessarily receptive to the evangelical religious message might have been more open to its ideological attacks on communism. A 1951 discussion among international evangelicals at an ICL conference in Germany linked communism with a world spiritual crisis that they believed was leading toward the endtimes. Mission work—spreading the Christian message—was the answer to this religious and political crisis, according to one speaker: ‘‘We must stand together. . . . We can overcome the world. . . . Everybody is called to work for the Lord. Everyone is responsible for the crisis of our time.’’34 These were the same arguments that American conservative missionaries made. The Cold War created new global alliances based on a combination of eschatology and anticommunism. Missionaries hyped Christianity as the alternative to communism. Billy Graham spread this message in his world crusades. He told his Berlin audience in 1960, ‘‘All that we know today will someday come to an end. The gospel message is good news to a doomed generation. God’s mighty judgment will fall on the world but you can be saved.’’35 Graham’s speech intended to highlight the differences between communism and Christianity to the people of Berlin, a city especially affected by the Cold War. ‘‘Communism,’’ according to Graham, was ‘‘a well-oiled machine, supernaturally empowered by the devil himself.’’36 By providing a tangible evil to exploit, communism ironically eased missionaries’ efforts to spread the message of Christianity. It fulfilled two specific prophetic signs by providing an ideology for the Antichrist and by indirectly aiding missionary endeavors throughout the world. Interdenominational organizations such as the NAE adopted resolutions denouncing communism in almost every year of the 1960s. These resolutions reflected the high value evangelicals placed on missionary activity and condemned what the organization believed to be a communist threat to it. Mainstream evangelical ecumenical groups pressured the U.S. government to

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take a strong and active stance. The NAE even formed the Emergency Christian Mobilization, a church-based program aimed at opposing communism. Though quick to clarify that they did ‘‘not believe that the NAE should become involved in the investigation and exposure of individual communists,’’ the program included study guides, publications, a pastor’s manual, lectures, literature, tapes, and films, all with a ‘‘spiritual emphasis.’’37 Other Christian organizations translated and distributed anticommunist literature beyond U.S. borders. Fred Schwarz’s newsletter for the CACC included a portion of a letter from the Republic of Vietnam’s secretary of state for education, Dr. Nguyen Van Tho. The secretary wrote to thank the organization for one thousand copies of Schwarz’s book You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists) that were ‘‘distributed among members of the teaching profession and have been highly appreciated.’’ He also encouraged the translation of the book into Vietnamese.38 Later that same year, the president of the Indian Christian Crusade, Dr. Ch. Devananda Rao, wrote to James Colbert, president of the CACC, with a similar request: Now, coming to the point, I have the specific project of putting this challenging book, You Can Trust the Communists (To Be Communists), in our Telugu language into the hands of all the Pastors, Evangelists, Teachers, Bible women, doctors, nurses, primary health center workers, village officers and high school class students so that they may study it carefully to know the truth and to prepare themselves to combat the communist forces. I know they in turn will speak to the villagers. Both Rao and Schwarz believed that the distribution of this book would ‘‘influence the world’’ and could ‘‘decide the future of mankind.’’39

U.S. Cold War ‘‘Missionaries’’ Christian anticommunist activists used mission strategies to export both the gospel message and the anticommunist message. In one publication, the All American Conference to Combat Communism described communists as missionaries and then went on to urge anticommunists to a similar approach: Communists and their vast corps of secret allies are tireless missionaries. They never waste time or efforts trying to convince or convert each other but are constantly working to seduce and subvert outsiders. Be an equally fervent and tireless missionary for Americanism. See that our material gets the widest possible distribution. Practically every American passes through a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room in the course of a year. Copies of Congressional reports


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on communism and periodicals and newsletters with facts on current subversive activities should be placed in every waiting room in this country.40 This ideological mission work was pursued in the name of God and country. Unapologetically, anticommunist organizations utilized religious methods to promote the U.S. Cold War position. Missionaries’ embrace of anticommunism and the way they wielded it in both the religious and the Cold War arenas signaled their acceptance of a political faith in a way that could have emerged only after World War II as the United States assumed a new world role and a global perspective: ‘‘The message is given over and over again in His Word. All the earth is to worship Him. Let Him rule. He has the answers. What a privilege we have to pray to this end: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ Are we spending the time in prayer that we should be spending in order to see God move in the affairs of nations as well as in the affairs of individuals?’’41 By 1964 it was important for missionaries to be influencing the lives of individuals and of nations. The synchronization of religion and politics explicit in the missionary message mirrored a similar drift in the dominant secular political discourse. Specific organizations, instances, and events demonstrated a parallel secular ‘‘missionary’’ movement. Missionaries had access to foreign policymakers in the U.S. government and were involved in organizations like the Committee of One Million (Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations), part of the larger China lobby. First, membership roles and tactics of the Committee of One Million revealed the link between Christianity and the campaign against communist China. Second, State Department officials sometimes relied on missionaries as convenient, unofficial diplomats who distributed the U.S. Cold War philosophy. Finally, VOA broadcasts and the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow were examples of Cold War ‘‘mission efforts’’; the individuals behind these endeavors spread the U.S. ‘‘gospel.’’ As purveyors of mainstream cultural traditions increasingly applied evangelical missionaries’ tactics and parts of their message, conservative Christians assimilated more easily into the mainstream. The emphasis that evangelicals placed on religion in politics was shared by some U.S. political leaders. John Foster Dulles, secretary of state from 1953 to 1959, served as an elder in the Presbyterian Church and was an active lay spokesperson for the World and Federal Council of Churches. Imbued with a desire to emphasize Christian principles in international affairs, Dulles’s speeches and writings bore out his belief that successful policy depended on spirituality: ‘‘The terrible things that are happening in some parts of the world are due to the fact that political and social practices have been separated from spiritual content.’’42 Specifically, throughout his career Dulles claimed that God had given the United States a ‘‘spirit of mission’’: ‘‘Our people have always

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been endowed with a sense of mission in the world. They have believed that it was their duty to help men everywhere to get the opportunity to be and to do what God designed.’’ The country’s freedom, he argued, depended on America’s faithfulness to its mission: ‘‘Our society of freedom would quickly succumb to the overlordship of others if we renounced a sense of mission in the world.’’43 The secretary’s consistent focus on the idea of a U.S. mission was familiar to Christian missionaries, but it also defined the U.S. course in the Cold War for many others who shared the belief that the United States was in a righteous battle against a godless communist foe. American Cold War policy emerged out of this idea of mission. Evangelicals who wished to become involved in anticommunist groups had many outlets available to them, in both Christian and secular organizations. One of the most well-known and effective congressionally based groups was the Committee for One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations; it changed its name to the Committee of One Million in 1955. Part of the so-called China lobby, the Committee of One Million was established in 1953 (immediately following the Korean War) to drum up American public opinion against U.S. recognition of communist China and against its admission into the United Nations. The original inspiration for the committee arose in a 1953 meeting of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, chaired by Dr. Walter H. Judd, former missionary to China and representative from Minnesota.44 Other key men involved with the formation of the committee included one-time governor of New Jersey Charles Edison, Pittsburgh industrialist Frederick C. McKee, former ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, and another former missionary to China, Dr. B. A. Garside. The committee presented a petition to President Eisenhower in October that included 210 names of citizens—congresspersons, governors, generals, diplomats, labor leaders, entertainment professionals, church leaders, journalists, scientists, educators, and businesspersons—who opposed communist China’s admission to the United Nations. The respectability and diversity of supporters reflected in the list of signers was important to the committee’s campaign, as was the composition of the steering committee. In 1959, it consisted of, among others, conservative Walter Judd and Illinois Democratic Senator Paul Douglas, whose 1966 resignation from the steering committee dealt a blow to the organization, as he had ‘‘prevented the opposition from calling the Committee an extremist right-wing group.’’ The committee also named former ambassador to the United Nations Warren R. Austin, who apparently never attended a meeting, its honorary chair.45 Missionary participation was fundamental to the effort to oppose communist China in favor of the Nationalists under the leadership of Jiang Jieshi. Judd, the committee’s greatest champion, spent a tireless career in opposition to communist China. Before beginning his twenty-year stint in Congress as a Minnesota representative, Judd traveled to China in 1926 as a medical


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missionary, returning to the United States in the late 1930s following increasing Japanese aggression. He publicly pushed for U.S. intervention against Japan on China’s behalf until he replaced his Japanese target with communist China, becoming an influential member of the China lobby. Tony Ladd has described Judd’s political career as an extension of his missionary experiences in China; religious enthusiasm characterized both. His diligent ‘‘missionary anticommunism’’ in Congress was acknowledged by fellow members of the House of Representatives in a 1962 poll when they voted him one of the five most influential members. Judd’s missionary-inspired politics was most evident in his speeches and writing: ‘‘The reason why it has not proved possible to get any real agreement with the communist world all these years is because the communists are not pursuing the same objectives as we are pursuing. Because they do not believe the same things we believe—about man, about the universe, about God. It was under God that our freedom was born. Only under God can there be a rebirth.’’ Judd’s career revealed how easily missionary zeal and Cold War politics crossed paths in organizations like the Committee of One Million.46 A second missionary on the steering committee, B. A. Garside, aided in the group’s propaganda mission through his personal connections with the founder of Time and Life magazines, Henry Robinson Luce. Garside was the sympathetic biographer of Luce’s father, a fellow missionary to China. His influence with Henry Robinson Luce was such that the son at one time loaned Garside $60,000 and two Time publicity men for the United China Relief, an organization that Garside had helped to establish by combining numerous China aid societies. The Time/Life mogul promoted Chinese nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi, who had converted to Christianity in 1931 and had married American-educated Methodist Song Meiling. Time chose Jiang and Madame Jiang as 1937’s Man and Wife of the Year. The activities of men like Judd, Garside, and Luce, who all had missionary connections to China, revealed their intentions to directly influence U.S. foreign relations and, more brashly, to maneuver the constitution of another nation’s government. Their example dispels any doubts about the purpose and authority of religion in the Cold War. Support for Jiang was a part of Luce’s goal of ‘‘Christianizing and Americanizing China.’’47 Henry Luce joined other influential Americans in claiming membership in the Committee of One Million. General Lucius D. Clay, author John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, Professor Sidney Hook, and Eli Lilly partnered with several politicians and clergy such as Bishop Fred P. Corson, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, Reverend Daniel A. Poling, Bishop Bernard J. Sheil, Bishop Herbert Welch, and one-time chaplain of the U.S. Senate Frederick Brown Harris. There is no doubt that Christian influence played a large role in the committee, and many evangelicals were participants in or supporters of the movement to oppose the recognition of the PRC. The Committee of One Million even established a special Clergymen’s Committee, which conducted

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a poll of forty-five thousand Protestant ministers in the United States after reacting with alarm to a 1958 NCC announcement that urged diplomatic recognition of the PRC. The results of the poll justified to the committee that ‘‘the overwhelming majority of the American Protestant community’’ agreed with them ‘‘in spite of the sentiments of minority groups [NCC].’’ It boasted that 87 percent of the 8,572 replies strongly opposed recognition of the PRC, only 11 percent favored it, and 2 percent had no opinion. In a press release, Secretary of the Committee of One Million Marvin Liebman said, ‘‘The clergymen’s poll has justified our belief that the American Protestant community is firmly opposed to any steps which would build the power or prestige of Communist China to the detriment of our national security and of freedom throughout the world.’’48 It is clear that exaggeration permeated the committee’s analysis of the poll results; 7,437 ministers out of 45,000 are far from a majority, and one could hardly call the NCC a ‘‘minority group.’’ Nevertheless, this poll does reveal the conservative Protestant makeup of the Committee of One Million. Committee members Bishop Fred Pierce Corson, president of the World Methodist Council, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, and others released a statement in 1960: ‘‘We believe that the action taken by the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches is inconsistent not only with the standards of the UN but also with the clear principles of morality and Christian faith.’’49 More significant, the committee’s arduous efforts to publicize the results of their poll demonstrate that the opinions of religious leaders in the United States had clout in the country. Members of the committee identified poll results as proof of the ‘‘actual’’ views of the American people and utilized them to influence public opinion at the same time. The concern that evangelicals on the Committee of One Million expressed about communist influence in China partly emerged out of a long tradition within American Christianity that placed that country at the center of mission activities. The victory of communism in China made the Cold War personal for many evangelicals who had been missionaries there. They spoke of it in apocalyptic terms and it justified the anticommunist crusade to them all the more. In a January 2, 1949, sermon entitled ‘‘Do You Want Christianity to Win?,’’ Reverend S. M. Shoemaker of Calvary Church in New York spoke about communist China: ‘‘To one who, like myself, has lived in China, and loved those patient and most lovable people, the picture of their enslavement by communism is an unspeakable horror. . . . Do not forget: communism is out to exterminate religion and to bring the world under the yoke of its own bondage.’’50 Evangelical leaders appealed directly to government officials. Clyde Taylor wrote to Secretary of State Dulles in 1957 of the NAE’s opposition to an NCC proposal to send a delegation to China: Thus it is quite possible that such a visit would be a serious detriment in several respects. It would be a source of great discouragement


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to the leadership of the vital evangelical segment of the Chinese Church. It would undoubtedly produce a very unrealistic picture of the situation of the Church in China. It undoubtedly would be used as a means to bring further pressures in the U.S. Department of State toward the recognition of Communist China. Finally, and this is most important, such a visit would imply U.S. approval of the collaborationist tactics of the leaders of the ‘‘government-approved’’ church in China.51 Communism clashed with missionary efforts around the world, deepening the eschatological worries of many Christians and pushing them into the anticommunist political culture that supported U.S. Cold War campaigns conducted in its name. Missionaries were more than symbolic, religious weapons. They were also unofficial diplomatic envoys. Serving as representatives of both the United States and the Christian community to a world caught in the Cold War quagmire, individual missionaries literally embodied the meshing of evangelical and secular identities in the United States. They took this new amalgamation abroad and served as diplomats for the United States and for Christianity both indirectly and directly. First, they brought knowledge of different parts of the globe to American evangelicals at home, who in turn used that information to inform their political choices. Second, there were some instances when the U.S. State Department used missionaries and their contacts to build better relations with countries around the world. In both cases, the blending of religious and secular identities made possible by Cold War and premillennial conceptions allowed for evangelical participation in foreign relations. By far the most common way that missionaries became diplomats was indirect. Instruction was their key instrument. By disseminating information to Christians and others back home in the United States, missionaries often shaped the world concerns of their audiences. Perhaps the most successful groups were evangelical advocates of the new state of Israel. Holy Land tours often featured missionaries or other experts, such as Douglas Young of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies, who were strong defenders of the state. Other groups and publications made the case for Israel as well. The Chosen People was a monthly publication that functioned ‘‘as a medium of information concerning the Jews, Israel and the work of the American Board of Missions to the Jews, Inc.’’ By telling of their experiences, missionaries played an important role in helping to form an evangelical political voice that supported the Jewish state. Missionary tales from communist countries also made those Christians unofficial spokespeople in the U.S. anticommunist crusade. Broadcasts by the VOA often included reports of religious persecution from leaders of various faiths and denominations. In a program aired on April 13, 1953, Father Joseph

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P. McGinn, a Catholic missionary, told listeners, ‘‘Communists hate religion of all kinds and are bent on wiping it out in favor of their own idolatrous religion: the worship of their state and their absolute power. To that end, they employ not only violence, but also fraud, and the venal service of false priests, monks, and mullahs.’’52 Government agencies regularly published incidents of religious persecution that aided their condemnation of communism. In one U.S. Information Agency publication, Problems of Communism, the editors printed parts of letters from prisoners in the Soviet Union. In one such letter, Pavel Semenovich Overchuk wrote, ‘‘We of the Evangelical-Baptist faith have been convinced over and over again that in fact the faithful are being treated not in accordance with the laws of our country or with generally accepted international laws, but in accordance with secret (unpublished) instructions which permit all sorts of persecutions and even the physical destruction of believers.’’53 Missionaries and the U.S. government joined together in an effort to provide the American people with information that contributed to the political and ideological anticommunist crusade. Evangelicals at home who heard these reports often embraced the cause, whether that meant supporting the nation of Israel or becoming anticommunist activists. In some instances, the U.S. government, particularly the State Department, relied on missionaries in its dealings with other nations. In 1959, Stuart W. Rockwell, the director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, wrote a letter to the secretary of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. He wrote to inquire about the plans of Dr. Sarah Hosman, a medical missionary in Sharjah (later, part of the United Arab Emirates). The ruler at Sharjah had asked the U.S. consul general in Dhahran about her. Rockwell wrote, ‘‘The Department would appreciate any information which you might be able to provide which could be transmitted to the Ruler through the Consul General concerning Dr. Hosman’s plans. If Dr. Hosman is not planning to return, it would appear that the Ruler would welcome someone else to carry on her work.’’54 In this case, a State Department official directly encouraged mission work for the sake of friendly relations with Sharjah. Mission activity that compelled evangelical contact with the State Department raised questions about the proper meaning of the separation of church and state during the Cold War. In several cases, evangelical organizations aggressively sought to influence government. A Colombian policy in the 1950s, for example, sparked an evangelical letter-writing campaign that turned out to be very successful. When a 1953 treaty between the Colombian government and the Vatican gave the Roman Catholic Church exclusive mission rights to a considerable area designated ‘‘Mission Territory,’’ many Protestant missions in the region were closed down. A memo from the NAE’s Secretary of Public Affairs Clyde W. Taylor claimed that more than forty evangelical churches were affected. The NAE launched a letter-writing campaign ‘‘asking that our government take strenuous action to have restored to American citizens in the


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mission territories of Colombia the right of religious freedom and the right to educate evangelical children, insisting that Colombia, as one of the free nations of the world, observe religious freedom for minorities as well as for the majority religion.’’ Bob Lazear from Cheyenne, Wyoming, wrote President Eisenhower that religious persecution in Colombia should ‘‘emphatically and promptly be brought to an end.’’ In response to between three thousand and four thousand letters such as Lazear’s, the State Department issued a statement assuring evangelicals that ‘‘the Department and the Embassy at Bogota are giving constant attention to the situation in Colombia and will continue to make every effort to obtain full protection and consideration for the rights and property of citizens of the United States.’’55 Evangelicals did not let the fact that they were canvassing the U.S. government to change a policy in another country stop them, and certain senators did pay attention. Oregon Senator Wayne Morse told the Senate on March 1, 1957, that the Subcommittee on South American Affairs, of which he was the chair, would be discussing the situation later in the year. Did evangelical and missionary pressure result in concrete changes in U.S. policy, or did it just force representatives to appease their evangelical constituency by saying that they would look into it? The NAE certainly believed that officials were responding positively to their concerns. In 1957, it passed a resolution to ‘‘express appreciation to the Secretary of State and the officers of his department for their cooperation on numerous occasions in matters referred to them by our Washington Office of Public Relations.’’ It repeated that note of gratitude in 1969, declaring that the State Department’s ‘‘divisions of Passport, Visa, Authentication, Special Services and Public Liaison [have] willingly assisted in handling the regular and emergency needs of the more than fourteen thousand American citizens who serve overseas as evangelical missionaries.’’ What is most significant here is the degree that evangelicals engaged in the political discourse over policy. Their participation in that discourse drastically increased during the Cold War as a result of premillennial urgency. In yet another declaration in 1967, the NAE officially acknowledged that its policy toward government affairs urged members ‘‘as citizens’’ to ‘‘make their voices heard at every level and by all proper means within public life.’’56 The apocalypticism and internationalism of the Cold War had begun to influence the way evangelicals viewed their role in the political culture; this would become most noticeable a few decades later with the rise of more public politically motivated fundamentalist organizations such as the Moral Majority. Whether or not government officials paid serious attention to the issues that evangelicals raised, born-again Christians believed they were influencing policy matters. Only a few months after the United States entered World War II, the Office of War Information launched a government-sponsored radio agency, the Voice of America. ‘‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’’ America’s apocalyptic anthem, initiated the first program. The VOA’s purpose was to introduce U.S. war

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policies to the world. As American propaganda, it manipulated the myth that the United States ‘‘was an innocent giant whose mission was to save war-tired Europe,’’ according to historian Holly Cowan Shulman. But even after the end of the war, the VOA’s supporters argued for the necessity of continued broadcasts. After President Truman moved it to the State Department, the inception of the Cold War guaranteed its life as America’s ‘‘ideological arm of anticommunism’’ and primary propaganda weapon against the Soviet bloc. The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act established permanent standing for the VOA, and the agency expanded in 1950 under the leadership of Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Edward Barrett. At that time, a government-sponsored initiative, the ‘‘Campaign of Truth,’’ added new languages to VOA programs to reach more people throughout the world and worked to override Soviet jams of its broadcasts with new equipment.57 The VOA did encounter some obstacles in its early years of existence. According to David Krugler, most of these difficulties came about as a result of the clash between ‘‘liberal internationalists’’ in the executive branch and ‘‘parochial’’ congressional conservatives who set out to redefine New Deal notions of government, feared liberal control of government media, and sought to curry legislative domination of foreign policy. Most famously, the VOA became a target of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s search for communists in the State Department. McCarthy accused the VOA and other State Department officials of being ‘‘more loyal to the ideals and designs of communism than to those of the free, God-fearing half of the world.’’ In his 1953 hearings, he charged the VOA with impairing new transmitters and with being too soft on communism. He exploited testimony that suggested that the head of religious programming, Director Roger Lyons, might be an atheist (even though Lyons later expressed his belief in God), and implied that this was grounds for association with communism. McCarthy went so far as to accuse the head of the French desk, Troup Matthews, of recruiting an unmarried woman to bear children for a collective. The McCarthy hearings resulted in the resignation of several VOA officials, employee termination, and the expulsion of the organization from the State Department into the new U.S. Information Agency (USIA).58 Ironically, McCarthy’s allegations of communist leanings were targeted at one of America’s primary anticommunist propaganda agencies. Voice of America broadcasts frequently called Soviet leaders ‘‘power-hungry’’ and claimed that Mao Zedong ‘‘ruled all China by terror and violence—long enough to sow the seed of totalitarianism and to harvest its crop.’’ According to one broadcast, ‘‘Communism is not content with forcing a way of life upon those under its control. It demands the minds and hearts of men as well as their bodies. But try as they will, communist regimes have found it impossible to suppress man’s faith in God—eloquent testimony to the universal hold that religion has upon man’s spirit. And that spirit will remain alive long after the empire that Stalin has nurtured has crumbled into dust.’’ Anticommunist


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broadcasts that defended religion and decried religious persecution in communist nations were very frequently aired on the VOA—despite McCarthy’s accusations that the VOA’s programming and officials were sympathetic to communists and atheists. Religious transmissions by priests, ministers, and rabbis were common, as were programs about religious life in the United States. In February 1953, for example, a feature on the World Day of Prayer described faithful Americans who were ‘‘held together by the fellowship of prayer and the common purpose of building world brotherhood.’’ Reports that focused on religious persecution in communist countries served a double purpose: they spread the anticommunist message and extolled the religious dedication of Americans. Commentary from a 1953 broadcast described Brotherhood Week in the United States: ‘‘This week is what Americans call Brotherhood Week, a week when Americans of all faiths re-dedicate themselves to the principle that all men whatever their race or nationality are brothers under God. . . . Forty-nine of America’s more distinguished citizens of all races and creeds wrote an appeal to President Eisenhower in behalf of over two million Jews now in dire peril of communist terror.’’59 Broadcasting this piece was a clear attempt to portray the United States in a positive light—and to emphasize the U.S. commitment to godliness. The VOA appeared to make sure not to miss any communist nation when reporting incidents of religious persecution, whether they occurred in China, the Soviet Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Romania. In several cases, listeners heard accounts of parents in the Soviet Union who had lost their children to the state because they had been accused of raising them according to religious rather than communist standards. According to the VOA, these attacks ‘‘touched an American very deeply, for our country is built on the keystone of freedom of religion.’’60 The VOA clearly used both anticommunism and religion to spread American propaganda to the rest of the world. Voice of America broadcasts often directly aligned with U.S. foreign policy goals. This was especially evident during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when radio became not only a propaganda tool but an actual mouthpiece for President Kennedy. The government had excluded the USIA from its disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in spite of the fact that the USIA had obtained research and survey results about the popularity of Castro in Cuba. Though this information could have shed further light on erroneous assumptions about the willingness of the Cuban people to revolt, the USIA was not consulted, and its head, Edward R. Murrow, learned of the invasion from a New York Times reporter. With the dawning of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration was ready to utilize the VOA as much as it could; this proved relatively easy because the VOA’s policy toward Cuba at the time was to ‘‘expose, weaken and isolate the present government there with a view to its eventual elimination and replacement by one friendly to the U.S.’’61 The president announced

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to the United States that a Soviet missile buildup had been discovered in Cuba on October 22, 1962. In the same speech, he notified the American people of a quarantine of Cuba that would occur two days later. The VOA aired the message in its entirety, and ten other radio networks broadcast it to Cuba. Kennedy could thus assure the Cuban people that the United States had ‘‘no wish to cause you to suffer or to impose any system upon you. We know that your lives and land are being used as pawns by those who deny your freedom.’’ The USIA and the VOA were partners with the Kennedy administration in both technology and in purpose. The USIA’s deputy director of policy and planning, Thomas Sorenson, explained that the intent of the media should be to gain the Cuban people’s support for the blockade and to promote opposition to the Castro government. In his directive, Sorenson cautioned the media not to use ‘‘any comment, regardless of source, which is not wholly consistent with the lines set forth in the president’s speech.’’ During the crisis, the VOA used fifty-two transmitters to boost power to overcome communist jamming. It halted publication of information that the U.S. government judged a possible security risk and emphasized world support of the blockade.62 Clearly the VOA’s missionary character was in full swing during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not only did it actively back U.S. Cold War policy by getting the message out to the world, but it also attempted to ‘‘convert’’ the globe into validating American foreign policy objectives.63 Just as evangelical missionaries abroad used prophetic rhetoric to describe and carry out their mission and purpose, VOA propaganda drew on apocalyptic language for its own messages. Reporting on the funeral of Joseph Stalin in March 1953, one broadcast quoted directly from the book of Revelation to describe Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria, and Vyacheslav Molotov, three Soviet officials in attendance: ‘‘By these three was the third part of men killed—for their power was in their mouths (Rev. 9:18).’’64 Most commonly, though, VOA broadcasts included transcripts from American leaders or commentary from VOA reporters that described the hope of a millenniumlike future, free from communist oppression and blessed with American-style liberties. The VOA was a missionary broadcast, and its purpose was to convert the world to the realization of the superiority of the United States and American democracy. To its proponents, the VOA represented and disseminated the truth. Alan L. Heil Jr. described it in quasi-religious terms: ‘‘Its daily ‘piercing beam of light’ is its determination to present straight-arrow news, publicservice programming, and enlightened comment of value to people everywhere.’’65 Evangelical missionaries were motivated by the Great Commission and by the potential imminence of Christ’s return. The VOA was motivated by the apocalypticism that accompanied World War II and then, more seriously with the nuclear potential of the two superpowers, the Cold War. Both evangelical missionaries and American propagandists identified signs of potential disaster, whether events in Israel, world government organizations, or


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communist victories in China and Cuba. Both fought clearly named enemies— sin, Satan, atheism, and communism—and these enemies often were the same. Cold War American foreign policy borrowed tactics from evangelicalism that had profound implications on evangelical and national identity. Historian Walter L. Hixson defines propaganda as the ‘‘attempt to influence behavior by shaping the attitudes of masses of people.’’66 The broad nature of this definition makes parallels to missionary work easy to draw, and the urgency of the Cold War further blurred distinctions between state-directed and religious-directed actions. The goal of both propaganda and missionary efforts was to convince nonbelievers of the truth. In the Cold War, the message itself was often the same when U.S. propaganda agents referenced God and the religious devotion of citizens of the United States. At the same time, American evangelicals advocated the American way of life in their churches, publications, and ministries. Differences between missionaries and U.S. propagandists also existed, of course. Evangelical missionaries, though very supportive of the American Cold War position, sometimes opposed particular policies. The VOA and other official propaganda agencies invoked dedication to a Judeo-Christian God but often did so in a way that evangelicals sometimes charged was too general and ‘‘compromising.’’ Nevertheless, the similarities between U.S. Cold War propaganda and evangelical missionary efforts are striking. Ironically, most evangelicals did not recognize the missionary traits of the VOA. In 1952, the NAE even passed a resolution criticizing the agency for ‘‘not allowing adequate representation of evangelical Protestant life.’’ The early 1950s was the peak period of the anticommunist hysteria in the United States and the time when the VOA faced its harshest criticism with the beginning of the McCarthy investigations. The 1952 resolution illustrated that evangelicals were right in the middle of it. After McCarthy had been discredited in the Army-McCarthy hearings and the anticommunist witch hunts had begun to abate, the NAE passed a new resolution after its Washington office communicated with the VOA directly. This time, the NAE ‘‘commended the Agency for its interest that religion be reflected properly.’’67 Even if evangelicals did not always realize it, U.S. propaganda efforts— aimed at winning the hearts and minds of people in the Soviet bloc—certainly acknowledged the importance of religion. Connecticut Senator William Benton called for support of the Truman administration’s Campaign of Truth by describing it as a ‘‘Marshall Plan in the field of ideas. . . . The central issue of our time is intellectual and spiritual, and the heart of the present conflict is a struggle for the minds and loyalties of mankind’’ (emphasis mine). The 1959 launching of the American National Exhibition in Moscow (most famous for the Nixon-Khrushchev ‘‘kitchen debate’’) illustrated U.S. cultural propaganda efforts at their best. The exhibition highlighted examples of modern American conveniences and consumerism, but plans for the exhibition drew criticism from Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater for leaving out religion. George Allen,

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USIA director, responded that religion ‘‘was a continuing theme running all through the American exhibits.’’ The exhibition’s book display also included Bibles, which many Soviet visitors took with them. On the opening day of the exhibition, fourteen Bibles were stolen from the display.68 A controversy over the art presented at the exhibition demonstrates more clearly that the dialogue over U.S. cultural propaganda included religion. The battle over the use of art in the cultural Cold War was not new in 1959. The State Department met criticism over a decade earlier with its proposed exhibition of modern art in Europe and Latin America entitled ‘‘Advancing American Art.’’ After aesthetically conservative artist groups, the press, and some government officials lambasted the collection for its ‘‘weird,’’ ‘‘sinister’’ paintings, the State Department—already under suspicion by anticommunists— canceled the exhibit.69 In 1959, Democratic representative from Pennsylvania Francis E. Walter and Wheeler Williams, president of the American Artists Professional League, Inc., led the charge against the art chosen to represent the United States in Moscow. The American Artists Professional League was a conservative group that believed that modern art was ‘‘debauching all that is noble in art.’’ Williams and his organization protested the pieces selected by the USIA’s jury of artists and art experts. Walter also expressed his dissent after checking into the background of the sixty-nine artists selected and finding that ‘‘34—a fraction less than 50 percent—have records of affiliation with communist fronts and causes.’’70 Congressman Walter and HUAC investigated the situation in a hearing in July, dismissing the artwork as ‘‘hopelessly meaningless’’ and ‘‘doodle[s] in ceramics or stone.’’ At one point, Williams, in his testimony before the committee, called Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral the ‘‘worst doodle that you could imagine on a telephone pad.’’ Williams believed that modern art was connected to communist subversion: It seems to me quite obvious that the first thing they want to do to any county outside of the Iron Curtain, and particularly ours, is to destroy our faith in God, our religions. . . . Why they want to destroy art is equally important or second almost to religion. They want to destroy all phases of our culture; and if they can destroy our faith in God and our faith in the beauty and wonders of our cultural heritage, including the arts and literature and music and so forth, they can take us over without a hydrogen bomb. They can take us over with popguns.71 Cultural diplomacy, according to this line of reasoning, was important because the Soviets were intent on destroying America’s faith in God. The consequences of allowing them to do so through art, Williams argued, were apocalyptic in nature.


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In the end, President Eisenhower intervened with the compromise solution of sending twenty-seven additional paintings, dating from the mid-eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, to Moscow. These included Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 Portrait of George Washington and Childe Hassam’s 1890 Washington Arch, Spring. One selection exported the American millennial vision to the Soviet Union. Edward Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom depicted Isaiah 11: ‘‘The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.’’ Aside from the illustration of animals and children together, Hicks included a representation of William Penn’s treaty with the Indians. By incorporating this painting, the United States presented an aspect of its millennial tradition to the Soviets, demonstrating its importance during the Cold War. It also attempted to build a case for America’s peaceful and just society— especially significant as the civil rights movement was beginning to undermine this image around the world.72 The controversies surrounding the Moscow exhibition illuminated a contentious dialogue over cultural diplomacy. Despite the quarrels over content, all appeared to agree that this kind of propaganda was important. Furthermore, conservatives such as Williams and Walter were able to use religion and apocalypticism to win concessions for their own understanding of the meaning of the ‘‘American nation.’’ Mission work provided a previous reference from which American Christians had learned to pay attention to and care about the rest of the world. U.S. foreign policy makers had long judged America’s world role a kind of missionary endeavor commissioned by the divine to spread the American way of life abroad. During the Cold War, premillennialism and anticommunism combined with these previous frameworks to create a culture of urgency. The alliance of anticommunism and evangelical mission work continued to alter evangelical identity in the United States as born-again Christians increasingly considered their place in U.S. and world politics essential to God’s plan for both the present and the future.


4 The Cuban Climax

As we watched this celebration, I asked myself, how could he do it? How could this man start a seemingly hopeless revolution with only twelve followers and within two years’ time have so captured the hearts of the people and acquire such an army? Fidel has said that he usually ended a battle with more men than when it began because he took captive his enemies and never killed them; instead, he won them to his side as firm supporters of his cause. . . . Through all of the recent happenings, we have not lost sight of the fact that there is a greater battle to be fought. The winning of these people to the realization that the most important task of all is to pursue the peace of heart and the freedom from Satan’s chains which have enslaved their souls. —Maxine Sorensen, ‘‘Liberation for an Oppressed People,’’ United World Mission in Action, March 1959 The Castro Regime has not elected to sever the head of the Evangelical Church with one swift blow. It has chosen rather to torture its victim slowly through brutal harassment and weighty taxes. —Sidney Correll and Roy Ackerle, ‘‘Cuba: The Gospel under Communism,’’ Missionary Digest, January–March 1963 Both these statements came from articles written four years apart in publications of one evangelical organization. Alluding to the twelve disciples, the first describes revolutionary Fidel Castro in

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terms reminiscent of Christ. The second, in direct contrast, speaks of Castro as the torturer of evangelicalism. Though Castro’s firm embrace of communism only after leading a successful revolution to overthrow the former Cuban dictator Fulgeˆncio Batista explains this discrepancy for the most part, inconsistent descriptions of the Cuban government by evangelicals continued to appear even after 1963. In 1964, the Associated Press interviewed one missionary for the Baptist Home Mission Board who said, ‘‘[Under Castro] there’s the same opportunity to preach the gospel we’ve always had.’’1 How are these conflicting attitudes explained, especially in a Cold War context that almost always merged conservative evangelicalism with anticommunism? On July 26, 1953, a young Fidel Castro and a small group of revolutionaries led a failed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago in opposition to Batista’s government in Cuba. After serving time in prison and then leaving for Mexico in 1955, Castro declared a new name for his anti-Batista band: the 26th of July Movement. He returned in December 1956, but Batista’s soldiers reduced Castro’s followers to twelve men who fled to the jungle of the Sierra Maestra and began guerrilla warfare against the Cuban government. Eventually, in early 1959, a successful 26th of July Movement claimed control of Havana, driving Batista out of the country. U.S.-Cuban relations almost immediately began to deteriorate as the United States reacted with alarm to the new Cuban government’s policies, especially the Agrarian Reform Act of 1959, which prohibited foreign land ownership and requisitioned one thousand acres of farmland. In April 1961, a group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at Playa Giroń (Bay of Pigs) hoping to incite an uprising against Castro. The invasion failed, defeated by the Cuban army. At the same time that diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States worsened, Cuba and the Soviet Union strengthened their ties. All of this culminated in a U.S. Cold War nightmare when Castro proclaimed Cuba a socialist country in 1961.2 While evangelicals tried to make sense of the political situation in Cuba, an apocalyptic cloud developed over the United States’ small communist neighbor. In October 1962, the Cold War reached a climax in the standoff known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The most apocalyptic event during the period, the Cuban Missile Crisis turned the thoughts of people around the world toward the possibility that life as they knew it could end. How did this incident influence premillennialists who had attracted a willing audience to their prophetic ideology of doom during the Cold War? How did it affect the political identity of conservative Christians in the United States? This chapter answers those questions against the backdrop of the ambivalent and often inconsistent evangelical attitudes toward revolutionary and then communist Cuba that demonstrated the multifarious influences on evangelical religious and political identity in the United States. In the apocalyptic Cold War context, this was a result of evangelicals’ uneasy attempt to balance religious and political loyalties that sometimes corresponded and other times diverged.

the cuban climax

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The eschatological trauma of the Cuban Missile Crisis both mitigated and heightened that conflict. On the one hand, the threat of a nuclear holocaust erased almost all of the remaining support for Castro from the evangelical community by hardening even further the Cold War good-versus-evil dichotomy. The crisis temporarily homogenized U.S. national identity, and evangelicals joined with other Americans in putting aside differences. On the other hand, the Cuban Missile Crisis solidified the premillennial notion that prophecy was being fulfilled before evangelicals’ eyes, opening up the potential for future conflict between premillennialists and others who supported policy that believers interpreted as countering God’s plan for the end-times. The apocalypticism of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in other words, sharpened Cold War developments already in place. Analyzing evangelical attitudes toward Cuba in the aftermath of the crisis can help us to better understand how evangelical identity in relation to the dominant U.S. political culture changed during the Cold War.3

U.S. Evangelicals and the Hegemonic Gospel in Latin America In his study of Protestant mission efforts in turn-of-the-century, newly independent Cuba, Jason Yaremko notes that Christians aided U.S. hegemonic designs by ‘‘seeking to foster Cuban replicas of a U.S. Protestant church and citizen.’’ After Cuba’s independence from Spain was secured in 1898 (though indeed tempered by the shadow of U.S. paternalism and influence), more than twenty-four Protestant mission groups descended upon the small country. Though not intentionally (the number-one priority for these missionaries was to preach their gospel), their North American cultural biases affected their worldview, policies, and attitudes toward Cubans, as they did in places such as China. Protestant mission schools that were developed with U.S. educational standards and structures in mind closely resembled the U.S. government’s program for education in Cuba and were even supported by U.S. companies such as Coca-Cola and United Fruit Company. As a result, ‘‘the struggle over Cubanization versus Americanization persisted both within the political and ecclesiastical realms,’’ and U.S. missionaries often judged Cubans according to how closely they followed the American cultural model.4 Yaremko’s analysis provides essential historical background for understanding the later role of American Protestants in Cuba. Particularly since the projection of Protestant hegemony over Cuban citizens accompanied U.S. political and economic hegemony, missionaries accustomed to managing the direction of Cuba’s religious community must have considered Castro’s radicalization of the Revolution in 1961 confusing and a kind of betrayal. In the apocalyptic Cold War, some evangelical missionaries believed that their own

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worlds were turning upside down. The fruition of the Cuban Missile Crisis less than two years later confirmed their fears. Missionaries in Latin America during the Cold War recognized that they were dealing with several new developments. They faced revolution, they faced communism, they faced anti-Americanism, and they faced a divided world that, in their eyes, appeared to be fulfilling disastrous biblical prophecy. How they chose to respond to this new world depended on their cultural values as Americans and as evangelicals. They represented both groups to people in Latin America, and as intermediaries their attitudes and actions made some impact on the status of Cold War dynamics at the grassroots level. The 1960 annual report of the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society outlined the organization’s perception of the character of Cold War Latin America, the role of evangelicals in the region, and its vision for the future. To begin with, the report contained familiar Cold War themes sprinkled with rhetoric about the enemies of Christ—communism and Satan—which were described as mostly interchangeable threats. Christians around the world, according to the report, were united in facing these common enemies: ‘‘Behind the unrest caused by nationalism, the tensions caused by communist materialism, caused by a love for things, stands a person—cunning, deceitful, slanderous, powerful. Satan, the one who ‘opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God,’ is the common foe faced by fellow Christians in all parts of the world.’’5 The apocalyptic report went on to blend aspects of the Cold War with ‘‘signs of the times.’’ A more specific look at Latin America enumerated the Mission Society’s anxiety over Catholic influence and an increase in ‘‘anti-Yankee sentiment.’’ At the same time that they noted the strength of conservative evangelicals, the report’s authors identified challenges. Concerns about ministering in an era of revolution (particularly in the shadow of the Cuban Revolution) and about the relationship between the missionaries and the national churches were of primary importance. The Cold War and Cuba had forced evangelicals to rethink mission strategy and how they understood and reacted to the rest of the world. The report offered specific solutions: a renewed focus on biblical theology and youth training, a new approach to Catholicism, a greater emphasis on building up lay leadership, and an increasing reliance on media. Furthermore, as foreign workers in places like Cuba began to leave for home in larger numbers, American mission organizations looked to native Christians to carry out these goals.6 Reports such as that by the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society show that evangelical mission organizations during the Cold War had a keen interest in Latin America, but what did that attention specifically look like in Cuba? Comparing statistics from the 1937 edition of the Evangelical Handbook of Latin America to those from the 1961 edition shows substantial growth in the Protestant population in Cuba. According to these sources, church

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membership more than doubled in that time, from 21,342 to 51,973 people. A list of expenditures of the Cuba Evangelistic Association for 1957 reveals that the bulk of the budget went to worker support and travel expenses, but it also purchased a mimeograph machine, a loudspeaker, filmstrips, an accordion, and printing and literature. By 1960, there were 136 Assemblies of God, forty Brethren in Christ, six Church of God (Cleveland), 150 Free Will Baptist, twenty International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, seventy-four Open Bible Standard Churches, Inc., and thirty-two United World Missions churches in Cuba. At least six organizations or individuals provided gospel programming. Cadena Cultural Panamericana, a cooperative Christian radio network formed in 1951, distributed around fifty-four hundred phonograph records to Latin American countries. Of those, 159 went to Cuba.7 This evidence demonstrates a small but thriving evangelical community (of both foreign workers and nationals) in Cuba in the years before Castro’s government established a strong open relationship with the Soviet Union. Even within that period the proportion of the Cuban population who considered themselves Christian was low compared with other Latin American countries. Only 17 percent claimed to frequent any Christian church in 1954 (that number dropped to 2 percent by 1976).8 After the Cuban government openly embraced communism, many of the relatively few Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) fled, and organizations such as the West Indies Mission withdrew. Nevertheless, a smaller missionary presence remained and evangelical ministries continued under Cuban leadership. Despite pullouts of mission organizations, some missionaries, including Canadians Don and Elsie Elliott of the West Indies Mission, decided to stay. Evangelical missionaries to Latin America faced a Cold War world defined along an ideological fault line, a region confronted with revolution, the increasing nationalization of the churches, division within the Protestant community, and a population that was overwhelmingly Catholic. Partially motivated by what they believed to be ‘‘prophetic necessity,’’ many evangelical missionaries used apocalyptic themes to understand, to respond to, and to translate what they encountered. As key communicators to evangelicals back home, these missionaries played an essential role in shaping the U.S. evangelical perception of the nature and the significance of world affairs. The evangelical attitude toward Catholicism during this period is difficult to characterize. While embracing Catholicism’s anticommunism, evangelicals continued to condemn the Catholic Church in other areas and were particularly critical of the Church’s dominance in Latin America. The possible election of a Roman Catholic to the presidency in 1960 elicited concern among American evangelicals about a breach of the separation of church and state that they believed would probably not be to their advantage. The NAE commented officially on this matter at its annual convention in April 1960: ‘‘Whereas

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separation of church and state is the historic American principle, be it resolved that the NAE states its belief: That due to the political-religious nature of the Roman Catholic Church we doubt that a Roman Catholic president could or would resist fully the pressures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.’’9 This very political statement (made in an election year) grew out of evangelicals’ historic mistrust of the Roman Catholic Church. Evangelical WASPs in nineteenth-century America reacted with alarm to the power of political machines in the cities that often overwhelmingly represented the interests of Roman Catholics, and they had protested vehemently when President Franklin Roosevelt and later President Truman sent Myron C. Taylor to the Vatican as their personal representative.10 Evangelical anti-Catholicism ran deep, even while conservative Protestants overlooked their own profound influence in the political arena. The Cold War introduced another weapon that evangelicals could wield against the Catholic Church. In some evangelical circles, anti-Catholicism merged with anticommunism in surprising ways, considering the extreme anticommunism of American Catholics such as Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen and Francis Cardinal Spellman, who warned of ‘‘communist floodings’’ of the United States.11 In spite of this, many evangelical leaders made direct connections between Catholicism and communism. Outgoing NAE president Herbert S. Mekeel of Schenectady, New York, made these comments in a press release in 1960: ‘‘Just as communism will have no [truce?] with God, but substitutes a human God, so Catholicism substitutes for the living Christ either the Virgin or in effect, displaces His power with the more immediate presence of the living pope. Naturally, in both movements, the freedom of the individual is circumscribed, nor is there encouraged individual liberty. Where possible, the thinking is done for the individual.’’12 Such a powerful condemnation by an influential figure in one of evangelicalism’s foremost organizations demonstrated the extent to which two separate fears, of Catholicism and of communism, were welded together in the minds of many evangelicals. Dick Hillis, general director of Orient Crusades, took this comparison even further in the 1959 EFMA Executives’ Retreat: Roman Catholic strategy for world conquest is as clearly planned as communist strategy. In almost every country of both the slave and the free world, the Catholics have their priests and agents. With frightening intrigue, Catholicism is gaining ground around the world. With brilliant propaganda and outstanding success the Catholics march forward, exalting Eve, while with equal success the communists exalt Adam. The more they deify man, the more they humanize God. Hillis’s description did not end with the interchangeability of Catholicism and communism. He went on to comment on the meaning and the consequences of these trends:

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We have faced the growing problems; we now turn to the scriptures and ask ourselves if the next major event in history is not the coming of our Lord. He may come for all of us this year. If He does not, He certainly will come for some of us. Will we meet Him in joy, or will we be ashamed at His coming? That will be answered in part by our answer to another question. Are we fully obeying His order to get the Gospel to every creature, in every nation, in every generation?13 For Hillis, the fears generated by the successes of these dual threats culminated in the fulfillment of prophecy. The trepidation infiltrating the Cold War world allowed the premillennial paradigm to penetrate relationships (such as the one between Catholicism and evangelicalism) in surprising ways. The evangelical opinion of Catholicism had important consequences in missionary endeavors in Latin America, a region that was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Catholic influence over governments and schools in Latin America was a matter of great concern to evangelical missionaries. One 1962 study conducted by the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia, for example, purported to ‘‘indicate the extent of [Roman Catholic] control [over public schools in Colombia] and the ways and means by which it is exercised.’’ It concluded with alarm that only Roman Catholic priests were named local public school inspectors, presidents of school boards, and school business officials. Attending mass was obligatory, all students were instructed in Catholicism, classrooms displayed Catholic images, and schoolchildren recited Roman Catholic prayers. According to the author, the report was meant as an ‘‘examination of the machinery through which the Church makes effective its control over public schools.’’14 Evangelicals consistently used accounts such as these to criticize Catholicism in Latin America. In Cuba, the historical relationship between evangelicalism and Catholicism exhibited an unusual mix of tension and a certain camaraderie of purpose. Although antagonism between the two groups existed, both also shared a tradition of religious imperial hegemony. Scholars of the Catholic Church in Cuba point out that, institutionally, it was the weakest in Latin America.15 In the 1950s, 72.5 percent of the population called themselves Catholic, but only 5 to 8 percent were practicing Catholics, the lowest in Latin America.16 Cuba’s colonial past, coupled with overwhelming Spanish control over the Cuban Church’s hierarchy, helped to contribute to the weakness. Spanish influence meant that the Church, for the most part, backed Spain during the Cuban independence movement, and the Cuban Catholic clergy drew on that relationship for the majority of its political power.17 Protestant missionary activity began on more than a limited scale only after the Cuban independence struggle escalated in 1895. In many respects, it borrowed tactics and assumptions of Spanish Catholics in Cuba. The strong

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Catholic support of Spain during the independence period benefited the Protestant churches, which also profited from increased U.S. influence in Cuba. One scholar has noted the ironic consequence of this Protestant-U.S. cultural alliance on Cuban national identity. The Spanish had employed Catholicism to dominate Cuban religious identity, and at the same time that Protestants in Cuba were criticizing Spanish Roman Catholics, U.S. ministers were using ‘‘translations of prayer books and hymns written for an American audience and massive subsidies from the American Mother Church.’’18 Both Spanish Catholics and U.S. Protestants employed religion in their cultural hegemonic efforts to mold Cuban identity. Evangelicals—numerically and influentially a minority group both within Cuba and within its Christian community—saw the church and state dialogue that was emerging after the Revolution from several different angles. Although their Christianity, their ties to the United States, and their anticommunism at times united them with the Catholic community, they often praised the policies of the Cuban government that were meant to mitigate the authority of the Catholic Church. A complicated web of international Cold War ideology and politics, interfaith schisms, and the influence of powerful individuals informed the debate over church and state in Cuba. Until the 1960s, Protestants continued to believe that salvation depended on both Christian principles and U.S. cultural and political institutions. Protestantism expanded successfully in its first three decades in Cuba due to its close relationship with the United States. Ironically, though, that relationship would prove to be a liability later.19 Furthermore, in spite of American Protestant criticism of the influence of Spanish Catholicism in Cuba, many American evangelicals appeared to exhibit genuine shock at the Cuban Revolution’s anti-American turn, which both validated and augmented the evangelical premillennial culture of urgency. To American evangelicals, Cuba had become another sign of the end-times as it embraced communism and scorned the United States.

Before the Crisis In November 1959, Clyde Taylor of EFMA received a letter from Irving B. Parkhurst, the treasurer of Gordon College, a Massachusetts evangelical institution. Parkhurst related to Taylor some concerns of his daughter, who had been in Cuba for fifteen years supplying local churches with Sunday school materials: ‘‘She has been in intimate contact with the rebellion under Castro and feels there is a great injustice being done by allowing planes based in Florida to fly over Cuba and bomb the cities and villages.’’ Taylor responded right away. He first denied the bombs, stating that the Cuban military had ‘‘wounded quite a few people’’ while targeting a plane with rifles. He also advised caution to missionaries who would support the new Castro regime, not-

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ing Washington’s ‘‘uncertainty about [its] true nature.’’ In the end, Taylor suggested that missionaries in Cuba ‘‘take it easy in doing anything to defend the present government. They would do better to completely stay out of politics and keep quiet about what is going on, because this government is sure to fall unless we are greatly mistaken.’’ Parkhurst responded well to Taylor’s advice: ‘‘[I will] advise my daughter and her associates that they must devote all their time and efforts to the winning of the children to Christ and of teaching them the Bible lessons. If they do this, there will be no time for other activities.’’20 An example of attempts to separate politics from spirituality, this brief correspondence seems on the surface to denote a rejection of one in favor of another, a tendency long associated with evangelicalism. However, the idea that one could rebuff politics to concentrate on spirituality became problematic in the Cold War. Though Taylor advised Parkhurst that his daughter and other Cuban missionaries would be better off halting their support of Castro and thus ‘‘staying out of politics,’’ he implied that criticism of the Cuban government would not be out of the picture. Staying out of politics in the Cold War was not possible, especially for American missionaries abroad. Mission work usually meant expressing approval for U.S. government policy or for anticommunism. Parkhurst’s exchange with Taylor exemplified well the larger confusion of American evangelicals concerning the Cuban Revolution. Many Christians enthusiastically backed Castro’s anti-Batista movement, especially in the early years: ‘‘These men are striving for an honest and just government in Cuba. They have the backing of the Cuban people. Urge your legislators not to interfere. Do not criticize the Cuban leaders; pray for them! Watch and learn.’’21 Others, like Taylor, were leery. At times, evangelicals even admitted their uncertainty. Occasionally, individual Christian assessment of the island nation changed radically over time. Conflicting judgments about the Cuban situation accompanied diverse ideas about how to respond, from spiritual solutions to political ones. Sometimes the same course of action was used to procure opposing ends, as when calls for prayer to aid Castro mixed with calls for prayer to stop him. Contrary to the fairly simple, dichotomous image of the Cold War world, the evangelical reaction to Cuba revealed a complex picture. Evangelicals’ ambivalent attitudes toward Cuba were epitomized by their descriptions of Fidel Castro; to some extent their contradictory positions can be explained by acknowledging change over time as the Cold War progressed. Initially, when Castro’s connections to communism were unclear, American missionaries cheered his leadership in a revolution that was to topple an oppressive Batista regime in Cuba. Missionary Maxine Sorenson described Castro’s victory in 1959 for Americans at home: ‘‘After years of struggle and sacrifice, Fidel Castro, Cuba’s hero, along with his bearded warriors, made his triumphal entry into the city of Havana on January 8. It was the most tumultuous, carnival-flavored, freedom celebration witnessed in contemporary Latin

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American history.’’22 Castro’s Cuba was often favorably compared to the Batista years, and some missionaries, while praising Castro, scolded the United States for its support of Batista. In March 1959, American missionaries who ministered in the Cuban prisons depicted the situation as they saw it: We have analyzed the great simplicity of the inspirer of the movement, Fidel Castro. We have seen him dare to expose himself hourly to some foolish assassin under the dictatorship of Fulgeˆncio Batista as he goes about in complete freedom. We have been amazed at his great humility, his refusal of what many consider the glories of conquest, and his fanatical dedication to see inaugurated a pure democracy. His high moral ideals cannot be disputed and the conformity of the humblest country man to the leaders in civic and business circles. . . . We bow our heads in shame when we realize that our country furnished or at least made easy to acquire the arms for a cruel dictator. Many millions robbed from the Cuban people were deposited in the United States.23 In both of these descriptions Castro was portrayed as a freedom-fighting savior for the Cuban people. Other reports echoed these sentiments and added their own admonishment to unfair, ‘‘adverse propaganda in the United States about Castro.’’24 The experiences of these missionaries and visitors to Cuba contradicted the statements of U.S. officials, and they expressed their disapproval openly. Castro’s own conception of Christianity as a practical faith played a major role in this debate, for he believed that true Christianity worked toward carrying out justice: A true Christian is one who loves his neighbor, who makes sacrifices for others, who obeys the doctrines of Christ and gives what he has in order to go and serve his fellow human beings. Let these ‘‘Christians’’ leave their temples and go out to the fields to help the sick, plant trees, build houses, assist the Agrarian Reform, sew smocks for the children who have no clothes. That’s what being Christian means! On the other hand, going to church to conspire against our fatherland is the action of a Pharisee—never of a Christian.25 Castro’s view of Christianity, and thus his position on the church-state relationship, was shaped by the Revolution. He was highly critical of anticommunist, ‘‘counterrevolutionary’’ Christians, which did not bode well for those church leaders who condemned his government. At the same time, Castro was not anti-Christian, defying the Cold War characterization that pitted God and capitalism against evil communism. Instead, he endorsed Christianity as he defined it, as revolutionary Christianity. In the late 1980s, Brazilian priest Frei

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Betto published transcripts of conversations with the Cuban leader in Fidel and Religion: Castro Talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto. Here, Castro clearly upset conceptions that pitted religion against Marxism: ‘‘I believe that it is possible for Christians to be Marxists as well, and to work together with Marxist communists to transform the world. The important thing is that, in both cases, they be honest revolutionaries who want to end the exploitation of man by man and to struggle for a fair distribution of social wealth, equality, fraternity and the dignity of all human beings.’’26 This attitude blurred the strictly dichotomous Cold War paradigm and helps to explain the ambivalence of the evangelical position on Cuba, as it was much easier for evangelicals to condemn communist leaders who openly scorned religion. Focusing on certain personalities connected to communist countries facilitated the demonization and personification of America’s Cold War enemies. Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, and Fidel Castro served as tangible targets—much more concrete than the vague notion of a communist threat. Additionally, this tendency to denounce a communist leader implied the disconnection of the people of the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba from evil communist governments.27 Communist critics could then claim that people living under these rulers had been imprisoned against their will. Because of this inclination, evangelical ambivalence toward Castro is somewhat remarkable. Missionaries and the publications that printed their stories and articles appeared to have wavered and disagreed over what to make of Castro. From 1959 through 1961 (and even beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962), evangelical missionaries and Cuban nationals sent conflicting reports on Castro and the Cuban Revolution. The situation appeared to genuinely perplex American evangelicals. Was the communist regime in Cuba severely limiting evangelical work, or was Castro the leader described by several earlier missionaries as the savior of the Cuban people? In an attempt to clear up some of this confusion, Clyde D. Taylor of the EFMA sent out a letter in 1961 to a number of evangelical denominations and organizations with mission projects in Cuba. The EFMA was trying to get a handle on the situation in Cuba ‘‘in light of the present conditions and trends’’ there.28 The responses to Taylor’s inquiry, though they provided certain details, did not give a clear-cut answer to these questions. In fact, they may have added to evangelical dissonance over Cuba. An examination of six of those responses—from the Assemblies of God Foreign Missions Department, Brethren in Christ Church World Missions Department, the Church of God Foreign Missions Department, the Free Will Baptist Foreign Missions Department, the Church of the Nazarene Foreign Missions Department, and La Conferencia Cubana—shows that the Cuban mission field remained obscure to evangelicals in the United States. Confusion, even within denominational bodies, was common. In one letter, Melvin Hodges of the Assemblies of God told Taylor that the Cuban government had halted the production of

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their national radio program, but he added in a handwritten postscript, ‘‘Word just received indicates that the radio program may become available again.’’29 Many of the letters commented on the blurry status of the organization’s property. Some told Taylor that school and church buildings had been taken over by the government, others had not had this experience at all, and still others had transferred missionary property to Cuban nationals to avoid such government action. Similarly, some groups claimed that though they were still able to preach, they could not speak out against communism, and a few ministers were asked to legitimate the Cuban government. The Free Will Baptist report, on the other hand, stated, ‘‘The socialist government has not placed any restrictions on the church’s ministry to date,’’ and the Brethren in Christ Church recorded an ‘‘unusual measure of freedom in relation to their work.’’30 Most of the letters also noted that though their missionaries had left after the Cuban government openly declared itself socialist, native Christians had taken over the ministries. Many of the organizations reported increased church attendance. These responses almost certainly left Taylor and the EFMA more confused than ever. Despite so many contradictions that did not appear to fit the neatly organized good and evil Cold War world, many representatives of these various missionary organizations used familiar language of the period to describe what had become a typical situation in the context of the evangelical apocalyptic paradigm. One wrote of the ‘‘hardships’’ in Cuba, another responded, in a fatalistic tone, that ‘‘only God [knew]’’ what the future held, and yet another cited the need to rely on God to help them through ‘‘the problems of life as found in Jesus Christ in times such as these.’’31 References to the uncertainty of the future sometimes even trumped prophetic speculation: ‘‘As to the future, I do not think any of us are capable of making any predictions. All we can do is wait and see what the outcome will be.’’32 Conflicting reports on Cuba presented evangelicals with a new Cold War scenario. How they assessed communist Cuba differed from past explanations of the bipolar Cold War model of the world, but how significant would that difference prove during the apocalyptic climax of the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Cold War Climax In the middle of the Cold War, when Americans were torn between moods of pessimism and optimism,33 President Kennedy made an announcement on the night of October 22, 1962. He revealed that U-2 spy plane photographs taken over Cuba had shown Soviet missile installations there and proclaimed that this situation was unacceptable to the U.S. government. After learning that a blockade of Cuba would be the response, people in the United States and around the world collectively held their breath as the Soviet Union announced

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plans to break the quarantine. Whatever ambivalence lingered in the evangelical community over Cuba, they had no ambivalence about the sense of dread that overwhelmed them during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cold War apocalyptic environment had finally culminated in the biggest sign of the times yet, and the world had never been so close to ending. The potential chiliastic consequences of the Cuban Missile Crisis had a real impact on the relationship between evangelical and secular identity by augmenting universally adopted premillennial understandings of the world. U.S. policy toward Cuba in the few years prior to the crisis does show traces of premillennial influence on policymakers as they pursued geopolitical gain. In a 1998 article, Ernesto Betancourt wrote of one suggestion from General Edward Lansdale, who had been a key leader in Operation Mongoose, a program designed to undermine Castro and his government from within. Lansdale had proposed spreading a rumor to convince Cubans that Castro’s overthrow would bring about Christ’s return: ‘‘At that time, a U.S. submarine was to fill the night sky with star shells, thus convincing the natives that Christ was arriving, leading to the final overthrow of Castro.’’34 This effort assumed that Cubans believed in and would be motivated by the second coming. However erroneous that assumption was, the propaganda attempt revealed that Lansdale supposed that premillennial notions were considerable enough to spark rebellion. Lansdale’s scheme was outlandish, even according to some Operation Mongoose officials at the time. Nevertheless, there were additional (less extreme) endeavors to depict Castro’s Cuba in an alarming, apocalyptic fashion by others within the Kennedy administration. Sherman Kent, a member of the Board of National Estimates of the CIA, offered the president two memorandums in early 1961 asking, ‘‘Is Time on Our Side in Cuba?’’ These reports were meant to convince Kennedy of the necessity of an invasion of the island with the intention of overthrowing Castro. According to Kent and others, time was running out as Castro continued to gain strength in Cuba. The implication was clear that such a course would be considered a failure on the part of the Kennedy administration and have ruinous consequences for the United States.35 Political scientist James A. Nathan has argued that ‘‘the lethal element of international relations’’ characterized the foreign policy initiatives of Kennedy administration officials. The Joint Chiefs of Staff shocked the president in 1961 when they proposed using nuclear weapons to avert the communist takeover of the small country of Laos. Kennedy’s resolution in this case was an indication of the tactics he would later apply to the Cuban Missile Crisis: ‘‘The president sought to make it appear as if an armed solution might be necessary at that same time that he strove to engineer, through quiet—indeed, almost invisible—diplomacy, a well-veiled exit from an insupportable position.’’ The resulting Geneva Conference on Laos defused the Joint Chiefs’ nuclear proposal by establishing a neutral government in the Asian country.36

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Even the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 was based on faulty conceptions about the Cuban situation that led some policymakers to believe that extreme measures were necessary. They shared the same assumptions as premillennialists who argued for the special role of the United States in God’s end-times plans. The United States was good (as opposed to the evil communists in Cuba and the Soviet Union) and its citizens, as God’s chosen people, would play a key role in the last days. It would not be accurate to argue that U.S. Cuban policy could be explained solely (or even mostly) by the influence of premillennial Cold War culture. Nevertheless, these shared assumptions did have an effect on policymakers who launched the Bay of Pigs operation believing that the Cuban people would overwhelmingly join the effort to overthrow their evil ruler. The events that followed Kennedy’s October 22 announcement of Soviet missile installations in Cuba happened quickly. The Strategic Air Command sent out bombers to military and civilian bases after Nikita Khrushchev promised that Soviet ships would ignore the American blockade line. Tension mounted in President Kennedy’s Executive Committee meetings in the White House and exploded when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson confronted the Soviet Union in a Security Council meeting on Thursday, October 25. On Saturday, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down and a confrontational incident between the U.S. military and a Soviet submarine came close to launching the nuclear war that Americans feared. The Soviet captain had responded to a U.S. demand to surface by threatening to fire instead. Though the submarine eventually had surfaced and that nuclear skirmish had been averted, the president ordered the military to prepare for air strikes against Cuba for the next Monday. In the meantime, Kennedy received two letters, one mollifying and one confrontational, from Khrushchev. His decision was to respond to the less threatening message and ignore the other, in conjunction with continuing the low-key diplomatic talks between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The president’s brother offered the Soviets a promise not to invade Cuba and the removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey. The next day Khrushchev accepted the deal. The Soviet Union would dismantle the missiles in Cuba in exchange for U.S. assurance that it would not invade Cuba and would disassemble its own missiles in Turkey. The decision ended a week of breathless dread, when the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse had the entire world on edge. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the amalgamation of foreign policy and apocalypticism directly into the everyday lives of the population. Alice L. George points out that it is impossible to generalize about the reaction of the American public to the Cuban Missile Crisis because Americans presented a ‘‘collection of individual responses to the threat of nuclear war.’’ Forty percent of Americans said they had taken civil defense precautions, which may have included holding family discussions, preparing shelters, contacting local civil

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defense authorities, or stocking up on food supplies. Others did not. Some Americans raided grocery stores; others did not. Some bought shelters or prepared for evacuations; others did not. Most civil defense offices in places such as Miami, Cleveland, Oklahoma City, and Atlanta were deluged with calls, but some towns reported no heightened civil defense activities. Waterford, Connecticut’s civil defense director resigned after only five of sixteen thousand residents requested information.37 Inactivity, of course, can be interpreted in many ways and it did not necessarily mean that these Americans were not anxious. It could indicate a sense of inevitability, denial, or a feeling of helplessness and resignation. Whatever the case, Americans reacted to the news of the standoff over Cuba in diverse ways. The crisis either demonstrated or renewed many Americans’ faith in God. Church attendance in the country rose 10 to 20 percent on Sunday, October 28. One reader of the Daily Gazette in Sterling, Illinois, wrote that the worst result of a communist victory was the possible loss of religious freedom: ‘‘With the snarling, nation-swallowing bear of atheistic communism earnestly pawing at our door, it is high time that religious leaders take urgent heed of our position. It would be tragic enough to lose our physical or national freedom, but even worse to lose our religious freedom.’’38 The Chicago Civil Defense Department’s chief administrative officer, Colonel Aurel Clark, advised Americans to ‘‘take cover and pray’’ in case of a nuclear attack.39 Associated Press writer Saul Pett told of an eleven-year-old Portland, Oregon, girl whose mother discovered her ‘‘alone in her room, on her knees, praying no harm would come to her home in the crisis she could not understand.’’ Even Washington officials staying in one government bunker asked for additional military support and for chaplains who could meet needs of a higher, spiritual nature.40 God had been used as a religious weapon in the Cold War, and many Americans, who felt otherwise powerless, again turned to their faith when tensions peaked. Aside from scrutinizing daily news reports more closely, preparing for the effects of nuclear warfare on varying levels, and turning to religion, many Americans continued on with their daily lives. Local newspaper coverage reveals that people and churches continued with their Halloween and holiday plans, their club and youth meetings, and their sporting and social activities. On Thursday, October 25, the Daily Gazette in Sterling-Rock Falls, Illinois, printed a story on the local Y-Wives Club of the YWCA. The night before, in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, they had sponsored a program entitled ‘‘Proper Table Settings for All Occasions.’’ The article accompanied a picture of three of the women displaying their formal dinner settings and an announcement of a Christmas workshop that included a candle-making demonstration.41 In the same newspaper, one story announced that there were only ‘‘twelve more days’’ before Six Flags Over Texas concluded its season.42 This was assuming, of course, that nuclear warfare did not shut down the amusement park early.

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But what was the response of the churches? Particularly, what did evangelicals who believed in the inevitable destruction of the earth do when faced with the real possibility of that destruction? One way to gauge a specific response of the churches during the Cuban Missile Crisis is to look at sermon topics for that Sunday, October 28. Those listed in the DeKalb (Illinois) Daily Chronicle reveal a good variety of subject matter. Some sermons appear to have dealt directly with the Cuban Missile Crisis, its apocalyptic implications, or its deadly potential consequences. The minister at First Baptist preached on ‘‘The World’s Worst Quarantine,’’ an obvious allusion to the world situation. Parishioners at Bethany Baptist heard a message entitled ‘‘He Is Coming Back.’’ A few weeks after the crisis had been averted, the president of Wheaton College Dr. V. Raymond Edman spoke even more decisively with ‘‘We Stand at Armageddon.’’ Other sermon titles utilized themes of trials and death. ‘‘Man’s Trials—Man’s Faith’’ was the title of the sermon heard at First Lutheran, and the pastor of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, spoke on ‘‘Probation after Death.’’ Other sermon titles listed do not appear to apply directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was ‘‘The Case against God’’ at Genoa Methodist, ‘‘Should Protestantism Be Saved?’’ at Bethlehem Lutheran, ‘‘Your New Name’’ at Hinckley St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, ‘‘The Truth Shall Make You Free’’ at Trinity Lutheran, and ‘‘Christ—The Will of God’’ at University Methodist.43 Churches in other parts of the country demonstrated a similar blend of topics. The Reverend Leonard Mansen of the Christian Church in Greenville, Texas, appeared to draw on the geopolitical fears surrounding the crisis to conjure up spiritual anxiety. His sermon ‘‘Are You Fearful or Concerned?’’ purported to answer the question, ‘‘Can I know for sure I am saved?’’ Meanwhile, evangelist John R. Bisagno asked a question of a different kind at the Greenville First Baptist Church. ‘‘Is ‘The Twist’ merely harmless exercise or is it actually a moral corrupting tool in the hands of subversive communism?’’44 The Cold War’s best-known evangelist, Billy Graham, was in Argentina during the Cuban Missile Crisis. On October 28, he delivered an ominous address to his Buenos Aires audience and to those listening to the radio program Hour of Decision. The crisis, according to Graham, had caused the world to ‘‘tremble,’’ and his own dark words probably added to a great many listeners’ trepidation: Many think this may be the prelude to the greatest crisis in the history of mankind. Never before have weapons of such magnitude been poised at great segments of the human race. The Caribbean crisis came to a head and the American people closed ranks behind the president. Whether the strong action of the American government has come in time remains to be seen. For many years the policy has been to compromise, talk, retreat, and appease. Many of

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our leaders in both political parties have looked at the world through rose-colored glasses and now we are paying for it. The chickens are coming home to roost. . . . Now thousands of Americans may have to die because of the tragic mistakes that have been made in the past. . . . Men are becoming desperate. Fear of the future is in everyone’s hearts. Graham boldly and without hesitation linked the Cuban Missile Crisis to the second coming: ‘‘Now the four horses of the apocalypse are preparing for action. The eventual showdown that is now on the horizon is inevitable. We are now on a collision course. . . . The Bible tells us that when world conditions are the worst . . . then will Christ come.’’ In spite of Graham’s menacing tone, he curiously concluded on an optimistic note: ‘‘The world crisis has added to the interest [in Graham’s crusade]. And the people of Argentina have been willing to listen to the gospel as never before. . . . We believe this is a glorious day of opportunity in the midst of a crumbling world.’’45 Though these words may have seemed opportunistic and contradictory to outsiders, evangelicals understood them within a larger premillennial paradigm. Born-again Christians looked forward to world revival and to ‘‘meeting Christ in the air’’ in the shadow of the end-times. Anticipation accompanied the apocalyptic despair surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis when it was linked to the second coming. Ecumenical organizations such as the NCC also issued statements regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Christian Century supported the statement and printed it for its readers: ‘‘In this time of international crisis, the world and our nation are confronted with questions of utmost urgency and gravity. . . . Having our trust in God as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of our world and the Sovereign of men and nations, we are governed by faith, not fear.’’ The statement also acknowledged the power of prayer: ‘‘Believing in the power of prayer, we call upon our people to be in constant prayer related to responsible action.’’46 Prayer was a common response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, for it gave Americans who otherwise felt helpless a spiritual activity that they believed offered them some control over their own fate. The Presbyterian Church (USA) and some U.S. Catholic Bishops made Sunday a day of prayer, several laymen and women activated prayer chains by placing calls to their friends and neighbors, and a prayer service for international peace took place in Birmingham, Alabama. In Key West, Florida, the Holy Innocent Episcopal Church prayed together on the church lawn. Some churches remained open to accommodate those who wished to pray.47 These Americans’ commitment to prayer during a time of crisis was a sincere act of supplication, and the pervasiveness of prayer indicated that those who prayed believed their efforts would affect the outcome of the crisis.

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Fear proved a second common response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Christian Century published a poem that week by Charles Angoff entitled ‘‘After the Bomb’’: God doesn’t live Here any more. Lucifer has Departed. All the Redeemers Are vagabonds. Creation is Bankrupt. Now the Lice and rats Will try.48 Evangelicals shared this fear of the future with other Americans. Surprisingly, considering the pervasiveness of premillennialism during the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis did not appear to boost exponentially talk of prophecy fulfillment. Though many Christians joined Graham in connecting the crisis with biblical prophecy, most evangelicals appeared more concerned with the moment. Immediate anxiety brought on by the Cuban Missile Crisis mostly overshadowed thoughts of the rapture, the tribulation, and the Antichrist. For those few days in October, evangelicals were able to relate well to the fears of a woman from South Florida who supposedly realized she had forgotten her children in the process of evacuating.49 Yet, as in other times during the Cold War, a sense of immediate doom mingled with expressions of spiritual hope. Right under ‘‘After the Bomb,’’ the Christian Century printed another poem, ‘‘Fallout’’: Christ the megaton Christ the detonation: Grace is percussive, Though you can never quite resent it. Never hide the act although you mute it. Grace is explosive. Christ the fallout Christ the contamination: Grace is endemic, Though you can never quite pinpoint it. Never put your finger on the culprit Grace is pandemic.50 Here, the poet, William Elliott, uses nuclear descriptors to explain personal faith in yet another example of building popular comprehension of the world

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by mixing Christian and Cold War images in an apocalyptic way. Fear and hope, together, was the result.

After the Crisis U.S. evangelicals’ attitudes toward Cuba remained mixed even after the missile crisis. As condemnation of communism in that country increased, other influences competed with Cold War anticommunism to produce some surprising results. In one case, conservative Christians united with liberal Protestant groups to protest a U.S. policy disallowing U.S. funds into Cuba. In spite of the heightened tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, some evangelicals remained somewhat positive about the situation in Cuba. Diverse loyalties competed within evangelicalism to create a complicated worldview driven by apocalyptic and millennial expectations for the future. These interests continued to work themselves out in evangelical assessments of U.S. foreign policy, which had been emboldened by premillennialism. Predictably, after the Cuban Missile Crisis many more evangelical critics of Castro’s Cuba emerged. Later articles and reports from evangelical organizations incorporated official, secular, and religious anticommunist critiques of Castro, reflecting the ability of anticommunism to blur the distinctions among these various sources. The Evangelical Information Center, located very near to the homes of Cuban refugees in Miami, put out bulletins in 1963 and 1964 to highlight persecution under Castro and his regime. It blamed Castro for instigating a ‘‘great wave of persecution’’ against evangelical churches in Cuba. The 1964 bulletin included a long list of incidents that were meant to demonstrate the Cuban government’s harassment of evangelical churches. It cited laws that allowed the regime to intervene in a church’s business, to confiscate Bibles, to halt the construction of church buildings, to close evangelical institutes, to censor Christian radio and print, and to obstruct church services. To validate what it perceived as the truly oppressive nature of the Cuban government, it quoted a pastor: ‘‘For us the picture is very dark. The whole weight of an iron fortress of steel and cement rests upon us. Our only hope is to raise our eyes to God.’’51 A 1963 report by the Washington-based Capital Baptist claimed that 90 percent of all Bibles and hymnals sent to Cuba had been confiscated and ground into pulp, which surely must have outraged conservative evangelicals who believed the Bible to be the very word of God.52 Heartbeat, a Free Will Baptist publication, printed an interview with a Cuban pastor in 1967. The article offered a stark contrast between his experiences in Cuba and his new life in the United States: ‘‘The days of harassment were over. He and his family finally were safe. He could preach with freedom from fear of arrest and death. It was time to greet old friends who had made it out ahead of him, to buy milk for his seven-year-old

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boy who last tasted it at age two, to breathe prayers of thanksgiving, to cry a little.’’53 Another Heartbeat contributor described Castro as a Christmas grinch, quoting him in a 1969 article: ‘‘In 1969 we will do away with the celebration of Christmas. Instead, I am calling upon the people of Cuba to join me in bringing in a ten-million-ton sugar harvest, and from now on July 26 (the anniversary of the Revolution) will be the day of celebration.’’54 These accounts all served to assure evangelical readers of the evil of communism and Castro. Fantastic stories of communist atrocities against evangelicals in Cuba abounded. One conservative organization claimed, ‘‘Everyone that knows anything about the theory and practice of Marxist-Leninism knows that the system is radically anti-Christian, that it is opposed to all that is godly or an object of divine worship. . . . In Cuba, as everywhere, communism came in disguised in lamb’s clothing with the intention of bringing the Christians to a level of cooperation and integration.’’ The bulletin went on to describe numerous incidents of communist aggression toward Christians. It told of communists converting churches to hospitals, church hymns interrupted by ‘‘red mobs’’ singing the ‘‘Cuban Communist International Anthem,’’ and spies for the government’s Department of Religious Affairs in ‘‘all the churches.’’55 Tales of persecution were meant to garner emotional responses of outrage and show the cruelty of the communists while demonstrating the power and effectiveness of those Christians who stayed firm and held their own. One anecdote recounted an incident at a Pentecostal church in Yaguajay (Sancti Spı´ritus). Church members were in the middle of prayer when communists entered cursing God’s name. According to the bulletin, ‘‘While some [communists] put their fingers in the ears of the faithful, others pulled their hair and yelled, ‘We are from the devil.’ ’’ Other accounts told of evidence of God’s vengeance toward communists who harassed Christians: ‘‘A Baptist church in the country, in the province of Camaguëy, was burned by the communists. The fire from the church started a fire in a cane field and this fire passed on to the house of the local communist leader. The house was completely destroyed. Some people upon seeing this cried, ‘The Hand of God.’’’56 A story in a bulletin distributed only a month after this tale told of similar consequences for communists who opposed God’s people in Cuba. According to this account, a group of communists discovered a Bible in a home in Potrerillo and ‘‘with diabolical anger destroyed the sacred book and left.’’ Shortly after doing so, their vehicle overturned, killing the leader and injuring the others. Those who heard about the incident attributed the accident to God’s judgment.57 Evangelicals took these tales as evidence that God would not leave atheistic communism unopposed—in Cuba or elsewhere. Some feared the contagion of the Cuban Revolution would spread throughout Latin America. Fred Schwarz’s CACC, based in Long Beach, California, continually emphasized the danger of Fidel Castro to the United States: ‘‘Castro’s long-range goal is the destruction of the United States of America, which he

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regards as the fountainhead of imperialism. He judges individuals, organizations, and nations by their relationship to the struggle to destroy America. If they contribute to the weakening of American power and prestige, they are good.’’58 The CACC made two out of ten anticommunist films about the dangers of Castro’s Cuba available in 1970: Castro, Cuba, and Communism and Lessons from Cuba. In early 1968, Schwarz warned readers of the CACC newsletter of a communist ‘‘triple threat’’ in South America. Colombia, Venezuela, and Guyana, he warned, were being bombarded with cunning communist attacks that had been tailored to each country’s particular situation in order to be most successful.59 Schwarz also wrote with alarm of the September 1970 victory of Salvador Allende in the Chilean elections: ‘‘It appears probable that communist power will soon be established in Chile, a South American republic with a long tradition of democracy. This will result in a Cuba-Chile communist axis that will bisect South America.’’60 The danger for the CACC was illustrated by a cartoon in which a soccer player identified as ‘‘America Latina’’ is kicking a soccer ball into a goal guarded by President Richard Nixon. A ball labeled ‘‘Cuba’’ has already made it into the goal and a ball labeled Chile is entering it after eluding Nixon’s grasp. The caption reads, ‘‘The second goal for Latin America.’’61 Anticommunists such as Schwarz did not take lightly socialist victories in Latin American nations or in any nation, for in their Cold War understanding of the world this invoked catastrophe. In the same newsletter that printed the soccer cartoon, Schwarz offered a list of predictions for Chile that was highly reminiscent of premillennial prophecy. A communist victory in Chile would mean the end of free elections, firing squads and executions, political prisoners by the thousands, refugees, an end to religious education, a weakened family, decreased production, military alliances with Cuba and the Soviet Union, and revolutionary training camps in Chile.62 Evangelical apocalypticism enabled people such as Schwarz and others to understand and explain the Cold War world. Placed within a premillennial paradigm that expected the world’s deterioration as the end approached, the language of anticommunism was much more effective; evangelicals after the Cuban Missile Crisis used the prose to understand Cuba under Castro, linking that part of the world to their Cold War assessments elsewhere. Nevertheless, the initial ambivalence toward communist Cuba complicated this apocalyptic, anticommunist vision. Because this uncertainty came from conflicting religious reports over the political situation on the island, it demonstrates that as evangelicals were working out their national identity, religious characterizations were not always dependent on blackand-white Cold War conceptions of the world. Instead, a mix of religious and political loyalties formed a unique evangelical cultural identity. Despite a fairly clear pattern among evangelical portrayals of Castro—from positive to negative as the years progressed—some exceptions existed that defy

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simple analysis and show that evangelicals were not easily categorized during the Cold War. Even after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, evangelical missionaries continued to report positively on Castro and his regime. Dr. Herbert Caudill of the Baptist Home Mission Board told reporters in 1964 that Castro still allowed him to preach. Other visitors to Cuba in the years after 1962 brought back positive assessments of communist Cuba and of Castro, suggesting that conservative Christians used their own experiences and alternate identity sources (connected to but not the same as their national identity) to form their own assessment of Cuba and its leader. The religious encounters of these evangelicals did not always merely defend the U.S. Cold War position. In the case of Cuba, it actually challenged that position by offering alternative interpretations. In 1963, one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the people of the world to the edge of their seats, President Emeritus of Princeton Theological Seminary Dr. John Mackay visited the ‘‘Tragic Island.’’ The description of his visit, published in the Christian Century in February 1964, caused a firestorm of responses from the publication’s readers and others throughout the Protestant United States. Mackay reported to have found ‘‘no evidence of religious persecution’’ in Cuba. Although Cuban Protestants were all opposed to the communist regime, Mackay argued that they differed in how they believed they should behave as citizens. Government officials, according to Mackay, did not withhold permission for Christian assemblies and gatherings, and he conveyed the presence of a large, active Christian community in Cuba. Furthermore, Mackay claimed that many Cuban Protestant leaders saw the Cuban Revolution and the regime that followed as an important opportunity to ‘‘confront fellow Cubans with the revolutionary significance of Jesus Christ, the gospel and the church. Moreover, it is their judgment that in pursuing this objective they enjoy the necessary religious freedom.’’ All of these observations led Mackay to a conclusion about U.S. foreign policy: ‘‘The American blockade of Cuba is morally reprehensible, pragmatically futile, and politically disastrous.’’63 Responses to this article were immediate, passionate, and numerous. Readers of the Christian Century wrote both in support and condemnation of Mackay. Some strongly objected to his conclusions and what one writer claimed were the generalizations that led him to those conclusions. Protests came from a representative of the NCC, from ministers and laypeople of various denominations, from exiled Cuban nationals, and from other organizations with connections to Cuba. One writer, a member of the anti-Castro Cuban Revolutionary Junta in Indianapolis, Indiana, wrote, ‘‘We protest John A. Mackay’s article. We have proof present leaders [in the] Presbyterian Church in Cuba are communist agents.’’ With the same tone and in the same language, Edmundo G. Morgado of the Association of Cuban Protestants concurred with a simple message: ‘‘We protest Dr. Mackay’s article. It is not the truth.’’ Cecilio Arrastıá of the NCC Committee on Cooperation in Latin America countered Mackay with examples

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of indirect persecution of Protestant churches, including the confiscation of Bibles, the prohibition of religious television and radio programs, and the closing of some church buildings. He added examples of widespread religious harassment of Catholics in Cuba and argued that both poverty and oppression had led many Cubans to flee the country.64 Some writers more specifically took issue with Mackay’s criticism of U.S. foreign policy: Are we to assume that the missiles which Castro aimed toward us were perhaps loaded with sugar cane, rum and cigarettes? The trade embargo against Cuba is one of the weapons of this war. That Christians in Cuba may have to suffer thereby is indeed regrettable, but should that warrant our surrender in the struggle against atheistic and totalitarian communism? . . . As to the ban on travel to Cuba, let us hope that in the future the state department will be more careful, so that misinformed, gullible and naı¨ve clergymen will not be able to return and serve as Castro’s propagandists in this country. Letters such as this one suggested that Mackay had undermined freedom, Christianity, and the United States. These three things seemed to be almost indiscernible from the letter writers’ perspectives. Mackay’s article, according to this line of thought, was subversive and dangerous to the good side of the Cold War: ‘‘Dr. Mackay and your magazine have done great damage to the image of Christianity, freedom and the United States, the like of which may be of far-reaching consequences once Cuba is free and can live again in Christ and with friends, not foes.’’ These objections fit easily and expectantly into the discourse on world power relations framed by the Cold War. But letters criticizing Mackay’s article were not the only ones that the Christian Century received. Many also wrote in support of Mackay. Their viewpoints, considered alongside those hostile to his article, underline the ambivalent attitudes toward communist Cuba. In particular, letter writers who validated Mackay were highly critical of U.S. Cuban policy. Louis P. Pojman of West End Collegiate Church in New York called it myopic, ‘‘unjust, ridiculous and futile.’’ Instead of linking Christianity, ideals of freedom, and the United States, these writers emphasized the stark differences they saw in Christianity and U.S. foreign policy in Cuba: ‘‘Unworthy of a democratic nation that claims to be Christian are our refusing food and other basic necessities to be carried in American ships, banning [input?] by those who would study the situation and report their findings, forbidding churches to send money to churches in Cuba.’’ Others put U.S. Cuban policy in a larger Cold War context, criticizing the U.S. government’s actions. J. Stuart Innerst of Whittier, California, wrote, ‘‘Cuba, China and Vietnam vividly demonstrated that our negative anticommunism policy is bankrupt.’’ John C. Wiley of the Second Congregational Church in Williamstown, Massachusetts, agreed:

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‘‘ ‘Cuba Revisited’ dares to challenge a deep-seated fallacy of our foreign policy with regard to non-free countries: that we should build walls around nations whose policies we disapprove.’’ These widely divergent responses illustrate the absence of a monolithic Protestant and even evangelical attitude toward Cuba. Not only were U.S. Christians uncertain about the condition of the Protestant churches in Cuba due to often conflicting reports, but they had formed opposing views on CubanU.S. relations as well. A discourse regarding the Christian quandary over foreign policy resulted. In the process, evangelicals began to re-form their own religious and national identities. The evangelical and Protestant communities joined others in the United States who were debating the significance of the Castro regime. The reaction of Washington to one senator’s comments in 1964 illustrated that U.S. political leaders were just as divided over the nature of Cuba’s threat and over U.S. policy toward its neighbor. In March 1964, Senator J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas made some controversial remarks: The effort to weaken and eventually bring down the Castro regime by a policy of political and economic boycott . . . has been a failure, and there is no reason to believe that it will succeed in the future. . . . Castro is a nuisance but not a grave threat to the United States. . . . We must abandon the myth that Cuban communism is a transitory menace that is going to collapse or disappear in the immediate future. . . . The continued existence of the Castro regime, though inimical to our interests and policies, is not an insuperable obstacle to the attainment of our objectives, unless we make it so by permitting it to poison our politics at home and to divert us from more important tasks in the hemisphere.65 Fulbright’s dissenters included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, New York Senator Jacob Javits, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, Iowa Senator Jack R. Miller, and Florida Senator George Smathers, who called Fulbright’s comments on Cuba ‘‘an attitude of defeatism’’ that was both ‘‘unrealistic and shortsighted.’’ These men agreed with each other that Castro’s Cuba was more than the nuisance that Fulbright suggested, that it was a real menace and a dangerous threat. Others sided with Fulbright. Oregon Senator Wayne Morse argued that the United States should turn its policy into one that would ‘‘speak strongly in favor of using . . . international law methods of settling the disputes we have with Cuba.’’66 Clearly, the evangelical community was not the only one divided over how to interpret and deal with Cuba. As evangelical interpretations of Cuba varied widely, it’s understandable that their offered solutions to Cuban relations would also differ. Christian commentators on Cuba saw many opportunities to both influence U.S. foreign policy and to aid evangelicals there. Most commonly, they called for prayer and for

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appeals to the government. Typically, whether a commentator praised the Cuban Revolution in the early years (1959 to 1960), condemned the Castro regime, or condemned U.S. Cuban policy, a conclusion with a suggestion to write to legislators would appear. These authors proposed that there were tangible actions that Christian citizens could take to influence U.S. and world affairs. One writer who supported Mackay’s position on Cuba argued, ‘‘In Cuba we have isolated the religious, democratic and liberal forces which still exist. We ought to be there supporting our friends and offering peaceful competition to the communists.’’ Another criticized U.S. Cold War policy but offered a plan to change it: ‘‘[Mackay’s article] should precipitate a deluge of letters to Washington calling for a Cuban policy rooted in the ethical idealism which we as a nation profess.’’67 Calls for Christians to pressure Washington were not limited to those who disapproved of U.S. Cuban policy. Other evangelicals asked their readers to compel the federal government to increase efforts to protect Cuban Christians and do more to oppose Castro. Evangelical missionaries in Cuba, like missionaries in every part of the world during the Cold War, played distinctive foreign policy and religious roles. They donned several hats, acting as intermediaries and bridges between the United States and revolutionary Cuba and as civilian investigative reporters and key sources of information. Evangelicals in the United States relied as much on missionary contacts to form an opinion on the political situation in Cuba as they did on the U.S. government. They read missionary reports in religious publications, listened to them on Christian radio programs, and heard them in their local churches. Though their influence should not be overrated, American missionaries to Cuba, as eyewitnesses in a communist country, shaped the way U.S. evangelicals saw the island nation and attempted to wield their influence among U.S. foreign policymakers, making them unofficial religious emissaries. Protestant leaders in the United States recognized, at least on some level, the important role that U.S. missionaries to Cuba played in both the U.S. and the Cuban contexts. And even while the puzzling circumstances of the Cuban Protestant churches under the Castro regime divided Protestants in the United States, all agreed that Christians in Cuba, natives and missionaries, should not be denied funds from American donors. Eventually, this pitted leaders of Protestant organizations against the U.S. government after it announced its policy in 1963 against travel and any financial transactions (including aid to missionaries) to Cuba. Several Christian denominations and other organizations issued statements that opposed the U.S. embargo. The Presbyterian Church USA called on Congress to normalize relations several times—in 1969, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1990, 1993, and 1997. The United Church of Christ made a similar appeal in 1972 and 1973 and went even further by encouraging members to travel to Cuba: ‘‘We urge the congress and the

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president to reverse the policy of the last decade and to work for friendship, trade and mutual assistance with Cuba. . . . We urge United Church of Christ members, churches and conferences to . . . undertake to travel to Cuba to visit church groups and to seek knowledge, understanding and friendship with our neighbors to the South.’’ Other religious groups that stood against Cuban sanctions included the American Friends Service Committee, the Church of the Brethren, the Episcopal Church, Reform Judaism, the United Methodist Church, and the United States Catholic Conference.68 Whereas premillennial anticommunist rhetoric often sanctioned and sometimes ‘‘sanctified’’ U.S. policy abroad by placing America on God’s side, this support was not guaranteed. In this particular case, evangelicals found themselves alongside their liberal Protestant rivals facing off against U.S. foreign policymakers. Premillennialists’ cultural values, informed by religious conviction and anticommunism, did not always endorse government endeavors abroad. When historians of the post–World War II period in the United States cite the existence of an ecumenical trend in Protestant America, they are often referring primarily to mainline denominations that joined together within national organizations such as the NCC. To make such a claim, however, they must marginalize other Protestants in the United States, those evangelicals, for example, who formed competitor organizations to the NCC and the international WCC. The NAE consistently took opposing stands to NCC actions and resolutions, making any claims of Protestant ecumenism questionable. In 1959, an NAE policy resolution openly admonished the Cleveland World Order Study Conference, sponsored by the NCC, for issuing a call for the U.S. recognition of communist China. The NAE argued that such an action would ‘‘tend to make the communist conquest of the mainland of China a ‘legitimate’ action’’ and would ‘‘have the effect of lessening the confidence of free nations in the Far East in U.S. concern for their continued opposition to the devious onslaughts of communism in that part of the world.’’69 It was not uncommon for evangelical organizations to find themselves on the opposite side of the fence of their Protestant coreligionists. In fact, on many issues groups such as the NAE appeared much more comfortable partnering with the U.S. government than with the ‘‘liberal’’ NCC. Ironically, despite this deep-seeded contention among Protestants, the communist island of Cuba united them in at least one specific way. After the United States announced its guideline against sending U.S. currency into Cuba in 1963, representatives from the NAE joined with the NCC to petition the State Department to allow exceptions to the policy for mission organizations funding Christian churches in the country. On September 13, representatives from the NCC, the Episcopal Church, the Women’s Division of Christian Service of the Methodist Church, the United Presbyterian Church USA, the NAE, the American Baptist Convention, the Southern Baptist

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Convention (SBC), and the United Presbyterian Commission met to discuss the issue with John Crimmins, the coordinator for Cuban Affairs in the State Department, and other government officials.70 The meeting exhibited the ambivalent position that evangelical churches took on communist Cuba, demonstrated the willingness of evangelicals to take an atypical stand alongside mainline Protestant denominations, and illustrated the complicated relationship between evangelicalism and U.S. Cold War foreign policy. The NAE and the SBC gave their ‘‘full concurrence with and support of the initiative taken by the National Council of Churches.’’ Altogether, these various organizations represented more than one hundred missionary agencies. They argued that the ban on sending funds to Cuba would have devastating consequences. Specifically, it would mean ‘‘suffering for pastors, seminary professors, pensioners and their families’’; a ‘‘threat to the survival of Christian institution’’; a ‘‘threat to the future contribution of Protestant Churches in Cuba’’; a ‘‘demoralization’’ of Christian Cubans; the ‘‘weakening or destruction of an important bulwark against communism’’; and the provision of a ‘‘dangerous propaganda opportunity’’ for the Cuban government. Throughout their argument the churches employed Cold War anticommunist rhetoric to convince the government that the Protestant church was an important ally in the Cold War at the same time that it seemed to be opposing a key anticommunist policy initiative. In fact, they argued that their proposed exception to the embargo would strengthen Cuban Christian opinion of the United States while weakening that of Castro. By denying such an exception, they continued, the opposite would also be true: ‘‘The Castro regime can point out that not it but the churches’ ‘imperialist friends’ in the U.S. have cut off its funds. This will be used to vindicate the Marxist claim that religion is only a tool of the exploiters and is cast off when no longer useful.’’ Government officials who participated in the two-hour meeting responded by explaining that the purpose of the embargo was to weaken the country in the hopes of cutting off ‘‘subversive activity.’’ Furthermore, the policy was necessary, according to State Department official John Crimmins, and was meant to be ultimately beneficial to the Cuban people, though he admitted that it ‘‘involved grave hardships’’ for them at the time. Finally, the officials argued that ‘‘there are many pressures to make exceptions to the embargo on funds, but in order to maintain this policy at all it is necessary to maintain a ‘hard line.’ The granting of any exceptions will lead to gradual erosion of this whole policy.’’ The churches’ petition, Crimmins told them in conclusion, ‘‘would be given prompt and serious attention at high levels in the government.’’ Despite this promise, the government denied the exception, and the organizations involved searched for other ways to get funds into Cuba. The NCC immediately explored the possibility of the WCC’s Division of World Mission and Evangelism establishing a fund directed to the ‘‘orphaned-mission’’ churches. U.S. money could be funneled into Cuba indirectly through this

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international effort. This initial endeavor demonstrated the very reluctant nature of the partnership between the NCC and other evangelical organizations. Wade Coggins of the NAE informed one affiliate association of a possible offer by the NCC to consider their churches as recipients of a portion of the ‘‘orphaned’’ churches funds. Coggins wrote, ‘‘While we would not recommend letting them [WCC] become involved with your churches, we feel that we cannot give them a final answer for you until we have your word on it. It seems to me that to put the WCC in direct touch with your churches there, especially in the absence of U.S. personnel on the field, would be quite a dangerous thing to do. On the other hand, I do not have any live alternative to offer for getting help to them.’’71 Although evangelical organizations were willing to join with the NCC in petitioning the government for exceptions to the embargo, they were willing to consider partnering with them further on the matter only in the absence of another option. Theologically and politically, evangelicals still mistrusted the mainstream churches. Eventually, conservative churches solved this dilemma by setting up their own ‘‘orphaned church fund’’ with the help of the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF), which provided for the transfer of U.S. evangelical funds to Cuba.72 The fluctuating partnerships of evangelicals with the U.S. government and with the NCC over Cuba paint a much more multifaceted picture of conservative Christians’ political identity than the accepted paradigm of a dichotomous and polarized Cold War world would allow. Evangelical anticommunism did not always translate into wholehearted support of U.S. foreign relations. The way they perceived the role of their faith on the world stage allowed them to challenge U.S. policy on Cuba. Evangelicals were also willing to ally with the NCC in doing so, an organization they regularly opposed on religious and political grounds. Furthermore, conservative Christian groups used their religious connections throughout the world to work out a way around the embargo, indicating that the world was not solely defined by the U.S.-Soviet conflict. At the same time, evangelical criticism of U.S. policy did not mean that they had somehow united with communists. Protestant organizations first approached the State Department with their concerns. They used anticommunist rhetoric to make their case, and even when they established the orphaned church funds they made sure to ‘‘comply with the U.S. government regulation.’’73 This example makes clear the multilayered character of the Cold War world where evangelicals did not always fit easily into an ‘‘us versus them’’ model. If good citizenship in the post–World War II United States meant taking an active interest in world events, religion motivated evangelicals to do so in many different ways. Not only did they extend funds to Cuba (thus spreading both Christian and capitalist ideology), but they also tried to address the problem of Cuban refugees. In doing so, evangelicals linked missionary efforts with Cold War politics. This is evident in one description of the situation by a missionary

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organization working among Cuban refugees in Miami: ‘‘The medicines which were sent from the U.S. in exchange for the prisoners have been sent to Russia to pay the debt Cuba owes Russia. In [Castro’s] great discourse on Friday, March 22, he said that several Christian denominations must disappear from Cuba because their teachings are not in accord with his regime. the refugees continue to arrive in miami.’’74 Politically, the refugees gave evangelicals a chance to place blame on a communist enemy of the United States. Religiously, they opened up a mission opportunity. The refugee matter presented conservative Christians in the United States with a particular and very political image of Cuba. Hyperbolic language described conditions of Cuban citizens and of refugees. Spanish World Gospel Broadcasting, which fed Christian radio broadcasts into Cuba through stations in Ecuador, Haiti, California, and Miami, put out one detailed depiction called ‘‘Who Is a Refugee of Communist Cuba?’’ It itemized the hardships of Cuban Christians who wrote to them by quoting letters and explaining the experience of a refugee in sensationalist detail. One letter from a pastor in Cuba outlined the writer’s troubles in a way that was reminiscent of biblical eschatology. He spoke of oppression by the communist government, natural disasters in the aftermath of Hurricane Flora in 1963, illness, and scarcity. He closed with words of despair: ‘‘Is there no more humanity in the world? Why have the civilized people of the world turned their back to our cry and misery? Our lives are destinated [sic] to work and sacrifice in pains and anguish unto death, this is our hope.’’ In another letter, reference to prophecy was direct: One of the worse [sic] things for us to take is that now we have to work to help this cursed Government to subsist. Many people, however, do not show up for work until they are forced to go. We feel that the personal initiative has been destroyed. We are tired of this life. For anything we have to buy, one has to stand in line [en cola] for hours and hours carrying a number to have the right to buy. Maybe this is the fulfillment of the ‘‘666’’ number in the Apocalypse? These descriptions of the refugee situation gave readers the impression that life in communist Cuba was as bad as it could possibly be. Indeed, it appeared to be of apocalyptic proportions. Those who wished to flee Cuba found themselves, according to Spanish World Gospel Broadcasting, ‘‘in a labyrinth of terror, fear and humiliation.’’ Individuals who applied for permission to leave Cuba were labeled ‘‘enemies of the regime’’ and ‘‘worms,’’ were forced to endure ‘‘a searching probe of their lives,’’ gave up their private property to ‘‘big brother spy groups,’’ were ‘‘disgracefully stripped and searched,’’ and were subjected to ‘‘severe questionings, searchings and loudspeakers continually villif [ied them]. [They were] constrained to listen to long recorded Fidel Castro harangues.’’75 This highly political description added to the evangelical condemnation of communism.

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The concerns of Cuban refugees to the United States incorporated yet another dimension to the Christian dialogue over Cuba. Miguel A. De La Torre has pointed out that there are in reality two Cuban communities. The exilic, pro-capitalist community based primarily in Miami saw the United States as its primary hope to overthrow the Castro regime. The resident population in Cuba itself sought to resist U.S. hegemony over the island. According to De La Torre, these two Cubas were so divided that one detected no sign of the ambivalence of other American Protestants toward communist Cuba within exilic Cuba. ‘‘For a Miami Exilic Cuban even to suggest any positive accomplishment of the Revolution invited violence.’’ In the three years between 1973 and 1976, more than one hundred bombs detonated in Miami, many of them targeting Cubans who supported Castro’s Revolution or criticized exilic politics. The exilic description of the situation in Cuba merged the political and the religious, whether an individual adhered to Catholicism, evangelicalism, or the AfroCuban religion of Santerıá. Adhering to a trend that paralleled the assimilation of politics and religion among non-Cuban evangelicals during the Cold War, the exilic community took it to an even greater extreme. Four clergymen (three Spanish priests and one Methodist minister) had participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, armed with a message to the Cuban people that demonstrated the politico-religious nature of the invasion from the exilic point of view: ‘‘The liberating forces have disembarked on Cuba’s beaches. We come in the name of God. . . . The assault brigade is made up of thousands of Cubans who are all Christians and Catholics. Our struggle is that of those who believe in God against the atheists.’’ This exilic political religion came with its own eschatology that named exilic Cubans ‘‘children of light,’’ resident Cubans ‘‘children of darkness,’’ Castro as the Antichrist, and a post-Castro Cuba as the promised land.76 For their part, evangelical organizations such as the EFMA used their connections with the State Department to intervene on behalf of Cubans who wished to migrate to the United States. In one case, the Reverend Rubeń Lores wrote to his friend Wade T. Coggins of the EFMA asking for help in checking on the status of his brother’s application for entry into the United States. Lores’s brother and two nieces were being ‘‘subjected to all sorts of pressure by the [Cuban] regime,’’ and he was anxious for word on the status of his request. Coggins wrote to John Mullin at the State Department on behalf of Lores less than one week later. Evidently, this kind of contact with the government was not uncommon, for there were at least two other incidents when Coggins interceded for Cuban nationals who wished to leave for the United States.77 Evangelical organizations like the EFMA gave their constituents a way to approach the government on international affairs by acquiescing to and fully supporting the bureaucratic process. They used Cold War apocalyptic rhetoric to ally themselves with the U.S. government as never before, granting evangelical leaders and laypersons indirect access to political power. Ministers with

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relatives in Cuba could write to Coggins about the terrible injustices their family members were suffering under a communist government. Coggins would in turn use the prestige of the EFMA, partly established through its commitment to anticommunism, to contact the State Department. Cold War politics combined with communal apocalyptic worldviews generated a loose bond between evangelicals and the U.S. government. The U.S. Cold War relationship with Cuba culminated in 1962 with the apocalyptic climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis. More than anything else, the crisis justified the premillennial prophets of doom. Evangelicals were able to use their eschatology during the Cold War to build a stronger connection with the secular national culture. At the same time, born-again Christians’ ambivalent attitudes toward Revolutionary and then communist Cuba cast doubt on the rigid Cold War paradigm and illuminated a more complicated relationship between American evangelicals and the state.


5 Next Year in Jerusalem?

In their 1979 book Israel’s Final Holocaust, Jack Van Impe and Roger F. Campbell outlined the importance of the state of Israel in evangelical prophecy: ‘‘All prophetic truth revolves around the Jews. The Bible reviews their history and unfolds their future. The future of the world will be affected by the future of Israel. . . . Israel is back in her land. This is the keystone of all Bible prophecy concerning the end time.’’1 The certainty of this tone was not new. Believers interpreted biblical passages that described God ‘‘restoring [the Israelites] to the land [he] gave their forefathers’’ as an indication that divine power would ensure the homeland of the Jewish people.2 According to the prophetic theology of many conservative evangelical Christians during the early years of the Cold War, a Jewish state was an essential prerequisite for the end-times. Therefore, the significance of May 1948, when Israel declared itself a sovereign nation, cannot be overstated. Freda Lindsay described her reaction to hearing this news from her husband, Pentecostal evangelist Gordon Lindsay: ‘‘When he said the word ‘Israel’ I felt a strange sensation. A tingling in my spine as though he was saying, and in fact God was saying, you are living in the last days.’’3 Because so much prophecy depended on such a concrete, sensitive area of international affairs, Israel’s nationhood not only impacted evangelical views of the future of the world, it also had political, social, cultural, and religious implications. Many evangelicals had gained an elevated status in the Cold War United States by embracing anticommunism and extreme patriotism; their prophetic framework that revolved around Israel also influenced U.S. foreign policy.4

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Evangelical prophetic interpretations changed the way these Christians thought and acted, from where they took vacations to how they renegotiated their own national identity to what role they believed their faith should play on the world stage. Eschatology had clear consequences for U.S. political culture by creating new alliances between previously antagonistic religious groups and by stirring up growing evangelical interest in U.S. policy. Israel influenced how evangelicals acted politically, how they perceived time itself, and how they understood land and sacred space. Timothy P. Weber’s On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend chronicles the history of dispensationalists’ prophetic connections to Israel. Weber argues that for the first one hundred years of the dispensational movement in the United States, premillennialists ‘‘sat in the bleachers on history’s fifty-yard line’’ watching for signs of the end. It was not until the state of Israel began to expand its borders in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly after the Six-Day War in 1967, that dispensationalists ‘‘went political,’’ leaving the bleachers to ‘‘get onto the playing field.’’ Confident that events in the Middle East had justified their adherence to prophecy, they aggressively inserted their message into popular culture, joined the New Christian Right in a call for Christian political action, and created multiple organizations in support of Israel.5 Weber acknowledges the existence of earlier dispensationalist efforts to act politically, but these, he writes, were limited. Certainly dispensational mobilization surged in the aftermath of the 1967 War and with the publication of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970. This political push was particularly effective as it accompanied the rise of the Moral Majority and the Christian Right. Still, Weber underestimates earlier examples. An examination of dispensational support for Israel within a larger Cold War context demonstrates that premillennialists were advocating for their prophetic worldview on several fronts after World War II. The early Cold War made it possible for dispensationalists to assert their political and religious voices over issues of domestic and foreign policy. These earlier efforts cleared the way for premillennialists in the 1970s and 1980s to make such an aggressive case for Israel. Evangelical interest in the Middle East demonstrated the strength of premillennial eschatology over the entire Cold War period. Whereas chiliastic fear and hope about nuclear warfare peaked and declined, the evidence shows that evangelical interest in Israel remained constant, from the early to the late Cold War and beyond. Comparing dispensational interpretations of Israel after 1948 and after 1967 reveals certain patterns. In both periods, evangelical leaders and ‘‘ordinary’’ churchgoers engaged in debates over the prophetic significance of events in the Middle East in strikingly similar ways. In both periods, eschatology helped to politicize evangelicalism by encouraging attentiveness and interpretation to world events. Evangelicals learned about Israel through books, films, and even tours. In both periods, the evangelical-Jewish relationship was characterized by a deep ambivalence on the part of both dispensationalists and

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Jews. In both periods, the evangelical community displayed complex attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims. These continuities demonstrate the important part the Cold War played in crafting the prophetic evangelical identity centered on Israel that would explode onto the nation’s radar after 1967. Even after the Cold War ended, though, Israel captured the attention of premillennialists who adhered to increasingly complex interpretations of the place of the Jewish nation in their end-times narratives.

Israel and Evangelical Prophecy What exactly was Israel’s place, as the Jewish homeland, in premillennial eschatology? Though timelines and prophecy charts varied widely on the specific details of coming events, most premillennialists agreed that biblical scripture predicted certain ordeals for Israel. First, prophecy stated that the Jewish people would return to their homeland in Palestine. Evangelicals across the country echoed the comments of Percy Crawford, president of King’s College (New Castle, Delaware), on his popular television program Youth on the March: ‘‘The Jew is a perfect sign of the coming of the Son of God. . . . The Jews are returning right now, thank God, back to Palestine by the millions. . . . God is bringing the Jew back to Palestine—a direct fulfillment of their scriptures and the New Testament.’’6 Fourteen-year-old Paul Grabill agreed with Crawford when he wrote that May 14, 1948, marked a ‘‘historic day’’ when prophecy was fulfilled according to God’s plan.7 Israel’s place in premillennial prophecy was also connected to the Antichrist, a world dictator who would come out of the Mediterranean region promising peace to the Middle East. According to dispensationalists like John F. Walvoord, president of Dallas Theological Seminary from 1952 to 1986, the prophet Daniel had predicted that this leader will rule over a period of seven years, known as the tribulation. The Antichrist will sign a seven-year covenant with Israel, guaranteeing its security and prosperity. After three and a half years, he will break that covenant after Russia attempts to invade Israel and is destroyed by God. Israel will be crushed after disarming in the preceding years of peace. The last three and a half years of the tribulation period will be known as the ‘‘time of Jacob’s trouble’’ because of the expected suffering of Israel.8 Not all of Israel, according to premillennial eschatology, will endure the same fate. Most pretribulationists argue that after the rapture, twelve thousand Jews from each of the twelve tribes of Israel will convert to Christianity. This ‘‘remnant’’ of believers, known in evangelical eschatology as ‘‘the 144,000,’’ will successfully convert many people from across the world, and they will eventually be martyred during the tribulation.9 ‘‘The time of Jacob’s trouble’’ will be marked by a series of ‘‘disasters in sevens.’’ Walvoord described them as the ‘‘seven seals of horror,’’ the ‘‘seven trumpets of disaster,’’ and the ‘‘seven last bowls of wrath.’’

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All of these catastrophes will culminate in a final world battle, the battle of Armageddon, in Megiddo in northern Palestine. Once again, Palestine was the bull’s eye of premillennial prophecy. This world war will end in the second coming of Jesus to earth, where he will set the stage for the millennium.10 Evangelical eschatology, as has already been established, is highly divergent. Even among pretribulation premillennialists, there are disagreements on the details and timing of certain events. Similarly, some evangelicals believed that because the Jewish people did not accept Jesus as the messiah the first time he appeared, the prophetic promises directed toward Israel were meant for Christian believers. They contended that the United States was God’s ‘‘new Israel.’’ Nonetheless, most premillennialists during the Cold War agreed that Palestine and the nation of Israel would play a key role in the future (of the end).

American Evangelicals and Jews before Israeli Statehood Palestine’s status in premillennial prophecy required evangelical Christians to contend with the other religious groups that outnumbered them in the region. In particular, the Jews were a primary concern for evangelicals. Not only did the Jewish state have an important function in premillennial eschatology, but the Jewish people themselves performed a specific role in the end-times. According to Hal Lindsey, ‘‘The Jew is the most important sign to this generation.’’11 A deeply ambivalent and erratic history of American evangelical attitudes toward the Jewish people informed dispensationalists’ worldview before and after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Ugly anti-Semitism was often replaced with some sense of commonality based on a shared background, interspersed with reluctant acceptance and sympathetic advocacy following periods such as the Holocaust. Since the colonial era, American evangelicals have made a homeland for God’s chosen people the center point of prophecy. As historian Nathan Hatch and others have noted, revolutionary New England witnessed the junction of republicanism and millennial ideology.12 Clergy such as Ezra Stiles, who argued that America’s ‘‘triumph of liberty on earth’’ would be an example for the world, repeatedly described the fledgling nation as God’s ‘‘New Israel.’’13 Early American church leaders clearly believed in a divinely favored United States, and some took this self-identification so seriously that they often questioned just who God’s ‘‘chosen people’’ were. A number believed that prophecies in Jeremiah and elsewhere referred to the Jewish people; others argued that those Christians who accepted Jesus as the messiah had usurped the position of the elect. Many Americans upheld the ‘‘city on a hill’’ conception of the country and took it a step farther in light of prophecy. They believed that American Christians were the new chosen people who would be a light to the world and help usher in Jesus’ reign and the millennium. According to this


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postmillennial view of the world, the Church had to establish the millennial utopia on earth before Jesus Christ would return. Because postmillennialists in early America believed that they would be leaders in bringing about the end-times and should be shining examples for the rest of the country and the world, ‘‘morality crusades’’ in the form of the abolition and temperance movements, among others, were easily justified as necessary. This demonstrates that, as historian Paul Boyer and others have shown, evangelical eschatological belief ‘‘influence[d] the worldview of those who embrace[d] it.’’14 At the same time, this chiliastic interpretation, by transferring the special place of the Jewish people in prophecy to American Christians, may have helped to spur on nativism and anti-Semitism in response to Jewish immigration, though it did not necessarily follow that postmillennialists were anti-Semites. Nativists believed that U.S. political institutions were directly dependent on their domination by the older, northern European races. These individuals saw Jewish immigrants as inassimilable threats.15 Jewish immigration in the nineteenth century occurred at around the same time that evangelicals were beginning to look more seriously at premillennialism, the belief that Jesus will return before the millennium, using his power to establish it. This transitional eschatological period produced some interesting and sometimes contradictory evangelical exposition on the Jewish people. Historian Yaakov Ariel has noted that occasionally evangelicals made stereotypical anti-Semitic comments even while arguing that Jews were important in biblical prophecy. One representative of the Hope of Israel mission in New York described the Jewish people in an 1895 prophecy conference: ‘‘A few decades of emancipation and equal rights and behold the unbearable proud and loud an [sic] obnoxious modern Jew.’’16 Evangelical Americans who believed they were God’s chosen people did not withhold nativist assessments of Jews and other immigrants they believed threatened their political, social, and economic positions. Dispensationalists who continued to expound on the place of the Jewish people within U.S. society and within prophecy also participated in a thrust to convert them. Though Protestant proselytizing to Jews began as early as 1816, these first attempts were limited, and it was not until the 1880s that missionary efforts picked up. This occurred after mainstream evangelical denominations began to adopt dispensational premillennialism that gave the Jewish people a specific place in evangelical prophecy. The increased popularity of dispensationalism accompanied a rise in mission work in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York.17 Earlier missionary efforts of the nineteenth century were directed at the Jews. The missionaries were their saviors, not their allies. Though this savior complex could still be found in missionaries during the Cold War, political expediency informed by eschatology lessened it.18 Because part of what defined an evangelical was the prominence of evangelism and conversion, this sense of mission to the Jews emerged from a larger purpose. Evangelicals believed that

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God had called them to preach the gospel to the world, but followers of Judaism were of particular concern for a few reasons. First of all, according to evangelicals’ religious tradition, Jews were considered God’s chosen people. Most dispensationalists still believed that the Jewish people had a special place in God’s plan. Second, Jesus himself was Jewish. Therefore, Jewish conversion in some sense substantiated the evangelical faith. Last, premillennialism not only gave the land of Palestine itself a place of importance in the end-times, but it spelled out a specific plan for its people because during the tribulation 144,000 Jews were expected to convert to Christianity. The Jews, therefore, were both a sign of the end and primary participants. Still, the dispensationalist attitude that the Jewish people were somehow ‘‘prophetic partners’’ in God’s final plan fashioned a highly superficial alliance. The complex nature of premillennial depictions of Jews brought mixed results. According to Boyer, ‘‘The Jew’s cosmic otherness in the premillennial system encouraged subtle stereotyping that, if not consciously ‘anti-Semitic,’ nevertheless shaped perceptions.’’19 Many Jews who studied premillennialism accused these Christians of treating them like end-times pawns. Furthermore, evangelical mission campaigns directed at the Jews often fed off of the eschatological speculation surrounding Israel. The American Association for Jewish Evangelism used prophetic urgency to call for proselytizing efforts during the early Cold War. By the 1970s, mission activity embraced more creative approaches with organizations like Jews for Jesus, created by Moishe Rosen in San Francisco in 1970. Though Rosen’s group drew some fire from more traditional missions associations, as did its parent organization, the American Board of Missions to the Jews, Jews for Jesus used new methods to accomplish old hagiographic goals: convincing Jews that Jesus was the Messiah.20 Ambivalent attitudes toward the Jewish people blended with continued theological debates about the end-times. When premillennialism surpassed postmillennialism as the chief evangelical chiliastic interpretation, dispensationalists began to look more closely at world events as indicators of the last days. Revelations about the Holocaust following World War II generated much sympathy for the Zionist quest for a homeland in the Middle East. Shortly thereafter, the creation of the state of Israel reinforced dispensational beliefs.21 The first Arab-Israeli War followed closely behind the announcement of Israel’s sovereignty, touching off a pattern of violence in the region that appeared to evangelicals to follow biblical predictions.

A New State, the Cold War, and the Foundations of Politicized Prophecy: 1948–1967 American evangelicals and Jews in the United States and Israel encouraged a close relationship between the United States and the Jewish state. Zionist


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organizations were of course primary instigators in the effort to obtain U.S. support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Groups such as the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Hadassah, Pioneer Women, the Labor Zionist Organization of America—Poale Zion, and the Mizrachi Organization utilized a variety of methods. They organized rallies, issued statements, set up committees to put political pressure on U.S. leaders, passed resolutions, financed Jewish immigration to Palestine, established medical missions and educational programs, set up lecture tours, organized relief activities, and created pamphlets, books, and radio programs. Disagreements over partition did affect the unity of the American Zionist community. A rift in the ZOA developed when some leaders supported a plan to form a Jewish state in part of Palestine and others insisted that the Jewish homeland must encompass the entire area. Though this schism no doubt affected the ZOA, the Zionist movement in the United States continued to move its agenda forward. Even after 1948, Zionist groups worked to support the new nation through propaganda and fund-raising activities. In 1949, for example, the United Jewish Association kicked off a $250 million fund-raising drive for Israel.22 Christian and Jewish Zionists pressured U.S. administrators to establish a strong partnership with Israel. The American Christian Palestine Committee wrote to every member of Congress after World War II ended in Europe urging them to compel President Truman to take a pro-Zionist position in Palestine.23 Government officials, especially Special Counsel Clark Clifford and a generally pro-Zionist Congress, acknowledged the formidable support and loud, persistent voices for Israel. Clifford wrote of ‘‘tremendous pressure domestically’’ for U.S. recognition of Israel, and New York representative Sol Bloom noted that both the Democratic and Republican party platforms backed policies that supported Israel. Pennsylvania Senator Francis Myers wrote to the president of his concern over Palestine and U.S. support of UN initiatives there. He wrote of his constituents’ positions on Israel and their displeasure with U.S. actions: ‘‘The protest is vocal among Jewish citizens, of course; but it is also genuine among all non-Jews, I believe, who sincerely believe the United Nations must be made to work.’’ Myers wrote, ‘‘Foreign affairs and the United Nations are things which are now real and personal to nearly all Americans. We want them to stay that way.’’24 These officials acknowledged that at least among pro-Israel Jews and evangelical Christians, the new Jewish state helped to generate interest in U.S. foreign policy. Their faith shaped their political beliefs. Some used Cold War rationalization to encourage U.S. recognition of Israel. A statement by Special Counsel Clark Clifford warned that unless the United States reacted quickly to recognize the new state, the Soviet Union would do so first: ‘‘Once they have already recognized the Jewish state, any similar action on our part will seem begrudging—no matter how well-intentioned. In fact, it would be a diplomatic defeat.’’ Rabbi Samuel Thurman made a similar argument: ‘‘An authentic report has just come to me that Russia will

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recognize the New Judea. Shall we let her get ahead of us?’’25 It is unclear whether some used Soviet competition as justification for the more important aim of recognizing the Jewish state or whether they used recognition as a way to gain Cold War advantage. Whatever the case, Israel and the Cold War were closely intertwined. Despite fervent Zionist politicking, division and confusion characterized U.S.-Israeli relations. Truman’s administration included both those like Clifford who supported a Jewish state and others, mostly in the State Department, who did not. Truman’s frustration with pressure from both sides was revealed in a statement in June 1947, when he appealed to Americans to ‘‘refrain from engaging in, or facilitating, any activities which tend further to inflame the passions of the inhabitants of Palestine, to undermine law and order in Palestine, or to promote violence in that country.’’26 One historian described Truman’s aversion to those on either side of the Israeli issue by observing, ‘‘It is difficult to determine who irritated Truman more—the Zionists or the State Department.’’27 In fact, Truman seemed to think of himself as above the crass politics surrounding the state of Israel, preferring to consider his policy humanitarian. His concern for Jewish displaced persons has led historian Michael Cohen to dub his Israel policy ‘‘refugee Zionism.’’ To the chagrin of the State Department, his administration was one of the first to recognize the new state in 1948.28 There is some evidence of U.S. government confusion over the mood of the American people concerning Israel in these early years of the new nation’s existence. One revealing letter from President Eisenhower to John Foster Dulles in 1953 quotes a ‘‘highly respected friend’’ of the president calling the Zionists a ‘‘minority pressure. . . . The great majority of the nation’s Jewish population is anti-Zion.’’29 This was quite an extraordinary statement considering the voluminous Zionist efforts by both Jewish and conservative Christian groups. U.S.-Israeli relations under the Eisenhower administration were poor, and whether the letter reflected confusion over popular feeling about Israel, government uncertainty over how to approach a complicated area of foreign policy, or an anti-Israel stance is unclear. Most likely, all of these causes influenced the Eisenhower administration’s Israel policy. Whatever the case, the Eisenhower administration was not as sympathetic as Truman had been to Israel; it saw the Jewish state as an obstacle to friendly U.S. relations with the Arab nations. Even John Foster Dulles, with his strong Christian ties, described the Truman administration’s actions as going ‘‘overboard on Israel.’’ Ike openly disregarded the Israel lobby. After Britain and France collaborated with Israel in reaction to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s move to nationalize the Suez Canal, Eisenhower told the State Department ‘‘that they should inform Israel that we would handle our affairs exactly as though we didn’t have a Jew in America.’’ Still, the Eisenhower years witnessed no real breakthrough in U.S. relations with either Israel or the Arab world. In the early years of the Cold War,


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U.S. government officials disagreed widely on the direction of U.S. relations with Israel, and no one side held a monopoly on foreign policy decisions.30 Warren Bass has argued that the key turning point in U.S.-Israeli diplomacy occurred during the Kennedy administration. When attempts to pursue beneficial contacts with Egypt and Nasser were curtailed after the Yemen War in 1962, Kennedy turned to Israel, where Israeli Prime Minister David BenGurion had been hoping to achieve closer ties with the United States. In August 1962, an embargo on arms sales to Israel that had been in place since the Truman administration was overturned with a decision to sell the Jewish state Hawk surface-to-air missiles, in spite of U.S. suspicions of nuclear weapons development there. Bass claims that these events marked the ‘‘true origin of America’s alliance with the Jewish state’’ in the Kennedy period.31 In depicting the beginnings of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, Bass takes issue with those who overemphasize the role of the Zionist lobby in that process. Though the main lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, had some success in influencing Congress, its effect on the executive branch was not great. Instead, Bass credits a ‘‘diplomatic triangle between Kennedy, Nasser, and Ben-Gurion’’ for the U.S.-Israeli alliance.32 Bass’s caution against exaggerating the importance of the Zionist lobby in shaping official government policy is well founded, but Zionist support for Israel (Jewish and Christian) was crucial for other reasons. Most important from a premillennial perspective, advocating on behalf of Israel out of a religious, prophetic rationale politicized evangelicals’ faith. Motivations for Jewish Zionists ranged from the religious to the historical to the cultural and beyond, but premillennial support for Israel arose almost solely out of a religious belief that God had ordained the promised land for the Jewish people. When evangelicals called for U.S. support for Israel (whether as an official lobby group or not), their very participation in the political process revealed their belief that their religious, eschatological voices properly belonged in the dialogue over U.S. foreign policy. Evangelicals’ identity as U.S. citizens was informed by their prophetic value system, paving the way for their insistence on an even greater influence in the future. Evangelicals commented widely on the significance of events in the Middle East. Prophecy experts such as Wilbur Smith and evangelists as famous as the Reverend Billy Graham gave lectures that focused on Israel’s place in prophecy. In November 1957, Smith, professor of English and the Bible at Fuller Theological Seminary, presented five prophecy studies on a Sunday-night television program. Practically all of the topics involved the Middle East. They included Jerusalem, Israel, Egypt, the great empires, Babylon, and Megiddo.33 The premillennial attitude toward the new nation of Israel was an expression of both politicized religion and religious politics. Evidence of the complex political character of postwar evangelicalism is clear in the sermons of the best-known

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evangelical of the time. In a 1958 crusade, Billy Graham spoke these words to his audience: Ladies and gentlemen, I think every one of us should do everything we can for peace. Every day of my life I pray for peace. We are told in the scriptures to ‘‘pray for the peace of Jerusalem.’’ We are told to work for peace; we are told to pursue peace. And I believe that is why we should back every effort of the United States to bring peace. But after all is said and done, the very best efforts of man will fail. Men will still fight as long as there is hatred in the human breast. As long as there is prejudice in the human heart, men are going to fight. As long as there is greed within men, they are going to fight. . . . Oh, there are so many things you could talk about. You could talk about the tremendous happenings within Israel which many people believe is a sign of the end. That doesn’t mean that we are to become hysterical. It doesn’t mean that we are to become morbid. It doesn’t mean that we are to sit down and say, ‘‘The Lord is coming; we shouldn’t work.’’34 Graham’s statement demonstrated the blending of evangelical commitment to politics and individual salvation that had developed in the context of an eschatology centered on Israel. Evangelists encouraged Christians to ‘‘do everything they could for peace,’’ pray for peace, back peace efforts by the United States, and work rather than become despondent or ‘‘hysterical.’’ In other words, they were to be far more than politically passive. At the same time, Graham did not hold out much hope for humanity. He argued that people could not change and that ‘‘the very best efforts of man will fail.’’ God was still in control, according to Graham. Other evangelicals agreed, particularly when they trusted that they had knowledge of the future in prophetic scripture, which told them that the world would one day be destroyed. Prophecy that expounded on Israel politicized evangelicalism in the United States in a very specific way. The Cold War generated prophetic speculation concerning Russia’s relationship with Israel. The prophet Ezekiel had predicted that a land from the north, Magog, would attack Israel. A substantial invading force would arrive on horseback, according to the prophet, but God would protect Israel and turn back the invaders. The identification of Magog in Christian prophecy across time has been ambiguous and changing. In the late thirteenth century, many believed the Ottoman Turks were from Magog. By the nineteenth century, some prophecy commentators had begun to argue that Russia would be Israel’s ‘‘invader from the north.’’ Though historic biblical criticism in the late nineteenth century discredited this notion among some, many premillennialists still argued that Russia was Magog. The advent of the Cold War repopularized this belief among a wider audience.35 Oswald Smith echoed the thoughts of many evangelicals:


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The Bible makes it very, very clear that Russia is going to march on Palestine. I do not believe for one single moment that we need have the fear of Russia marching upon the United States of America as we should have a fear of Russia marching on Palestine. . . . And how will communism be overthrown in Palestine and the Middle East? God Himself is going to come on the scene, so we are told by the prophet Ezekiel. God Himself will undertake to defeat these northern armies marching as they will march against His own people who have returned to Palestine.36 The Cold War provided justification for interpreting prophecy in this specific way. It made sense in a political culture that defined the Soviet Union as an evil enemy for it to take on the role of God’s adversary. Furthermore, if God himself was going to defeat communism, the United States, as a foe of the Soviet Union, was on God’s side. Quite directly, then, prophecy vindicated U.S. actions in world affairs. The United States had become God’s warriors—Cold War crusaders on the side of right. This identification was significant in both bestowing religious support on U.S. foreign policy and in altering the way that evangelicals saw their own identification within the national culture. Premillennialism justified evangelical support of national policy and cemented that support for the future. The foundation of dispensationalists’ concern for Israel, then, was established much earlier than 1967, when the Jewish nation took control of Jerusalem. Evangelicals who believed that their prophetic worldview was further vindicated after that year organized themselves to a greater degree, but they drew on earlier paradigms of politico-religious activity to do so. They made increasingly bold statements on world affairs during the early Cold War. Don Ordell, of the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, advocated strong Christian support for Israel in a 1956 report: ‘‘We must not permit ourselves merely to skim the news reports emanating from [the Middle East]. . . . Unless the people of America, beginning with each one who reads these pages, take an active part in insisting that our government stop appeasing the Arab states, Israel will be the next to fall. These are not the emotional pleadings of an alarmist, but the cold, hard facts.’’37 Ordell implied that unless Christians acted to support Israel, God’s plan would fail. How did evangelicals reconcile two contradictory tendencies, one that pushed for action and the other that emphasized the futility of action? How did Ordell’s urging to ‘‘ascertain the facts and act according to those facts’’ (emphasis mine) make sense next to Oswald Smith’s argument that ‘‘we’re going to have war to the very end of this dispensation. I do not believe that the United Nations, that any statesman, that any peace conference can possibly eliminate war’’?38 In part, these contradictions can be explained by those to whom the urging to act is addressed. Evangelicals believed that God had

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blessed people like themselves with the power to enact his will. They had little faith in the United Nations, which seemed strikingly close to descriptions of world government in biblical prophecy, or even in the World and National Councils of Churches, deeming those organizations to be too liberal. Some even claimed that the WCC was the false world religion that the Bible warned would appear in the end-times. A good understanding of the place of prophecy within evangelicalism as a whole could also help to explain the contradiction. Partly because it dealt with God’s future plans, eschatology could be treated as a kind of subset theology. It helped make sense of inconsistencies within evangelical thought by encouraging action while claiming that God’s will would eventually be accomplished. But evangelicals could also safely overlook prophecy when it was not convenient. The focus of evangelicalism remained personal salvation. Even when expounding on eschatology, evangelical speakers emphasized conversion as the key component of the faith. After every Hour of Decision broadcast, no matter the topic, Billy Graham always made a plea for his audience to ‘‘come to Christ.’’ Every crusade sermon was followed by an ‘‘altar call,’’ when individuals were encouraged to speak with a counselor about committing their life to Christ. In response, people came forward by the hundreds. According to evangelicals, individual change was necessary before world change could begin. Graham persistently claimed, ‘‘There will never be world peace unless we have peace in our hearts.’’39 Evangelicals believed that individual conversion was social reform and political action. Rather than opposing means of expressing the Christian faith, evangelism and social reform worked toward the same end. Revivals, street evangelism, and mission work could change the world one person at a time. Simultaneously, making that change dependent on individual choice allowed premillennialists to accept the prophetic scripture that predicted that many would not choose God’s path. Those who refused would lead the world down the road to Armageddon. Individual salvation, God’s will, and political action all converged in premillennial thought to help form the evangelical worldview. Cold War events, predominantly those in Palestine, reshaped evangelical identity in the United States and its place in the world. Millennial beliefs had begun to merge spirituality and politics in the evangelical worldview even before the Cold War. The early Cold War was marked by a deeper amalgamation of evangelical and secular identity, partly through the application of premillennial beliefs to understanding world events. It helped to create a culture that integrated Christianity in subtle but powerful ways. Eschatology infused the land of Israel with specific spatial and temporal meanings that continued to add to the politicization of evangelicalism. Israel symbolized a certain view of history as well as a sacred space that had profound implications for the evangelical conception of geopolitics. Time was


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particularly important in dispensationalism, and premillennialists placed Israel at the fulcrum of time itself. In December 1950, Dr. J. Elwin Wright, an evangelical leader working to create an international evangelical organization, visited Palestine. On Christmas Eve night, he delivered a last-minute message outside of Bethlehem. Though Wright admitted in a letter to his family that he was ‘‘quite unprepared,’’ he spoke of what he called the ‘‘three greatest messages ever brought to the human race.’’ The first message announced Christ’s birth, the second announced his rising from the dead, and the third announced that he would come again. These three episodes, according to Wright, marked turning points in history, and they all had occurred in Palestine. The past, the present, and the future merged in the Holy Land. Dr. Wright wrote home to his family, ‘‘After lunch we passed Mt. Carmel and the place where the prophets of Baal were slaughtered. Then we came to the beautiful and very fertile plain of Megiddo. This is where prophecy says the battle of Armageddon will be fought. It will certainly be a great place for a big battle as it is many miles across and fairly level.’’40 This description is further evidence of the blurring of time that evangelicals encountered in the Holy Land. Wright’s visit to the place of the prophet Elijah’s showdown at Mt. Carmel years before Jesus Christ was followed by a stop at the plain where the battle to end the world would appear. Like some kind of cosmic timepiece, Israel’s status on earth gave evangelicals an indication of God’s plan for humankind. Awareness of world events, according to the premillennial paradigm, actually helped them better comprehend their faith. ‘‘I sincerely believe,’’ Billy Graham remarked in a 1952 radio broadcast of Hour of Decision, ‘‘if I can study the scriptures aright and read current events and keep up with my current reading that we are living in the latter days.’’41 The list of signs of the latter days was long. It included immorality, political corruption, world government, world religion, scoffers, the rise of Russia and communism, and natural disasters such as earthquakes. The events in Israel, however, took top priority on the list. Just as Israel informed evangelical conceptions of time, it also influenced how dispensationalists perceived space. As the Cold War developed into a world struggle between two major superpowers, physical space became one symbol of influence for both the United States and the Soviet Union. Both sides sought geographical dominance by expanding their spheres of influence. It was in this context that dispensational interest in Israel picked up. The space had been infused with eschatological meaning, which had profound political implications for the Cold War. A deep affinity for the land itself prompted ordinary evangelicals to visit the Holy Land and tour groups were formed to accommodate their interest. R. W. Gustafson, an associate evangelist of the Billy Graham team, developed a Bible study guide for a summer tour of the Holy Land in 1964. Current politics merged with prophetic scripture in his guide: ‘‘Israel is located in that section of the world that touches Africa, Asia, and Europe. Its present territory covers

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an area of 7,992.6 square miles, although God gave at least 250,000 square miles to Abraham’s seed forever.’’42 Faith, informed by biblical prophecy, worked to create politicized religious tourism. In a volatile Middle Eastern context, these seemingly simple words held an unconsciously divisive message. Land struggles between Israel and the Arab nations that surrounded it exploded in the Cold War with some regularity. Evangelicals who believed that the future of the Middle East depended on biblical prophecy argued that God had preordained the promised land to Israel. Tours such as this one were not uncommon and they illustrated how Israel and prophecy infused physical land in the Middle East with both spiritual and political meaning.43 Furthermore, American dispensationalists who co-opted the meaning of Israeli space for their own religious purposes were unconscious negotiators in the Cold War struggle for world influence. Evidence is scarce regarding how laypersons during the Cold War interpreted current events surrounding Israel according to their understandings of God’s timeline. Still, clues are available. Letters to editors of Christian publications provide insight, as do commentaries that outline Christian education strategies, children’s essays, and journal entries that detail Holy Land tour experiences. These pieces of the puzzle not only suggest the consistently significant place that Israel held in the worldviews of evangelical believers over the Cold War years (and beyond), but they also confirm that the debate over the meaning of the place of the Holy Land in evangelical eschatology existed among evangelicals in the pews as well as among clergy, evangelists, and scholars. Sunday school teachers picked up suggestions from studies and advice books on children’s Sunday schools in the 1950s. One such book encouraged the use of maps of the Holy Land to better acquaint children with ‘‘the place names that are important in Jesus’ life and ministry.’’ According to George T. Eggleston’s 1958 book, A Treasure of Christian Teaching, a map of the world was an easy way to show students how the Holy Land could ‘‘be seen in relation to the United States and other countries.’’44 The authors of A Survey of Religious Education (1959) agreed: ‘‘Mapmaking fits into the geography ages of the Sunday school. For studying the contour of the Bible lands, or the changing borders of changing kingdoms, or the historical connections with important places it is valuable.’’45 Children who studied the Middle East in their Sunday school classes learned to conceptualize holy space through Bible study. They also learned to use those lessons to interpret world events. Eggleston suggested that teachers take their students through a ‘‘present-day walk through the holy land,’’ and he encouraged teachers to tell stories about other Christians who had visited Israel.46 The Middle East was an important focal point for evangelicals young and old who were learning and teaching about Israel in Sunday schools and Bible studies. Evangelicals in the pews engaged in the dialogue over the significance of the state of Israel to world politics and eschatology in part by keeping an eye on


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developments through publications such as the American Christian Palestine Committee’s journal Land Reborn. Land Reborn was published from 1950 to 1961 to help advance the American Christian Palestine Committee’s chief goal of ‘‘helping to arouse the Christian conscience of America with respect to a Zionist solution of the Jewish problem.’’47 The journal published stories and editorials about Israel. It advertised supplementary materials, speaking tours, and Holy Land trips. The American Christian Palestine Committee also solicited donations for projects in Palestine. Evangelicals could give $1.50 to plant a tree in the Children’s Memorial Forest in Palestine, for example. The forest was touted as a ‘‘gift of American Christians in memory of the one million Jewish children under twelve years of age, who were murdered by the Nazis between September 1, 1939 and May 10, 1945.’’ The journal printed ads for used clothing donations for Jewish and Arab children, and evangelicals who contributed to these programs demonstrated their attentiveness to the Middle East.48 They translated a religiously (sometimes eschatologically) motivated concern into action. In the few years of its existence, Land Reborn published few articles on the eschatological significance of Israel. Still, this did not stop some of its readers from speculating on the issue, an indication of the important role of end-times thought to evangelicals in the pews. Walter Vander Beek of Palmyra, New York, wrote to the journal in 1956, ‘‘Is it possible that in Land Reborn we could include a regular article on ‘Israel and prophecy’? It would bring out more the Christian nature of the periodical.’’49 In his series on the development of prophecy in the modern world, historian Arthur H. Williamson argues that apocalypticism can lead to the most intense kinds of religious persecution while preparing the way for tolerance at the same time. More specifically, he argues that Christian millennialism in the Reformation period in Europe resulted in both anti-Semitism and philoSemitism. On the Iberian Peninsula, the more apocalyptic you were, the more anti-Semitic you were. Cardinal Ximenes, for example, developed a translation of the canon in its original form because he believed in the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Though he used converted Jews in his endeavor, he contended that there must be no compromise with Judaism and that all Jews must convert. In Britain, the opposite phenomenon occurred: the more apocalyptic you were, the more philo-Semitic you were. Apocalypticism, according to Williamson, produced both responses.50 Whether or not Williamson’s conclusions were valid in every case, his characterization of the dual applications of Christian millenarianism to Jews was present among premillennialists in the United States in the Cold War period. Most mainstream evangelicals embraced Israel and the Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in light of the prophetic significance of Israel as a Jewish state. On the far right, however, many organizations with ties to prewar fundamentalist groups, such as those led by Gerald Winrod, Gerald L. K. Smith,

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and Verne Paul Kaub of the ACCL, maintained the anti-Semitism of their predecessors. Kaub and the ACCL attracted organizations and individuals who believed in the old threat of the ‘‘Jewish conspiracy.’’ The Jews, according to them, were infiltrating the U.S. and other governments. The fear of communist subversion in the United States helped to establish dread of ‘‘outsiders’’ that did not squash these notions, despite the sympathy for Jews after World War II. In one letter to Kaub in 1952, Conde McGinley, editor of Common Sense, an anti-Semitic publication that supposedly endorsed patriotic and Christian values, wrote of what he believed were the dangers of four congresspersons from New York, ‘‘two of them Jews and one a Negro communist,’’ who were trying to pass a group libel bill: ‘‘My opinion is that these Jews are going to make more enemies and will eventually defeat themselves. . . . People are finally becoming Jew conscious.’’51 Even more worrisome for these far-right anti-Semites, however, was Jewish influence in world government. A circular entitled Jews Running the United Nations, which included a list of approximately eighty names, made its way around the far-right community in the early 1950s.52 According to the far right, Zionists were creeping into Christian churches and denominations. This may have been a reaction of extreme conservatives to the premillennial embrace of Israel. In a letter to Kaub, Arthur E. Case of the Associated Constitutional Patriotic Groups perceived this as a problem of apocalyptic proportions: I regard that [the international Zionists] have control of every group, political, religious, educational, financial, all means for the transmission of intelligence except our few publications and pamphlets, etc. The only remaining force they do not have, is the mass of the people of this remaining Christian nation. This they are fast taking over by one or more of the world schemes, world government, United Nations, world police force. By one or more of these, they will be able to suppress and enslave the people of this nation, all backed by the established ever existing group of international Zionists.53 This description conveyed a twist in prophetic interpretation. Here, the Jewish people themselves appeared to be the Antichrist; they took on the role of God’s antagonist, rather than as the chosen people who would turn to God. Despite the contradictions apparent in associating Jews with the Antichrist in dispensationalism, as they were considered important instruments of God in the last days, far-right conservative Christians have frequently done just that. AntiSemitic extremist Gerald Winrod wrote of his belief in the Jewish origins of the Antichrist in a 1936 pamphlet entitled Antichrist and the Tribe of Dan. As late as 1999, Jerry Falwell claimed that the Antichrist was definitely Jewish and probably alive. Unlike Winrod, though, Falwell disputed charges of antiSemitism that followed his remarks.54


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The focus on Jewish conspiracies characteristic of the ACCL and other right-wing groups was also notable next to a considerable absence of discussion of the place of the state of Israel in prophecy, demonstrating that premillennial eschatology was malleable enough to conform to a particular political philosophy. While moderate evangelicals such as Billy Graham were able to use premillennial prophecy to call for political action in support of Israel, right-wing groups such as the ACCL used similar images to condone antiJewish attitudes. During the Cold War, politics, religion, and culture worked together in diverse ways to create the varied worldview of believers. Moderate evangelicals’ attitudes toward the Jewish people during the Cold War continued to be marked with ambivalence. Dispensationalists proselytized to the Jews, yet they also tried to form a kind of imbalanced alliance with them based on their chiliastic understanding. Organizations that focused on converting the Jewish community flourished in the postwar period. One group active after World War II was the American Association for Jewish Evangelism. On its own biweekly radio broadcast, it advertised that it ‘‘maintained full-time missionary testimonies to the Jews in many large cities in this country, as well as in Europe and Israel.’’ The association was not an anomaly and evidently had the support of respected individuals within the evangelical community. One tract boasted that the association’s board consisted of ‘‘the presidents of five outstanding seminaries, and on its advisory council are sixty men whose names are known wherever Christians gather.’’ The association promoted a documentary about Israel entitled Three Minutes to Twelve which highlighted the ways postwar Israel had fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. Implying that the return of Jesus Christ was very near, it promised to ‘‘hold your congregation spellbound from start to finish with a message of primary importance to Christian and unbeliever alike.’’ With images of the land of Israel and its men, women, youth, and traditions, this film connected Christians in the United States to people across the world by using the language of prophecy. The implied urgency of the message made the mission of the association all the more important. If the signs indicated that time was running out for nonbelievers, converting the Jews to Christianity was an essential prerequisite.55 For the first time on an institutional scale, the Cold War witnessed the beginning of an alliance between American evangelical Christians and Jews in both the United States and Israel. There had been small attempts at this before, especially in the nineteenth century, when Christian missions to Jews increased. Groups such as the Hebrew Christian Alliance, established in London in 1866, were formed for Messianic Jews (who had come to accept Jesus as the messiah), so their status as ‘‘alliance’’ organizations between adherents of Christianity and Judaism was deceiving. These groups were predecessors to the partnership that developed in the postwar period, but it was not until after World War II that the partnership expanded in a significant way. Before the

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Cold War, anti-Semitism, nativism, and the modernist-fundamentalist battle overshadowed the limited appeals to consider the place of the Jewish people in prophecy. But post-Holocaust guilt, coupled with the prophetic significance of Israel, worked with the dichotomies set up by the Cold War to change that. In an ‘‘us versus them’’ world, many evangelical Christians and Jews saw each other as potential partners. From the evangelical perspective, as movers and shakers in God’s timeline at the end of the world, the Jewish people were to be protected. Any commitment that fell below this would result in the retraction of God’s blessing and, worse, God’s wrath: ‘‘God is going to punish the nations— the nations that fought against Jerusalem.’’56 It was dangerous to oppose Israel. As conservative evangelicals continued to advance the Israeli cause in the Middle East, how did this premillennial-Jewish coalition influence evangelical perceptions of the Muslim Arab countries that surrounded and were the enemies of the new nation? Evangelical prophecy in the postwar period revealed an anti-Arab bias, and tales of Arab abuse and aggression circulated among evangelicals. In one pamphlet published by the American Christian Palestine Committee, Protestant Missionary P. V. D. Prince described his eyewitness account in Jerusalem in June 1948. As the head of a small children’s home, Prince wrote of an incident involving a group from the Muslim Arab Legion. According to his description, a child in the home overheard the Legionnaires questioning a Muslim Arab on details of the home’s occupants. In the end, the Legionnaires left and promised to return around midnight. After hearing of the incident, the group fled to another part of Jerusalem in search of safety. Prince wrote to his American Christian readers: To readers in more civilized lands such things may seem melodramatic and unreal; but here in Jerusalem, as soon as the conversation was reported to us, we knew that we were confronted by a very real threat to our home. Since all the Jewish girls were, by Muslim standards, of marriageable age, we did not need to inquire to exactly what would be the intentions of our uninvited visitors. At the worst, it might end in the massacre of the whole household; at the least, it would mean the abduction of the Jewish girls.57 Reports such as this one helped to reinforce the evangelical image of the ‘‘dangerous Muslim Arab’’ as the enemy of God’s people. This description is reminiscent of white American fears of the alleged threat of African American men to white women that often resulted in black lynching. Even though it portrayed only one incident, the pamphlet probably shocked American evangelicals already suspicious of Muslim Arabs in the Middle East. By itself, this story would help to buttress evangelical notions of the aggressive, unscrupulous Muslim who would target even children.


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The Arabs, according to evangelical Christianity, were descendants of Abraham’s union with the slave woman Hagar, not of his wife, Sarah, the mother of the Jewish people. In this respect, even from their conception, the Muslim Arab people were marginalized in the eyes of many Christians. Furthermore, just as through the centuries some Protestant eschatologists believed that the Roman Catholic pope was the Antichrist, many also claimed that Mohammed held the dubious distinction. The Cold War united these stereotypes with suspicions that the Arab nations were allies of the Soviet Union.58 Though the demonization of the Muslim world did occur in premillennial writing in the Cold War, evangelical images of the Arab Middle East were surprisingly more complicated. Evangelicals who witnessed or heard about the plight of the Palestinian refugees were often sympathetic. This made it difficult for some to paint an image of the Middle Eastern world solely in black and white. One evangelical visiting Israel in 1950 wrote of what he saw: ‘‘The places where they used to put the animals are now packed full of refugees. These are Arabs who were driven out of Israel, losing everything they possessed. Many are refined and educated. [They] had fine homes. Now they are on the verge of starvation.’’59 Others actively sought to enlist U.S. government aid for these refugees. Often they did so on behalf of Christian families who helped to bring the refugee problem to the attention of American evangelicals. In one case, only a few months after the state of Israel was officially founded, a chain of correspondence concerning the refugees eventually reached the office of Gordon H. Mattison, deputy director of the Office of African and Near Eastern Affairs. After hearing from a Christian refugee family residing in Lebanon and learning of their story, Thomas Vakory of New York wrote to Clyde W. Taylor, executive secretary of the EFMA. According to Vakory, the United States and the UN were responsible for the Palestinian refugees after the UN turned Palestine over to the Jewish people. As a result, innocent Christian families were made ‘‘refugee plus.’’ He went on to call for a remedy for this injustice.60 This example illuminates a few aspects of Cold War premillennialism. First, this was a typical way that evangelicals in the United States worked to create change. Often, a grassroots connection was magnified through a channel of evangelical organizations that sometimes worked its way up to higher levels of secular government. Second, these letters show that support for Israel was not unqualified. Many evangelicals criticized the new state on some levels and defended it on others. Finally, in the previous example, calls to aid refugees stemmed from concern for Christian refugees. At least in this case, any support for Muslim Arab refugees was a marginal result of reaction to the treatment of Christian coreligionists. Nevertheless, this does demonstrate that evangelical premillennialism did not automatically take on the dichotomous tone of the Cold War worldview in the case of Israel.

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The Jewish state was a primary concern for evangelical leaders and for those Christians in the pews during the early Cold War. Israel’s place in prophecy served to politicize evangelicals, shaped their concepts of time and space, and directed their attention to world politics long before the 1967 war. Furthermore, these trends were all part of a bigger process of identity transformation the religious subculture had been undergoing since the dawn of the Cold War. That process was complex and sometimes contradictory. Evangelicals continued to debate the nature of a worldview informed by eschatology. That often translated into an ongoing dialogue over Middle Eastern politics that was not always predictable.

Jerusalem, a Prophetic Landmark: 1967–1991 Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of June 1967 was a particular high point for premillennialists who claimed that Jewish control of the holy city was a prerequisite of the end-times. Interest in the prophetic implications of the area rose after 1967, but the increased activity continued earlier Cold War patterns that combined eschatology and politics. As Cold War events in the Middle East continued to generate chiliastic speculation, evangelicals in the United States paid more attention to foreign policy. Graham explained the importance of the Middle East in a 1970 press conference: History began in the Middle East and history will conclude in the Middle East, according to the Bible. The last war of history will be the war of Armageddon. . . . To many of us, these signs are a prelude to the last events of this age, just before the coming of a new age, and most of these signs we believe are now in the process of fulfillment. And one of the greatest signs of all is the Middle Eastern sign. The Bible almost always indicates that we are to keep our eyes on the Middle East.61 Events in this part of the world allowed those evangelicals who believed in a premillennial end to validate the truth and credibility of prophecy. Freda Lindsay argued that current events mirrored prophecy. Zechariah 12:2–3 sounded to her ‘‘like what we read in the papers’’: ‘‘I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that sends all the surrounding peoples reeling. Judah will be besieged as well as Jerusalem. On that day, when all the nations of the earth are gathered against her, I will make Jerusalem an immovable rock for all the nations. All who try to move it will injure themselves.’’62 Lindsay repeatedly confirmed the conviction that other dispensationalists had maintained in the 1950s and early 1960s after the creation of Israel; God was in control of the future of Israel and human efforts were futile. ‘‘There will always be an Israel. God will see to it. The United Nations will never solve Israeli problems.


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It will take the Messiah returning to eventually do that.’’63 Premillennialism predicted world events for followers like Lindsay, and dispensational ideas about the Middle East actually brought these two contradictory tendencies of evangelicalism—political action and a Calvinist attitude toward change— together. Though most evangelicals shied away from giving specific dates, Lindsay was so emboldened by the Israeli signs that she ventured into the dangerous zone of date setting.64 ‘‘The generation that saw Jerusalem returned to the Jews (1967), that same generation shall not pass away until all will be fulfilled. How long is a generation, according to the Bible? It is forty years. So you add forty to 1967 and you have 2007.’’65 Events in the Middle East continued to arouse dispensationalists, who believed that they had an obligation to study, pray for, and even influence Cold War policy. Religious exercises, in their prophetically inspired support of Israel, became overtly political acts. They exploded into services such as prophecy writer and San Antonio pastor John Hagee’s annual ‘‘Night to Honor Israel,’’ which he began in Texas in 1981 and eventually expanded to Arizona, Oklahoma, and California.66 Ministries concerning Israel abounded in numerous forms after 1967. By the early 1980s, the American Forum for Jewish-Christian Cooperation, Evangelicals United for Zion, Goyim for Israel, and the Genesis 12:3 Committee were among other organizations established to support Israel. In the last chapter of his 1982 book, Magog 1982 Canceled, David Allen Lewis listed more than seventy American and Canadian Christian groups that supported Israel. He added, ‘‘There are many other fine organizations—the list is not complete. We are learning about new groups every week.’’67 Evangelicals from these ministries believed that God had called them to protect the country. The founders of the Genesis 12:3 Committee took their name from a scripture portion in which God tells Abraham, ‘‘I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’’68 This belief, combined with the sense that world events were proving dispensational timelines correct, witnessed a barrage of evangelical interest in Israel that remained consistent throughout the Cold War. Many evangelicals took prophetic speculation about Israel so seriously that they freely contributed to ministries that claimed to have special insight into the meaning of world events. Salem Kirban’s eschatologically motivated organization, Second Coming, Inc., set out to print Kirban’s Guide to Survival: How the World Will End in 1968. Advertised as a book that ‘‘had to be written,’’ Kirban’s association claimed that ‘‘current events are already shaping up to world chaos. There is only one guide to survival! God already provided the answers. Now for the first time . . . you can read these answers. Skillfully arranged with easy-to-read instructions that can mean to you and your unsaved loved ones a guide to survival!’’ As a world ministry, Second Coming, Inc., promised to print the book in Hebrew for Israel, as well as in Japanese, Dutch,

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and Chinese along with an English edition. It conducted a fund-raising campaign to do so: ‘‘Perhaps you have $500, $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000 gathering dust and interest in a savings account.’’ In one fund-raising letter, Kirban told readers about a widow who had collected enough bottles to send one dollar to Second Coming’s Israel ministry: ‘‘She had no income. Yet she sent in this $1, giving it joyfully and sacrificially. One day this physical life will end for you and for me. And the money in your bank account or savings account will mean nothing. Its very presence will fill your last hours with regret.’’69 Kirban and his organization thrived on the fear of Americans who believed in the significance of Israel and the propinquity of the end of the world in light of the Cold War. Evangelical laypersons were stirred by what they considered the prophetic fulfillment of the Six-Day War. Readers’ letters to Christianity Today after 1967 give us some idea of how evangelicals were interpreting its significance. They indicate that evangelicals in the pews continued to engage in debate over Israel’s place in the end-times just as their leaders did. In the July 21, 1967, issue, V. E. Roman of Los Angeles wrote in response to a Christianity Today editorial, ‘‘War Sweeps the Bible Land.’’ Roman called it ‘‘thoroughly relevant, prophetic, and inspirational to Bible-believers. You concluded it so impressively with two sentences which gave a hopeful impetus to the Christian’s heart: ‘The prophetic clock of God is ticking while history moves inexorably toward the final climax. And as that clock ticks, the Christian believer lifts his head high, for he knows that a glorious redemption draws near.’’’ Dave Holmer of Seattle objected to the same editorial, charging that it was ‘‘not as concerned with the war as with a flagrant, though brief, denunciation of the United Nations and a hastily assembled comment on the ‘closing days of the age.’ It seems to me that the editorial staff of this magazine should not openly ridicule an organization without providing equal space for its more noteworthy accomplishments in the same area.’’70 These letters also debated the plight of Arabs in Palestine. Some agreed with James Kelso, whose contributions to Christianity Today blasted Israeli treatment of Arab refugees and called American Christians to task for ignoring the needs of the Arab population. One letter-writer from Chicago wrote, ‘‘As a Christian teacher, I am ashamed that ecclesiastical policy which has advanced claims of conscience has remained silent about the plight of the Arabs as it has about the victims in the Soviet empire, China, Tibet, and currently in South Viet Nam.’’ Silas Jones of Oregon praised one of Kelso’s articles as ‘‘a refreshing change from the one-sided material that has flowed from far too many pens over the last few months.’’ But others criticized Kelso. One Minneapolis reader commenting on the periodical’s Middle East coverage expressed his ‘‘chagrin and disillusionment when reading the ‘interpretive analysis’ written by the Rev. James I. Kelso.’’ Benad Avital from the Israeli Embassy in Washington called Kelso ‘‘an Arab partisan.’’71 Evangelical readers of Christianity Today frequently weighed in on eschatological coverage spurred by news about Israel. In a letter printed in the


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August 18, 1967, issue, Ben Chandler wrote, ‘‘I have difficulty reconciling the intellectual integrity and candid scholarship you customarily show with the ‘prophetic’ tone of recent articles on the significance of the Israeli affair. I was truly surprised to see what appears, to me at least, to be such parochial deductions concerning prophecy and current events.’’ Another reader asked, ‘‘Does Christianity Today endorse the dispensational view as the only valid approach to biblical interpretation? If so, would it not be proper to inform readers that there are millions of Christians . . . who dissent from equating dispensationalism with the biblical view of history and Christian eschatological expectations?’’ Howard Park of Birmingham, Alabama, praised the periodical for its objectivity: ‘‘What to my wondering eyes should appear but an actual non-condescending word relative to a dispensationalist, i.e., Dr. Charles C. Ryrie. And, believe it or not, there are others in the dispensational camp who share his moderation.’’ David Bentley, writing from Amman, Jordan, called American Christians ‘‘of all eschatological stripes to examine the present conditions more carefully than we have before. We are doing all parties here a disservice when we support the Zionist aggression here in the Middle East because it seems to fit our prophetic expectations. Our Lord said that he will come as a thief in the night, and all of us may find our most cherished ideas stolen by his coming.’’72 Though some of these readers may have had more personal stakes in the question of the prophetic significance of Israel than others, these letters show that many evangelical churchgoers participated in the dialogue over the political implications of eschatological signs in the Middle East. Churchgoers after 1967 were also inundated with books on the prophetic significance of Israel and on travel books about the Holy Land. The most influential was Hal Lindsey’s 1970 The Late Great Planet Earth, which generated an audience beyond the evangelical community when it became the best-selling nonfiction book in the 1970s and was even adapted into a film in 1978.73 Writers like Richard Wolff wasted no time getting their prophetic commentary published. Wolff’s Israel Act III came out in 1967. An advertisement for the book in the October 27, 1967, issue of Christianity Today claimed that seventyfive thousand copies had already been sold. The short book considered recent events in light of prophetic scripture. In the end, Wolff asked his readers, ‘‘Does now the present worldwide turmoil give us ample incentive to proclaim the Gospel? . . . Shall we not be challenged anew with the task ahead as we consider that the time is short and that Act III may soon come to a climactic end?’’74 Christians could also satisfy their curiosity about Israel by reading travel books with colorful pictures and commentary on places of historical and religious significance. Marcia Kretzmer’s Adventure in the Holy Land: A Guide for Children and Their Families served as a guide for young American tourists to the Middle East.75 The Six-Day War did not discourage evangelicals from taking Holy Land tours, and the past, the present, and the future continued to intermingle in

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Holy Land travel after 1967. A brochure from Gotaas World Travel for a ‘‘memorable experience’’ to Europe and the Holy Lands in 1969 advertised the Reverend H. Bruce Chapman, pastor of the First Evangelical Free Church of Minneapolis, as tour director and Dr. G. Douglas Young, director of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies, as guest lecturer. The trip went through Rome, Italy, Cairo, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Samaria, Galilee, Tiberias, Capernaum, Haifa, Athens, Berlin, and London. The stop at Galilee was accompanied by a ‘‘stop at the fortress of Megiddo (Armageddon) where more than twenty layers of civilization have been excavated.’’76 Companies like Wholesale Tours International and Am-Ur-Asia Christian Tours continued to place advertisements in Christianity Today. One Wholesale Tours ad offered the evangelical ‘‘general public’’ a ‘‘journey of a lifetime’’ on a Christian Bible lands tour for only one down payment of $70. For a total of $696, one could be ‘‘thrust personally into the area dominating current world attention, observe and experience the holy land in depth, visit Jerusalem under control of Israel for the first time in two thousand years, and walk in the footsteps of Jesus.’’ Am-Ur-Asia Christian Tours offered a package to Israel for only $599.77 Evangelical tourism to Israel increased after the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy in 1971. Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the Israeli Ministry of Tourism also promoted Christian tourism in the late 1970s and early 1980s.78 Grace Halsell wrote of her own experiences on a Jerry Falwell–sponsored tour in 1983 in Prophecy and Politics: The Secret Alliance between Israel and the U.S. Christian Right. She recounts how a fellow traveler from Minneapolis expressed his excitement upon reaching Megiddo: ‘‘At last! I am viewing the site of the last great battle!’’ Another Christian on the tour told Halsell, ‘‘If Arabs are enemies of Israel, it follows they are enemies of God.’’ Halsell reports in Prophecy and Politics that from 1967 to 1977, international tourism to Israel increased by almost 75 percent. In the 1980s, more than 70 percent of Israel’s tourism revenue came from Christian tourists. Christians who went on tours sponsored by Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority often heard political messages meant to praise U.S. support of Israel. Halsell writes, ‘‘On each tour, I attempted to count the hours we spent at Christian sites and hearing about Christ, and the time we spent learning the political and military achievements of the Zionist state. I came up with a ratio of about one to thirty. That is, for every hour for Christ’s teachings, we spent about thirty hours on the political-military aspects of Israeli life.’’79 Douglas Young’s Institute of Holy Land Studies offered evangelicals another venue from which to experience Israel. Established for graduate studies in 1957, the institute, now known as Jerusalem University College, gave students the ‘‘opportunity to study the Christian scriptures in the context of the land where the events occurred.’’ One student promoted the school in 1972 through his own description of Israel as (among other things) ‘‘sleeping in the desert a few feet away from a camel with bad breath, marching around Jericho


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to see your arches fall, and seeing your Jewish friends join in on Christmas carols.’’80 American evangelicals could now ponder the meaning of the state of Israel as tourists or as students. By the early 1980s, evangelical Christians were debating the prophetic importance of Israel in Christian journals, reading books about the Holy Land, going on tours, and sometimes attending schools in the Jewish state. They were also watching filmstrips and films like the popular 1983 World Wide Pictures’ His Land. Billy Graham associate Cliff Barrows and British pop star Cliff Richards narrated the film. Commentary on prophecy and the recent history of the land now populated by the nation of Israel was interspersed with song and shots of the Middle Eastern countryside and its inhabitants. The narrators explained, ‘‘The Bible clearly reveals that God has a plan for the world and that the Middle East is God’s timepiece for that plan. Jerusalem reclaimed after nearly two thousand years could well mean that we are nearing the end of a block of time on God’s calendar, and that the world has moved a step closer toward the climactic events that will end this age.’’81 Richards sang Ralph Carmichael lyrics that referred to Israel as ‘‘His Land—all of it His. And as it blooms before our eyes, just like an Eden paradise, the world will understand. This is His Land.’’ The film reached a large evangelical audience curious about an area so central to their belief system. It was a part of a long list of dispensational venues and opportunities concerning Israel that American evangelicals of all stripes could, and did, access. A missionary attitude commingled with prophecy in all kinds of ways after 1967. Sometimes individual Christians took it upon themselves to ‘‘enlighten’’ Jews about Jesus using eschatological signs. In one extreme case in 1976, a woman wrote a letter to ‘‘Jewish friends in Jerusalem.’’ The letter was filled with personal details in which she saw numerical proof of Jesus’ messiah status: ‘‘God has given more proof for the ‘17’ for in the last week, I saw my Father’s face in sky [sic]. This surprised me for he has been dead nearly twenty-six years. I got out my Bible where this is recorded and summed up his birth and death and it is ‘17.’ godis giving you proof jesus christ is god, the father, for there is only one god, as you know, and father and son are one with proof in John 10:30.’’82 The letter writer continued in excruciating detail, convinced that God had given her eschatological and personal evidence to share with Jews. Evangelicals believed that the mission effort to the Jewish people was a directive of their faith. In 1976, Fuller Theological Seminary issued a statement on Jewish-Christian relations: ‘‘We feel it incumbent on Christians in all traditions to reinstate the work of Jewish evangelism in their missionary obedience. Jewish-oriented programs should be developed. Appropriate agencies for Jewish evangelism should be formed. And churches everywhere should support those existing institutions which are faithfully and lovingly bearing a Christian witness to the Jewish people.’’83 This charge resulted from the Great

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Commission, from a belief that ‘‘God would bless those who blessed the Jewish people,’’ and from an eschatological worldview. Evangelism efforts directed toward the Jewish community concerned Jewish leaders. The American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) Interreligious Affairs Commission recommended that the committee take action in response to two evangelism campaigns in 1972 and 1973: Campus Crusade for Christ’s ‘‘Explo ’72’’ and the ecumenical ‘‘Key ’73.’’ They identified three potential problems these efforts posed to the American Jewish community: the encouragement of ‘‘so-called Hebrew-Christian groups’’ to pick up conversion campaigns; the threat to the ‘‘pluralistic concept of America, which has been so beneficial to Jews’’; and the ‘‘possibility of the Jewish response being over-reactive and irrational.’’ The AJC considered evangelism to be the source of ‘‘a great deal of apprehension.’’84 Jewish individuals and organizations after 1967 recognized their very ambivalent role in the dispensational worldview. While Jews were leery of evangelicals who openly tried to convert them, some reluctantly acknowledged the influence that evangelical support of Israel could bring. Jewish organizations like the AJC sought to promote programs that encouraged Christian backing of Israel. In 1972, for example, the Interreligious Affairs Commission of the AJC recommended that the organization support financially a newly launched program called ‘‘Christian Visitors to Israel.’’85 It was important to both evangelicals and Jews that faithful adherents experience the land itself. That experience made the religious pasts of both groups more real. On the other hand, it made the present more real for Jews than evangelicals and the future more real for evangelicals than Jews. Israel’s sacred space was a powerful landscape that both united Jews and evangelicals and separated them at the same time. On June 23, 1969, the AJC arranged a meeting of a small contingent of Jewish leaders with evangelist Billy Graham. Some of the participants came to the meeting with impressions of Graham similar to that of Ronald Kronish, a representative of Reform Judaism. Kronish expected a ‘‘loud and pompous . . . wild raving fundamentalist,’’ but according to his own account, Kronish’s image of Graham ‘‘was severely shattered.’’ The evangelist spoke of his love for the land of Israel, reassured his audience that he did not travel to Israel to proselytize, and mentioned his political ties with Israeli and American leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon.86 The response to the meeting was overwhelmingly positive in spite of the apparently low expectations of those such as Kronish, who concluded that ‘‘those of us who were fortunate to talk with [Graham] informally came away with an impression of a powerful, yet extremely sensitive human being who expressed an unusual love for Israel and the Jewish people.’’ Other participants wrote to Graham with similarly positive assessments. Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum of New York praised him for ‘‘helping overcome a number of misconceptions and strengthening the bonds of fellowship between our peo-


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ples.’’ Others found Graham’s position on Israel ‘‘particularly gratifying’’ and expressed an interest in further Jewish-evangelical exchanges.87 Graham’s support for Israel, informed by his eschatology and powerful because of his political import, continued to impress Jewish leaders. In 1970, the National Executive Board of the AJC wanted to confer its first award for distinguished achievement in human relations on the evangelist.88 As a representative of an influential evangelicalism that had been demarginalized during the Cold War, Graham’s eschatological stance on Middle East politics proved attractive to some parts of the American Jewish community. Whatever certain Jewish leaders thought about Graham, the evidence shows that Jewish-Christian relations were influenced by premillennialism and evangelism in a complicated, mixed way. Conservative evangelical attitudes toward Jews during the Cold War ranged from anti-Semitism to philo-Semitism based on chiliastic conceptions. The Jewish perspective was also mixed. Some openly embraced evangelical allies, but others were more suspicious over their intentions and their eschatology, which often differed from Jewish eschatology in key ways. The evidence demonstrates that Jewish reaction to the surge in evangelical support for Israel after 1967 was somewhat ambivalent. According to one Jewish perspective, an alliance with American evangelicals made sense in at least two ways. First, evangelicals and Jews shared a belief in Old Testament prophecy. Eschatology provided a common language that made it easier to acknowledge a mutual purpose. Still, though both traditions shared many of the same holy scriptures, the way each interpreted prophecy, and in turn current events, differed. Most obviously, of course, those differences revolved around the status of the messiah. Because Jews did not accept Jesus as their messiah, the question of the second coming was moot for them. It was not a matter of Christ coming again but a matter of the messiah coming for the first time. A second reason that a partnership with evangelicals was attractive to many Jews centered on the conservative Christian influence in the cultural and political life of one of the most powerful nations in the world. In 1981, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin described friendly evangelicals as ‘‘a pillar that Israel has in the United States. They number ten times the Jews in America, and they are outspoken. Naturally, we look kindly on what they are doing.’’ Zeey Chafets, director of Israel’s government press office under Begin, expressed similar pleasure over specific evangelical support of Begin and the Likud government. Begin showed his government’s appreciation of this support by awarding Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell the Zionist Jabotinsky Award for service to Israel in 1981. Jewish organizations such as the AJC often discussed ways to court evangelical cooperation by countering Arab claims, by encouraging Christian visits to Israel, and by initiating education campaigns.89 Conservative Christian support eventually came specifically to address U.S. foreign policy. In the early 1980s, the Genesis 12:3 Committee

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held demonstrations against the sale of warplanes to Saudi Arabia believing that God would intervene on behalf of Israel.90 As the Cold War developed, spiritual support of the Jewish nation based on premillennial worldviews often morphed into political pro-Israel stands. Although Jews recognized that evangelicals in one of the most powerful nations of the world could wield immense influence, they also saw biblical prophecy in decidedly dissimilar ways. Ironically, the premillennial-Jewish alliance that had developed proved to be a singular means to reach disparate ends. Kitty O. Cohen points out that Israel’s conception as a Jewish state had ‘‘historical, spiritual and political’’ meaning for Jewish people. Israel was the fulfillment of a historical consciousness in which a Jewish homeland was central. It was thus more than the place where their faith had been founded and more than a sign of the end of the world. She continues that although both the Christian and the Jewish communities had ‘‘messianic longings, Israelis did not see their state as a prelude for the messianic age. They yearned for an age of social justice in the spirit of the prophets. But the majority had no literal expectations of the Messiah.’’91 For Jewish partners in the premillennial-Jewish Cold War alliance, Israel was important for what it meant in the present world, not in a future one. This interpretation of Israel’s meaning to the Jewish people was confirmed in a traditional Jewish prayer for peace, which emphasized the role of Israel in the present world, not as a symbol of an eschatological future: Grant us peace, Thy most precious gift, O Thou eternal source of peace, and enable Israel to be its messenger unto the peoples of the earth. Bless our country that it may ever be a stronghold of peace, and its advocate in the council of nations. May contentment reign within its borders, health, and happiness within its homes. Strengthen the bonds of friendship and fellowship among the inhabitants of all lands. Plant virtue in every soul, and may the love of Thy name hallow every home and every heart. Praised be Thou, O Lord, Giver of peace.92 Jewish eschatology envisioned two Jerusalems: one earthly and one heavenly. Whereas evangelical premillennialism held that a heavenly Jerusalem would come down to earth, the Talmud holds that the heavenly Jerusalem would remain above the earthly city, offering the hope of the reconstruction of a Jewish nation. Furthermore, the two cities are closely connected in Jewish eschatology, which argues that the heavenly world cannot come to pass until the earthly Jerusalem is ‘‘reconstructed.’’ This context illuminates the importance that the Jewish people placed on Israel in its earthly form during the Cold War. Rabbi Tanenbaum explained this perspective in a statement before the Near East Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1971: Normative Judaism thus was less concerned with the meta-historical ‘‘Heavenly Jerusalem’’ than with the historical ‘‘New Jerusalem’’


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which, in the main, Jewish eschatology portrays as an improved edition of the historical Jerusalem of the Hebrew scriptures. Linked with the eschatological picture of the ultimate and final peace for all mankind, the era of eternal peace to be inaugurated in Jerusalem, was the ongoing hope of Jewry for an imminent restoration of Jerusalem as a renewed center of national worship and an imminent source of rejoicing and well-being.93 ‘‘Eternal peace’’ here was just as important as the restoration of Jerusalem in the present. As in premillennialism, the temporal world remained closely connected to the eternal world. However, premillennialism placed more importance on the eternal. Events in the present were considered signs for a more important future period. Jewish eschatology, on the other hand, placed more emphasis on the historical Jerusalem as an end in itself. It fulfilled the Jewish longing for a national homeland that had a long history in Jewish communities around the world. Individual Jewish contemplation on the significance of the state of Israel often reflected the Jewish population’s awareness of its own history: ‘‘To me Israel is the fulfillment of a dream our forefathers had nurtured through all the years in exile.’’94 Many saw Zionism as the means of ensuring the survival of both the Jewish people and Judaism. Seymour Siegel explained this perspective at a 1975 conference of evangelical and Jewish scholars and leaders: ‘‘Though the roots of Zionism are many, its main thrust is the result of the understanding that whatever improvements the modern world may have wrought, the soul and the body of the Jewish people are in grave danger. . . . Zionism was not concerned only with the physical survival of Jews. It was also concerned about Judaism.’’95 This focus on the temporal survival of the Jewish faith and people helps explain the Jewish community’s reluctant acceptance of a premillennial partnership. Although evangelical support appeared positive, some Jews were suspicious of an interpretation of the meaning of Israel that was outside of human history. One pastor wrote to Rabbi Tanenbaum of a discussion on Israel that he had with a Jewish family: ‘‘Indeed, on the way home, I was explaining to a Jewish family the biblical basis for the right of Jews to live in Israel. They did not see the biblical basis, only an historical one, and they tended to reject the [former].’’96 Agreement over supporting Israel did not necessarily equal a common understanding on what that support meant. Just as evangelicals varied widely in how they interpreted prophecy, not all Jews agreed on a singular eschatological interpretation. Orthodox and Reform Jews, traditionalists and modernists, composed a diverse faith. When a Cold War evangelical-Israeli partnership is thrown into this mix, Jewish expectations of the meaning of the nation of Israel and the importance of the city of Jerusalem were not always clearly expressed. Evangelicals whose own worldview had been shaped by premillennial prophecy sometimes grafted their

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own ideas about the meaning of world events in the Middle East onto Jewish voices. In his book Inside Jerusalem: City of Destiny, Arnold T. Olson of the Evangelical Free Church of America quoted a letter from an eyewitness in Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967: Until this war the ultra-orthodox Jews would not recognize the State of Israel because they felt it could have nothing to do with God’s plan for them since the Temple site was not in their possession. now it is! And literally overnight these Jews have changed their minds about the State. Tomorrow begins the Feast of Weeks, and it was announced in the newspaper that the Messiah will come tomorrow or seven years from tomorrow. This Messianic hope which has swept through Judaism during the past few days could be significant.97 Olson’s report said more about the perspective of the author than it did about the reaction of the Jews to the unification of Jerusalem. Because the city of Jerusalem was essential to the writer’s own idea of ‘‘Messianic hope,’’ it was easier for him to interpret Jewish actions as the same. Because they shared common prophetic ground, Jews and premillennial evangelicals were able to join in support of Israel. At the same time, the differences in the eschatology of the two groups set up barriers of misunderstanding. Many Jews raised questions about the details and implications of premillennial thought. Arthur Gilbert, then director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Department of Religious Curriculum Research, confronted Graham with some of these in a 1967 interview: In Jewish experience, such Christian affirmation of the ‘‘chosen’’ concept and the gathering of the exiles as fulfillment of prophecy had been accompanied frequently by warnings that Israel would be destroyed in a catastrophic battle. . . . Some had given their interpretation with such enthusiasm that it appeared almost to be a wish that the catastrophe would occur soon. This kind of thinking lends itself to passivity in the face of harsh political realities. The will to prevent international chaos and disorder is repressed as the fundamentalist, in smug self-righteousness, sits out the trouble. Therefore, what appeared to be support of Israel might, in fact, be a disguised expression of hostility.98 Gilbert recognized that though premillennial support of Israel might appear on the surface to be a positive development, in reality this form of Christian eschatology considered the Jewish people and the state of Israel end-times pawns who would suffer immense persecution. Others agreed. One study of Jewish material in Protestant textbooks considered dispensational coverage of Israel that portrayed the state as a place outside of real human experience, ‘‘a stage on which an important act of the


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drama of human history is to be enacted.’’ The study warned that this focus resulted in insensitivity to ‘‘human concern.’’ As the Cold War moved into the 1980s, Jewish criticism of evangelical premillennialism got progressively harsher when greater national attention focused on the politics of the religious right. Those who condemned premillennial attention to Israel were quite aggressive. James M. Dunn of the AJC chastised Jews who embraced premillennial prophecy: ‘‘The absence of clear-headed understanding of apocalyptic fundamentalism has allowed some Jews to be manipulated by and mutually to manipulate the premillenarian prophecy people. Despite all claims to the contrary, there is a cynical anti-Jewish spirit among the practitioners of much of American fundamentalism.’’99 Recurrent evangelical blunders likewise raised doubts among the Jewish community. From SBC president Bailey Smith’s claims in 1980 that God did not hear Jewish prayers to revelations in 2002 that Billy Graham had made anti-Semitic comments during a private conversation with President Nixon in 1972,100 evangelicals have frequently given the Jewish community reason to question what their support of Israel actually entailed. Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, one-time national director of the Interreligious Affairs Department of the AJC and one of the leaders of the American Jewish community most involved in Christian-Jewish relations, collected literally hundreds of articles on evangelical support for Israel, on evangelical missionaries, and on evangelical involvement in politics. Particularly in the late 1970s and the early 1980s with the rise of the religious right and of such conservative Christian organizations as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Tanenbaum and the AJC paid close attention to these developments. They feared antiSemitism, a decrease in American pluralism, and conversion campaigns implicit in evangelical calls to Christianize the United States. Their ambivalence toward evangelicalism left some in the Jewish community with what they judged to be few options for a Protestant-Jewish dialogue. Although a certain number believed with Rabbi Tanenbaum that Jews had more in common with the mainline, liberal Protestant ethos, those Christians’ stance on the Israeli-Palestinian question sometimes alienated American Jews. Protestants who rebuked the state of Israel for injustice toward the Palestinian people often reprimanded premillennialists who utilized prophecy to affirm Israel at the same time. One group of Christians who gathered at La Grange, Illinois, in May 1979 issued what they called the La Grange Declaration: ‘‘We plead for all Christians to construct a vision of peace in the holy land which rests on the biblical injunctions to correct oppression and seek justice for all peoples. Forthrightly, we declare our conviction that in the process of establishing the State of Israel, a deep injustice was done to the Palestinian people, confiscating their land and driving many into exile and even death.’’101 This stance left some Zionists in the Jewish community feeling as if they had little choice but to reluctantly accept evangelical support for Israel.

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Paradoxically, even as Jewish criticism of premillennialism increased as the Cold War progressed, the various partnerships between the two groups strengthened. Israel was the common bond. According to Dr. Benjamin Armstrong, executive director of National Religious Broadcasters, ‘‘The state of Israel is the Jew’s and the Christian’s spiritual home.’’102 The founding members of the American Forum for Jewish-Christian Cooperation generated a statement of purpose that included a goal ‘‘to cooperate in the strengthening of Israel as witness to the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.’’103 By the 1980s, a buildup of premillennial support of Israel led to an increase in the formation of evangelical organizations such as Evangelicals United for Zion and Goyim for Israel that set out to promote the state even as some Jews were criticizing premillennialism’s espousal of Israel. In a surprisingly contradictory way, the Jewish-evangelical association both strengthened and weakened as the Cold War advanced. The intensity of feeling surrounding Israel shared by Jews and premillennialists, albeit in different forms, only increased as time went on. For Jews, this resulted in both a greater embrace of evangelical support and a greater rejection of it. Most evangelicals held anticipatory hopes for Israel’s place in the timeline of the end of the world which colored their view of Middle Eastern politics, but there were some who challenged this position. In the July 21, 1967, issue of Christianity Today, Dr. James Kelso of the United Presbyterian Church asked evangelicals how they could ‘‘applaud the murder of a brother Christian by Zionist Jews’’ and went on to chastise those who could ‘‘applaud crimes’’ against Muslim Arabs.104 The problem of the Palestinian refugees sometimes tempered the tendency to see the state of Israel as a holy, divinely guided state that could do no wrong. Still, other evangelicals such as long-time Israeli advocate G. Douglas Young portrayed Arab-Israeli conflicts from the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 to the Six-Day War as incidents of Muslim aggression. In a 1967 Toronto Star article, Young reported that he saw ‘‘many Arab cruelties but none by the Israelis. . . . The Arabs used anti-personnel and fragmentation bombs to cause maximum pain and death to human beings.’’ His unwavering support of Israel led to a negative portrayal of Arab countries. The Palestinian refugee problem that emerged after 1948 was not the fault of Israel, according to Young, but of the Arab nations that encouraged flight and then refused to receive them. Muslim Arab policies discouraged peace: ‘‘Contrary to the policy of the Arab countries, we here do not find opposition to ideas of peace. Attempts to bring physical destruction on civilians by border incidents or by planting of bombs in schools and theatres, or to use women and children for political ends, are ideas that are abhorrent to the mentality of the people among whom we have lived here.’’105 In the process of defending Israel, Young and other evangelicals often built on preconstructed notions of Arab aggression.


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The Muslim population in the Middle East is particularly relevant to one major detail in evangelical premillennialism. Premillennialists believed (both then and now) that for Israel’s prophetic destiny to be fulfilled, the Jewish nation of Israel had to rebuild its ancient temple (for the third time) on its historic site: Mount Moriah. That site is buried beneath the Dome of the Rock, the place where Muslims hold that Mohammed ascended into heaven. Religious tension over this land ran deep, but premillennialists such as Hal Lindsey believed that the Jewish temple would be resurrected: ‘‘Obstacle or no obstacle, it is certain that the Temple will be rebuilt. Prophecy demands it.’’106 A religious powder keg, this particular area and its prophesied place in JudeoChristian eschatology has inspired many people to do surprising things that have substantial political repercussions. There is the case, for example, of Mississippi Pentecostal minister and cattle raiser Clyde Lott, who began raising ‘‘Numbers 19 red heifers’’ in the late 1980s. Lott’s belief that a ‘‘perfectly red heifer’’ (Numbers 19:1) was necessary for sacrifice when the final Jewish temple is rebuilt—which would signal the beginning of the end, according to premillennialists—inspired his eschatological cattle-raising: ‘‘I would be considered an evangelist in the field, with a ministry toward the restoration of Israel.’’107 Of course, the full restoration of Israel, according to evangelical scriptures, requires the rebuilding of the temple where the Dome of the Rock now stands. Violent attempts (by Christian and Jewish messianics) to remove the Dome have erupted with some consistency since 1969, when an Australian fundamentalist Christian set fire to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, located next to the Dome. Other endeavors to displace the Muslim site took place in 1982 and 1984. A messianic group known as the Temple Mount Faithful started a riot in 1990 that killed seventy-two Palestinians when they displayed a banner that demanded an end to the Muslim presence.108 The importance of the Temple Mount to premillennialism has had definite personal, religious, and political meaning for believers. Whether it influenced the career path of red-heifer-raising Clyde Lott, focused the attention of evangelical churches on the fate of the new nation of Israel, or plopped evangelical Americans right down in the middle of Middle Eastern politics, the Temple Mount symbolized the significance of prophecy for many Americans. While evangelical interest in prophecy accelerated with Israel’s capture of Jerusalem in 1967, it drew on older Cold War patterns that had already begun to form.

The End of the Cold War: Israel Reconsidered? Prophetic anticipation generated by the Cold War experienced a temporary halt in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. Because evangelical eschatology had relied so heavily on the dichotomous Cold War worldview that conveniently

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labeled the Soviet Union evil, what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed? Though this turn of events caused much reevaluation among premillennial commentators, it was not the first disappointment for those Christians who looked for the signs of the dawning of the millennium in current events. Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter’s 1956 case study When Prophecy Fails famously addressed this phenomenon. According to the Festinger thesis, failed prophecy creates dissonance among believers, who in turn strengthen their adherence to the original value system through proselytization. The authors argued that because ‘‘the behavioral commitment to the belief system is so strong that almost any other course of action is preferable . . . it may be even less painful to tolerate the dissonance than to discard the belief and admit that one had been wrong.’’109 Though the Festinger thesis has been criticized for the authors’ data-gathering practices, others have nonetheless expanded upon its observations about a group’s continued commitment to a value system that produced an unsuccessful prophecy. Joseph F. Zygmunt and Mathew N. Schmalz have both examined the significance of failed prophecy in the Jehovah’s Witnesses movement. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1870s, having had some connections with the Millerites’ failed predictions about Christ’s ‘‘fleshly’’ return, made a remarkable series of forecasts at the turn of the century in which they expected to be transformed into spiritual saints. When this did not happen, believers were able to adapt by relying on strong organizational structures already in place.110 Likewise, evangelical premillennialism did not internally combust after the Cold War ended. In some ways, it even strengthened with the help of technological advances such as the Internet. Web sites like Rapture Ready, the Prophecy News Page, the Night Watchmen, Midnight Call, Focus on Jerusalem, 666 Watch, and many others continue to monitor world events for signs of the end. As a broad movement, evangelicalism had faced many incidents of what in hindsight could be called ‘‘prophetic misspeculation.’’ Organizationally, it could withstand such miscalculations, and eschatology even appeared to incorporate anticipated failure into its theology by continually stressing the foolishness of making specific predictions. Furthermore, as any Billy Graham crusade would attest, what was most important to evangelicals was eternal, personal salvation. ‘‘Winning souls for Christ’’ and assuring their eternal glory trumped predictions about Magog and the Antichrist. Perhaps most important, the legacy of Cold War premillennialism had assured evangelicalism’s impact on America’s political and cultural worldview. The good-versus-evil paradigm, though not as clear-cut as it seemed on the surface, could adapt to multiple scenes. It was useful to consider America’s enemies in apocalyptic terms. The Gulf War, for example, brought with it speculation that Saddam Hussein was the Antichrist. Books such as Joseph Chambers’s A Palace for the Antichrist: Saddam Hussein’s Drive to Rebuild Babylon and Its Place in Prophecy ensured that premillennial-


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ism’s Cold War birthright would live on.111 Dispensationalists continued to perceive evidence of the end-times in world events after the Cold War ended. Premillennialists watched Israel in particular for indicators that Jesus would return soon. A volatile Middle East that reinforced conservative evangelicals’ eschatological worldview continued to shore up their Cold War national identity from the middle to the end of the twentieth century. In fact, presidential attitudes toward Israel since the early Cold War have been indicators of the continued influence of premillennialism, though the relationship between evangelicalism, Israel, and U.S. foreign policy has become more and more complicated. Israel has remained an important ally of the United States. It would be an overstatement to argue that this was due primarily to evangelical pressure, but this alliance surely made it easier for conservative Christians to support policy that appeared to follow a prophetically sound course of action. In one address, George W. Bush drew connections between his faith and Israel: I am a Christian. But I believe with the psalmist, that the Lord God of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. Understanding my administration should not be difficult. We will speak up for our principles; we will stand up for our friends in the world. And one of the most important friends is the State of Israel. . . . My administration will be steadfast in supporting Israel against terrorism and violence, and in seeking the peace for which all Israelis pray. Bush believed, in fact, that cooperation between Christians and Jews was a fulfillment of prophecy. In a sermon given while he was governor of Texas, he quoted a hymn: ‘‘Now it is a time approaching by prophets long foretold, when all share well together one Shepherd and one fold. Now Jew and Gentile meeting from many a distant shore, around an altar kneeling one common Lord adore.’’112 Many of Bush’s evangelical contemporaries agree with him on the importance of Israel. The doctrinal statement of Dallas Theological Seminary, the country’s foremost dispensationalist institution, acknowledges the place of Israel in its official position on the second coming: We believe that the period of great tribulation in the earth will be climaxed by the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to the earth as He went, in person on the clouds of heaven, and with power and great glory to introduce the millennial age, to bind Satan and place him in the abyss, to lift the curse which now rests upon the whole creation, to restore Israel to her own land and to give her the realization of God’s covenant promises, and to bring the whole world to the knowledge of God.113

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One 1990 study found a direct correlation between dispensational beliefs and support of Israel among clergy, clerical activists, lay activists, and evangelical activists.114 Still, there is evidence of an increasing multiplicity of evangelical attitudes toward Israel. Some dispensationalists criticized George W. Bush in 2003 for his administration’s support for a ‘‘roadmap to peace’’ in the Middle East. They opposed any attempt to negotiate between ‘‘democratic Israel, a reliable friend and ally that shares our values, and the terrorist-infested Palestinian infrastructure.’’ Others took umbrage at the suggestion that evangelicals were likeminded when it came to Israel and argued that born-again Christians supported and opposed Israel for a variety of reasons that often had little to do with a particular eschatological stance. The evangelical-Israeli relationship in the twenty-first century has been complex. Pat Robertson’s loud support of Israel did not prevent the Jewish nation from turning down a contract with him and a group of investors planning to build a Christian tourism center and theme park near the Sea of Galilee. Robertson’s suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke in early 2006 was divine retribution for Sharon’s role in Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip led the country to turn down the proposal, reportedly worth $50 million.115 Nevertheless, the strong partnership between evangelicals and Israel that developed during the Cold War has remained relevant. In 2005, Group Publishing, a company that develops Vacation Bible School resources, created the ‘‘Holy Land Adventure,’’ a program meant to familiarize evangelical children with Bible stories and Jewish customs by generating a ‘‘Jerusalem marketplace’’ or a ‘‘Bethlehem village.’’ The complex relationship between evangelicalism and the state of Israel, much of which was formed during the Cold War due to the power of eschatological frameworks, has continued into the twenty-first century.

6 A Different Kind of Prophet

Explo ’72 is sometimes known as a ‘‘Christian Woodstock.’’ It drew more than eighty thousand students and others to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas in the middle of June 1972. Conference participants spent a week together praying, attending workshops, and listening to Christian music and well-known speakers such as Honorary Chairman Billy Graham, Dr. E. V. Hill of the Mt. Zion Missionary Church in Los Angeles, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, and astronaut James Irwin. The event was sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), an organization founded by Bill Bright in 1951 on the campus of UCLA to encourage Christian growth on college campuses across the country. By 1960, forty campuses were home to active CCC organizers.1 The mission of Explo ’72, according to Bill Bright, was to fulfill ‘‘the Great Commission by the target date of 1980.’’ Evangelism was a prominent theme of the convention as participants ‘‘learned how to share [Christ] with others.’’ At its opening, Graham enumerated Explo goals. It was meant to ‘‘dramatize the Jesus revolution,’’ train Christian evangelists, speak of the relevance of the Christian message, ‘‘teach young Christians that true faith must be applied to the social problems of the world,’’ recruit young people to Christian ministry, evangelize, and ‘‘to say to the whole world that Christian youth are on the march.’’ Enthusiastic participants displayed T-shirts, banners, and signs that read ‘‘Jesus Christ is the Real Thing,’’ ‘‘Wanted: Jesus Christ,’’ ‘‘Smile, God Loves You,’’ and even the popular ‘‘In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.’’ Explo general director Paul Eshleman’s account of the event included numerous stories—‘‘testimonies,’’ in evangelical

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circles—of the meaningful encounters of those attending. Eshleman and Bright joined others who concluded that Explo ’72 had been a tremendous success. Some even claimed that it was the ‘‘most significant Christian event since Pentecost.’’2 But Explo officials in Dallas did bump heads with a small group of participants who called themselves the People’s Christian Coalition (PCC). This band of radicals insisted on chanting ‘‘Stop the War’’ and carrying signs such as one that read, ‘‘U.S. bombs killed 300 today. They won’t be reached in our generation.’’ Jim Wallis, one of the leaders of the PCC and the editor of the group’s newspaper, the Post-American, explained their motivations: ‘‘Our radicalism is not based on American values which we consider corrupt and oppressive, but rather we base our faith on Christian radicalism, taking what Jesus had to say seriously.’’3 The PCC criticized mainstream evangelical organizations and leaders such as the CCC and Billy Graham for misguided nationalism and for neglecting to emphasize the importance of social action. Accounts of the confrontation differ depending on the source. A PCCfriendly article contended that though Explo officials appealed to Wallis’s group to ‘‘for Christ’s sake, please refrain from any more demonstrations,’’ PCC protestors continued their activities and their exhibition booth became one of the most popular and contentious.4 By contrast, Paul Eshleman associated the PCC with other ‘‘fractious’’ groups such as the extremist communal Children of God and wrote that PCC members ‘‘impugned Explo’s announced goal’’ with their antiwar signs. Eshleman’s description of PCC incidents gave the impression that the protestors changed their tune after facing kind, compassionate Explo officials: ‘‘A Christian group which had made plans to register protest for their social and humanitarian causes backed off when confronted with love and reason by our staff.’’ Eshleman’s version of the PCC presence at Explo ’72 was somewhat reiterated by Bill Bright, who wrote that ‘‘experiencing anew the oneness of the body of Christ’’ in Dallas had impressed him. ‘‘Never before have I seen so many bound so completely together in Christian love by God’s Holy Spirit.’’5 Bright either omitted PCC radicals from his own conception of the ‘‘body of Christ’’ or he accepted Eshleman’s description of unhappy radicals joining the mainstream when ‘‘confronted with love and reason.’’ Bright’s comments on Christian antiwar activities were representative of the thoughts of several mainstream evangelicals: ‘‘Explo ’72 can do more to bring peace to the world than all of the antiwar activity combined. Changed people in sufficient numbers will result in a changed world.’’6 Wallis and the PCC clearly intended to challenge the priority placed on individual evangelism by evangelicals such as Bright and Graham. The part they played in Dallas and their subsequent criticism of what they believed to be the evangelical neglect of social justice issues called into question the unity that Bright and Eshleman purported. Who were these activists? How did they emerge from a conservatively dominant Cold War evangelicalism? The PCC was formed in 1971 by a group of

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students from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago. Disturbed by the Vietnam War, they began to regularly discuss the war and other issues of faith and politics. Drawing from their experiences in student movements in the 1960s and from their evangelical backgrounds, they described themselves as ‘‘a grassroots coalition calling for people committed to the Christian message . . .with an active social commitment to social justice which serves as a basis for social liberation.’’ They published their views in the Post-American. In 1975, the group, taking the name the Sojourners Community, also renamed their magazine Sojourners and moved to Columbia Heights, in inner-city Washington, DC. From their new base, they continued to balance Christian social commentary on politics with programs aimed at attacking poverty, hunger, and discrimination. They focused attention on housing and homelessness in Washington, set up food distribution centers and health care facilities, and were active participants in the antinuclear movement of the 1980s.7 The emergence of the Sojourners Community came at a time when the black freedom movement and the Vietnam War had begun to reveal deep rifts in American society. The culture of dissent became less and less subordinate to Cold War McCarthyism as much of the American populace participated in the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement. Hegemonic political culture became increasingly difficult to define. Fractures in the secular United States could also be found in the evangelical community when groups such as Sojourners arose to challenge conservative evangelicals’ interpretation of the United States as a Cold War purveyor of biblical truth.8 As the age of protest set the stage for a period of contested explanations of both mainstream political culture and evangelicalism, two developments within the religious tradition took place. First, conservative evangelicals increasingly distinguished themselves from the dominant culture by embracing issues such as abortion. They became key players in the new culture wars, and their apocalypticism shifted to make room for a greater emphasis on those signs of the times that condemned the immorality of secular America. One 1970 resolution passed by the NAE documented the organization’s ‘‘sense of crisis and urgency’’ at the beginning of the decade. Entitled ‘‘Saving the Seventies,’’ the resolution listed some concerns of the NAE: air pollution and ecology issues, drugs, immoral elements in entertainment, ‘‘efforts to sabotage the judicial system, the loss of a sense of authority and the meaning of freedom with obligation in the educational campuses of our country, and the increasing polarization of nations, races, and peoples with the resultant sin of racism and prejudice.’’9 The concerns clearly reflected the NAE’s reaction to the counterculture, to the student movement, and to the civil rights movement. As the black freedom movement and the Vietnam War began to erode the illusory dominant political culture of the early Cold War that had been based on anticommunism and apocalypticism, conservative evangelicals added their own voices to the dialogue on national identity. Premillennialism, with its

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warnings of last-days disaster before the coming of Jesus ushers in a period of world peace, continued to figure prominently in their arguments. The authors of the ‘‘Saving the Seventies’’ resolution demonstrated that by concluding, ‘‘Our watchword in saving acts in the Seventies will ever be—Behold, He Cometh! And to that end, in word, deed and being, we shall occupy till He comes. Amen. ‘Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.’ ’’10 Though anticommunism was still a powerful influence in the late Cold War (one need only remember Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an ‘‘evil empire’’ to see that), it was not quite the unifier that it had been in an earlier period. Still, conservative evangelicals built on the legacy of their eschatological anticommunism from the early Cold War and entered the political arena in more direct ways through alliances with fundamentalist organizations such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. They increasingly turned their attention to moral crises in the United States by developing what they called pro-family agendas. In a second development, evangelicals who had embraced a more politically liberal stance in the 1960s and the 1970s mounted a growing challenge to conservative Protestantism. Like the Sojourners Community, they took up causes that set out to alleviate poverty, promote racial reconciliation, and oppose nuclear proliferation. Particularly in their antinuclear stance, their apocalypticism centered on the potentially devastating impact of contentious Cold War policy coupled with increasingly sophisticated nuclear weapons. This was in some ways reminiscent of dire chiliastic warnings of the early Cold War. But these evangelicals’ antinuclear messages were not employed to support theological positions about the end of the world (their literature, in fact, rarely made direct references to eschatology), nor were they used to galvanize the American standing in the Cold War. In fact, their efforts often criticized U.S. and Soviet policies. The evangelical left suppressed the eschatological meanings of the identifier ‘‘prophet’’ in the later Cold War period; they emphasized the term’s social justice connotations instead. The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War had a profound impact on the further diversification of evangelicalism. In his survey of evangelical political attitudes in the 1960s and the 1970s, Robert Booth Fowler has noted, ‘‘As evangelicalism grew during the stormy years from the new Left to Carter and came more and more often into contact with the broader culture . . . the old evangelical consensus on conservative values in all aspects of life gave way to a spreading social and political diversity.’’11 With its alternative viewpoints, Sojourners proposed a new evangelical framework for understanding the world. The Sojourners Community and others like them presented opinions on foreign policy that differed markedly from conservative evangelicals’. Together, these perspectives reflected a diverse, complicated evangelicalism. The increasingly visible liberal evangelical elements occurred, for the most part, only after the Cold War had advanced beyond its initial stages. As the nuclear threat


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appeared to temper somewhat, the dominance that the combination of anticommunism and premillennialism had held over evangelical identity began to wane as well. In particular, the Vietnam War’s divisive consequences for the United States paved the way for more strident evangelical alternatives to political conservatism among born-again Christians. That is not to say that dispensationalists did not continue to perceive evidence of the end-times in world events. Premillennialists particularly watched Israel for indicators that Jesus would return soon. Furthermore, evangelicals in the early Cold War had truly cemented born-again Christianity into the cultural landscape of the United States. It would become more noticeable in the late 1970s and the early 1980s with the rise of the religious right. At the same time, a new kind of prophetic focus came out of the evangelical left that spoke not of the end-times but of a need to address social and political issues such as poverty and nuclear warfare. Though this chapter is not a synthesis of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War, it does examine a piece of evangelical participation in and reaction to these landmarks of U.S. history. Evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s on the right and left drew on both their faith and a politicized evangelicalism that had developed in the early Cold War. In the midst of a vocal culture of dissent cultivated by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, evangelicalism splintered even further.

The Evangelical Explosion The demarginalization of evangelicals during the early Cold War years reached its fruition in the 1970s and 1980s. A combination of factors brought them to the forefront of the nation’s attention. Conservative evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal political organizations popped up to coordinate participation in the debates over abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, school prayer, and pornography. Some worked to lobby for legislation and elect officials (from the local school board to the president of the United States) friendly to their causes. The Moral Majority (1979), the Religious Roundtable (1979), the Family Research Council (1983), and others more directly integrated the evangelical movement into American politics by forming what became known as the religious right. Still, these organizations did not just spring up from nowhere. Conservative evangelicals’ Cold Warrior status had helped them assimilate into mainstream culture. Some also had political experience working with other conservatives. Lisa McGirr and Rick Perlstein have both maintained that Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican campaign against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson brought together conservative ‘‘ideological soul mates’’ of different stripes and taught them how to mount a political effort from

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the grassroots. In the process, the campaign created a movement that would reemerge much stronger at a later date. As Perlstein puts it, canvassing for Goldwater taught people how letters got written, how doors got knocked on, how co-workers could be won over on the coffee break, how to print a bumper sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by order of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate—how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering. How to feel bigger than yourself. It was something beyond the week, the year, the campaign, even the decade; it was a cause. You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: a movement.12 Conservative evangelical Christians were a part of that movement, and their involvement helped it to become so successful later, especially during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s embrace of biblical prophecy is well known; he adhered to the millennial narrative that defined the United States as a ‘‘city on a hill.’’ The president told a representative of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 1983 about his studies of the ‘‘ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about.’’ In the same year, he called the Soviet Union the ‘‘evil empire’’ in an address before the NAE.13 As the religious right emerged on the political scene with a splash in the 1980s, their partnership with Reaganism elicited predictable support of the Reagan administration’s anticommunist policies. McGirr has documented the role that significant evangelical growth played in the American right in Orange County, California. In part a rejection of what conservative Protestants believed were the excesses of the counterculture and in part an attempt to insert ‘‘traditional’’ pro-family values into American culture, evangelicalism blossomed. Ironically, one of the first symbols of that growth emerged out of the Jesus movement, a Christian adaptation of the counterculture zeitgeist. The Reverend Chuck Smith worked among young people of the counterculture to convert them by implementing a relaxed, informal style of worship. Smith’s church, Calvary Chapel, became one of the country’s first megachurches; by 1978 it had a membership of twenty-five thousand. Despite Calvary Chapel’s youthful membership and relaxed style, Smith preached an apocalypticism that had a familiar premillennial ring, frequently warning of one-world orders and immorality. Other Southern California megachurches, like Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, also brought a conservative message. Schuller’s evangelism, though, was accompanied not by fire-and-brimstone preaching but by discourses on self-help and material success.14 The growth of these churches and others like them across the country was a physical example


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of the increasing influence of evangelicalism during these years. Premillennial thought about the end of the world continued to play a role in this development. The tremendous success of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth demonstrated the continuing relevance of dispensationalism and showed that evangelicalism had become a powerful influence in the United States. The New York Times reported that it was the best-selling book of nonfiction in the 1970s. Lindsey’s book outlined dispensationalism and claimed that keys to the prophetic future had already been fulfilled. But believers were not the only ones who read The Late Great Planet Earth. As Timothy Weber and others have pointed out, the book was a ‘‘breakthrough’’ that generated interest from nonevangelicals as well. Eventually translated into more than fifty languages, it became a part of popular culture in national bookstore chains with new prophecy sections, was the inspiration for a film version in 1978, and produced a wave of Bible prophecy commentary.15 Lindsey’s book did more than anything up to that point to popularize dispensationalism. It also reflected the surge in evangelicalism during the period. The increasingly powerful evangelical movement existed simultaneously with other events, particularly the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, that would change the face of the United States in more than one way. Evangelicals interacted with and reacted to both in complex ways. Millennial thought that had been integrated with anticommunist rhetoric in the early years of the Cold War helped to characterize both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Some, particularly black freedom movement activists, used millennialism to advance the country toward greater equality for all citizens. Because the religious right became such a powerful force in these years, the impact of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War on the nature of evangelicalism has often been overlooked. Both events clearly revealed the diversity of the evangelical movement and in several cases increased that diversity as many evangelicals turned from conservatism to embrace social justice causes that sometimes countered the views of their fellow believers. These evangelicals became prophets of a different kind.

Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement Conservative Christians in the early Cold War drew on millennialism to construct a worldview that blended the international and domestic spheres. Other scholars have demonstrated a variety of crucial ways in which world politics and national trends have intersected. Mary L. Dudziak has brought together the histories of the Cold War and the civil rights movement to show that international Cold War objectives influenced how the federal government responded to civil rights even before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The government feared the impact that segregation and violent confrontations such as during

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the 1961 Freedom Ride had on the world’s image of the United States.16 The civil rights movement, with its demand for equal participatory democracy for all Americans, was the catalyst for the explosion of political and cultural protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It influenced the student movement, the counterculture, and the antiwar movement. White, conservative evangelicals faced new challenges as an emerging culture of dissent began to unravel the hold that Cold War McCarthyism had over the dominant political culture. Evangelicals both participated in (through a variety of ways) and reacted to this the new milieu. Race proved a key factor in how Christian Americans interpreted both the Cold War and the ‘‘culture of dissent.’’ The key involvement of the black church in the civil rights movement demonstrated that black Christian advocates were not willing to sit by and watch for signs that pointed to the end. Their actions indicated either that they were not convinced that the world was ending or that they believed they had a role to play in bringing God’s kingdom to the earth, a postmillennial notion. In 1962, the Council of Federated Organizations sponsored a meeting in Ruleville, Mississippi, to speak to black citizens about registering to vote. Reverend James Bevel spoke on ‘‘Discerning the Signs of Time.’’ A message based on Christ’s explanation of the end in Luke 12:24, it mirrored sermons on the same passage by white ministers and evangelists. Whereas these often railed against societal corruption and sin on the brink of world disaster, Bevel’s speech emphasized the need for action, referring specifically to action in the voting booths.17 The apocalyptic spirit of America in the early Cold War allowed white evangelicals to establish a closer relationship to the nation’s dominant political culture. Black evangelicals with connections to the civil rights movement, on the other hand, sometimes used prophecy interpretations to challenge the racial dimensions of the United States. Historian David L. Chappell has convincingly traced the roots of civil rights activism to a Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition. Civil rights workers believed that God was on their side. They believed that their sacrifices would be rewarded when the evils of the Jim Crow system were defeated and exchanged for a better future. Whereas premillennialists looked to an eschatological future that was other-worldly, civil rights activists believed that change would occur in the here-and-now.18 Advocates from civil rights leaders as famous as Martin Luther King Jr. to the movement’s foot soldiers drew on prophetic inspiration. James Lawson, who was one of the most influential philosophers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), taught students in Nashville about nonviolent techniques in the late 1950s. Trained as a theologian, Lawson employed his own understanding of the role of faith in the black freedom movement in his original drafts of SNCC’s ‘‘Statement of Purpose’’ in 1960. Nonviolence, justice, and love, according to Lawson, would lead to a ‘‘redemptive community.’’ It was necessary to expunge a sinful society of the evils of segregation: ‘‘The Christian favors the breaking down of racial barriers because


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the redeemed community of which he is already a citizen recognizes no barriers dividing humanity. The Kingdom of God, as in heaven so on earth, is the distant goal of the Christian.’’19 The Christian and the civil rights activist would work to establish God’s prophetic kingdom in the United States. Intellectual leaders like Lawson shared their prophetic commitment with grassroots leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer. A poor, black Mississippian, Hamer became an inspirational leader for other activists despite economic hardship and violence. Like Lawson, King, and others, Hamer’s prophetic Christianity colored her activities. She preached a revolutionary Christianity after gaining national esteem following her televised testimony before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As a delegate of the newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Hamer and her fellow delegates challenged the all-white regular delegates from Mississippi. Though President Johnson, fearing the impact her testimony would have on party unity, called a last-minute press conference that preempted Hamer’s speech, a national television audience had been reached. This provided the impetus for Hamer to travel the country giving speeches and garnering national attention for the plight of African Americans in Mississippi. Hamer often spoke of the civil rights movement as a force that would create God’s prophetic kingdom. She described SNCC’s 1964 Freedom Summer as ‘‘the beginning of the New Kingdom in Mississippi.’’20 Her prophetic vision, as Chappell notes, was shared by numerous others, leaders and lesser known activists, black and white. This prophetic tradition had a long history within evangelicalism and it had a complex relationship with the premillennial tradition. Evangelical civil rights workers called for change in the United States at the same time that some premillennialists were watching for signs both at home and abroad that confirmed their expectations of an imminent end. Still, the two impulses were not always mutually exclusive. Evangelical leaders and periodicals such as Christianity Today could support the black freedom movement and present dispensational interpretations of world events at the same time. Spirituality inspired many black civil rights advocates, particularly in the South, where the church was at the heart of the community. African American churches served as meeting places and important symbols for the movement. Many were also on the front lines of the struggle, burned to the ground for their involvement. Still, just as white churches took multifarious stands, some local black ministers surprised activists by refusing to cooperate. A worker in Holmes County, Mississippi, described one incident: ‘‘We got turned down a lot of times from the black minister. . . . He mostly was afraid because they [whites] whooped a few of ’em and bombed a few churches. The preacher didn’t want his church burned down, and them old members was right along in his corner.’’ African American churches that remained detached belie simple explanations that tied the black church to the black freedom movement. To further

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complicate matters, an institution’s position did not always match those of the individual churchgoer. Whatever involvement (or noninvolvement) their churches may have had in the civil rights movement, members often garnered from their faith the motivation, strength, and commitment to participate.21 This was true in black and in white churches. The predominantly white mainline Protestant churches did join the movement’s black leaders in calling for the extension of equal civil rights to all, but their initial commitment was hesitant. In the 1950s the NCC contributed principally through programs developed by the Department of Racial and Cultural Relations and by passing resolutions on issues such as segregation. These efforts were limited enough to prompt criticism by black leaders. Most famously, Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’’ chastised members of the clergy in Alabama: ‘‘I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need [for social revolution]. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.’’22 There were other episodes. In 1952, for example, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York voted to end their affiliation with the NCC after that body postponed the adoption of the ‘‘Statement on the Churches and Segregation.’’ It took the NCC until June 1963 to establish a Commission on Religion and Race to ‘‘confess [the Church’s] sins of omission and delay, and to move forward to witness to her essential belief that every child of God is a brother to every other.’’ The new Commission lost little time in becoming involved. Members made contacts with two of the black freedom movement’s foremost organizations, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC. They also participated in the March on Washington, aided in efforts to lobby for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and mediated racial disputes in southern and northern cities.23 Calls for social change in the segregated South before the black freedom movement sometimes originated in Southern Baptist culture, despite the denomination’s general conservatism. Historian Tracy Elaine K’Meyer has placed the activism of Koinonia Farm, established in Georgia in 1942 to promote interracial cooperation and community, in the context of a Southern Social Gospel tradition and the Southern Baptist Church. For Koinonia Farm founder Clarence Jordan, his introduction to Social Gospel tenets at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary reinforced his understanding of Christianity influenced by Southern Baptist beliefs that included the priesthood of all believers. At Koinonia Farm, believers combined a commitment to interracialism with a millennial understanding of God’s kingdom as an earthly community. In 1951, Koinonia members signed a statement that explained their pledge: ‘‘We desire to make known our total, unconditional commitment to seek, express, and expand the Kingdom of God as revealed in Jesus the Christ. Being


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convinced that the community of believers who make a like commitment is the continuing body of Christ on earth, I joyfully enter into a love union with the Koinonia and gladly submit myself to it, looking to it to guide me in the knowledge of God’s will and to strengthen me in the pursuit of it.’’24 In its early decades, Koinonia confronted internal division, economic hardship, and outside threats that caused its members severe strain. In 1957, Rufus and Sue Angry, one of the community’s few African American families, moved to New Jersey to seek refuge from the tension in Georgia and to establish a new Koinonia at Hidden Springs. Financial burdens forced the group to later abandon Hidden Springs. Koinonia lost the Angrys as a result, making the community’s claims of interracialism tentative at best. K’Meyer has also pointed out that Koinonia’s emphasis on establishing a community of believers committed to complete sharing as equals—their vision of the kingdom of God— compromised their interracial goals. As communalism became the group’s most important priority, their earlier ambitions for racial transformation in the nation were somewhat neglected.25 Still, Koinonia was a grassroots effort by black and white evangelicals committed to social change. It drew support from across the country and was an important outpost for civil rights workers in Georgia. Koinonia evangelicals drew on their Christian traditions to combat segregation. Institutionally, white evangelical churches played a limited role in the black freedom movement, especially when compared with the activities of mainline Protestant churches and bodies like the NCC. The NAE did pass resolutions on race relations and the civil rights movement. They emphasized the evangelical belief that the solution to racial conflict could ultimately be found in the ‘‘Christian message.’’ In 1964, the NAE resolved, ‘‘We believe that the biblical solution to the problem of race prejudice is through the transformation of the individual by the power of the Holy Spirit resulting in a love for all men.’’ It went on to call for the desegregation of churches and for evangelicals to ‘‘support on all levels of government such ordinances and legislation as will assure all of our people those freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution.’’ Billy Graham highlighted similar solutions, deemphasizing political action while upholding the power of Christian conversion: ‘‘I believe that we are not going to settle the race problem in the streets alone. It’s going to be settled in the hearts of people. And I believe that Christ can give this capacity to love our neighbors as we should. I don’t think that naturally and humanly we have this capacity apart from God.’’26 There were notable exceptions. Christianity Today urged evangelicals to take action to aid blacks facing discrimination. It condemned white churches that would use any available resource to fight alcohol while claiming that only personal salvation could solve racial trouble in America. Black evangelicals such as Baptist minister Tom Skinner took up the cause of racial reconciliation and called white evangelical churches to task. Skinner believed that real change could come about only through Jesus but also argued that the Church had

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a social responsibility as well: ‘‘We can’t go to a man who hasn’t eaten for four days and try to tell him about the bread of life.’’27 Individual white evangelical responses to or participation in the civil rights movement varied, of course. But although some (especially in the South) were more hostile to it and others contributed more actively to efforts to fully realize civil rights objectives, the official statements by the NAE and Graham’s comments represent the sentiments of the majority. They agreed with civil rights goals but believed that soul salvation was the real answer. Their attitudes toward the political actions of the black freedom movement were more ambivalent.

Evangelicals and the Vietnam War The manifold responses of the American evangelical community to the civil rights movement were also reflective of its positions on the U.S. war in Indochina. Though some scholars have simply contrasted the mainline denominations’ opposition to the Vietnam War with evangelical support for it, the situation was in fact more complex than such a simple dichotomy suggests. Evangelicals actively engaged in a discourse over the Vietnam War among themselves and with others. Many did back U.S. efforts, and their support stemmed from multiple sources. Others condemned the war with strong language and enthusiastically participated in antiwar activities. Some tried to steer what they claimed was a middle course by either avoiding the question of the morality of the war or by focusing their attention on evangelism. The controversies surrounding the Vietnam War created an environment from which evangelicalism’s ideological diversity reemerged on the national scene after anticommunism had tempered the religious community’s multifarious nature. In the early 1960s the Kennedy administration increased U.S. involvement in Indochina by placing more than sixteen thousand military advisors in Vietnam. Still, a large number of Americans were unaware of the conflict. The University of Michigan Survey Research Center released results from a poll in December 1964, after Congress had authorized the president to ‘‘take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack’’ in response to the Tonkin Gulf incident in August. The study showed that one quarter of Americans did not know about the fighting in Indochina. But that ignorance would not last much longer. Shortly thereafter, President Johnson escalated the U.S. commitment with a bombing campaign of North Vietnam. On March 8, 1965, two Marine battalions landed at Danang. The United States had become deeply embroiled in a war that would divide the American public—including the evangelical community.28 It is true that mainline Protestant denominations opposed the Vietnam War on a greater scale than the evangelical churches. Leading spokespersons for the Protestant antiwar movement included men such as Robert McAfee


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Brown, Reinhold Niebuhr, William Sloane Coffin Jr., and Martin Luther King Jr. The American Lutheran Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, the United Presbyterian Church, and the American Baptist Convention joined the NCC and the Christian Century in questioning the war. In late 1965, a group of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy met in New York to form the Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV), which became one of the most outspoken religious organizations to oppose the war. Of the twenty-eight Protestants who made up the early National Emergency Committee of Clergy Concerned About Vietnam, most hailed from liberal theological traditions and only one was associated with the fundamentalist Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. Harold E. Quinley surveyed ministers from the largest Protestant denominations in 1968 and found that 76 percent of the fundamentalist clergy supported military escalation in Vietnam; 50 percent of conservative clergy did so. By contrast, neo-orthodox clergy supported withdrawal over escalation by 30 to 15 percent and liberal clergy by 42 to 8 percent. Denominationally, 82 percent of the Southern Baptists surveyed supported increasing military efforts in Vietnam, and only 2 percent backed complete withdrawal. At the same time, only 9 percent of the Methodists favored boosting military operations, and 40 percent believed that withdrawal was the best course of action.29 Anne Loveland has argued that the rivalry between evangelicals and the Protestant churches that made up the NCC contributed to the evangelical support of the war once theologically liberal denominations opposed it. Certainly some antagonism is apparent in articles on the war printed by the conservative Christianity Today. In one issue, editor Carl Henry sharply criticized antiwar clergy from mainline denominations, accusing them of a ‘‘vocal and uninformed piety.’’30 Still, it is quite a leap to claim that this rivalry was justification for the evangelical backing of the Vietnam War, especially in light of the diverse positions born-again Protestants did take. One point of view prioritized Christian ministry in Vietnam over ideological stances about the justice of the war. Individual evangelicals joined organizations such as World Vision and denominational efforts like that of the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, which founded the Tin Lanh Protestant Church. These evangelicals collaborated with American Christians from peace churches and mainline denominations to build a Protestant relief effort in Vietnam. World Vision, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), the Church World Service (CWS), and the Vietnam Christian Service (VNCS), which encompassed the MCC, the CWS, and the Lutheran World Relief, provided refugee relief and medical care and distributed aid and other services. World Vision made plans in 1965 to build refugee centers, orphanages, a vocational school, a halfway house for disabled veterans, and a hospital for blind university students. The evangelical Pocket Testament League distributed Bibles and scripture portions in Indochina.

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United in their desire to assist the Vietnamese people, these Christian aid workers sometimes did find themselves at odds with their fellows over their personal stands on the war. Some of the VNCS staff resigned to protest the war, and ideological splits among the pacifists, political radicals, nonpacifists, and pro-war workers in the VNCS helped to break the coalition apart.31 Evangelicals who joined these relief efforts thus encountered Christians who held a variety of political positions on the Vietnam War. Furthermore, Loveland points out that evangelical missionaries and aid workers in Vietnam were able to focus on the ‘‘other war’’ in Indochina: the war to save the souls of the people. Nineteenyear-old Virginian Phyllis Overbay’s analysis succinctly summarizes the view of a majority of moderate evangelicals: ‘‘I believe that [Jesus Christ] is coming back soon. The war in Vietnam is really in a bad shape. . . . If more people would put their trust in the Lord and get saved I believe there wouldn’t be so many wars and killings in the world today.’’32 Insisting on salvation as the solution may have allowed some evangelicals to sidestep taking a political position on the Vietnam War. Of course, many evangelicals did openly uphold the U.S. war in Indochina. Because of the wholehearted evangelical support of anticommunism in the post-1945 world, many conservative Christians continued to react with alarm to perceived communist gains in Latin America and Asia. When the U.S. government persisted in casting the Vietnam War in Cold War terms, a good portion of the evangelical community accepted its justifications. Fundamentalists were among the most enthusiastic supporters; this was not surprising considering their extreme anticommunism. Carl McIntire maintained that U.S. troops in Vietnam were holy warriors, carrying out God’s will: ‘‘It is the message of the infallible Bible that gives men the right to participate in such conflicts, and to do it with all the realization that God is for them, that God will help them, and that if they believe in the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and die in the field of battle, they will be received into the highest Heaven.’’ McIntire also organized rallies in support of the war that culminated in his March for Victory in December 1971.33 Moderate evangelicals also took pro-war stances, though their language was not as extreme as fundamentalists like McIntire. In April 1965, Christianity Today praised President Johnson, arguing that he had ‘‘placed the Vietnam situation in proper perspective.’’ Weighing in on the debate only shortly after the United States had placed the first marine units in Vietnam, this support echoed earlier evangelical descriptions of Cold War America as a freedom stronghold standing in opposition to a dangerous communist threat. American policy does not yield one inch to those who want peace at any price, and who never seem to condemn communist aggression or even understand the nature of its threat. . . . It may be hoped that Mr. Johnson will not yield to opponents of a sound policy in


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Vietnam—those who neither sense nor see the true nature of our present dilemma, and whose hopes for withdrawal would precipitate another Munich. America is still the greatest bastion for freedom, and it holds the greatest military power in world history. This power must be used responsibly when principle, freedom, and truth are at stake.34 Writing as a Baptist layman in Christianity Today in January 1966, Lieutenant General W. K. Harrison took a similar stance by arguing that the consequences of U.S. inaction were too grave to not pursue military action in Southeast Asia: ‘‘The United States is faced with the alternatives of defeating the aggressor by military effort or of failing to do so. The latter would entail national humiliation, loss of prestige and influence in the world, and desertion of the South Vietnamese, who have every right to expect our full support and will be lost without it.’’ Harrison concluded with a familiar Cold War eschatological analysis: ‘‘What men overlook is that there can be no peace until the Prince of Peace comes at the Second Advent. . . . Apart from God’s intervention there can be no lasting peace. Wars will continue until man’s rebellion runs its full course, terminating in the wars of the great tribulation at the end of this age.’’ These comments typified the conservative evangelical tendency to place the Vietnam War into a Cold War, apocalyptic context: ‘‘It does not take religious commitment to know that the effects of war have vastly worsened since 1945, when atomic power introduced apocalyptic overtones to international conflict.’’35 Some conservative Christians felt threatened by peace activists and antiwar protestors. They no longer needed Cold War eschatological fear to ensure their Americanness, and they actively opposed those whom they believed held antiAmerican positions. Grassroots efforts that tied patriotism to Christianity sprang up during the war. In Nebraska in 1966, ‘‘Operation Patriot’’ went doorto-door distributing both patriotic and Christian literature to ‘‘appeal to the latent patriotic spirit of the American people. Once this spirit is rekindled, we will seek to direct them to the God of our fathers.’’36 Still, evangelical discourse over Vietnam suggests that the war was problematic for them. Christianity Today even called the Protestant stance on the Vietnam War ‘‘awkward’’ in 1966. The community struggled to synchronize religious directives to obey authority (as in Romans 13) with the concept of ‘‘dual citizenship,’’ the belief that American evangelicals were citizens of heaven as well of the United States. Evangelicals in the early Cold War had helped solidify the image of the United States as a Christian nation, and they also drew upon legacies of evangelical predecessors such as Billy Sunday, who used faith language in extreme ways to convince the world of the righteousness of the American cause in times of war. But as more and more Americans, including fellow Christians, began to doubt the morality of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, evangelicals faced difficult questions that they answered in multiple ways. Even

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the conservative SBC wrangled over the war. A 1970 SBC resolution had acknowledged ‘‘moral ambiguities’’ in the Vietnam War, but that phrase was eliminated in 1971 after messenger (delegate) William Brock proclaimed, ‘‘When a man lays down his life for another man’s freedom, that’s not morally ambiguous.’’ Some conservative Christians dealt with the quandary by rehashing the debate over the proper place of politics in the Church. Clark Kucheman, associate professor of Christian ethics at Claremont Men’s College, argued that an individual should not ‘‘act politically in the name of religion. . . . It is appropriate for religious people to assess political life in the light of moral principles; it is only inappropriate for them to use their church, or religion generally, to sanction a particular point of view.’’37 Evangelist Billy Graham insisted that his own position on the war was neutral and ‘‘nonpolitical.’’ After a trip to Vietnam in late 1966, Graham told reporters that he favored the biblical symbol of the lamb over both the hawk and the dove. Nevertheless, he urged Americans to support the president. Graham continued to preach against communism, maintained a close relationship with the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and traveled to Vietnam to preach to troops there in 1966 and 1968, in spite of increasing opposition to the war from other Protestant circles. His particularly close relationship with President Nixon and the advantages the evangelist apparently believed that the connection carried with it probably influenced his uncomfortable position on the war. Though he had refrained from publicly endorsing the war by the time of the Nixon administration, he did not use any leverage he may have possessed as spiritual advisor to the president to criticize the war either: ‘‘What can people expect me to do? March in protest? Carry a sign? If I do that, then all the doors at the White House and all the avenues to people in high office in this administration are closed to me.’’38 Just as evangelical support of the war ranged from militant endorsement to reluctant backing to ambiguous neutrality, different levels of dissent were also present. Protestant opposition was led by the NCC, Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam (CALCAV), and periodicals such as Christianity and Crisis and the Christian Century, all organizations and publications associated with mainline denominations. They examined U.S. policy in light of the just war doctrine and openly criticized it. CALCAV issued statements against the war and in support of dissidents. Its 1967 ‘‘Statement on Conscience and Conscription’’ announced, ‘‘We hereby publicly counsel all who in conscience cannot today serve in the armed forces to refuse such service by non-violent means. . . . In the sight of the law we are now as guilty as they.’’ High-profile CALCAV members gave speeches in opposition to the war. Most remembered was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 address at Riverside Church in New York. The civil rights movement leader told his audience, ‘‘I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos


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without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.’’ CALCAV held rallies and worked with other antiwar organizations to organize events of protest.39 Although evangelical institutions rarely officially embraced the antiwar cause, individual evangelicals did. Particularly at the local level, they sometimes joined the peace movement. In Anderson, Indiana, the local CALCAV chapter attracted evangelicals from the Church of God. Evangelicals from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) also were linked to the Indianapolis organization Hoosiers for Peace.40 These Christians worked with other mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who believed that the Vietnam War was immoral. Other evangelicals set up their own organizations. Groups such as the PCC, later the Sojourners Community, earned a reputation as radicals after they vocally repudiated the Vietnam War. Jim Wallis called it a ‘‘brutal criminal war’’ and chastised President Nixon for victimizing ‘‘millions of Indochinese people killed, wounded, or made homeless’’ while ‘‘almost 150,000 Americans [were] killed or wounded fighting in a cause few believed in.’’41 At one point, Billy Graham insisted, ‘‘God has called me to be a New Testament evangelist, not an Old Testament prophet!’’ He claimed that though ‘‘some may interpret an evangelist to be primarily a social reformer or political activist, I do not! . . . My primary goal is to proclaim the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.’’42 By contrast, Wallis’s comments and the antiwar activities of the Sojourner’s Community demonstrated a different idea of Christian mission that actively sought to censor the government and hold it accountable to their notions of justice. They were joined by others, including the editors of the Reformed Journal; evangelical academics such as Richard V. Pierard, Robert D. Linder, and Robert C. Clouse; and Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield. Hatfield, for one, insisted that ‘‘Christians and the church can not remain silent on such questions as the war.’’ But other evangelicals sharply criticized his antiwar position. One man addressed his letter to Hatfield with ‘‘Dear Former Brother in Christ.’’43 Though a minority within the larger evangelical community, this group of influential and noninfluential antiwar advocates helped to re-create the character of evangelicalism. Some student groups attempted to work within conservative denominations to express their own critiques of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Mark Oppenheimer’s case study of the Baptist Students Concerned in his book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture provides one example of this. In the late 1960s, a group of Baptist students from North Carolina began to organize around issues of poverty and the war, speaking together about current events at dinner meetings. In 1968, some members of the Baptist Students Concerned were elected as messengers to the SBC in Houston. They planned to raise awareness through picket lines and antiwar literature. Stuart Sprague, a member of the student group, described their

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posters at the convention: ‘‘In fact, the signs for our picket lines were mostly blank to minimize confrontation. The first sign in a series said, ‘Will this be the relevant response of Southern Baptists to social issues in 1968?’ About ten blank white posters followed the first.’’ These students were arguing for the politicization of a Baptist tradition that had historically been apolitical. On top of that, most Southern Baptists opposed their message. Nevertheless, Baptist Students Concerned members were invited to speak at the convention and at subsequent meetings. Oppenheimer points out that one reason for this cordiality most likely stemmed from the powerful familial and religious ties many of the student members maintained with influential Southern Baptist officials. Whatever the reason for their reception, the students were able to use it to engage in a dialogue about the war in a denomination that for the most part supported it.44 The message of the Baptist Students Concerned may have been out of the ordinary in one of the most conservative Protestant denominations in the country, but in another way these young messengers seamlessly fit in with their older counterparts. The students at the convention dressed conservatively, and no ‘‘longhairs’’ were found in the bunch. As Oppenheimer notes, they ‘‘made a conscious effort to be culturally acceptable, to look and sound as unthreatening as possible.’’ Sensitive to the harsh evangelical critique of the secular counterculture, the students avoided any identification with it. Somewhat paradoxically, this was so at the same time that a few conservative evangelists had attempted to interact with the Jesus Movement.45 Still, the Baptist Students Concerned did not have to look far to find Christian condemnation of the counterculture. On the whole, moderate evangelicals were much less equivocal about the counterculture than they were in debating confusing contradictions over the morality of the war in Vietnam. The diversity of evangelical opinion about the Vietnam War answers many questions that have arisen out of the mistaken notion that the community was a monolith of religious, social, and political thought. When Jimmy Carter became president in 1976, Time magazine declared that year the ‘‘year of the evangelical.’’ But many conservative evangelicals in the late 1970s and early 1980s judged Carter too liberal and turned instead to the religious right and to Ronald Reagan, whom they understood as having embraced ‘‘pro-family’’ causes. Grasping how an evangelical president like Carter could have been opposed by so many evangelicals is easier when we take into account the multiple evangelical stances on the Vietnam War. The domination of the religious right in discussions of evangelicalism in recent years has obscured this diversity, but evangelicals—like other Americans—engaged in a heated debate over the war in Indochina. They were influenced by an age saturated with dissent and emerged a kaleidoscopic, heterogeneous community. For evangelicals on the left, their antiwar activities were a precursor to their activism in the 1980s, particularly their participation in the antinuclear movement.


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The Counterculture, the Jesus Movement, and the Rise of the Religious Right The link between the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the other political movements that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s has been well documented. A new milieu of dissent had come upon the United States with the rise of the New Left; the counterculture had emerged along with it. Moderate evangelicals may have held ambivalent positions on the Vietnam War, but they were much more united against the counterculture. By the end of the 1960s, the country was becoming more and more polarized. The counterculture proved both a cause of and a reaction to that development. It was an array of communal life, rock and roll, acid, ‘‘longhairs,’’ sexual experimentation, ‘‘beins,’’ and flower children. Edward P. Morgan describes it as ‘‘manifestations of a distinct culture that emerged from the creative, prefigurative politics of the young who retreated from a violent American society that seemed beyond redemption.’’46 Evangelicals who observed blatant drug use and what they believed to be uncontrolled sexuality became increasingly alarmed, and many concurred with the Nixon administration’s attack on the activists as threats to law and order. In 1965, the NAE bemoaned the ‘‘new morality’’: ‘‘America is on the verge of moral collapse as expressed by the ‘New Morality’ and might more properly be called ‘amorality’ leading to ‘immorality.’’’ The resolution went on to identify the family as the institution most equipped to save the United States from the perilous consequences of its depravity: We urge all pastors of the NAE constituency to promote the observance of the family altar and to give themselves anew to a ministry of family counseling, advising parents to give clear instruction and close supervision to their children in preparing them to face the pressures of perversion within our society. . . . We accept the urgency of this situation and the importance of these resolutions to the preserving and the strengthening of our beloved nation and her influence for good around the world.47 Evangelicals denounced sexual experimentation, pornography, and abortion. There is some evidence that NAE denominations also took steps toward making social justice issues a greater priority in the 1970s. According to James Davison Hunter, one study showed that evangelical theologians claimed their churches emphasized social ministries but believed that more should be done. Still, the primary concern of the evangelical mainstream in these years was the promotion of the family unit, which they thought could become a moral bastion against growing immorality.48 The counterculture generated another, much different evangelical response in the form of the Jesus movement. Primarily a youth movement, ‘‘Jesus freaks,’’

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as they were sometimes called, emerged out of the hippie culture. They rejected conventional Christianity, the Eastern religions that were growing in popularity in the countercultural community, the ‘‘God is Dead’’ theology of the time, and atheism. Instead, they combined conservative Christian (often charismatic) theology with counterculture fashion, Jesus rock, and other unconventional forms of expression. To many in this new Christian youth culture, Jesus served as a revolutionary antihero to modern America. Jesus people engaged in street evangelism, went to Christian coffeehouses, organized marches, attended Christian music festivals, and a few even joined Christian communes. Some Jesus movement groups adopted politically radical messages. The Christian World Liberation Front, centered in Berkeley, took up the causes of war, ‘‘environmental control,’’ oppression, and racism. They believed that ‘‘Jesus proclaimed a spiritual revolution to bring about a fundamental change within, to deal with the faulty components of every system. . . . Accept Him as your Liberator and Leader; then join others of his forever Family here to change this world.’’49 The culture of dissent, in both its politically radical and its countercultural forms, was tinged with apocalypticism and utopianism. Rhetoric that bemoaned the failings and criminality of American policy and culture—as in the bombing of North Vietnam, for example—sometimes made use of an ‘‘implied apocalyptic’’ to call for revolution. Most obviously, the environmental movement worked to direct attention to the potentially devastating impact of ignoring environmental deterioration. At the same time, activists held high hopes for the world-shattering impact of a realized revolutionary effort. In the Jesus movement, this apocalypticism merged with Christian eschatology and the study of the last days in even more palpable ways. The communal Children of God, founded by David Berg in Huntington Beach, California, used sackcloth, signs, and literature to warn of the ‘‘death of the nation’’ as prophets of doom.50 One member described her conversion to the Children of God after a conversation with a proselytizer: ‘‘I asked him questions, eschatological questions. He had the answer for everything. You know, what’s going to happen. Like, even in, in the hippie community people were talking about the end of the world and what would happen—what kind of world would come—and he had the answer for everything. I thought, ‘Wow, this guy’—‘it’s all from the Bible,’ he says.’’ In dispensationalist fashion, Berg established a timeline of the end-times that predicted that the tribulation period would begin in 1989 and that Jesus would return in 1993.51 Evangelical eschatology that had worked to strengthen conservative Christian nationalism was adapted in the Age of Aquarius by multiple groups and movements in myriad ways. Some conventional evangelicals saw in the Jesus movement an opportunity for Christian ministry. The Reverend Don Williams of the United Presbyterian Church helped to establish the Salt Company Coffee House in Hollywood in 1967. Patrons of the Salt Company heard Christian music, scripture, and


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speakers. Southern Baptist Arthur Blessitt strolled Sunset Strip looking for converts among runaways and drug addicts, inviting them to his midnight services. He eventually founded a Christian center called His Place.52 But not all evangelicals embraced the Jesus movement. Pentecostal evangelist Gordon Lindsay condemned those who became a part of the movement, associating their work with the social gospel: One of the tragic things today is that the Church has left the Bible, left the gospel, left the scriptures and they’ve gone out for a social gospel. We should not leave the scriptures and the Bible and the gospel of salvation and start down the street with the protestors and the revolutionaries . . . white or black, whatever they are . . . the KKK, the Black Panthers, and so on. That’s no place for the minister of the gospel. Our purpose is to preach the gospel that men and women will be saved.53 Lindsay’s comments alluded to the division between theologically liberal and conservative Protestants over the priorities of the social gospel and evangelism. But they also point to a certain aversion that some evangelicals felt toward the counterculture, whether or not it took on Christian overtones. Whatever their views on the Jesus movement, mainstream evangelicals often identified the counterculture with society’s moral decline. They agreed with fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell, who had begun to back away from the extreme separatism that some fundamentalists had argued would save them from becoming contaminated by the secular world. Susan Harding has shown that by the 1980s certain fundamentalist leaders encouraged the subculture to move ‘‘out of exile and into the world, giving them access to and voice in the broad spectrum of middle-class institutions that shape and produce American culture, society, and politics.’’ But as we have seen in our examination of the early Cold War, this occurred on a small scale in an earlier period as fundamentalist anticommunism belied their claims of separatism. What made this later development different was the acknowledgement by Falwell and others that it was necessary to engage the world in order to save it. The foundation of the Moral Majority in 1979 accompanied an alliance between fundamentalist and evangelical leaders over certain moral questions. In particular, Harding cites the coalition between Falwell and Francis Schaeffer IV. In the words of Franky Schaeffer, Francis’s son, they and others like them wanted to work for a ‘‘great conservative crusade to turn America back to God. We do not need organic unity. Such is not necessary to achieve a mutual appreciation and respect.’’54 In particular, Schaeffer’s mission concentrated on combating abortion, evolution, pornography, and the ‘‘immorality’’ of secular entertainment. In many ways, abortion became the public symbol of the conservative crusade against an ungodly secular culture. The abortion debate heated up in the period surrounding Roe v. Wade in part because evangelicals believed that

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abortion threatened their notions of family. It reinforced their persistent notions about the increasing immorality of American society. According to an NAE account, ‘‘Abortion has been catapulted into the forefront of the ethical problems confronting evangelicals today. The issue has been nurtured in a general climate of moral relativism, a growing sexual permissiveness, and a threatening population explosion.’’ Unlike questions surrounding the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, evangelicals had little doubt about issues such as abortion. Indeed, the NAE called for direct action from Christian America: ‘‘Evangelicals, as much if not more than other citizens, must be involved in the decision making process as virtually every state legislature considers abortion legislation.’’55 Conservative evangelicals used these issues to disassociate themselves from secular America. They had merged millenarianism with patriotism in the early Cold War to draw closer to the dominant culture, but in this later period they made pains to distinguish themselves, laying the groundwork for what would come to be called the culture wars. Paradoxically, just as fundamentalists were ‘‘tearing down cultural walls of separation’’ to join conservative evangelicals ‘‘in the world’’ in the 1970s and 1980s,56 their crusade against immorality meant that conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists alike were disassociating themselves from a secular America they increasingly criticized. This did not mean that they withdrew from politics. Quite the opposite, as the emergence of the religious right makes clear. Still, the primary objectives of the religious right centered on cleaning up the American immorality originating from a secular ‘‘other.’’ Conservative evangelicalism’s renunciation of the dominant culture also did not mean that millennialism had disappeared. Indeed, many perceived growing decadence as further proof that the world was approaching the end-times. Finally, this development did not challenge the patriotic Christianity that had expanded during the early Cold War. The civil rights movement and the antiwar movement conjured up disturbing questions about the morality of the United States. By contrast, the unambiguous condemnation of pornography and abortion could be directed at a secular culture, somewhat distinct from the ‘‘nation.’’ Nevertheless, some evangelicals did make bold statements, both in favor of the civil rights movement and in opposition to the war, revealing the diverse character of U.S. evangelicalism.

Prophecy and the New Evangelical Left A 1982 book entitled Waging Peace: A Handbook for the Struggle to Abolish Nuclear Weapons purported to ‘‘probe the meaning of the current nuclear crisis and find ways to make a faithful response.’’57 More than thirty contributors to the book took up the task. One entry included a submission by modern-day prophet David H. Janzen, who claimed that God had given him a message in the


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summer of 1978. He first shared his prophecy at the Mennonite World Conference in Wichita, Kansas. It appeared in Waging Peace as ‘‘My People, I Am Your Security: A Nuclear Prophecy.’’ Janzen’s revelation articulated well the goals and motivations of the Christian antinuclear movement, stressing internationalism, faith, and the evils of nuclear weapons: ‘‘My kingdom is international. I am pleased that my children gather all around the globe to give allegiance to one kingdom. My kingdom is coming in power. No powers, not even the powers of nuclear warfare can destroy my kingdom. My kingdom is from beyond this earth.’’ At the same time, it rejected premillennial interpretations of the Cold War: Do not say time is running out. Do not threaten or despair. I am the Lord of time. There is no time to seek the world’s approval, but there is time to do what I will lay before you. By my mercy I have extended time. I extended time for a perverse human race when I called Noah. I lengthened the time of repentance by sending my prophets. I have averted nuclear disaster many times for you. Jesus offers you all time, time to repent and come to me. Obey my call and there will be time to do what I am laying before you. Now is the time.58 Janzen’s message epitomized the alternative prophetic focus of the evangelical left who embraced the antinuclear movement. Progressive Christian forerunners who worked for change guided and influenced their goals. Evangelical abolitionists and radical Christians like those who formed the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen in 1934 established a pattern of religiously motivated activism. The Fellowship sought to ‘‘identify with the emerging minority of prophetic Christians who are trying to discover and give practical expression to the historic redemptive mission of our religion.’’ The group’s journal, Prophetic Religion, was published in the 1940s through the early 1950s.59 The evangelical left in the 1970s and 1980s came out of this tradition, emboldened by their experiences in the civil rights and antiwar movements. For them, a prophet revealed social injustice and called for an end to harmful global developments; a prophet did not forecast eschatological doom or look for signs of the end of the world. Like the fundamentalists of the Moral Majority, these Christians advocated a kind of union between religion and politics, but their motivations and their conclusions deviated from their conservative counterparts. The primary way each group perceived the role of prophecy in part explained and demonstrated their differences. Evangelicals who insisted on the application of Christian prophecy to advance certain social and political causes had allies in other traditions. In April 1965, for example, CALCAV took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times imploring the president ‘‘In the Name of God, Stop It!’’ ‘‘It’’ referred to the Vietnam War, and CALCAV had sought and acquired more than twenty-five

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hundred signatures from ministers, priests, and rabbis who had signed an open letter to President Johnson. The letter alleged that ‘‘our government’s actions in Vietnam have been and continue to be unworthy either of the high standards of our common religious faith, or of the lofty aspirations on which this country was founded.’’ It went on to describe the signatories’ apparent sense of prophetic responsibility: ‘‘The prophets and teachers of our JudeoChristian faith admonished the people of their day . . . to deal with their enemies with love and good deeds. Yet in Vietnam this nation, so proudly selfdescribed as ‘under God,’ is not content even with ‘eye for an eye’ retaliation, but returns evil for evil on a multiple scale.’’ The letter ended on an apocalyptic note: ‘‘We have no alternative but to assert on every occasion and in every way open to us our conviction that these methods are not God’s methods, but will bring the judgment of God upon our nation.’’60 By the number of signatures, it is clear that liberal evangelicals agreed with CALCAV’s claim that prophets should hold people responsible for injustice. Evangelical youth helped lead the move toward the greater embrace of social activism within the movement. They not only strengthened evangelical liberalism, but collegians not considered part of a burgeoning evangelical left also advocated commitments to justice issues like poverty. James Davison Hunter reported that more seminary students under the age of thirty-five refused to distinguish between evangelism and aid to the poor than their older counterparts. Hunter quoted one Baptist seminary student: ‘‘This cannot be an either/or question. Both are necessary for it is through meeting the needs of the poor in Christian love that we bring them to a faith in Jesus Christ.’’ Hunter’s study still found that an overwhelming number, 88 percent, of seminary students chose personal evangelism over alleviating poverty as the ‘‘primary focus of missionary efforts overseas.’’ But of those who declined to separate the two goals, all but one were a part of what Hunter called the ‘‘coming generation.’’61 Surveys of the political views of the coming generation of evangelical college students, which began in 1982 as part of the Evangelical Academy Project, confirmed that though evangelicals took more conservative positions than public university students, the majority demonstrated liberal views on gun registration, school prayer, increased defense spending, and nuclear power. But on those ‘‘morality issues’’ that the religious right deemed critical to the ‘‘salvation’’ of the family—abortion, women’s rights, and homosexuality— evangelical college students demonstrated clear conservative positions. This study suggests that by the 1980s, young evangelicals translated their religious beliefs to their political viewpoints in increasingly complex ways. Though most may have agreed with the conclusions of organizations like the Moral Majority on abortion and women’s rights, Hunter showed that there was evidence of a backlash against the Moral Majority among the coming generation. One student reported: ‘‘You just can’t slap on morality from the outside. You can’t force people to be good. The whole premise of the Moral Majority is haywire.’’62


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Evangelicals, not always easily classified as conservative or liberal, political or apolitical, were crafting their own religio-political identities. The movement to direct the consciences of evangelicals toward issues of social justice took a variety of forms.63 One of its most influential leaders was Ronald J. Sider. Sider helped form Evangelicals for Social Action in 1973 and wrote prolifically in the 1970s and 1980s on hunger, poverty, simple living, and the nuclear holocaust. As general editor of the Unit on Ethics and Society of the WEF’s series of books entitled Contemporary Issues in Social Ethics, Sider identified a ‘‘historic transformation’’ of evangelicals committed to embracing social justice issues. It was a movement with a list of contributors that included the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern (1973), the Lausanne Covenant (1974), the Evangelical Fellowship of India’s Madras Declaration on Evangelical Social Action (1979), and the Evangelical Commitment to Simple Lifestyle (1980).64 In 1977, Sider first published Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study. The book had a powerful influence on evangelical leaders and others and it became a best seller. It challenged biblical Christians in developed countries to face the desperately impoverished conditions of those around the world. Sider confronted American evangelicals with biblical arguments about God’s concern for the poor, called for the church to act to alleviate poverty and to call for new foreign policy initiatives that would prioritize justice for the poor, and encouraged Christians to live simpler lifestyles: God requires radically transformed economic relationships among his people. Sin has alienated us from God and from each other. The result has been personal selfishness, structural injustice and economic oppression. Among the people of God, however, the power of sin is broken. The new community of the redeemed begins to display an entirely new set of personal, social and economic relationships. The present quality of life among the people of God is to be a sign of that coming perfection and justice which will be revealed when the kingdoms of this world finally and completely become the kingdom of our Lord.65 This view of the prophetic priority of social justice to the second coming was a common theme in Sider’s other books in the 1970s and 1980s. In Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope: A Book for Christian Peacemakers (1982), which Sider cowrote with Richard K. Taylor, he argued that Jesus’ messianic kingdom had not yet been fully realized but that it had also ‘‘broken into the present,’’ and believers ‘‘were to begin living out the radical values of the new age.’’ To do so meant practicing ‘‘unconditional love’’ and ‘‘unmerited forgiveness’’ that would mean loving one’s enemies. The authors outlined an eschatological framework that did not reject the premillennial notion of a future messianic age but argued that the beginning of that age had already begun.

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They called on Christians to recognize this by practicing ‘‘the way of the cross’’ and rejecting nuclear warfare.66 The amalgamation of the belief in the future return of Jesus and a commitment to social justice appeared in other evangelical circles as well. In 1980, the International Consultation on Simple Lifestyle, a meeting of eighty-five evangelical leaders from twenty-seven nations, created an ‘‘Evangelical Commitment to Simple Lifestyle.’’ The group resolved that ‘‘having been freed by the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, in obedience to his call, in heartfelt compassion for the poor, in concern for evangelism, development and justice, and in solemn anticipation of the Day of Judgement, we humbly commit ourselves to develop a just and simple lifestyle, to support one another in it and to encourage others to join us in this commitment.’’67 Grassroots groups also merged premillennial-inspired action with concerns about global peace and human rights. In Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope, Sider and Taylor included a ‘‘Peacemaker’s Pledge,’’ modeled after a document created by believers in northern Illinois. The pledge began with an expression of eschatological motivation: ‘‘Reflecting on the signs of the times.’’ It continued with a list of those signs: world conflict, the threat of nuclear holocaust, a costly arms race, injustice, poverty, and powerlessness. Finally, the pledge outlined a series of promises: ‘‘I will labor with others toward the goal of a more just world order where basic human needs for food, shelter, health care, education and work are met. . . . I commit myself to work for nuclear disarmament and promise not to earn my living by employment related to building or maintaining a nuclear weapons system.’’68 Evangelicals who advocated political and religious action in support of the poor or in opposition to the nuclear arms race did not necessarily reject millenarianism, but they did interpret its implications for the present in very different ways from conservative evangelicals. Though conservative and moderate evangelicals did not fully embrace the antinuclear prophetic movement in the same way as their more liberal counterparts, this did not mean that they were not concerned with developments such as the nuclear arms race. One 1982 NAE document, ‘‘Threat of Nuclear Holocaust,’’ illustrated the wide range of opinion within the organization on the matter: In 1979, NAE, recognizing the possibility of armed conflict and even mass destruction, declared that within the membership—are those who are committed to peace through strength and those who renounce the use of force as a matter of conscience. There was a call to urge our government to exercise reasonable restraint in the production and use of its military capabilities and to encourage other nations to do the same. The National Association of Evangelicals Board of Directors expresses its deep concern about the threat of a nuclear holocaust and urges our national leaders to rededicate their efforts to


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obtain a meaningful arms control agreement that will scale down the nuclear arms race.69 The NAE did participate in the dialogue on nuclear weapons, acknowledging the multiplicity of views on the matter within its membership body—a response not unlike their ambivalent stance on the Vietnam War. By contrast, evangelicals in the Sojourners Community were more united on the nuclear arms race. They believed it was their moral and biblical duty to actively try to ‘‘ban the bomb’’ and work toward disarmament. Sojourners’ antinuclear activities were numerous and varied. The magazine staff published articles, and in May 1978 they compiled literature meant to educate Christians on their obligations to ‘‘bear public witness to the security that comes through God’s love and not through nuclear weapons.’’ According to the community’s newsletter, by the summer of 1978, five thousand packets had already been sold. Members also joined other activists in New York at the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament and protested at the Seabrook nuclear plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire. Sojourners frequently attended ecumenical demonstrations. In 1982, they supported the ‘‘Fast for Disarmament’’ action, in which participants made their commitment public through peace walks, vigils, rallies, and letter-writing campaigns. Coordinators sought to ‘‘use our bodies and our spirits to speak for life, to affirm the life of our human community, to say ‘Yes!’ to another way of life, a life without arms and in peace.’’70 In 1982, the Sojourners Peace Ministry organized its own commemoration event on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. They held a prayer service and candlelight vigil across from the White House on August 6. The service demonstrated a blend of Christian repentance and an obligation to social justice. In his welcome address, Joe Lynch of the Sojourners Peace Ministry explained, ‘‘We come with repentant hearts, aware of our involvement in the deaths and the suffering caused by those bombings. We also gather to demonstrate publicly our opposition to the arms race, which has escalated ever since.’’ The next afternoon featured ‘‘paper crane making, music, drama and storytelling and balloons,’’ perhaps in an effort to include children and families in the Christian peace community by highlighting cultural awareness.71 A primary tactic of the evangelical antinuclear movement involved convincing Christians to set up their own peace ministries within their churches. Peace mission groups were active around the country in evangelical churches in the early 1980s. Riverside Church in New York established a Disarmament Program and a Southern Baptist congregation in Louisville, Kentucky, organized a peace journal, the Baptist Peacemaker. An article by Mernie King in the September 1980 issue of Sojourners magazine explained the rationale behind this approach: ‘‘In the U.S., very often it is the Christians who have their fingers on the nuclear button. If the church would get its own house in order,

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the threat of nuclear weapons could be powerfully confronted.’’ King used the Sojourners Fellowship as an example. Their peace ministry ‘‘encourage[d] church members to explore deeply the foundations of their faith in Jesus, where peace is found.’’ It also made use of the church’s worship experience and established specific events such as a 1979 Lenten series on the arms race. The call for local peace ministries illustrated a drive to spread the message of the antinuclear movement to other evangelicals by linking it with Christian obligation and emphasizing its millennial character. As King put it, ‘‘The church’s very purpose is to be evidence of Christ’s peace to the world. Peace is Christ’s gift to those who participate in his kingdom.’’72 These efforts provided opportunities for evangelicals in the pews to participate as peace activists at the same time that some of their leaders were rejecting the nuclear arms race through public petitions such as the 1978 declaration ‘‘A Call to Faithfulness.’’ Mainline Protestants and Catholics joined evangelical leaders, including Ted Engstrom of World Vision, Jay Kesler of Youth for Christ, and Vernon Grounds of Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary, to pledge commitments of ‘‘noncooperation with [their] country’s preparations for nuclear war.’’73 There were, of course, evangelicals who reacted negatively to Sojourners’ message, particularly as expressed by the magazine. The objections tended to be of two types. First, many conservative Christians in the 1980s who supported President Reagan’s Cold War policies accused Sojourners magazine of antiAmericanism. As one letter to the editor from Americus, Georgia, explained, ‘‘Our stomachs turned at the severity with which Sojourners express its antiAmericanism, anti-Reaganism, and anti-Republicanism.’’ The second type of complaint alleged an overemphasis on political issues and a neglect of spiritual ones. The same letter-writer claimed, ‘‘When opening the cover of your magazine, one is more apt to become aware of where Sojourners is politically and the strength of convictions of its political views, rather than seeing its spiritual and biblical foundations.’’74 The Sojourners Fellowship remained at the center of the contentious dialogue on the proper place of politics in the evangelical faith in part because it challenged the association of evangelicalism with conservatism. The group’s clash with Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority lasted well into the end of the twentieth century and through the beginning of the twentyfirst. The conflict was a part of the religious community’s ongoing identity negotiation. The differences that divided conservative evangelicalism from its liberal counterparts emerged in a more exposed manner after the Vietnam War. They are demonstrated and in part explained by the way that groups like Sojourners interpreted prophetic applications. Jim Wallis’s addresses in the late 1970s and early 1980s often consisted of a pattern that made use of the apocalypticism that marked evangelical (and secular) rhetoric during the early Cold War. In a 1979 message entitled ‘‘The Christian and Nuclear Power,’’ he told his audience, ‘‘We face a problem. A problem like we have never faced before and that is


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the possibility, no the probability of total destruction, of total war. Human beings, creatures so prone in their history to violence, to greed and to irrationality now have the destructive technology to devastate each other and the earth with them.’’ But Wallis questioned the conclusions that conservative evangelicals made based on this dire situation: ‘‘We are prone to say in the churches ‘the kingdom of God is at hand’ and the natural question back to our proclamation is, ‘Is it? Is it really?’ The evidence suggests something other than the kingdom is at hand in the churches but rather, what is at hand among our churches today is the culture of the political, economic and military system of America.’’75 Instead of following a theology that led to the ‘‘slavish obedience to the political order,’’ Wallis claimed that the real function and responsibility of a prophet involved ‘‘truth-telling’’ and calling others to social justice: ‘‘The prophets warn that highly proper religious observance and ritual was not enough. They demanded political and economic justice for the poor, the exploited, the oppressed, the defenseless, the weak, and the alien.’’76 Neglecting to draw on the premillennial paradigm to make sense of the apocalypticism that he saw in the world order, Wallis utilized a different spiritual reference: the prophetic appeal for peace and justice. Other evangelicals agreed with Wallis. Senator Mark Hatfield gave his own description of the role of the evangelical prophet: Our ‘‘prophets’’ are those concerned chiefly with seeing God’s purposes for the world being realized. They hear a call for the ‘‘Kingdom of God’’ to be furthered on earth, and are concerned about the problems of war, poverty, and social injustice. . . . In part, this has been a reaction against those Christians who wrap their Bibles up with the American flag. The recent re-sensitizing of the Church’s prophetic vision has illuminated more clearly to many of us the problems of racial and social injustice in our country.77 Hatfield’s rejection of patriotic Christianity, which ‘‘wrap[ped] Bibles up with the American flag,’’ appeared in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. The spirit of the 1960s had tempered somewhat the initial fearful impact of the Cold War. The threat of nuclear warfare and apprehension over an ‘‘evil [communist] empire’’ remained, but the lived experiences of some evangelicals who took part in the civil rights and antiwar movements emboldened them to speak out. In doing so, they broadcast evangelicalism’s diversity, demonstrating to a wider audience that the tradition was not always linked with political conservatism. The emphasis Wallis and Hatfield placed on the prophetic call to social justice was not new to American evangelicalism. It harkened back to those Christians who argued, among other things, for the end to slavery and for greater equality for women. But radical evangelicals in the 1970s and early 1980s emerged out of a period in U.S. history when evangelicalism had combined

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millennial thought with conservative politics to create a faith identity that was predominantly patriotic. Furthermore, for many evangelicals and fundamentalists, that faith-national identity continued to exist. Radicals who called for social justice and criticized U.S. Cold War policies (whether through the antiwar or the antinuclear movements) coexisted with conservatives led by fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and apocalyptic writers like Hal Lindsey. The diversity of the evangelical community had never really gone away; it had been suppressed by the group’s marginalization during the early twentieth century and by McCarthyism during the early Cold War. It resurfaced in America’s tumultuous decades and with the materialization of the culture wars in the 1980s.

Conclusion

By February 1963, only four months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Gallup Poll showed that 59 percent of respondents believed that Cuba was a serious danger to world peace. The same poll revealed that 64 percent did not want the United States to send the military to overthrow Castro. Only 20 percent agreed that deposing Castro was a good idea, and 16 percent had no opinion.1 The apocalyptic threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis most likely influenced these foreign policy attitudes. October 1962 had brought the world too close to nuclear warfare to risk another confrontation, even if a majority of Americans still believed that Castro’s Cuba was a menace to world peace. In the most dramatic, palpable way, the Cuban Missile Crisis reinforced premillennial conceptions and marked the demarginalization of the evangelical community. Born-again Christians’ embrace of anticommunism, coupled with a series of apocalyptic Cold War events, culminated in the creation of a patriotic evangelicalism. Many evangelicals in the post-1945 world continued to react with alarm to perceived communist gains in Latin America and Asia. Apocalyptic anticommunism served as a bridge that connected the evangelical population to the conservative political culture in the United States. As a result, premillennialists became an important branch of conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century. Anticommunism fit in well with the dispensational timeline. It provided a ‘‘villainous’’ foe and a ‘‘righteous’’ cause. Anticommunists feared a situation so dire it justified an arms race of weapons capable of destroying the earth. This corresponded strikingly to premillennialists’ expectations and matched biblical references of

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conclusion

annihilation by fire. The book of Revelation draws a firm line between good and evil. The demonization of the ‘‘other,’’ long familiar to evangelicals, helped them to comprehend the dichotomies established during the Cold War that closely paralleled those of their own belief system.2 Conservative evangelicals drew on these commonalities to establish their relationship to secular America, using the tool of anticommunism. As they created a closer relationship with Cold War mainstream culture in the United States, which had also adopted a more Christian identity in response to an atheistic Soviet Union, evangelicals used familiar religious practices like prayer to act on their millennialist worldview. Paradoxically, conservative Christians’ reliance on prayer to secure the subculture’s increasingly integrated position in Cold War America also opened the door for their disaffection from secular society when controversy over the proper role of prayer in public schools came to a head. The demarginalization of evangelicalism, aided by eschatology, during the Cold War was complicated. Despite building up a patriotic evangelicalism, conservative Christians did not always fully support U.S. Cold War policy and sometimes opposed it. Dispensational leaders continued to point to the immorality of American society as signs of the end. Premillennialists who believed that the world would have to come to a disastrous end continued to pray for God’s intervention. Conservative evangelical support for Israel was marked by ambivalence toward the Jewish community, which in turn had mixed reactions to dispensational enthusiasm for the Jewish state. Despite the sometimes contradictory, bumpy journey, though, evangelicals established a more integrated place within mainstream America during the Cold War, creating a foundation that would pave the way for conservative Christians in later decades. Premillennialism during the Cold War tied believers to world politics and U.S. foreign policy. Missionaries became agents of a Cold War ‘‘culture of urgency’’ to the evangelical community. They sent fellow Christians at home reports about the rest of the world that vastly impacted believers’ perceptions, but missionary work also provided a way for evangelicals to directly affect policy and change. Dispensational support of Israel grew out of the importance of the Jewish state in premillennial prophecy, but it also grew within the Cold War context, which witnessed the subculture’s increasingly bold statements on foreign policy. Even so, evangelical attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy were not monolithic. Born-again scholars developed a range of foreign policy approaches.3 As the Cold War progressed, the multifaceted evangelical response to U.S. foreign policy became more pronounced, especially when the immediate nuclear threat dissipated. A vocal evangelical minority countered conservative Christian positions. Groups such as Sojourners presented views on foreign policy that differed markedly from conservative evangelicals’, and they made determined efforts to influence Christian political attitudes. According to one case study comparing four evangelical publications in the early 1980s, Sojourners led the

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field in covering stories on Central America, publishing nearly half of the articles.4 With its alternative viewpoints, Sojourners proposed a new evangelical framework for understanding the world. The increasing liberal evangelical influence occurred, for the most part, only after the Cold War had advanced beyond its initial stages. The early Cold War had truly cemented the politically conservative evangelicalism that became more widely visible in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the rise of the religious right. Still, as time went on and the world began to adapt to the nuclear threat, the uniformity of evangelicalism’s public face began to wane. In particular, the Vietnam War’s divisive consequences for the United States provided more strident evangelical alternatives to political conservatism among born-again Christians. From the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, evangelicals have encouraged the growing influence of religion on America’s political culture and institutions. One 1996 Gallup study found that 68 percent of evangelicals interviewed believed that it was essential or very important for children to learn that ‘‘America has a special place in God’s plan for history.’’ While 58 percent of orthodox Catholics agreed, only 47 percent of mainline Protestants and 22 percent of ‘‘secularists’’ concurred. Furthermore, the study showed that evangelicals, far more than any other religious group, associated themselves with conservatism: 47 percent answered positively that they identified themselves as supporters of the conservative Christian movement (39 percent said they did not, and 14 percent answered that they did not know). By contrast, only 18 percent of Orthodox Catholics, 17 percent of mainline Protestants, and 8 percent of secularists said they supported conservative Christianity.5 Commentators on the 2004 presidential election made much of the impact of the evangelical voting bloc on the victory of George W. Bush. Kevin Phillips, in American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, writes that the Republican Party had become the country’s first religious political party. President Bush not only depended on the support of conservative evangelical voters, but he also appointed Pentecostal Missouri Senator John Ashcroft to the head of the Justice Department and continued to allude to America’s holy mission in public messages that conjured up scripture and prophecy. Furthermore, Phillips writes that Bush’s foreign policy, tinged with an end-times worldview, goes hand-in-hand with militant evangelicals’ antagonism to Islam, which has replaced the Soviet Union as the major dispensational threat.6 If Phillips is right, the premillennial political paradigm, which first developed in the early Cold War and helped move conservative evangelicalism from the outskirts of American political culture to the mainstream, continues to impact the national direction. Born-again Christians who draw on their dispensational understanding to embrace conservative politics utilize a variety of tools to shape their worldviews, culture, and relationships. Evangelicals today look to the Scofield Reference

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Bible, which combines biblical text with dispensationalist commentary, just as many of their coreligionists have done for almost a century, since it was first published in 1909. Many continue to believe that it is a guidebook to understanding the world. In Forcing God’s Hand, Grace Halsell wrote of one man who claimed, ‘‘Scofield just makes it all crystal clear.’’7 Scouring the news for indications of possible fulfilled prophecy remains a common practice within the evangelical community. In her study of the evangelical readers of Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s popular novel series Left Behind, Amy Johnson Frykholm writes of one couple who interpreted the ascension of King Abdullah of Jordan in 1999 through prophetic eyes, speculating that Abdullah ‘‘could be the Antichrist.’’ Though the assertion was made half in jest, evangelicals in the twenty-first century continue to look for indications of the imminent end of the world through current events, just as they have done for centuries. Frykholm found evidence that Left Behind readers utilize the texts in complex ways, drawing from them remnants of both hope and fear.8 This is not new, as the study of evangelical reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis has shown. The particular blend of ideology, religion, culture, and politics that culminated during the Cold War has had long-lasting ramifications for the evangelical community. Prophecy continues to fascinate, and the Internet provides new technological avenues for believers to speculate on the eschatological meaning of world events. Prophecy followers in the twenty-first century have more than one choice of e-mail newsletters. The End-Time Informer, sent out by Armageddon Books, also moves merchandise by taking advantage of the evangelical fascination for the apocalyptic and the growing potential of Christian consumerism. Web sites dedicated to the end of the world are not scarce. An interested Web surfer could get details on biblical prophecy from sites such as 100Prophecies.com, read about current events on an eschatological news site called Prophecynewswatch.com, or browse an e-zine cleverly entitled Prophezine.9 Numerous details of biblical prophecy are listed and debated on countless Web pages. Rapture Ready, for example, has one page devoted to Antichrist contenders living and dead from Nero to Barney the Dinosaur. (Other candidates include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Henry Kissinger, Yassir Arafat, Louis Farrakhan, and Sam Donaldson.) The page’s designer admitted that ‘‘examples like Barney the Dinosaur or Bill Gates only help blur the real meaning of the name Antichrist. . . . When the time for the Antichrist comes, he will achieve great power, but right now he could be out pumping gas at some service station.’’ Reiterating a common evangelical notion, the author goes on to emphasize that the most important thing is to remember the believer’s true hope in Jesus Christ.10 Whether sincere prophecy or spoofs, the Web is inundated with eschatology for the masses. One site that satirizes evangelicalism, Lark News, posted

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a bogus advertisement for a call-in ‘‘prophecy reading’’ with ‘‘Prophetess Sheila’’ in March 2004. For only $1.95 a minute, a customer could dial 1-900-4Prophecy to receive a personal reading. In fact, if copious apocalyptic parody proves the pervasiveness of the eschatological narrative in the United States, a researcher will have little trouble convincing others of its existence. Even those inside the evangelical community have criticized and made light of premillennial ‘‘sign watching.’’ Sojourners’s Jim Wallis cleverly exploited evangelicalism’s prophecy-tinted worldview in an editorial on the 2003 World Series, claiming that it had ‘‘truly eschatological implications . . . after the surprise playoff victories of two of the most long-standing underdogs in baseball.’’ What would happen, speculated Wallis, if the Chicago Cubs, whose ‘‘fan motto has always been ‘Wait ’til next year,’ ’’ faced the Boston Red Sox, whose ‘‘fans are the great fatalists of sports, always sure that something will happen (and always does) to ruin their hopes and shatter their dreams?’’ Wallis quipped that such a match-up could have been ‘‘the catalyst for the end of history as we know it—the hope that many Christians have always longed for.’’11 Evangelical millennialists shaped U.S. culture long before the Cold War. This book only begins to touch on the ways the Christian millennial narrative has saturated the United States and the world. Moreover, evangelical apocalypticism has remained alive and well long after the Cold War ended. What is unique about the Cold War story is the way strands of premillennialism intensified and came together with world events such as the creation of the atomic bomb and the establishment of the state of Israel. Missionary agendas have long emphasized apocalyptic urgency, and these missionary characteristics are evident even in U.S. foreign policy initiatives from earlier periods. But these agendas coupled with the explosion of eschatological commentary on Israel and the atomic bomb produced a much louder and more powerful premillennial voice in the United States. The nature of the Cold War allowed evangelicals to renegotiate and redefine their place in American political culture. It laid the foundations of an American evangelical tradition that became more American and less marginalized. As the early Cold War turned into the late Cold War and then the post–Cold War, conservative evangelicals found themselves in a stronger position to criticize certain aspects of secular American culture that they opposed. Ironically, it was the formation of a new patriotic evangelicalism in the Cold War that allowed the religious right and others to separate themselves out from the mainstream culture in a later period. As they played key roles in the emerging culture wars, conservative evangelical positions against abortion, feminism, and gay rights were formidable if frustrating to other, more progressive evangelicals. Evangelical millennialism thus aided conservative Christians in reformulating their political and cultural identities. The way they did so sheds

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light on the balance between religious and secular identity formation in the Cold War United States. Conservative evangelicals were able to renegotiate their own position in American society by taking advantage of both world events beyond their direct control and their own eschatological creeds. Ultimately, it was fear and anticipation of the end that propelled them from a tangential to a central subculture.

Notes

introduction 1. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). In Thompson’s study on the influence of Methodism on the English working class, he hypothesizes that the success of religious revivalism appeared to fluctuate between periods of hope and despair, disappearing in times of hope and returning in times of despair. He calls the Methodist resurgence between 1790 and 1830 the ‘‘chiliasm of despair.’’ Can Thompson’s model offer us any insight into the post-WWII period in the United States? Eschatological speculation in the period certainly heightened as a result of the Cold War nuclear arms race and the emergence of the state of Israel, but could these years be considered a ‘‘period of despair’’? The Cold War did raise anxiety levels in the population, and this mixed with continued racial segregation and pockets of urban poverty. Authors such as David Reisman, William Whyte, and Betty Freidan wrote about the growing alienation resulting from materialism and consumerism, the stifling effects of conformity, and oppressive gender roles. At the same time, poverty existed alongside prosperity. The United States came out of World War II a world leader and decidedly better off than the war-ravaged countries of Europe and Asia. Not so easily classified, this period witnessed a combination of hope and despair. The evangelical chiliasm of the Cold War served a larger purpose than ‘‘emphasiz[ing] the after-life [a]s the chiliasm of the defeated and the hopeless.’’ Instead, millennialism served as means to ends for a number of different purposes to meet a number of different needs. Conservative evangelicals used it to redefine their national identity in order to become more American. Government leaders used millennial language to justify Cold War policies. In this sense, a Cold War ‘‘chiliasm of utility’’ is a more apt description. Within the American ‘‘eschatological narrative,’’ the

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millennialism of this time uniquely met the needs of the evangelical subculture in reassessing its identity within the larger culture. 2. Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). 3. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has defined culture as ‘‘an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols.’’ See The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89. 4. See Glenn W. Shuck, Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 5. Jim Wallis and Jerry Falwell, ‘‘Interview: Jim Wallis and the Reverend Jerry Falwell Discuss the Issues of Values and Principles in the Presidential Election,’’ interview by Tavis Smiley, National Public Radio, July 13, 2004; Jim Wallis, ‘‘As Evangelical as an Oak Tree,’’ http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action¼sojomail.display &issue¼040714#3 (accessed February 12, 2005). 6. George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991), 4–5. One example of a debate over a denomination’s inclusion into the evangelical subculture involves Seventh-Day Adventists. See Gordon Russell Lewis, The Bible, the Christian, and Seventh-Day Adventism; or Is Seventh-Day Adventism Evangelical? (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1972). 7. For a more detailed and complete discussion of the origins and definitions of ‘‘apocalypse,’’ see Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 21–24. 8. To further clarify terms used here, a comment on ‘‘millennialism’’ and ‘‘millenarianism’’ is appropriate. In Christian eschatology, millennialism or millenarianism is the belief that Christ will reign on earth for a period of one thousand years in the end-times. Respectability marks the difference between millennialism and millenarianism, according to J. F. C. Harrison. Scholars and educated theologians were considered millennialists, and popular, self-taught believers in the millennium were millenarians. This distinction may have been useful at one time (when there was a greater divide between clergy and theologians and laypersons and when literacy was not as widespread), but it is not very meaningful for the postwar evangelicals of this study. Even in an earlier period, this demarcation is questionable, as ‘‘respectable’’ millennialists and millenarians held several common beliefs, making it difficult to untangle ‘‘respectable’’ from ‘‘unrespectable’’ eschatology. The terms are used interchangeably in this book. See J. F. C. Harrison, in The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 5–6. 9. As may be expected, millennial and prophetic discourse in Native American religious traditions vary as widely as the numerous communities themselves. The historiography of the prophetic in Native American religion has been dominated by major millennial movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These earlier studies tend to emphasize major prophetic figures, such as Neolin the Delaware prophet or the Sioux Wovoka and the Ghost Dance movement, and they often assume with a Western bias that American Indian prophecy was a reactionary response to challenges of Western encroachment. More recent scholarship has acknowledged the cultural heritage of prophecy apart from Western influence. The Sioux leader Black Elk attested to the fact that ‘‘prophetic visions were a part of both


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the mystical and historical Sioux past.’’ The practice of the Sioux vision quests validated that claim. Tom Mould argues that ‘‘prophetic vision is hardly a unique and unprecedented response to external pressures but rather part of an embedded cultural tradition.’’ The definition of prophecy in relation to American Indian religious groups has also begun to change in recent years. Thomas Overholt’s Prophecy in Cross-Cultural Perspective considers the prophet the central, kingpin figure. Prophecy, according to this definition, revolves around the ‘‘communication of the future [by someone in] contact with the world of spirits.’’ Others, such as Armin Geertz in his study of Hopi prophecy, recognize that prophecy can exist without prophets. Geertz and Mould define prophecy as ‘‘a tradition based not on individual prophets but on images of the future that people employ to structure their understanding of the world.’’ This definition held true for Choctaws in the late eighteenth century and can be expanded to include evangelical premillennialists in the Cold War. Mould’s study of Choctaw prophecy has found that it embodied both the specific prophecies and the discourse about those prophecies and that it could be described as ‘‘a living tradition . . . continuous, though continuously changing.’’ See Tom Mould, Choctaw Prophecy: A Legacy of the Future (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 8, 9, 10, 15; Thomas W. Overholt, Prophecy in Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Sourcebook for Biblical Researchers (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), 7. 10. Armin W. Geertz, The Invention of Prophecy: Continuity and Meaning in Hopi Indian Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 21. 11. Ibid., 19–40. 12. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1957). 13. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 51–53. 14. Ibid.; Ernest Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Timothy P. Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism1875–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 15. Harrison, The Second Coming, 23–24, 5. The highly diverse nature of European apocalypticism, as well as the apocalypticism of Native American and African communities, makes it impossible to adequately address their complexities in such a short introductory chapter. This discussion is therefore not inclusive, nor is it a sufficient examination of apocalypticism in these periods and parts of the world. It is merely meant to demonstrate the immense array of millenarian expressions and the multiple influences on millennial movements in the United States. Harrison offers suggestions of some works that address millenarian movements in the seventeenth century. Among those are William M. Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969); William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: London Printing & Publishing Co., 1963); and Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 16. Harrison, The Second Coming, 25–26. 17. Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 29.

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18. Aaron Fogleman, ‘‘Comment on Part One: The Failure and Success of Millenarianism in American Religious Culture,’’ in Visions of the Future in Germany and America, ed. Norbert Finzsch and Hermann Wellenreuther (New York: Berg, 2001), 105; Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 4–5, 86, 113. 19. For a discussion of Mormons as religious outsiders, see R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Also see Grant Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), and Dan Erickson, As a Thief in the Night: The Mormon Quest for Millennial Deliverance (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998). For a discussion on the history of Adventism, see Gary Land, Adventism in America: A History (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1986), and Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 20. Quoted in Richard H. Brodhead, ‘‘Millennium, Prophecy and the Energies of Social Transformation: The Case of Nat Turner,’’ in Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America, ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 223–224. Millenarian movements thrived in Africa, blended with other traditions, and were transported with slavery to the Americas. Africans brought their own numerous millenarian ideas. In Africa, native apocalyptic rites eventually merged with Islamic and, later, Christian traditions. This became especially evident in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In African Islam, for example, local Muslim practices often adapted African rites to defeated millenarian movements, leaving them to ‘‘lie dormant until their vital substance can be absorbed by their successors.’’ African beliefs in magic and divination gave credence to the messianic visions of the witch doctors who practiced them. Fear of encroaching whites in South Africa led to the implementation of the diviner Mhlakaza’s orders to sacrifice thousands of cattle. See Lamin Sanneh, ‘‘Comparative Millennialism in Africa: Continuities and Variations on the Canon,’’ in Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America, ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 245, 247–249, 250. 21. Brodhead, ‘‘Millennium, Prophecy,’’ 212–233. 22. Ibid., 213. 23. The atomic bomb in particular brought out the similarities between Hopi prophecy and dispensationalism in the post–World War II years. In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some Hopi clans reinterpreted one old prophecy that told of the destruction of a gourd of ashes. In 1948, some Hopi Traditionalists claimed that the atomic bomb was in fact the ash gourd of the old story. Like the premillennial assumptions concerning the bomb, these conclusions led the Hopi to the understanding that the last days were at hand. See A. W. Geertz, The Invention of Prophecy, 53–54, 223. 24. Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism; T. P. Weber, Living in the Shadow, 8–9, 178–179. In 1957, Norman Cohn awakened the scholarly world to the importance of millennial studies with Pursuit of the Millennium. He examined the medieval Euro-


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pean propensity to exhibit a ‘‘tense expectation of some sudden, miraculous event in which the world would be utterly transformed, some prodigious final struggle between the hosts of Christ and the hosts of Antichrist through which history would attain its fulfillment and justification.’’ According to Cohn, modern totalitarian movements such as national socialism and communism shared with medieval devotees the ‘‘phantasy’’ of the millennium, demonstrating the significance of the attraction to this pursuit across time, though often expressed in different and even opposing ways. Cohn’s success in arguing favorably for the influence of millenarianism in medieval Europe prompted myriad studies, but his work tended to marginalize millenarians by pronouncing them and their belief systems ‘‘pathological.’’ His analysis underemphasized the depth of these movements in their own time, arguing that the ‘‘lower strata of society’’ was most susceptible to what he called ‘‘a collective paranoiac fanaticism.’’ In a similar argument, Richard Hofstadter analyzed what he called the ‘‘political pathology’’ of the extreme right wing in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 6, 29–30. One of the ‘‘symptoms,’’ according to Hofstadter, is a tendency to see history in conspiratorial, apocalyptic terms: ‘‘The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, and whole systems of human values. . . . Like religious millenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days.’’ Others have since pointed out the attraction of millennialism by multiple levels of populations, and indeed, parts of the movement have subtly affected the social, political, religious, and cultural elements of several peoples of the world. See Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, xiii, 312. 25. This association of postmillennialism with liberal Protestantism has changed over time. One of the most influential evangelicals of the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards, held postmillennial beliefs. See George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Edwards defended the religious revivals of the Great Awakening and considered them a possible sign that the millennium might be fulfilled soon. See Stephen J. Stein, ‘‘American Millennial Visions: Towards Construction of a New Architectonic of American Apocalypticism,’’ in Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America, ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 188. 26. Stein, ‘‘American Millennial Visions,’’ 200–203. 27. Robert S. Ellwood, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 5; William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 120; Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 77. 28. Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Wayne E. Fuller, Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 29. Quoted in Roger A. Bruns, Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism (New York: Norton, 1992), 255. 30. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 10.

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31. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4–19, 54–55, 104, 260. 32. Mark A. Noll, ‘‘How the Religious Past Frames America’s Future,’’ in Faith, Freedom, and the Future: Religion in American Political Culture, ed. Charles W. Dunn (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 25–27. 33. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 5. 34. Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), vii. 35. Michael Barkun, ‘‘Politics and Apocalypticism,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age, vol. 3, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 1998), 459, 442–460. 36. Susan Harding, ‘‘Imagining the Last Days: The Politics of Apocalyptic Language,’’ in Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, vol. 4, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 57–78. 37. Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 38. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 257–261. 39. Christian Smith, Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink have developed what they call the ‘‘subcultural identity theory of religious persistence and strength’’: ‘‘Religion survives and can thrive in pluralistic, modern society by embedding itself in subcultures that offer satisfying morally orienting collective identities which provide adherents meaning and belonging. In a pluralistic society, those religious groups will be relatively stronger which better possess and employ the cultural tools needed to create both clear distinction from and significant engagement and tension with other relevant outgroups, short of becoming genuinely countercultural.’’ According to this model, evangelicals have structured their own collective identity by distinguishing themselves from various ‘‘outgroups.’’ See Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 118–119. Also see Christian Smith, Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Working from this model, we are able to see the complicated way evangelical subcultural identity evolved in the early Cold War period. Their apocalyptic, premillennial framework allowed evangelicals to elevate the danger of numerous outgroups, including ‘‘worldly’’ secular America and communist communities around the world. At times, by distinguishing themselves from one outgroup, they were able to build alliances with another. When evangelicals preached against communism, for example, they identified closely with Cold War, secular America. 40. Andrew J. Rotter, ‘‘Christians, Muslims, and Hindus: Religion and U.S.South Asian Relations, 1947–1954,’’ Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 593–613. The emergence of the New Cultural History in the 1980s emphasized determining how historical subjects perceived the world through categories such as gender, class, and race. This trend has penetrated the field of diplomatic history in recent years. Elaine Tyler May’s influential study in 1988, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), connected the Cold War with family life through the story of domestic containment. Articles such as Frank Costigliola’s ‘‘ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology and Emotion


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in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,’’ Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (March 1997): 1309–1339 examined George Kennan and the impact of gender ideals on foreign policy. 41. George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935–1971, vol. 3, 1959–1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 1662–1663. 42. Quoted in Daniel Wojcik, The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism and Apocalypse in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 102. 43. A. G. Mojtabai, Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 176. 44. Wojcik, End of the World. 45. This is not to argue that history is useful only in what it can tell us about the present. It is only to say that by way of comparison, secular conceptions of time find explanations of the present from the past and evangelicals see meaning in the present for the future as well. 46. Bruce Shelley, ‘‘The Meaning of History: Posing the Problem,’’ Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 7, no. 4 (1964): 110. 47. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 120, 295, 312–318. 48. Weldon Bedell to Christianity Today, September 23, 1959, Christianity Today, Inc., Records, Archives of the Billy Graham Center (BGC), Wheaton, IL. 49. Billy Graham, ‘‘Signs of the Times’’ [St. Paul, MN], July 16, 1961, BGEA: Films and Video Tapes Records, BGC Archives. 50. George Eldon Ladd, Jesus Christ and History (Chicago: Intervarsity Press, 1963), 26. 51. Ibid., 56. 52. Billy Graham, ‘‘Outpost Berlin’’ [Berlin, Germany], 1960, BGEA: Films and Video Tapes Records, BGC Archives. 53. Alva J. McClain, ‘‘Premillennialism as a Philosophy of History,’’ in Understanding the Times: Prophetic Messages Delivered at the 2nd International Congress on Prophecy, New York City, ed. William Culbertson and Herman B. Centz (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1956), 23. 54. News release from the Billy Graham Greater Chicago Crusade, June 3, 1962, BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives; Billy Graham, ‘‘The Second Coming of Christ’’ [Charlotte, NC], October 5, 1958, BGC Archives [online], http://www .wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/docs/bg-charlotte/1005.html (accessed May 19, 2006). 55. Ladd, Jesus Christ and History, 26. 56. Billy Graham, ‘‘The World’s Darkest Hour’’ [Charlotte, NC], October 18, 1958, BGC Archives [online], http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/docs/bg-charlotte/1018 .html (accessed May 19, 2006). 57. Billy Graham, ‘‘Remarks for the Presidential Prayer Breakfast,’’ February 17, 1966, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 58. McClain, ‘‘Premillennialism,’’ 24–25. 59. D. G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). Other scholars have rightly emphasized the distinctions among evangelical, fundamentalist, and liberal Protestants in the twentieth century. Jon R. Stone, On the Boundaries of American Evangelicalism: The Postwar Evangelical Coalition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997)

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has studied the self-defined boundaries that evangelicals constructed in the middle of the twentieth century to distance themselves from both fundamentalists and liberals. Though these distinctions were important in the identity formation of evangelicals in the Cold War, this study will show that the theological and political applications of these Protestants’ belief systems were often less precisely separate. Evangelicals often allied and distanced themselves from fundamentalists and liberals in diverse ways. 60. ‘‘Columbus Synod Secretary Rejects Doctrine of Premillennial Return of Christ: Promotes View That Millennium Began with Fall of Rome,’’ Free Press, November 20, 1959, 1–6; ‘‘The Change of Doctrine,’’ Free Press, October 19, 1961, 5.

chapter 1 1. Billy Graham, ‘‘Signs of the Times’’ [St. Paul, MN], July 16, 1961, BGEA: Films and Video Tapes Records, BGC Archives. 2. Martin E. Marty, ‘‘The Future of No Future: Frameworks of Interpretation,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, vol. 3, Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age, ed. Stephen J. Stein (New York: Continuum, 1998), 461–484. 3. Wojcik, End of the World. 4. Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 81–98. For other studies on the history of religion and science, see James A. Arieti and Patrick A. Wilson, The Scientific and the Divine: Conflict and Reconciliation from Ancient Greece to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, ‘‘Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science,’’ Church History 55 (1986): 338–354; David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll, ‘‘Introduction: Placing Evangelical Encounters with Science,’’ in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, ed. David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jonathan R. Topham, ‘‘Science, Natural Theology, and Evangelicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland,’’ in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, ed. David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 5. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 20, 33; see also Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism, and Paul K. Conkin, When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 6. Quoted in Larson, Summer for the Gods, 20–21. 7. Ibid., 20–21, 16, 28. 8. Quoted in Conkin, When All the Gods Trembled, 80. 9. Quoted in Larson, Summer for the Gods, 200.


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10. Ibid., 232, 265. 11. Quoted in ibid., 246. 12. Wilbur M. Smith had another book on the topic published shortly after the first: This Atomic Age and the Word of God (Boston: W A. Wilde, 1948). 13. Wilbur M. Smith, ‘‘The Atomic Bomb and the Word of God,’’ Religious Digest 19 (January 1946): 88. 14. Hyman J. Appelman, The Atomic Bomb and the End of the World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1954), 9–10. 15. Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, 150, 155. 16. Jerry Falwell, Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (Lynchburg, VA: Old Time Gospel Hour, 1983), 4–5. 17. W. M. Smith, ‘‘Atomic Bomb and the Word of God,’’ 85. 18. Livingstone et al., ‘‘Introduction,’’ 9. 19. Larry Eskridge, ‘‘A Sign for an Unbelieving Age: Evangelicals and the Search for Noah’s Ark,’’ in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, ed. David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 244–263. 20. Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, 124. 21. Dr. Harold John Ockenga to Christianity Today, A request to Christian leaders to comment on a ‘‘successful shot to the moon,’’ Christianity Today, Inc., Records, BGC Archives. 22. Billy Graham, ‘‘The End of the World’’ [Charlotte, NC], October 11, 1958, BGC Archives [online], http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/docs/bgcharlotte/1011.html, (accessed May 19, 2006); ‘‘Why I Believe in God,’’ Decision Magazine, BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives. 23. Robert F. Jones to Mr. Nims (Ford Foundation), October 28, 1959, Baptista Film Mission Records, BGC Archives. 24. Reinhold Niebuhr to Christianity Today, Christianity Today, Inc., Records, BGC Archives. 25. Memo from Clyde W. Taylor and Donald H. Gill to NAE Executive Committee, ‘‘Sources of Resolution Policy in NAE,’’ January 15, 1960, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 26. Earl B. Robinson, ‘‘Right Attitude and Action Clearly Defined: The Christian Faces the Atomic Age,’’ Moody Monthly, February 1947, 395; ‘‘Why I Believe’’ essays, BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives. 27. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), xix. 28. Ibid., 11, 17, 20, 67, 86; Wojcik, End of the World; Nevil Shute, On the Beach (New York: William Morrow, 1957), 97; ‘‘36 Hour War,’’ Life, November 5, 1945. 29. David Morgan, ed., Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 30. Wojcik, End of the World, 97, 108. 31. Shute, On the Beach, 320. 32. Wojcik, End of the World, 116–117; see also Paul Chilton, ‘‘Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Culture, and Propaganda,’’ in The Nuclear Predicament: A Sourcebook, ed. Donna Uthus Gregory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). 33. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 291–292, 352–358.

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34. Sun and Shadow, Baptista Film Mission, 1955, Baptista Film Mission Records, BGC Archives. 35. Ralph E. Flanders, ‘‘The Opportunity for Christian Leadership in the World Today,’’ U.S. Senate, May 9, 1951, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 36. Elizabeth Dilling, ‘‘The Red Betrayal of the Churches,’’ n.d., J. Oliver Buswell Jr. Papers, Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) Archives. 37. Billy Graham, ‘‘Communism and Christianity,’’ Hour of Decision, March 8, 1953; Billy Graham, ‘‘Christianity—The Answer to Communism,’’ Hour of Decision, September 9, 1953, Hour of Decision Radio Program Records, BGC Archives. 38. ‘‘Abstracts of papers of the Southern Section of the Evangelical Theological Society,’’ 1954, Evangelical Theological Society Records, BGC Archives. 39. ‘‘Why I Believe in God,’’ Decision Magazine, BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives. 40. Quoted in Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 14. 41. All quotations from NSC 68 are taken from Ernest R. May, ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston: Bedford Books, 1993), 25, 28, 52. 42. Emily S. Rosenberg, ‘‘Rosenberg’s Commentary,’’ in American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68, ed. Ernest R. May (Boston: Bedford Books, 1993), 160–164. 43. Policymakers continued to use apocalyptic language long after NSC 68 was written. For example, in 1979, the National Strategy Information Center published a book by Paul Nitze, James E. Dougherty, and Francis X. Kane entitled The Fateful Ends and Shades of Salt: Past . . . Present . . . And Yet to Come? (New York: Crane, Russak, 1979). 44. ‘‘New Alert Cards Printed: Total Nearing 20,000,000’’ and ‘‘Clergy Urged to Take Part in Civil Defense Program,’’ The Civil Defense Alert 1, no. 4 (July–August 1951) in Dennis Merrill, ed., Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, vol. 26, Preparing to Survive Atomic Attack: The Truman Administration’s Civil Defense Program (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1999). 45. ‘‘Alert America Campaign,’’ in Merrill, Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, 26: 322–336. 46. ‘‘Signs of Our Times,’’ in Merrill, Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, 26: 791–794. 47. Carl Vrooman, ‘‘A Dynamic Spiritual Leadership Our Foremost National Need,’’ September 30, 1961, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives; Helen M. Cavanagh, Carl Shurz Vrooman: Self Styled ‘‘Constructive Conservative’’ (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1977), 561. 48. NAE, ‘‘The Communist Threat,’’ Resolutions adopted in 1967, Governmental Affairs Office, NAE. 49. Jim Daly, ‘‘Christian Leader Says ‘Moral Drifting Must Stop,’’’ Fort Lauderdale News, April 12, 1959. 50. Arthur E. Case to Verne P. Kaub, October 22, 1950, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. 51. Robert Strong, ‘‘Will There Be a Millennium?’’ Presbyterian Journal 20, no. 16 (August 1961): 7–8, 20–21, quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call It Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964), 229.


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52. Lisle A. Rose, The Cold War Comes to Main Street: America in 1950 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999), 313. 53. Billy Graham, ‘‘Signs of the Times’’ [St. Paul, MN], July 16, 1961, BGEA: Films and Video Tapes Records, BGC Archives. 54. Billy Graham, ‘‘The End of the World’’ [Charlotte, NC], October 11, 1958, BGC Archives [online], http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/docs/bgcharlotte/1011.html, (accessed May 19, 2006). 55. Ruth Mougey Worrell, The Day Thou Gavest: The Story of the World Day of Prayer (New York: United Church Women [National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.], 1956), 39. 56. World Day of Prayer Committee, Wrought by Prayer: A Study of World Day of Prayer Projects (New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1953), 13. 57. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 61. 58. Fred Schwarz, You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), 16. 59. Carl McIntire, ‘‘The American Council of Christian Churches—Its Purpose and Testimony,’’ September 28, 1941, ACCC and the ICCC Collection, PCA Archives. 60. John Howard, ‘‘Are the Teachings of Church-Related Four Year Colleges of Liberal Arts, in the Field of the Social Sciences, More Nearly in Line with Historic American Social and Political Philosophy Than Those of Any Other Type of Institution?’’ September 11, 1954, Rockford Institute, Regional History Center, DeKalb, IL. For numerous other examples of anticommunism in the United States in the early Cold War, see John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998); Richard Gid Powers, Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1995); M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), to name only a few. 61. Gordon Lindsay, ‘‘Joel’s Army’’ at Christ for the Nation’s Institute, Dallas, n.d., James Gordon Lindsay Ephemera, BGC Archives. 62. ‘‘Are You a Communist?’’ ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 63. For more on Jones, see Douglas M. Strong, They Walked in the Spirit: Personal Faith and Social Action in America (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 77–89. 64. William Harllee Bordeaux to Verne Kaub, February 1, 1950, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 65. Quoted in John Harold Redekop, The American Far Right: A Case Study of Billy James Hargis and Christian Crusade (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1968), 14. 66. Arie Kok, ‘‘World Temptation from Behind the Black Curtain: An Allegory in Chinese Style,’’ PCA Archives; ‘‘Wake Up, America!’’ ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

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67. Advertisement in The Free Press, June 20, 1958: 15; Marilyn R. Allen to Verne Kaub, June 26, 1952, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin; W. E. Lyon to Verne Kaub, March 10, 1952, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 68. Redekop, American Far Right, 27–42. 69. Margaret Hopkins Worrell to President Harry Truman, July 18, 1950, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 70. Quoted in Redekop, American Far Right, 65. 71. ‘‘United Nations: Hope or Danger?’’ Silver Spring, MD, May 13, 1953, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 72. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 176–179; Redekop, American Far Right, 66–68; Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 272; Daniel 9, Mark 13:22, Revelation 13, 17, New International Version. 73. Irwin W. Steele, ‘‘Occupy ’Till I Come,’’ The Free Press June 20, 1958, 9–10, Presbyterian Bible Church Records, PCA Archives. 74. Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983). 75. Arthur E. Case to Verne P. Kaub, October 22, 1950, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 76. John T. Bates to Verne Kaub, January 23, 1950, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin; J. Howard Pew to Verne Kaub, June 21, 1951, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 77. J. B. Matthews, ‘‘Reds and Our Churches,’’ American Mercury, July 1953, 3. 78. Haynes, Red Scare, 91–92. 79. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Representative Donald L. Jackson, Congressional Record, 83rd Cong., 1st sess. (March 17, 1953), 2024. 80. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, Testimony of Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam: Hearings before the Committee on UnAmerican Activities, 83rd Cong., 1st sess. (July 21, 1953), 3801. 81. ‘‘Scrapbook,’’ Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 82. Robert Moats Miller, Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam: Paladin of Liberal Protestantism (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1990), 70–92. 83. Chicago Daily Sun-Times, July 29, 1953. 84. Frederick H. Giles to Verne Kaub, n.d., ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 85. Fulton J. Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948), 38, 96, 103.

chapter 2 1. Unknown author, diary entry, August 7, 1945, Baptista Film Mission Records, BGC Archives. 2. DeKalb (IL) Chronicle, February 25, 1952.


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3. Dr. K. H. Voss, ‘‘Our Responsibilities as Christians in This World,’’ Bad Nauheim newspaper, March 15, 1954, trans. unknown, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 4. F. Ray Keyser to President John F. Kennedy, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 5. Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. 6. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 90. 7. Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, eds., The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 54–55. 8. Bernard Reilly, American Political Prints, 1766–1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 75. 9. Commonwealth v. Henry J. Munson, 127 Mass. 459 (1879). 10. Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 1–21. 11. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, 2nd ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1960), 5, 49. 12. Quoted in Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 87. 13. BGC Archives, ‘‘Fellowship Foundation Records—Collection 459: Historical Background,’’ http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/GUIDES/459.htm (accessed May 19, 2006). 14. Wallace Bird, Bonn, Germany, January 1959, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 15. Le van Vien to Abraham Vereide, September 4, 1958, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 16. Nguyen-quan-Huot to Abraham Vereide, October 18, 1965, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 17. Worrell, The Day Thou Gavest; World Day of Prayer Committee, Wrought by Prayer. 18. Daily Chronicle (DeKalb, IL), February 21, 1966. 19. DeKalb Council of Church Women, Planning Committee meeting minutes, 1951, DeKalb World Day of Prayer Records, Regional History Center (RHC), DeKalb, IL. 20. Minutes of the Project Look Up membership meeting, January 13, 1981, National Religious Broadcasters Records, BGC Archives. 21. R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13. 22. Marge Neufeld to Mrs. Len B. Jordan, February 16, 1965, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 23. Prayers Offered by the Chaplain Rev. Frederick Brown Harris at the Opening of the Daily Sessions of the Senate of the United States During the Eighty-Seventh and Eighty-Eighth Congresses, 1961–1964 (Washington, DC: United States GPO, 1964), 1–4. 24. Church bulletin, Moody Memorial Church, Chicago, January 2, 1944, Moody Church Records, BGC Archives.

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25. ‘‘Billy Graham Chicago Crusade News Notes,’’ May 30, 1962; ‘‘Report of 1962 Chicago Crusade,’’ Decision Magazine, BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives. 26. Warren Filkin, ‘‘Prayer for Public Officials,’’ Moody Monthly, July 1947. 27. Billy Graham Press Conference [Knoxville, TN], 1970, BGEA: Blue Ridge Broadcasting Corp. Records, BGC Archives. 28. Blue Ridge Broadcasting Corp., ‘‘WFGW/WMIT Community Survey Questionnaire,’’ August 1, 1969, BGEA: Blue Ridge Broadcasting Corp. Records, BGC Archives. 29. 2 Peter 3:10, New International Version. 30. Jeremiah 33, New International Version. 31. ‘‘The U.S. in Trouble,’’ Moody Monthly, July 1959, 10. 32. Oswald Smith, ‘‘The Second Coming of Christ,’’ n.d., Oswald Jeffrey Smith Papers, BGC Archives. 33. ‘‘A Congressman’s Plea for Deeper Spiritual Roots,’’ Christianity Today 3, no. 13 (March 30, 1959). 34. R. Wallace Teed, ‘‘On the Understanding of Prophecy,’’ Moody Monthly, February 1947. 35. Schwarz, You Can Trust the Communists, 162. 36. ‘‘The Crux of the Korean Conflict’’ at the Far Eastern Conference annual meeting [ca. 1953], Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 37. Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, 176. 38. ICL agenda, September 14, 1945, Fellowship Foundation Records, BCG Archives. 39. Billy Graham Press Conference [Knoxville, TN], 1970, BGEA: Blue Ridge Broadcasting Corp. Records, BGC Archives. 40. J. Gordon Lindsay, ‘‘The Judgment Scene in Heaven’’ at Christ for the Nations Institute, Dallas, James Gordon Lindsay Ephemera, BGC Archives. 41. John Wesley White, Re-Entry: Striking Parallels between Today’s News Events and Christ’s Second Coming (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971), 125. 42. Billy Graham, World Aflame (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 199. 43. Speech by Senator Frank Carlson, Prayer Breakfast National Governors’ Conference [Cincinnati, OH], July 23, 1968, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 44. ‘‘You and Your Country,’’ Moody Monthly, July 1959, 7. 45. Paul and Lois Steward, ‘‘Past, Present, and Future,’’ Call to Prayer . . . For Missions, August 1963, 7; George R. Warner, ‘‘On the Mountain Top,’’ Call to Prayer . . . For Missions, January 1963, 2. 46. Devee Brown, ‘‘In Times Like These,’’ A Call to Prayer . . . For Missions, April 1961. 47. S. M. Shoemaker, ‘‘Plain Speaking about Today’s World’’ [Calvary Church, New York], May 22, 1949, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 48. Graham, World Aflame, 188. 49. Prayer Subject, bulletin of the Camps Farthest Out, January 1953, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 50. All quotations from ‘‘Why I Believe’’ essays, Decision Magazine, BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives. 51. Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, 91.


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52. Speech by Senator Frank Carlson, Prayer Breakfast National Governors’ Conference [Cincinnati, OH], July 23, 1968, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 53. Roy W. Wier to Carl Henry, October 24, 1956, Christianity Today, Inc., Records, BGC Archives. 54. John Foster Dulles and Christian A. Herter Papers, 1953–1961, Chronological Correspondence Series, reel 1 of 24 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1986). 55. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War, 88–90. 56. Joseph P. Chinnici and Angelyn Dries, eds., Prayer and Practice in the American Catholic Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 176–179. 57. President John F. Kennedy, First Lady Prayer Breakfast, February 9, 1961, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 58. Quoted in Joan DelFattore, The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America’s Public Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 80. 59. ‘‘A Memorial (?) to God,’’ Christianity Today 8, no. 1 (February 28, 1964): 38. 60. ‘‘Johnson and His Memorial to God,’’ Capital Baptist, 1964, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 61. William T. Price, letter to the editor, Washington Post, February 18, 1964. 62. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 177. 63. American Legion, Back to God (Indianapolis: National Public Relations Division, American Legion, 1954). 64. Ibid. 65. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America, 173–175; ‘‘Is God Dead?’’ Time, April 8, 1966, 82–87. 66. ‘‘An Introduction to Operation Patriot,’’ EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 67. Martin E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 249. 68. John Herbert Laubach, School Prayers: Congress, the Courts, and the Public (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1969), 39–42; Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). 69. Laubach, School Prayers, 1, 138, 85. Laubach records that the cartons were 14½ by 12 by 18½ inches. 70. The representative for the American Baptist Convention told the committee that the ABC reaffirmed their ‘‘historic Baptist belief that religion should not be a matter of compulsion and that prayers and religious practices should not be prescribed by law or by a teacher or public school official.’’ 71. Charles E. Rice, The Supreme Court and Public Prayer: The Need for Restraint (New York: Fordham University Press, 1964), xi. 72. Willmoore Kendall, ‘‘American Conservatism and the ‘Prayer’ Decisions,’’ Modern Age, Summer 1964, 245–259. 73. Laubach, School Prayers, 138–139; Donald E. Boles, The Two Swords: Commentaries and Cases in Religion and Education (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1967), 76–77. 74. Billy Graham Press Conference [Los Angeles], 1963, Billy Graham Press Conferences, Tapes and Transcripts, BGC Archives. 75. David E. Kyvig, Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776–1995 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), 381–385; U.S. Congress,

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House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, School Prayers: Hearing, 88th Cong., 2d sess., 1964. 76. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, School Prayers: Hearing, 88th Cong., 2nd sess., 1964, 213, 231–232. 77. Ibid., 441–442, 566–567. 78. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, School Prayer: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 1966, 1, 13, 451. 79. Boles, Two Swords, 77–80. 80. ‘‘‘Road Prayer’ Banned on North Carolina Maps: Atheist Wins Challenge before U.S. Court,’’ Star-Ledger, September 12, 1980.

chapter 3 1. 2 Thessalonians 4:16, New International Version; Hyman J. Appelman, Anti-Christ and the Jew and the Valley of Dry Bones (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1950), 12–13. 2. Matthew 28:19, New International Version. 3. Reverend Robert J. McGill, ‘‘The Gospel Trumpet,’’ Biblical Missions 27, no. 7 (August–September 1961): 2. 4. Ibid. 5. The historiography of American Protestant foreign missions has fluctuated according to how American Christians have conceptualized their identity as Christians and as Americans. In ‘‘From Missions to Mission to beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II,’’ in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Dana L. Robert argues that the study of U.S. missions has gone from a pursuit of separate missions before World War II, when denominations took charge of proselytizing for their own congregants, to a singular mission that was characteristic of the ecumenical movement after World War II. These latter studies perceived mission work as a descendant of both ecumenism and national unity and increasingly interpreted it as symbolic of American identity and imperialism. Finally, missiology moved beyond missions in the 1980s as scholars expanded their focus to examine mission theory, subcultures within the missionary movement, and indigenous Christian communities. Paul Cohen’s influential work, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), that took American historians to task for failing to grasp their own Western cultural bias in their research on China applied to historians of missionaries as well. His call for a more ‘‘China-centered’’ approach to historical research epitomized this trend by urging scholars to look beyond the single-minded inquiry of the Americanness of foreign missions to consider fresh perspectives. One of the leaders in this later historiographic development, Jane Hunter, took a new look at the experiences of women missionaries in China in The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Hunter found that many of these female evangelical missionaries, by choosing a life overseas, expanded their opportunities that were limited in the restrictive female culture in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scholars


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such as Cohen and Hunter have helped move the study of missions beyond a narrow description of missionaries as American cultural imperialists by asking questions about what the missionary experience meant to gender relations and how indigenous Christians may have influenced and changed American missionaries. These analyses have also led to a greater understanding of the complexities of the missionary experience by examining how American Christians illustrated and redefined their own cultural traits and traditions. To better understand those missionaries, whom Joel Carpenter and Wilbert Shenk have called ‘‘earthen vessels,’’ historians of the missionary movement must bear in mind that cultural biases and the mission experiences themselves shaped their identities. As Andrew Walls makes clear in ‘‘The American Dimension in the History of the Missionary Movement,’’ in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990), ‘‘American missions were both products and purveyors of American culture.’’ 6. Robert, ‘‘From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions,’’ 382; quoted in E. J. Kahn Jr., The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 56; Yu-Ming Shaw, An American Missionary in China: John Leighton Stuart and Chinese-American Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); John C. Brewer and Kenneth W. Rea, ‘‘Dr. John Leighton Stuart and U.S. Policy toward China, 1946–1949,’’ in United States Attitudes and Policies Toward China: The Impact of American Missionaries, ed. Patricia Neils (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 230; Edmund S. Wehrle, ‘‘John Leighton Stuart’s Role in the Marshall Negotiations: The Kalgan Crisis,’’ in United States Attitudes and Policies Toward China. Ed. Patricia Neils (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 245. 7. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk, eds., Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990), xii–xiv. 8. Directory of Foreign Mission Agencies in North America, 5th ed. (New York: Missionary Research Library, 1962). This directory gathered data only from mission work outside the United States and Canada. It is not an inclusive report as it contained information only from those organizations and individuals who replied to the study. Though the compilers made every effort to include all organizations, certain fundamental groups may not have cooperated with the NCC-affiliated survey. 9. Sydney H. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 959. 10. Robert S. Rapp, ‘‘Motivation for Biblical Missions,’’ Biblical Missions 28, no. 8 (October 1962): 12–14. 11. Stella Beckley, ‘‘Teacher’s Manual,’’ Collection of the Covenant Presbyterian Church, St. Louis, Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) Archives, St. Louis, MO. 12. Ziden L. Nutt, ‘‘Concepts, Cycle, Capabilities, and Considerations of Program Development,’’ September 15–16, 1980, National Religious Broadcasters Records, BGC Archives. 13. J. Philip Clark, ‘‘The Conflict of Cultures,’’ Biblical Missions 28, no. 4 (1962): 11. 14. Rev. Dwight R. Malsbary, ‘‘False Gods,’’ Biblical Missions 25, no. 5 (1959): 3. 15. Reverend Malcolm Frehn, letter to the editor, Biblical Missions 28, no. 10 (1962): 7.

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16. Louisa Lee, letter to the editor, Biblical Missions 28, no. 10 (1962): 7. 17. Sarah Hosmon, letter to the editor, Biblical Missions 27, no. 5 (1961): 9. 18. Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, 71, 73. 19. Stephen D. O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 157–158. 20. Kenneth L. Pike, ‘‘World Watchmen,’’ Moody Monthly, March 1947. 21. Matthew 24:14, New International Version. 22. Billy Graham, ‘‘The Second Coming of Christ’’ [Charlotte, NC], October 5, 1958, BGC Archives [online], http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/docs/bgchar lotte/ 1005.html (accessed May 19, 2006). 23. ‘‘Grounds for Hope,’’ Bibliotheca Sacra 103, no. 409 (January–March 1946): 257–258. 24. The Rapture, Baptista Film Mission, BGC Archives. 25. Irwin W. Steele, ‘‘Occupy Till I Come,’’ Biblical Missions 24, No. 5 (May–June 1958): 8–11. 26. Fanny J. Crosby, ‘‘Will Jesus Find Us Watching?’’ Biblical Missions 24, no. 1 (January 1958): 5. 27. ‘‘Born to Face Eternity—But Where?’’ Biblical Missions 25, no. 1 (January 1959). 28. Christian Century 76, no. 39 (September 24, 1958). 29. ‘‘From the Mailbag,’’ Berean Searchlight 22, no. 7 (October 1961): 2. 30. Salem Kirban, Second Coming, Inc., Special Report, November 24, 1971, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 31. Samuel W. S. Cheng, ‘‘Communism and the Spirit of Antichrist,’’ ICCC 6th plenary congress, August 1965, ACCC and ICCC Collection, PCA Archives. 32. Hans Kempe to Abraham Vereide, February 24, 1948; Friedrich von der Ropp to unknown, Autumn 1958, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 33. Statement of the International Christian Leadership, July 21, 1951, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 34. Dr. A. Schroeder, ‘‘The Spiritual Crisis of the Present’’ [Castle Mainau, Germany], June 1951, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 35. Billy Graham, ‘‘Outpost Berlin’’ [Berlin, Germany], 1960, BGEA: Films and Video Tapes, Records, BGC Archives. 36. Billy Graham, ‘‘Communism and Christianity,’’ March 8, 1953, BGEA: Hour of Decision Radio Program Records, BGC Archives. 37. NAE, ‘‘Policy Statement on Combating Communism,’’ EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 38. Christian Anti-Communism Newsletter, January 1968. 39. Dr. Ch. Devananda Rao to Rev. James Colbert, September 4, 1968, Christian Anti-Communism Newsletter, November 1968, 5–6. 40. All American Conference to Combat Communism, ‘‘12 Ways to Combat Communism,’’ EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 41. Alicia Abrahamsen, ‘‘Prayer Letter’’ of ICL, June–July 1964, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 42. Quoted in Perspective: A Weekly Devotional Letter for the Business Man 17, no. 11 (1965), Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives.


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43. John Foster Dulles, ‘‘A Righteous Faith,’’ Life, December 28, 1942, in The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles: Selections from His Articles and Addresses, ed. Henry P. Van Dusen (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 47–56; John Foster Dulles, ‘‘Patriotism and the American Tradition,’’ baccalaureate address at Indiana University, June 12, 1955, in Spiritual Legacy, 37–42; John Foster Dulles, ‘‘Our Spiritual Heritage,’’ address at New York Herald Tribune forum, October 21, 1947, in Spiritual Legacy, 64–69. Also see Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Boston: Little, Brown and Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973), and Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1999). 44. In his book The Committee of One Million: ‘‘China Lobby’’ Politics, 1953–1971 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), Stanley Bachrack raises questions about the origins of the committee, in particular with regard to Judd’s connections to Nicholas de Rochefort, who Bachrack speculates may have been connected in some way to the Office of Strategic Services or the CIA. 45. Ibid., 3–18, 51–69, 203, 247; Roger Biles, Crusading Liberal: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); B. A. Garside, Within the Four Seas: The Memoirs of B. A. Garside (New York: Frederic C. Beil, 1985). 46. Patricia Neils, ed., United States Attitudes and Policies toward China: The Impact of American Missionaries (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 16–18; Tony Ladd, ‘‘Mission to Capitol Hill: A Study of the Impact of Missionary Idealism on the Congressional Career of Walter H. Judd,’’ in United States Attitudes; Walter H. Judd, ‘‘We Must Develop a Strategy for Victory . . . ,’’ in Walter H. Judd: Chronicles of a Statesman, ed. Edward J. Rozek (Denver, CO: Grier, 1980), 388. 47. Bachrack, Committee of One Million, 10–11, 16–18; Patricia Neils, China Images in the Life and Times of Henry Luce (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990). 48. Committee of One Million, ‘‘A Brief History of an Authentic and Effective People’s Movement,’’ in Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Red China to the United Nation: File of Clippings and Miscellanea (East Lansing: Michigan State University,1970), 11; The Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations, Press Release, January 19, 1959, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 49. Committee of One Million, ‘‘A Brief History,’’ 11. 50. S. M. Shoemaker, ‘‘Do You Want Christianity to Win?’’ January 2, 1949, Fellowship Foundation Records, BGC Archives. 51. Clyde W. Taylor to John Foster Dulles, January 8, 1957, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 52. Joseph P. McGinn, ‘‘The Bitter Fruit of Mao Tse Tung,’’ on Voice of America, April 13, 1953. 53. Pavel Semenovich Overchuk to the procurator of UkrSSR, June 10, 1967, published in ‘‘Religious Dissent,’’ Problems of Communism 17 (July–August 1968): 96–97. 54. Stuart W. Rockwell to J. Philip Clark, January 5, 1959, published in Biblical Missions 25, no. 2 (February 1959): 9. 55. Memo from Clyde W. Taylor, secretary of Public Affairs, NAE, November 13, 1956; Robert M. Lazear to President Dwight Eisenhower, December 20, 1956, EFMA Records, BGC Archives.

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56. NAE, ‘‘State Department’’ in resolutions adopted in 1957, ‘‘Relations with Government’’ in resolutions adopted in 1969, and ‘‘NAE Policy on Government Relations’’ in the Executive Committee meeting, Los Angeles, April 3, 1967, Governmental Affairs Office, NAE. 57. Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); David F. Krugler, The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 1–11; Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 2. 58. Krugler, Voice of America, 3–4, 9–10, 185–196. 59. ‘‘This Week in the World,’’ VOA, January 9, 1953; ‘‘The Bitter Fruit of Mao Tse Tung,’’ VOA, April 13, 1953; ‘‘Communists Intensify Drive against Religion,’’ VOA, January 12, 1953; ‘‘World Day of Prayer—1953,’’ VOA, February 19, 1953; ‘‘This Week in the World,’’ VOA, February 20, 1953. 60. Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 139; ‘‘Religious Persecution in Yugoslavia,’’ VOA, September 17, 1953; ‘‘Communists Intensify Drive against Religion,’’ VOA, January 12, 1953. 61. Gary D. Rawnsley, Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda: The BBC and VOA in International Politics, 1956–64 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 114. 62. Ibid., 119, 122–123. 63. Though the missionary intent of the VOA depended little on its audience, alleged numbers of listeners in communist areas of the world were used as further evidence of the success and ‘‘righteousness’’ of the U.S. position. The State Department declared that eight to ten million Soviets listened to the VOA in 1949. See Nelson, War of the Black Heavens, 37. 64. Report on the funeral of Joseph Stalin, VOA, March 13, 1953. 65. Alan L. Heil Jr., Voice of America: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1. 66. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 1. 67. Memo from Clyde Taylor and Donald Gill to NAE Executive Committee, ‘‘Sources of Resolution Policy in NAE,’’ January 15, 1960, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 68. Hixson, Parting the Curtain, 15, 173–174, 191. 69. Jane de Hart Mathews, ‘‘Art and Politics in Cold War America,’’ American Historical Review 81, no. 4 (October 1976): 777–778. 70. Marilyn S. Kushner, ‘‘Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959: Domestic Politics and Cultural Diplomacy,’’ Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 6–26; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, The American National Exhibition, Moscow, July 1959, 86th Cong., 1st sess., 1959, 900–963. 71. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, American National Exhibition, Moscow, 910, 915–917. 72. Kushner, ‘‘Exhibiting Art,’’ 17, 25; Worchester Art Museum, ‘‘Edward Hicks: The Peaceable Kingdom,’’ http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/American/1934.65 .html (accessed January 29, 2005); Isaiah 11, New International Version.


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chapter 4 1. Associated Press, ‘‘Castro Lets Him Preach,’’ 1964, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 2. For studies of the history of Cuba and the Cuban Revolution, see Jane Franklin, Cuba and the United States: A Chronological History (New York: Ocean Press, 1997); John M. Kirk, Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1989); Clifford L. Staten, History of Cuba (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003); and Julia A. Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 3. Several scholars have written accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis and have analyzed the actions of the Castro, Khrushchev, and Kennedy governments. My intention here is primarily to analyze reaction to the crisis, particularly in respect to the implications for the evangelical community, not to contribute to the dialogue about the political contest that guided it. For these studies, see James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993); Herbert Dinerstein, The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and James A. Nathan, Anatomy of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001). Furthermore, this chapter does not intend to argue about the extent of human rights violations in Cuba, but merely to examine how evangelicals and other Americans perceived Castro and Communist Cuba. 4. Jason M. Yaremko, U.S. Protestant Missions in Cuba: From Independence to Castro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), x–xiv. 5. ‘‘Report of the Foreign Department to the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society,’’ April 1960, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 6. Ibid. 7. Evangelical Handbook of Latin America, 1937 and 1961 editions; EFMA, ‘‘Missionary Statistical Report,’’ March 31, 1959; Notes to the Latin American Survey of the EFMA in 1960; ‘‘On-Air Outlets of Gospel Program in Cuba’’; Robert H. Dalke, Cuba Evangelistic Association, January 1958, EFMA Records, BGC Archives; Directory of Foreign Mission Agencies in North America, (1962), 82. 8. Harvey Cox, introduction to Frei Betto, Fidel and Religion: Castro Talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 24. 9. Resolutions passed at the 18th annual convention of the NAE, Chicago, April 29, 1960, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 10. President Truman attempted to appoint General Mark W. Clark as ambassador to the State of Vatican City in 1951, but immediate protest and a campaign launched by the NCC and Protestants and Others United for the Separation of Church and State killed the appointment when Clark eventually withdrew his name. Opponents claimed that an ambassadorship to Vatican City would violate the separation of church and state. See John S. Conway, ‘‘Myron C. Taylor’s Mission to the Vatican, 1940–1950,’’ Church History 44 (March 1975): 85–99, and George J. Gill, ‘‘The Truman Administration and Vatican Relations,’’ Catholic Historical Review 73, no. 3 (1987): 408–423.

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11. Quoted in Heale, American Anticommunism, 172. 12. Herbert S. Mekeel, NAE press release to the convention in Chicago, April 1960, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 13. Dick Hillis, ‘‘On the Job Training: In Service Training of Missionaries and Nationals,’’ EFMA Executives’ Retreat, 1959, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 14. James E. Goff, ‘‘How the Roman Catholic Church Controls Public Schools in Colombia (Part I),’’ Office of Information and Public Relations, the Evangelical Confederation of Colombia, Bogota´, December 4, 1962, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 15. Margaret E. Crahan, The Church and Revolution: Cuba and Nicaragua (N.p.: La Trobe University Institute of Latin American Studies, [1983–1987]), 12; Kirk, Between God and the Party, xvi–xviii. 16. Crahan, Church and Revolution, 4. 17. Ibid., 1–2; Kirk, Between God and the Party. 18. Kirk, Between God and the Party, 53–54; Crahan, Church and Revolution, 1. 19. Kirk, Between God and the Party, 55–58. 20. Irving B. Parkhurst to Clyde Taylor, November 5, 1959; Clyde Taylor to Irving Parkhurst, November 10, 1959; Irving Parkhurst to Clyde Taylor, November 19, 1959, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 21. Milton Le Roy, David White to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Congress, January 15, 1959, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 22. Maxine Sorensen, ‘‘Liberation for an Oppressed People,’’ United World Mission in Action 1, no. 4 (March 1959): 2. 23. ‘‘We Minister in Daybreak,’’ March 1959, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 24. Sidney Correll, ‘‘U.W.M.’s Six Point Program for Cuba,’’ United World Mission in Action 2, no. 2 (February 1960): 1. 25. Quoted in Kirk, Between God and the Party, 106–108. 26. Betto, Fidel and Religion, 276. Upon its publication, this book was widely popular around the world. It sold more than two hundred thousand copies in Cuba within the first few days, and eventually 10 percent of the Cuban population obtained a copy. It was read throughout Latin America and Europe and translated into many languages. See Harvey Cox’s introduction (17–18). 27. In ‘‘ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration,’ ’’ Frank Costigliola has argued that George Kennan’s language in his famous long telegram in 1946 casts this distinction in gendered metaphors, referring to the Soviet government as a rapist and implying at a later date that the Soviet people were more ‘‘feminine’’: ‘‘a woman who had been romantically in love with her husband and who had suddenly seen his true colors for the sake of the children.’’ 28. Clyde D. Taylor to Henry N. Hostetter, August 18, 1961, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 29. Melvin L. Hodges to Clyde Taylor, September 20, 1961, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 30. ‘‘Churches Experience Growth Unhindered,’’ Heartbeat, August 1961, 5; Henry Hostetter to Clyde Taylor, August 22, 1961, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 31. Robert Hough to Clyde Taylor, August 31, 1961; Hodges to Taylor, September 20, 1961; Hostetter to Taylor, August 22, 1961, EFMA Records, BGC Archives.


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32. L. H. Aultman to Clyde Taylor, August 22, 1961, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 33. See James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) for an interpretation of this period. 34. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003), 77; Ernesto F. Betancourt, ‘‘Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro: A Participant’s View of the Cuban Missile Crisis,’’ Society 35, no. 5 (July/August 1998): 83. Betancourt had accompanied Castro in Washington in 1959 but broke with him over the Cuban leader’s communism. Later, he became a participant in the Alliance for Progress and director of an American radio station, Radio Marti, that pumped U.S. propaganda into Cuba. 35. Richard E. Welch Jr., Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 69. 36. Nathan, Anatomy of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 18. 37. Alice L. George, Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 85–86, 83, 70–72. As George notes, the percentage of Americans who admitted to taking precautions may have been low because the Office of Civil Defense study occurred nine months after the crisis had passed. 38. Leroy W. Johnson, letter to the editor, Daily Gazette (Sterling–Rock Falls, IL), October 25, 1962. 39. ‘‘Activities of Civil Defense Are Unchanged,’’ DeKalb (IL) Chronicle, October 24, 1962, 12. 40. Saul Pett, ‘‘Crisis Brings Patriotism, Prayer . . . and Humor,’’ Fort Worth (TX) Star-Telegram, October 28, 1962, 23; George, Awaiting Armageddon, xxiii, 49. 41. ‘‘Table Loveliness Shown for Y-Wives Club of YWCA,’’ Daily Gazette (Sterling– Rock Falls, IL), October 25, 1962, 8. 42. ‘‘Twelve More Days Are Left for Six Flags,’’ Daily Gazette (Sterling–Rock Falls, IL), October 25, 1962, 11. 43. Daily Chronicle (DeKalb, IL), October 26, 1962, 10–11; Church bulletin, Moody Church (Chicago), November 18, 1962, Moody Church Records, BGC Archives. 44. Greenville (TX) Herald Banner, October 27, 1962, 6. 45. Billy Graham, ‘‘The Bridegroom Is Coming’’ [Buenos Aires, Argentine], October 28, 1962, BGEA: Records of the Hour of Decision Radio Program, BGC Archives. 46. ‘‘For Restraint and Peace,’’ Christian Century 79, no. 45 (November 14, 1962): 1375. 47. George, Awaiting Armageddon, xvii, xiii, 76. 48. Charles Angoff, ‘‘After the Bomb,’’ Christian Century 79, no. 43 (October 24, 1962): 1287. 49. George, Awaiting Armageddon, 68–69. 50. William I. Elliott, ‘‘Fallout,’’ Christian Century 79, no. 43 (October 24, 1962): 1287. 51. ‘‘The Religious Situation in Cuba,’’ Evangelical Information Center Bulletin, no. 4 (April 1964), 1, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 52. ‘‘Cuba Confiscates Bibles, Hymnals, Books for Pulp,’’ Capital Baptist 9, no. 19 (1963), EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 53. ‘‘Red Stranglehold Tightens! A Special Edition Report on Conditions inside Castro’s Cuba,’’ Heartbeat (June 1967), EFMA Records, BGC Archives.

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54. Maxton Inglis, ‘‘Castro and the Cuban Church,’’ Heartbeat 9, no. 6 (July– August 1969), 1. 55. ‘‘Recent News from Cuba,’’ June 1963, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. ‘‘Fidel Castro Applauds the Soviet Union,’’ Christian Anti-Communism Newsletter, June 15, 1970. 59. Fred Schwarz, ‘‘The Triple Threat: Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana,’’ Christian Anti-Communism Newsletter, January 2, 1968. 60. ‘‘A Cuba-Chile Communist Axis?’’ Christian Anti-Communism Newsletter, October 1, 1970, 3. 61. Christian Anti-Communism Newsletter, October 1, 1970, 4. 62. ‘‘A Cuba-Chile Communist Axis?’’ 5. 63. John A. Mackay, ‘‘Cuba Revisited,’’ Christian Century 81, no. 7 (February 12, 1964): 200–203. 64. All quotations are from Friends Committee on National Legislation, compilation of readers’ responses to John A. Mackay’s ‘‘Cuba Revisited,’’ April 14, 1964, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Friends Committee on National Legislation, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 68. Latin America Working Group, Crossing the Divide: Religious and Humanitarian Perspectives on U.S.-Cuban Relations (Washington, DC: Washington Office on Latin America, 1998). 69. Memorandum from Clyde W. Taylor and Donald H. Gill to the NAE Executive Committee, January 15, 1960, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 70. All quotations from U.S. State Department, ‘‘Memorandum of Conversation,’’ September 13, 1963, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 71. Wade T. Coggins to Sidney Correll, October 24, 1963, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 72. Wade T. Coggins to Roy Ackerle, May 13, 1969, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 73. Ibid. 74. J. Byrl Sessions to Clyde Taylor, March 28, 1963, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 75. Spanish World Gospel Broadcasting, ‘‘Who Is a Refugee of Communist Cuba?’’ n.d., EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 76. Miguel A. De La Torre, La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 13–14, 29–32. 77. Ruben Lores to Wade T. Coggins, February 9, 1966; Wade T. Coggins to John J. Mullin, February 17, 1966, EFMA Records, BGC Archives.

chapter 5 1. Jack Van Impe and Roger F. Campbell, Israel’s Final Holocaust (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1979), 9, 24. 2. Jeremiah 16:15, New International Version.


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3. Freda Lindsay, ‘‘Israel Today and in Prophecy’’ at Christ for the Nations Institute, Dallas, James Gordon Lindsay Ephemera, BGC Archives. 4. The impact of cultural history on diplomatic history in the Cold War has been significant in recent years. For an example of gender analysis, see Costigliola, ‘‘ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration.’ ’’ In ‘‘Christians, Muslims, and Hindus,’’ his culturalist diplomatic history of U.S.–South Asian relations from 1947 to 1954, Andrew J. Rotter adds religion to the analytical tropes revolving around race, class, and gender. He shows that religion in the United States, as well as in Pakistan and India, affected U.S. policy abroad. 5. Timothy P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 15, 187–230. 6. Percy Crawford, ‘‘Youth on the March,’’ Percy Bartinimaus Crawford and Ruth Crawford Porter Papers, BGC Archives. 7. Paul Grabill, ‘‘Why I Believe in God,’’ Decision Magazine, 1969, BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives. 8. John F. Walvoord, Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis: What the Bible Says about the Future of the Middle East and the End of Western Civilization, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990), 147, 155–162. 9. Van Impe and Campbell, Israel’s Final Holocaust, 126–129. 10. Walvoord, Armageddon, Oil, 172–193. 11. Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth. 12. Hatch, Sacred Cause. Also see Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 13. Examples of this kind of rhetoric are plentiful. In another case, Joseph Huntington directly compared the thirteen tribes of Israel (after the tribe of Joseph was divided into two) with the thirteen colonies. See Hatch, Sacred Cause, 3, 90, 159. 14. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, xi. 15. David A. Gerber, ‘‘Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past,’’ in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 31. 16. Quoted in Yaakov Ariel, Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880–2000 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 14. 17. Ariel, Evangelizing, 2, 9, 11–12, 15. 18. In many cases, Zionism became the basis for this interfaith alliance. Both Christians and Jews welcomed it. In 1961, for example, the Pentecostal churches around the world put together the Sixth World Conference of Pentecostal Churches. By meeting in Jerusalem, they were expressing their support of Israel and its capital. In response, the Israeli government welcomed Christian conference-goers and their support with special publications, special medals, and a speech by Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. See Ariel, Evangelizing, 159. 19. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 220. 20. T. P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 234–238. 21. See Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism; T. P. Weber, Living in the Shadow.

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22. Harry Schneiderman and Morris Fine, eds., American Jewish Yearbook, vol. 49 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1948), 244–265; Morris Fine, ed., American Jewish Yearbook, vol. 51 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1950), 167–175. 23. Joseph Grew, ‘‘Memorandum for the President,’’ May 28, 1945, in Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, vol. 24, The United States’ Recognition of Israel, ed. Dennis K. Merrill (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1998), 6. For more information on the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship, see Nasser Aruri, The Dishonest Broker: The Role of the United States in Palestine and Israel (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003); Warren Bass, Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.-Israel Alliance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Abraham Ben-Zvi, The United States and Israel: The Limits of the Special Relationship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Michael J. Cohen, Truman and Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel (New York: William Morrow, 1984); George Lenczowski, American Presidents and the Middle East (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); Douglas Little, ‘‘Gideon’s Band: America and the Middle East Since 1945,’’ Diplomatic History 18 (1994): 513–540; Douglas Little, ‘‘The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and Israel, 1957–1968,’’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25 (1993): 563–585; Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); and David Schoenbaum, The United States and the State of Israel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 24. ‘‘Papers of Clark Clifford,’’ May 9, 1948; Sol Bloom to President Harry Truman, August 3, 1948; Francis J. Myers to President Harry Truman, March 4, 1948, in Merrill, Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, vol. 24, The United States’ Recognition of Israel, 66, 119, 188. 25. ‘‘Papers of Clark Clifford,’’ May 9, 1948; Rabbi Samuel Thurman to President Harry S. Truman, May 13, 1948, in Merrill, Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, vol. 24, The United States’ Recognition of Israel, 118, 157. 26. Statement by President Harry Truman, June 5, 1947, in Merrill, Documentary History of the Truman Presidency, vol. 24, The United States’ Recognition of Israel, 38. 27. M. J. Cohen, Truman and Israel, 279. 28. Bass, Support Any Friend, 23–34; M. J. Cohen, Truman and Israel. 29. President Dwight David Eisenhower to John Foster Dulles, October 28, 1953, John Foster Dulles and Christian A. Herter Papers, 1953–1961, roll 1 of 9. 30. Bass, Support Any Friend, 35–47. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 4, 6, 14, 59. 33. Wilbur Smith, professor of English and Bible at Fuller Theological Seminary, presented five prophecy studies on a television program at 9:30 on Sunday nights in 1957. Wilbur M. Smith to Carl F. H. Henry, Washington, DC, Christianity Today Records, BGC Archives.


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34. Billy Graham, ‘‘The Second Coming of Christ’’ [Charlotte, NC], October 5, 1958, BGC Archives [online], http://www.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives/docs/bg-charlotte/1005 .html (accessed May 19, 2006). 35. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 152–167. 36. Oswald Smith, ‘‘The End of the Age,’’ n.d., Oswald Jeffrey Smith Papers, BGC Archives. 37. Don Ordell to the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, July 21, 1956, Christianity Today Records, BGC Archives. 38. Oswald Smith, Oswald Jeffrey Smith Papers, BGC Archives. 39. Billy Graham, ‘‘The Day of the Lord’’ [Philadelphia], August 27, 1961, BGEA: Films and Video Tapes Records, BGC Archives. 40. Dr. Elwin Wright to family, December 25, 1950, WEF Records, BGC Archives. 41. Billy Graham, Hour of Decision, March 16, 1952, BGEA: Hour of Decision Radio Program Records, BGC Archives. 42. William Claiborne, ‘‘Israelis Look on U.S. Evangelical Christians As Potent Allies in Battle with Arab States,’’ Washington Post, March 23, 1981; R. W. Gustafson, ‘‘Bible Study Guide for 1964 Summer Holy Land Tour,’’ BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives. 43. Interest in visits to the Holy Land was high in this period across generations. In 1969, Decision Magazine, the publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, sponsored an essay contest for readers twenty-five and younger. In eight hundred words or less, participants were to write on ‘‘Why I Believe in God.’’ The first prize was a trip to the Holy Land. Aside from the essayists who included a desire to see Palestine, the vast number of entrants still held by the Billy Graham Center Archives attests to the value of the trip for the youth of the period. 44. George T. Eggleston, A Treasury of Christian Teaching (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), ix. 45. J. M. Price, et. al., A Survey of Religious Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1959), 182. 46. Eggleston, Treasury of Christian Teaching, 27, 217. 47. Quoted in Lawrence J. Epstein, Zion’s Call: Christian Contributions to the Origins and Development of Israel (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 126. 48. ‘‘Children’s Memorial Forest in Palestine,’’ Land Reborn 1, no. 1 (1950): 14; ‘‘They Look to You for Clothing!’’ Land Reborn 3, no. 5 (1952): 2. 49. Walter Vander Beek, letter to the editor, Land Reborn, September–October 1956, 16. 50. Arthur H. Williamson, ‘‘Lecture Four. Prophecy and Science I. Francis Bacon and Tommaso Campanella: Science Salvation, and Sexuality,’’ in Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Modern World, Part One, audiotape series (Springfield, VA: Teaching Co., 1995). 51. Conde McGinley to Verne P. Kaub, May 19, 1952, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 52. W. E. Lyon to Verne P. Kaub, May 10, 1952, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

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53. Arthur E. Case to Verne P. Kaub, October 22, 1950, ACCL Records (microfilm edition, 1987), State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 54. Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003). 55. A. B. Machlin, ‘‘Three Minutes to Twelve’’ (Winona Lake, IN: American Association for Jewish Evangelism, [1950]), American Association for Jewish Evangelism, BGC Archives. 56. Oswald Smith, ‘‘The Drama of the End Times,’’ n.d., Oswald Jeffrey Smith Papers, BGC Archives. 57. P. V. D. Prince, pamphlet by the American Christian Palestine Committee, June 11, 1948, EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 58. Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 200–203. 59. J. Elwin Wright to family, December 24, 1950, WEF Records, BGC Archives. 60. Various letters found in EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 61. Billy Graham Press Conference [Knoxville, TN], 1970, BGEA: Blue Ridge Broadcasting Corp. Records, BGC Archives. 62. Zechariah 12:2–3, New International Version. 63. Freda Lindsay, ‘‘Israel Today and in Prophecy,’’ at Christ for the Nations Institute, Dallas, 1973, James Gordon Lindsay, Ephemera, BGC Archives. 64. Perhaps warned by unhappy incidents of past prophetic promises going unfulfilled—one of the most famous involved the followers of William Miller in 1843—most moderate evangelicals during this period shied away from setting specific dates when the last days would unfold. Billy Graham repeatedly tempered his warnings of the ever-approaching end of time with statements such as ‘‘I’m not saying these are the latter days. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m setting no dates. I say that these signs indicate that it may be the latter days in which we are living.’’ Graham, ‘‘The Second-Coming: A Glorious Truth,’’ The Hour of Decision, March 16, 1952, Hour of Decision Records, BGC Archives. For an examination of the theories behind failed prophecy, see the analyses of the Festinger thesis in Jon R. Stone, ed., Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy (New York: Routledge, 2000). 65. Freda Lindsay, ‘‘Israel Today and in Prophecy,’’ Christ for the Nation’s Institute, Dallas, Texas, James Gordon Lindsay Ephemera, BGC Archives. 66. Paul Boyer, ‘‘The Middle East in Modern American Popular Prophetic Belief,’’ in Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America, ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 331–332. 67. David Allen Lewis, Magog 1982 Canceled (Harrison, AR: New Leaf, 1982). 68. Genesis 12:3, New International Version. 69. Salem Kirban, Second Coming, Inc., EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 70. Christianity Today 11, no. 21 (July 21, 1967): 20. 71. Ibid.; Christianity Today 11, no. 25 (September 29, 1967): 19; Christianity Today 11, no. 22 (August 18, 1967): 24. 72. Christianity Today 11, no. 22 (August 18, 1967): 24; Christianity Today 12, no. 8 (January 19, 1968): 16; Christianity Today 12, no. 11 (March 1, 1968): 21–22. 73. T. P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 191. 74. Richard Wolff, Israel Act III (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1967), 94.


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75. Marcia Kretzmer, Adventure in the Holy Land: A Guide for Children and Their Families (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Massada, 1983). 76. ‘‘20 Day Tour: A Memorable Experience,’’ Herbert John Taylor Papers, BGC Archives. 77. Christianity Today 12, no. 2 (October 27, 1967); Christianity Today 19, no. 6 (December 20, 1974). 78. T. P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 214. 79. Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics: The Secret Alliance between Israel and the U.S. Christian Right (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1986), 22, 55, 118–119, 122. 80. Jerusalem University College home page, http://www.juc.edu (accessed May 19, 2006); Jim Mullins, ‘‘Israel Is,’’ Alumni News of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies, June 1972, Herbert John Taylor Papers, BGC Archives. 81. His Land, World Wide Pictures, 1983, BGC Archives. 82. Edna Jolly to ‘‘Jewish Friends in Jerusalem,’’ February 26, 1976, Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, American Jewish Archives (AJA), Cincinnati, OH. 83. ‘‘Fuller Theological Seminary Statement on Jewish-Christian Relations, 1976,’’ Missiology: An International Review (October 1976). 84. ‘‘The American Jewish Committee Recommendations to AJC Plenary Session from Interreligious Affairs Commission,’’ May 3, 1972; Memo from Milton I. Goldstein, commission chairman of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, September 13, 1972, Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 85. ‘‘The American Jewish Committee Recommendations to the AJC Plenary Session from Interreligious Affairs Commission,’’ May 3, 1972, Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 86. Gerald Strober to Marc Tanenbaum, June 4, 1960; Ronald Kronish, ‘‘Meeting with Billy Graham and Jewish Leaders at American Jewish Committee,’’ June 23, 1969, Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 87. Ronald Kronish, ‘‘Meeting with Billy Graham and Jewish Leaders at American Jewish Committee,’’ June 23, 1969; Marc Tanenbaum to Billy Graham, June 23, 1969; Harold H. Gordon to Billy Graham, June 24, 1969; Gerald Strober to Robert Ferm, June 24, 1969; Bertram H. Gold to Billy Graham, June 24, 1969, Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 88. Marc Tanenbaum to George Wilson, December 16, 1970, Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 89. William Claiborne, ‘‘Israelis Look on U.S. Evangelical Christians as Potent Allies in Battle with Arab States’’ Washington Post, March 23, 1981; Letter from the AJC, March 12, 1971, Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 90. William Claiborne, ‘‘Israelis Look on U.S. Evangelical Christians as Potent Allies in the Battle with Arab States,’’ Washington Post, March 23, 1981. 91. Kitty O. Cohen, ‘‘Briefing: The Role of Israel in the Electric Church,’’ December 17, 1985, National Religious Broadcasters Records, BGC Archives. 92. Barbara Z. Presseisen, women’s chair of the Northern Illinois Jewish Community Center in 1966, included this prayer in response to a request to participate in the World Day of Prayer services that year. Quoted in a letter from Barbara Z. Presseisen, January 27, 1966, DeKalb World Day of Prayer, Regional History Center, DeKalb, IL.

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93. Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, Washington, DC, July 28, 1971, ‘‘Statement on ‘Jerusalem’ before the Near East Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,’’ EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 94. Quoted in Ruth Seligman, ‘‘Why Do Americans Come to Israel?’’ American Zionist, June 1971, 32–34. 95. Seymour Siegel, ‘‘The Meaning of Israel in Jewish Thought,’’ in Evangelicals and Jews in Conversation on Scripture, Theology, and History, eds. Marc H. Tanenbaum, Marvin R. Wilson, and A. James Rudin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978), 114–115. 96. Malcolm Boyd to Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, March 23, 1974, Marc Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 97. Arnold T. Olson, Inside Jerusalem: City of Destiny (Glendale, CA: Regal Books, 1968), 13. 98. Arthur Gilbert, ‘‘Conversation with Billy Graham,’’ ADL Bulletin 24, no. 10 (December 1967). 99. Gerald S. Strober, An Evaluation of the Jewish Content of Protestant Textbooks (New York: American Jewish Committee, n.d.), 36–39; James M. Dunn, The Consanguineous Union of Fanatical Fundamentalism and Political Extremism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1981), Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 100. Eric J. Greenberg, ‘‘Graham Apology Not Enough,’’ Jewish Week [online], March 1, 2002, http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid¼5854 (accessed May 19, 2006). 101. Interreligious Affairs Department of the AJC, Christian Statements and Documents Bearing on Christian-Jewish Relations: A Compendium, compiled and edited by Judith Banki, June 1972; ‘‘The La Grange Declaration: Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Responsibilities for the Christian Church,’’ La Grange, IL, May 18–20, 1979, Marc H. Tanenbaum Papers, AJA. 102. Dr. Benjamin Armstrong, April 22, 1983, National Religious Broadcasters Records, BGC Archives. 103. American Forum for Jewish-Christian Cooperation, 1980, National Religious Broadcasters Records, BGC Archives. 104. Solomon S. Bernards, ‘‘The Arab-Israel Crisis and the American Christian Response’’ Lutheran Quarterly 20, no. 3 (August 1968): 269; James Kelso, letter, Christianity Today 11, no. 21 (July 21, 1967). 105. Quoted in Calvin B. Hanson, A Gentile, with the Heart of a Jew (Nyack, NY: Parsons, 1979), 275, 279. 106. Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, 45. 107. Quoted in Alex Heard, Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America (New York: Norton, 1999), 91. 108. Ibid., 69–70. 109. Quoted in Stone, Expecting Armageddon, 5. 110. Joseph F. Zygmunt, ‘‘Prophetic Failure and Chiliastic Identity: The Case of Jehovah’s Witnesses,’’ in Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy, ed. Jon R. Stone (New York: Routledge, 2000), 65–86; also see Mathew N. Schmalz, ‘‘When Festinger Fails: Prophecy and the Watchtower,’’ in Expecting Armageddon:


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Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy, ed. Jon R. Stone (New York: Routledge, 2000), 233–250. Schmalz’s study also notes the importance of the movement’s organizational structure in light of disconfirmation, though he shows that, contrary to the Festinger thesis, proselytizing played no part in the aftermath of the Witnesses’ 1975 prediction. Instead, the failure brought denial and purge. 111. Joseph Chambers, A Palace for the Antichrist: Saddam Hussein’s Drive to Rebuild Babylon and Its Place in Prophecy (Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Press, 1996). 112. Quoted in David Aikman, A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (Nashville, TN: W Publishing Group, 2004), 146, 212–213. 113. Doctrinal statement of the Dallas Theological Seminary, http://www.dts.edu/ about/doctrinalstatement/ (accessed May 19, 2006). 114. James L. Guth et al., Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 330–355. 115. ‘‘Robertson Suggests Stroke Is Divine Retribution,’’ New York Times [online], January 6, 2006, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res¼9F0DE1DC1E30 F935A35752C0A9609C8B63 (accessed April 13, 2006); ‘‘Israel Punishes U.S. TV Evangelist,’’ BBC News [online], January 11, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_ east/4602186.stm (accessed April 13, 2006).

chapter 6 1. Paul Eshleman and Norman Rohrer, The Explo Story: A Plan to Change the World (Glendale, CA: G/L Publications, 1972). 2. Ibid., i–vii, 49. 3. ‘‘Those Radical Christian Troublemakers,’’ found in the Sojourners Collection, Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections, Wheaton, IL; also see Peter Ediger, ‘‘Explo ’72,’’ Post-American 1, no. 5 (Fall 1972): 13. 4. ‘‘Those Radical Christian Troublemakers.’’ 5. Eshleman and Rohrer, Explo Story, ii, 10, 31, 46–47. 6. Ibid., 10. 7. ‘‘Sojourners History,’’ Sojourners [online], http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action¼ about_us.history (accessed July 16, 2005). For documents describing some of the programs of the Sojourners Community, consult the Sojourners collection at Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections. 8. These divisions were not new, but they were more visible in the context of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Furthermore, to argue that the historical circumstances influenced the nature of evangelicalism is not to say that it was shaped exclusively by secular trends. In many ways, evangelicals such as those involved in the Sojourners Community led the way in calling for a halt in nuclear armament in the 1980s, for example. 9. NAE, ‘‘Saving the Seventies,’’ http://www.nae.net/index.cfm?FUSEACTION¼ editor.page&pageID¼242&IDCategory¼9 (accessed July 18, 2005). 10. Ibid. 11. Robert Booth Fowler, A New Engagement: Evangelical Political Thought, 1966– 1976 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 2.

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12. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), xv; also see McGirr, Suburban Warriors. 13. Quoted in Grace Halsell, Forcing God’s Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture—And Destruction of Planet Earth, rev. ed. (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 2003), 17; Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Paul Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (New York: Regan Books, 2004). There are multiple examples of evangelicalism’s influence on presidential politics in the late and post–Cold War periods. Jimmy Carter’s candor about his evangelical faith partially prompted Time magazine to call 1976 the ‘‘Year of the Evangelical’’ and led to a Playboy interview in which, as a presidential candidate, he admitted to lusting ‘‘in his heart.’’ More recently, George W. Bush claimed that Jesus Christ was the political philosopher he most admired. For more information, see Aikman, Man of Faith. 14. McGirr, Suburban Warriors, 243–255. 15. T. P. Weber, On the Road to Armageddon, 188–192. 16. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 17. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 25. 18. David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 86. 19. Quoted in ibid., 68, 69. 20. Quoted in Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 45. For other works on Hamer, see Chappell, Stone of Hope; Fannie Lou Hamer, To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography (Jackson, MS: KIPCO, 1967); Lee, For Freedom’s Sake; Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003). 21. Paul Harvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 170, 175–176. 22. James F. Findlay Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13–15; Martin Luther King Jr., ‘‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’’ in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Mentor, 1963), 89. 23. Findlay, Church People in the Struggle, 3, 14, 77, 80. 24. Tracy Elaine K’Meyer, Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 22, 70. 25. Ibid., 77. 26. NAE, ‘‘Civil Rights,’’ in resolutions adopted in 1964, Governmental Affairs Office, NAE; Billy Graham Press Conference [Los Angeles], 1963, BGEA: Billy Graham Press Conferences, Tapes and Transcripts, BGC Archives. 27. Fowler, New Engagement, 175, 177–181; also see Tom Skinner, Black and Free (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970), and Tom Skinner, Words of Revolution (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970).


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28. Mitchell K. Hall, Because of Their Faith: CALCAV and the Religious Opposition to the Vietnam War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 8–9; Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991). Other general histories of the United States and the Vietnam War include Robert Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformations of American Life (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999); Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1989); and Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1997). 29. Anne C. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military 1942–1993 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 119; James H. Smylie, ‘‘American Religious Bodies, Just War, and Vietnam,’’ Journal of Church and State 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1969): 383–408; M. Hall, Because of Their Faith, 13–17; Harold E. Quinley, ‘‘The Protestant Clergy and the War in Vietnam,’’ Public Opinion Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 43–52. 30. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 120. 31. Perry Bush, ‘‘The Political Education of Vietnam Christian Service, 1954– 1955,’’ Peace and Change 27, no. 2 (April 2002): 198–224; ‘‘Aid for Vietnam,’’ Christianity Today 10, no. 1 (October 8, 1965): 53. 32. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 139–141; ‘‘Why I Believe’’ essays, Decision Magazine, 1969, BGEA: Decision Magazine Records, BGC Archives. 33. Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 121–122. 34. ‘‘Halting Red Aggression in Vietnam,’’ Christianity Today 9, no. 15 (April 23, 1965): 32. 35. William K. Harrison, ‘‘Is the United States Right in Bombing North Vietnam?’’ Christianity Today 10, no. 7 (January 7, 1966): 25–26; ‘‘Vietnam: Where Do We Go from Here?’’ Christianity Today 10, no. 7 (January 7, 1966): 30–31. 36. ‘‘An Introduction to Operation Patriot,’’ EFMA Records, BGC Archives. 37. ‘‘No Viet Calm,’’ Christianity Today 10, no. 17 (May 27, 1966): 50; Russell Chandler, ‘‘Sticky Thicket Snares Broadman Commentator,’’ Christianity Today 15, no. 20 (July 2, 1971): 32–33; Clark Kucheman, ‘‘Churches and the Vietnam Issue,’’ Christianity Today 15, no. 2 (October 23, 1970): 15–16. 38. ‘‘Graham Preaches Peace in Vietnam,’’ Christianity Today 11, no. 8 (January 20, 1967): 36–37; Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 129–131. 39. M. Hall, Because of Their Faith, 42–44, 56–57; Smylie, ‘‘American Religious Bodies,’’ 383–408. 40. M. Hall, Because of Their Faith, 60. 41. Jim Wallis, ‘‘The New Regime,’’ Post-American 3, no. 7 (October 1974): 3–4. 42. Quoted in Loveland, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 131. 43. Mark Hatfield, ‘‘Pastors, Prophets, and Politicians,’’ Princeton Theological Seminary, ‘‘Sojourners,’’ Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections. Also see Mark Hatfield, et al. Amnesty? The Unsettled Question of Vietnam (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: Sun River Press, 1973), and Robert G. Clouse, Robert D. Linder, and Richard V. Pierard, eds. The Cross and the Flag (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1972). 44. Mark Oppenheimer, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 173–211. 45. Ibid., 173, 174.

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46. Edward P. Morgan, The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 169. For other sources on the U.S. counterculture, see Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Routledge, 2002); Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (New York: Penguin Books, 1989); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987); Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Random House, 1984); Theodore Roszak, The Making of the Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969); Steven M. Tipton, Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 47. NAE, ‘‘Evangelical Responsibility in Light of the New Morality, 1965’’ [resolution online], http://www.nae.net/index.cfm?FUSEACTION¼editor.page&pageID¼ 200&IDCategory¼9 (accessed August 7, 2005). 48. James Davison Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 42–43; Fowler, New Engagement, 191. 49. Stephen A. Kent, From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 136–142; Robert S. Ellwood Jr., One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973); also see Alvin L. Reid, ‘‘The Spontaneous Generation: Lessons from the Jesus Movement for Today,’’ Journal of the ASCG 11 (Spring 2000), http://www.ascg.org/journal/11Spg00/Reid.html (accessed August 8, 2005). 50. Ellwood, One Way, 101–111. 51. Kent, From Slogans to Mantras, 148–149, 154. 52. Ellwood, One Way, 59–60, 95–96; For a first-person account of Blessitt’s work, see Arthur Blessitt and Walter Wagner, Turned On to Jesus (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1971). 53. Gordon Lindsay, ‘‘An Introduction to Revelation and the Seven Churches,’’ at Christ for the Nations Institute, Dallas, n.d., James Gordon Lindsay, Ephemera, BGC Archives. 54. Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 147, 130, 148. 55. NAE, ‘‘Abortion, 1971’’ [resolution online], http://www.nae.net/index.cfm? FUSEACTION¼editor.page&pageID¼135&IDCategory¼9 (accessed August 7, 2005). 56. Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, 152. 57. Jim Wallis, ‘‘Introduction: A Time to Wage Peace,’’ in Waging Peace: A Handbook for the Struggle to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ed. Jim Wallis (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), xiv. 58. David H. Janzen, ‘‘My People, I Am Your Security,’’ in Waging Peace: A Handbook for the Struggle to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ed. Jim Wallis (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 175–177. 59. Harvey, Freedom’s Coming, 100. 60. New York Times, April 4, 1965, B5. 61. J. D. Hunter, Evangelicalism, 43. 62. Ibid., 134, 147–148.


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63. The movement has lasted through the twenty-first century. See Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005). 64. Ronald J. Sider, ed., general preface to Evangelicals and Development: Toward a Theology of Social Change (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981). 65. Ronald J. Sider, ed., Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1977). 66. Ronald J. Sider and Richard K. Taylor, Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope: A Book for Christian Peacemakers (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1982), 99, 104, 121, 133. 67. Ronald J. Sider, ed., Lifestyle in the Eighties: An Evangelical Commitment to Simple Lifestyle (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982), 19. 68. Sider and Taylor, Nuclear Holocaust, 187–188. 69. NAE, ‘‘Nuclear Holocaust 1982’’ [resolution online], http://www.nae.net/index .cfm?FUSEACTION¼editor.page&pageID¼262&IDCategory¼9 (accessed August 12, 2005). 70. Sojourners newsletter, Summer 1978; Ecumenical Peace Institute, ‘‘A Call to Join the Fast for Disarmament,’’ Sojourners Collection, Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections. 71. Sojourners Peace Ministry, ‘‘A Prayer for Peace,’’ flyer and transcript of welcome address, 1982, Sojourners Collection, Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections. 72. Sider and Taylor, Nuclear Holocaust, 184; Mernie King, ‘‘A Model for Peace Ministry in the Local Churches,’’ Sojourners (September 1980). 73. Sider and Taylor, Nuclear Holocaust, 80–81. 74. Letter to the editor, Sojourners magazine, Sojourners Collection, Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections. 75. Jim Wallis, ‘‘The Christian and Nuclear Power,’’ Sojourners Collection, Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections. 76. Jim Wallis, ‘‘Biblical Politics,’’ n.d., Sojourners Collection, Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections. 77. Mark Hatfield, ‘‘Pastors, Prophets, and Politicians,’’ Princeton Theological Seminary, ‘‘Sojourners,’’ Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections.

conclusion 1. Gallup, Gallup Poll, 1807. 2. Jonathan Kirsch, A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 250–251. 3. See Michael Cromartie, ed., Evangelicals and Foreign Policy: Four Perspectives (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1989). 4. For a quick history of the Sojourners community and magazine, see the Sojourners Web site, ‘‘About Us,’’ at http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action¼about_us .history; Dean C. Curry, ‘‘Biblical Politics and Foreign Policy’’ in Cromartie, Evangelicals and Foreign Policy, 52–56.

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5. James Davison Hunter and Carl Bowman, The State of Disunion: 1996 Survey of American Political Culture, vol. 2, Summary Tables (Ivy, VA: In Medias Res Educational Foundation, 1996), Table 23.H, Table 35. 6. Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006), vii–ix, 103, 182–183, 206–207, 233, 259. 7. Halsell, Forcing God’s Hand, 45. 8. Amy Johnson Frykholm, Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119, 8, 17. 9. For information on God and consumerism, see R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); ‘‘Primary Prophecy Sites,’’ http://www.bible-prophecy.com/links.htm# prophecy (accessed May 19, 2006). 10. ‘‘The Antichrist . . . Have You Seen This Man?’’ http://www.raptureready.com/ rap666.html (accessed May 19, 2006); also see Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 11. Jim Wallis, ‘‘Baseball and the End Times,’’ Sojomail, October 10, 2003, http:// www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action¼sojomail.display&issue¼031008#2 (accessed May 19, 2006).

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archival sources American Association of Jewish Evangelism. Billy Graham Center (BGC) Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) and the International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC) Collection. The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) Archives, St. Louis, Missouri. American Council of Christian Laymen Records. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. Baptista Film Mission Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Blue Ridge Broadcasting Corporation Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Buswell, Oliver J., Jr. Papers. PCA Archives, St. Louis, Missouri. Christianity Today, Inc., Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Covenant Presbyterian Church Collection. PCA Archives, St. Louis, Missouri. Crawford, Percy Bartinimaus, and Ruth Crawford Porter. Papers. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Decision Magazine Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. DeKalb World Day of Prayer Records. Regional History Center, DeKalb, Illinois. Dulles, John Foster, and Christian A. Herter Papers. 1953–1961. The White House Correspondence and Memoranda Series (microfilm edition). Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1986. Evangelical Fellowship of Missions Agencies (EFMA) Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Fellowship Foundation Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Films and Video Tapes Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Hour of Decision Radio Program Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois.

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Lindsay, James Gordon. Ephemera. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Moody Church Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. National Religious Broadcasters Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Oxnam, Bishop G. Bromley. Collection. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Presbyterian Bible Church Records. PCA Archives, St. Louis, Missouri. Rockford Institute Records. Regional History Center, DeKalb, Illinois. Smith, Oswald Jeffrey. Papers. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Sojourners. Wheaton College Archives and Special Collections, Wheaton, Illinois. Tanenbaum, Marc H. Papers. American Jewish Archives (AJA), Cincinnati, Ohio. Taylor, Herbert John. Papers. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois. Voice of America. Transcripts (microfilm), Washington, DC. World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) Records. BGC Archives, Wheaton, Illinois.

periodicals ADL Bulletin America American Mercury The American Zionist Bad Nauheim Baptist History and Heritage Baptist Message Berean Searchlight Biblical Missions Bibliotheca Sacra Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society A Call to Prayer . . . For Missions Capital Baptist Catholic Digest Chicago Daily Sun-Times Chosen People Christian Anti-Communism Newsletter Christian Century Christian Science Monitor Christianity Today Daily Chronicle (DeKalb, Illinois) Daily Gazette (Sterling-Rock Falls, Illinois) Decision Magazine Evangelical Information Center Bulletin Fort Lauderdale News Fort Worth Star-Telegram The Free Press Greenville Herald Banner (Greenville, Texas) Heartbeat International Review of Missions

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The Jewish Week Ladies’ Home Journal Land Reborn Life Look Lutheran Quarterly Missionary Digest Moody Monthly New York Herald Tribune New York Times Occasional Bulletin (from the Missionary Research Library) The Post-American Presbyterian Journal Religious Digest Sojourners Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey) Time United Evangelical Action United World Mission in Action Washington Post

government documents and court cases Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963). Commonwealth v. Henry J. Munson, 127 Mass. 459 (1879). Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). U.S. Census Bureau. Statistical Abstracts of the United States. 1960, 1963, 1968. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on the Judiciary. School Prayer: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary. 88th Cong., 2nd sess., 22 April 1964. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Un-American Activities. The American National Exhibition, Moscow, July 1959: Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities. 86th Cong., 1st sess., 1 July 1959. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Un-American Activities. 100 Things You Should Know about Communism and Religion. Washington, DC: GPO, 1948. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Un-American Activities. Testimony of Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam: Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities. 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 21 July 1953. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Committee on Un-American Activities. Soviet Total War: ‘‘Historic Mission’’ of Violence and Deceit. Vol. 1. 23 September 1956. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Congressional Record. 83rd Cong., 1st sess., 17 March 1953. U.S. Congress. Senate. Prayers Offered by the Chaplain Rev. Frederick Brown Harris at the Opening of the Daily Sessions of the Senate of the United States During the EightySeventh and Eighty-Eighth Congresses, 1961–1964. Washington, DC: GPO, 1964.

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U.S. Congress. Senate. Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, Committee on the Judiciary. School Prayer: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary. 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 1 August 1966.

yearbooks and directories American Jewish Yearbook. Vol. 49. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. 1947–1948. American Jewish Yearbook. Vol. 51. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. 1950. American Jewish Yearbook. Vol. 56. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. 1955. Directory of Foreign Mission Agencies in North America. New York: Missionary Research Library, 1956. Directory of Foreign Mission Agencies in North America. 5th ed. New York: Missionary Research Library, 1962. Yearbook of American Churches. Ed. Benson Y. Landis. 23rd issue. New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1955. Yearbook of American Churches. Ed. Benson Y. Landis. 28th issue. New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1960. Yearbook of American Churches. Ed. Benson Y. Landis. 30th issue. New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1962.

books Acosta, Tomas Diez. October 1962: The ‘‘Missile’’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba. New York: Pathfinder, 2002. Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. Aikman, David. A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush. Nashville, TN: W Publishing Group, 2004. Amanat, Abbas, and Magnus Bernhardsson, eds. Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002. American Legion. Back to God. Indianapolis: National Public Relations Division, American Legion, 1954. Appelman, Hyman J. Anti-Christ and the Jew and the Valley of Dry Bones. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1950. ———. The Atomic Bomb and the End of the World. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1954. Archives of American Art. American Painting and Sculpture, American National Exhibition in Moscow, July 25–Sept. 5, 1959. Meriden, CT: Meriden Gravure, 1959. Ariel, Yaakov. Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880–2000. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

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Arieti, James A., and Patrick A. Wilson. The Scientific and the Divine: Conflict and Reconciliation from Ancient Greece to the Present. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Aruri, Nasser. The Dishonest Broker: The Role of the United States in Palestine and Israel. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003. Bachrack, Stanley D. The Committee of One Million: ‘‘China Lobby’’ Politics, 1953–1971. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Barkun, Michael. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. ———. Disaster and the Millennium. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Bass, Warren. Support Any Friend: Kennedy’s Middle East and the Making of the U.S.Israel Alliance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Bebbington, D. W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Ben-Zvi, Abraham. The United States and Israel: The Limits of the Special Relationship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Berlitz, Charles. Doomsday 1999 a.d. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981. Beshore, Kenton. Five World-Shaking Events: Prophesied for the Near Future. N.p., 1964. Betto, Frei. Fidel and Religion: Castro Talks on Revolution and Religion with Frei Betto. Translated by The Cuban Center for Translation and Interpretation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Biles, Roger. Crusading Liberal: Paul H. Douglas of Illinois. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. Blessitt, Arthur, and Walter Wagner. Turned On to Jesus. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1971. Blight, James G., Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch. Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993. Bloch, Ruth H. Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Boles, Donald E. The Two Swords: Commentaries and Cases in Religion and Education. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1967. Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. New York: Pantheon, 1985. ———. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Bradbury, John W., ed. Israel’s Restoration: A Series of Lectures by Bible Expositors Interested in the Evangelization of the Jews. New York: Iversen-Ford Associates, 1950– 1959(?). Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle, eds. Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s. New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Brentano, Frances, ed. Nation under God: A Religious-Patriotic Anthology. Great Neck, NY: Channel Press, 1957. Britt, George L. When Dust Shall Sing: The World Crisis in the Light of Bible Prophecy. Cleveland, TN: Pathway Press, 1958. Brown, Robert McAfee, ed. The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Bruns, Roger A. Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism. New York: Norton, 1992. Bundy, McGeorge. Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years. New York: Random House, 1988. Burdick, Eugene, and Harvey Wheeler. Fail-Safe. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962. Butler, G. Paul. Best Sermons: 1946 Edition. New York: Harper, 1946. ———. Best Sermons: 1951–1952 Edition. New York: Macmillan, 1952. Butler, Jon, and Harry S. Stout, eds. Religion in American History: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Buzzanco, Robert. Vietnam and the Transformations of American Life. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. Carpenter, Joel A., and Wilbert R. Shenk, eds. Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990. Cavanagh, Helen M. Carl Schurz Vrooman: Self Styled ‘‘Constructive Conservative.’’ Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1977. Chafe, William H. The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Chambers, Joseph. A Palace for the Antichrist: Saddam Hussein’s Drive to Rebuild Babylon and Its Place in Prophecy. Green Forest, AR: New Leaf Press, 1996. Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Cherry, Conrad, ed. God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Chinnici, Joseph P., and Angelyn Dries, eds. Prayer and Practice in the American Catholic Community. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000. Clouse, Robert G., Robert D. Linder, and Richard V. Pierard, eds. The Cross and the Flag. Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1972. Cohen, Michael J. Truman and Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Cohen, Paul A. Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Fairlawn, NJ: Essential Books, 1957. Coltman, Leycester. The Real Fidel Castro. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Communist China to the United Nations. Committee of One Million Against the Admission of Red China to the United Nation: File of Clippings and Miscellanea. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1970. Conkin, Paul K. When All the Gods Trembled: Darwinism, Scopes, and American Intellectuals. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Crahan, Margaret E. The Church and Revolution: Cuba and Nicaragua. N.p.: La Trobe University Institute of Latin American Studies, [1983–1987].

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———, ed. Religion, Culture, and Society: The Case of Cuba. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2003. Criswell, W. A. Expository Sermons on Revelation. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1969. Cromartie, Michael, ed. Evangelicals and Foreign Policy: Four Perspectives. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1989. Crossman, Richard, ed. The God That Failed. New York: Harper, 1949. Culbertson, William, and Herman B. Centz, eds. Understanding the Times: Prophetic Messages Delivered at the 2nd International Congress on Prophecy, New York City. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1956. Daniels, Ted. A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation. New York: New York University Press, 1999. ———, ed. Millennialism: An International Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992. Davidson, Donald L. Nuclear Weapons and the American Churches: Ethical Positions on Modern Warfare. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983. Dean, Robert D. Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Defenders Editorial Staff. Fire by Night and Cloud by Day: A History of the Defenders of the Christian Faith. Wichita, KS: Defenders, 1966. De Jong, James A. As the Waters Cover the Sea: Millennial Expectations in the Rise of Anglo-American Missions, 1640–1810. Kampen, Netherlands: J. H. Kok, 1970. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. DelFattore, Joan. The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America’s Public Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Dennett, Raymond, and Robert K. Turner. Documents on American Foreign Relations. Vol. 12. January 1–December 31, 1950. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951. DeWolf, L. Harold. Teaching Our Faith in God. New York: Abingdon Press, 1963. Diamond, Sara. Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right. New York: Guilford Press, 1998. Dickstein, Morris. Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Dinerstein, Herbert. The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Dolbeare, Kenneth M., and Phillip E. Hammond. The School Prayer Decisions: From Court Policy to Local Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Dunn, Charles W., ed. Faith, Freedom, and the Future: Religion in American Political Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Dunn, Charles W., and J. David Woodard. The Conservative Tradition in America. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996. Eckardt, Alice, and Roy Eckardt. Encounter with Israel: A Challenge to Conscience. New York: Association Press, 1970. Eggleston, George T. A Treasury of Christian Teaching. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958. Ellwood, Robert S. The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

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———. 1950: Crossroads of American Religious Life. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000. ———. One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1973. Epstein, Lawrence J. Zion’s Call: Christian Contributions to the Origins and Development of Israel. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984. Erickson, Dan. As a Thief in the Night: The Mormon Quest for Millennial Deliverance. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 1998. Eshleman, Paul, and Norman Rohrer. The Explo Story: A Plan to Change the World. Glendale, CA: G/L Publications, 1972. Falwell, Jerry. Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Lynchburg, VA: Old Time Gospel Hour, 1983. Fernlund, Kevin J., ed. The Cold War American West, 1945–1989. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Findlay, James F., Jr. Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Finzsch, Norbert, and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds. Visions of the Future in Germany and America. New York: Berg, 2001. FitzGerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. New York: Vintage, 1989. Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Foster, Gaines M. Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Fowler, Robert Booth. A New Engagement: Evangelical Political Thought, 1966–1976. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982. ———. One Way: The Jesus Movement and Its Meaning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1973. Franklin, Jane. Cuba and the United States: A Chronological History. New York: Ocean Press, 1997. Freston, Paul. Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Fried, Richard M. The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Frykholm, Amy Johnson. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Fuller, Wayne E. Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Gallup, George H. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971. Vol. 3: 1959–1971. New York: Random House, 1972. Garber, Marjorie, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds. One Nation under God? Religion and American Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. Garside, B. A. Within the Four Seas: The Memoirs of B. A. Garside. New York: Frederic C. Beil, 1985.

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Geertz, Armin W. The Invention of Prophecy: Continuity and Meaning in Hopi Indian Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. George, Alice L. Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Gerber, David A., ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Gibson, Scott M. A. J. Gordon: American Premillennialist. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001. Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1987. Goddard, Hugh. A History of Christian-Muslim Relations. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. Gorenberg, Gershom. The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Graham, Billy. World Aflame. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965. Green, Stephen. Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel. New York: William Morrow, 1984. Gregory, Donna Uthus, ed. The Nuclear Predicament: A Sourcebook. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Griffith, R. Marie. God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Guth, James L., et. al. Religion and the Culture Wars: Dispatches from the Front. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996. Hall, David D., ed. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Hall, Mitchell. Because of Their Faith: CALCAV and Religious Opposition to the Vietnam War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Haller, William. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation. London: London Printing & Publishing, 1963. Halsell, Grace. Forcing God’s Hand: Why Millions Pray for a Quick Rapture—And Destruction of Planet Earth. Rev. ed. Beltsville, MD: Amana, 2003. ———. Prophecy and Politics: The Secret Alliance between Israel and the U.S. Christian Right. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1986. Hamer, Fannie Lou. To Praise Our Bridges: An Autobiography. Jackson, MS: KIPCO, 1967. Handy, Robert T. A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Hanson, Calvin B. A Gentile, with the Heart of a Jew. Nyack, NY: Parsons, 1979. Harding, Susan Friend. The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Harrison, J. F. C. The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Hart, D. G. Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004. ———. That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: Ivan R. Dees, 2002.

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Harvey, Paul. Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Hatch, Nathan O. The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Hatfield, Mark, et al. Amnesty? The Unsettled Question of Vietnam. Croton-on-Hudson, NY: Sun River Press, 1973. Havner, Vance. In Times Like These. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1969. Haynes, John E. Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996. Heale, M. J. American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Heard, Alex. Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America. New York: Norton, 1999. Heil, Alan L., Jr. Voice of America: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Henriksen, Margot A. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Herberg, Will. Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. 2nd ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1960. Herken, Gregg. The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945–1950. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Hill, Christopher. Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Hilton, Boyd. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Hitchcock, James. The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life. Vol. 1. The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. ———. The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life. Vol. 2. From ‘‘Higher Law’’ to ‘‘Sectarian Scruples.’’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Hixson, Walter L. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945– 1961. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1965. Hoopes, Townsend. The Devil and John Foster Dulles. Boston: Little, Brown and Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973. Hull, William L. Israel—Key to Prophecy: The Story of Israel from the Regathering to the Millennium, as Told by the Prophets. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1957. Hunter, Allen, ed. Rethinking the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Hunter, James Davison. American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983. ———. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991. ———. Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

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Hunter, James Davison, and Carl Bowman. The State of Disunion: 1996 Survey of American Political Culture. Vol. 2. Summary Tables. Ivy, VA: In Medias Res Educational Foundation, 1996. Hunter, Jane. The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-theCentury China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Idinopulos, Thomas A. Jerusalem: A History of the Holiest City as Seen through the Struggles of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994. Immerman, Richard H. John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1999. Jenkins, Jerry B. Twenty-Five Years of Sterling Rewards in God’s Service: The Story of Christian Booksellers Association. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1974. Jewett, Robert, and John Shelton Lawrence. Captain America and the Crusade against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2003. Jorstad, Erling. The Politics of Doomsday: Fundamentalists of the Far Right. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1970. Juster, Susan. Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Kahn, E. J., Jr. The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Kaplan, Jeffrey. Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 1997. Kengor, Paul. God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life. New York: Regan Books, 2004. Kent, Stephen A. From Slogans to Mantras: Social Protest and Religious Conversion in the Late Vietnam War Era. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001. King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Mentor, 1963. Kirban, Salem. 666. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1970. Kirby, Dianne, ed. Religion and the Cold War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Kirk, John M. Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1989. Kirsch, Jonathan. A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Western Civilization. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Kliebard, Herbert M., ed. Religion and Education in America: A Documentary History. Scranton, PA: International Textbook Company, 1969. K’Meyer, Tracy Elaine. Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Koch, Klaus. The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic: A Polemic Work on a Neglected Area of Biblical Studies and Its Damaging Effects on Theology and Philosophy. Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson, 1972. Kovel, Joel. Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

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Kretzmer, Marcia. Adventure in the Holy Land: A Guide for Children and Their Families. Ramat-Gan, Israel: Massada, 1983. Krugler, David F. The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Kuznick, Peter J., and James Gilbert, eds. Rethinking Cold War Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Kyvig, David E. Explicit and Authentic Acts: Amending the U.S. Constitution, 1776–1995. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Ladd, George Eldon. Crucial Questions about the Kingdom of God: The Sixth Annual MidYear Lectures of 1952 Delivered at Western Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary of Portland, Oregon. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1952. ———. Jesus Christ and History. Chicago: Intervarsity Press, 1963. Lamont, William M. Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603–60. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969. Land, Gary. Adventism in America: A History. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1986. Larson, Edward J. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Latin America Working Group. Crossing the Divide: Religious and Humanitarian Perspectives on U.S.-Cuban Relations. Washington, DC: Washington Office on Latin America, 1998. Laubach, John Herbert. School Prayers: Congress, the Courts, and the Public. Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1969. Lauren, Paul Gordon, ed. The China Hands’ Legacy: Ethics and Diplomacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Lenczowski, George. American Presidents and the Middle East. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. Levinson, Sanford. Constitutional Faith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Lewis, David Allen. Magog 1982 Canceled. Harrison, AR: New Leaf Press, 1982. Lewis, Gordon Russell. The Bible, the Christian, and Seventh-Day Adventism; or Is Seventh-Day Adventism Evangelical? Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1972. Lindberg, David C., and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Lindsay, Gordon. The Antichrists Have Come! Dallas: Voice of Healing Publishing Company, 1958. Lindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Livingstone, David N., D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll, eds. Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Long, Burke O. Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

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Long, Edward Leroy, Jr. The Christian Response to the Atomic Crisis. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1949. Lotz, David W., with Donald W. Shriver Jr. and John F. Wilson, eds. Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989. Loveland, Anne C. American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military 1942–1993. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Lowry, Charles Wesley. To Pray or Not to Pray! A Handbook for Study of Recent Supreme Court Decisions and American Church-State Doctrine. Washington, DC: University Press of Washington, 1963. Mandelbaum, Michael. The Nuclear Question: The United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1946–1976. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of TwentiethCentury Evangelicalism, 1870–1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. ———. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. ———. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1991. Marsh, Charles. The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today. New York: Basic Books, 2005. ———. God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Marty, Martin E. Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America. New York: Dial Press, 1970. Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby, eds. Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements. Vol. 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ———, eds. Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1999. May, Ernest R., ed. American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68. Boston: Bedford Books, 1993. McClarnard, Elaine, and Steve Goodson, eds. The Impact of the Cold War on American Popular Culture. Vol. 36. Carrollton: State University of West Georgia, 1999. McDannell, Colleen, ed. Religions of the United States in Practice. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. McGinn, Bernard. Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. McLoughlin, Jr., William G. Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age. New York: Ronald Press, 1960. ———. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. McPherson, Alan. Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

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Merrill, Dennis, ed. Documentary History of the Truman Presidency. Vol. 7. The Ideological Foundation of the Cold War. The ‘‘Long Telegram,’’ the Clifford Report, and NSC 68. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1996. ———, ed. Documentary History of the Truman Presidency. Vol. 24. The United States’ Recognition of Israel. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1998. ———, ed. Documentary History of the Truman Presidency. Vol. 26. Preparing to Survive Atomic Attack: The Truman Administration’s Civil Defense Program. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1999. Miles, F. J. The Horsemen Are Riding. London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1947. Miller, Perry. The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. Miller, Robert Moats. Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam: Paladin of Liberal Protestantism. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1990. Mojtabai, A. G. Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Montgomery, Maxine Lavon. The Apocalypse in African-American Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996. Moore, R. Laurence. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ———. Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Morgan, David, ed. Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Morgan, David, and Sally M. Promey, eds. The Visual Culture of American Religions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Morgan, Edward P. The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991. Mould, Tom. Choctaw Prophecy: A Legacy of the Future. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Nathan, James A. Anatomy of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001. National Council of Churches in the United States of America, Department of United Church Women. Wrought by Prayer: A Study of World Day of Prayer Projects. New York: National Council of Churches, 1952. Neils, Patricia. China Images in the Life and Times of Henry Luce. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990. ———, ed. United States Attitudes and Policies toward China: The Impact of American Missionaries. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990. Nelson, Michael. War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Neuhaus, Richard John. Time toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. The New Nation of Israel and the Word of God! A Discussion between Dr. Louis T. Talbot and Dr. William W. Orr Conducted over the Bible Institute Radio Hour. Los Angeles: Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1948.

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Niebuhr, Reinhold. Faith and Politics: A Commentary on Religious, Social and Political Thought in a Technological Age. Ed. Ronald H. Stone. New York: George Braziller, 1968. Nitze, Paul H., James E. Dougherty, and Francis X. Kane. The Fateful Ends and Shades of Salt: Past . . . Present . . . And Yet to Come? New York: Crane, Russak, 1979. Noll, Mark A. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994. Numbers, Ronald L., and Jonathan M. Butler. The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. O’Leary, Stephen D. Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Olson, Arnold T. Inside Jerusalem: City of Destiny. Glendale, CA: Regal Books, 1968. Open Doors International. Cuba for Christ: The Amazing Revival. Tonbridge, England: Sovereign World, 1999. Oppenheimer, Mark. Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Overholt, Thomas W. Prophecy in Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Sourcebook for Biblical Researchers. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986. Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Peale, Norman Vincent. Adventures in the Holy Land. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1963. Perez, Louis A., Jr. Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy. 2nd ed. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. Perry, Charles. The Haight-Ashbury: A History. New York: Random House, 1984. Pessen, Edward. Losing Our Souls: The American Experience in the Cold War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993. Phillips, Kevin. American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. New York: Viking, 2006. Pomerantz, Charlotte, ed. A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana. New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1963. Powaski, Ronald E. Return to Armageddon: The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1981–1999. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Powers, Richard Gid. Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism. New York: Free Press, 1995. Price, J. M., et al. A Survey of Religious Education. 2nd ed. New York: Ronald Press, 1959. Price, Randall. The Battle for the Last Days’ Temple: Politics, Prophecy, and the Temple Mount. Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2004. Quinby, Lee. Millennial Seduction: A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Rawnsley, Gary D. Radio Diplomacy and Propaganda: The BBC and VOA in International Politics, 1956–64. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

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Redekop, John Harold. The American Far Right: A Case Study of Billy James Hargis and Christian Crusade. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1968. Reilly, Bernard. American Political Prints, 1766–1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Library of Congress. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Ribuffo, Leo P. The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. Rice, Charles E. The Supreme Court and Public Prayer: The Need for Restraint. New York: Fordham University Press, 1964. Rodriguez, Juan Carlos. The Bay of Pigs and the CIA. Translated by Mary Todd. New York: Ocean Press, 1999. Rose, Lisle A. The Cold War Comes to Main Street: America in 1950. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999. Rosenthal, Joel H. Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power, and American Culture in the Nuclear Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Ross, Rosetta E. Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of the Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Rozek, Edward J., ed. Walter H. Judd: Chronicles of a Statesman. Denver, CO: Grier, 1980. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Sandeen, Ernest R. Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Schell, Jonathan. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Knopf, 1982. Schoenbaum, David. The United States and the State of Israel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Schuparra, Kurt. Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945–1966. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998. Schwarz, Fred. You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960. Shaw, Yu-Ming. An American Missionary in China: John Leighton Stuart and ChineseAmerican Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Sheen, Fulton J. Communism and the Conscience of the West. Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill, 1948. Shuck, Glenn W. Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Shulman, Holly Cowan. The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. New York: William Morrow, 1957. Sider, Ronald J. Cry Justice: The Bible Speaks on Hunger and Poverty. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1980. ———, ed. Evangelicals and Development: Toward a Theology of Social Change. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981.

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———, ed. Lifestyle in the Eighties: An Evangelical Commitment to Simple Lifestyle. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982. ———, ed. Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1977. ———. The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005. Sider, Ronald J., and Richard K. Taylor. Nuclear Holocaust and Christian Hope: A Book for Christian Peacemakers. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1982. Skinner, Tom. Black and Free. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970. ———. Words of Revolution. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1970. Smith, Christian. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ———. Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Smith, Robert Gordon. One Nation under God: An Anthology for Americans. Yeadon, PA: Young Americans Riding into History Corporation, 1961. Smith, Rodney K. Public Prayer and the Constitution: A Case Study in Constitutional Interpretation. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1987. Smith, Wilbur M. The Atomic Bomb and the Word of God. Chicago: Moody Press, 1945. ———. Egypt in Biblical Prophecy. Boston: W. A. Wilde, 1957. ———. This Atomic Age and the Word of God. Boston: W. A. Wilde, 1948. Sobel, Richard. The Impact of Public Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy Since Vietnam: Constraining the Colossus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Spike, Robert W. The Freedom Revolution and the Churches. New York: Association Press, 1965. Staten, Clifford L. History of Cuba. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Stebbins, Richard P., ed. Documents on American Foreign Relations, 1962. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Stein, Stephen J., ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism. Vol. 3. Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age. New York: Continuum, 1999. Stone, Jon R., ed. Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. A Guide to the End of the World: Popular Eschatology in America. New York: Garland, 1993. ———. On the Boundaries of Evangelicalism: The Postwar Evangelical Coalition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Stormer, John A. None Dare Call It Treason. Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964. Stout, Harry S., and D. G. Hart, eds. New Directions in American Religious History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Strong, Douglas M. They Walked in the Spirit: Personal Faith and Social Action in America. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997. Strozier, Charles B. Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Sweig, Julia A. Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

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Tanenbaum, Marc H., Marvin R. Wilson, and A. James Rudin, eds. Evangelicals and Jews in Conversation on Scripture, Theology, and History. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. Tipton, Steven M. Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Tuttle, Dorothy E. L. Official Training Book for Guides at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. N.p., 1959. Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Tweed, Thomas A., ed. Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Underwood, Grant. The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Van Dusen, Henry P., ed. The Spiritual Legacy of John Foster Dulles: Selections from His Articles and Addresses. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960. Van Impe, Jack, and Roger Campbell. Israel’s Final Holocaust. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1979. Wager, W. Warren. Terminal Visions: The Literature of Last Things. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Wald, Kenneth D. Religion and Politics in the United States. 4th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Wallis, Jim, ed. Waging Peace: A Handbook for the Struggle to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. Walvoord, John F. Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis: What the Bible Says about the Future of the Middle East and the End of Western Civilization. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990. Walvoord, John F., Merrill C. Tenney, and Ralph L. Keiper. Six Prophetic Messages Delivered at the First Annual New England-Wide Prophecy Conference March 18–22, 1953. Boston: New England Fellowship of Evangelicals, 1953. Wang, Jessica. American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Weber, Eugen. Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Weber, Timothy P. Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism 1875–1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. ———. On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004. Welch, Richard E., Jr. Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959–1961. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. White, Andrew Dickson. A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. Vol. 1. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1978. White, John Wesley. Re-entry: Striking Parallels between Today’s News Events and Christ’s Second Coming. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971. Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

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Wills, Gary. Under God: Religion and American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. Wilson, John E. Religion and the American Nation: Historiography and History. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Wilson, Dwight. Armageddon Now! The Premillenarian Response to Russia and Israel Since 1917. Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991. Winkler, Allan M. Life under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wojcik, Daniel. The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Wolff, Richard. Israel Act III. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1967. World Day of Prayer Committee. Wrought by Prayer: A Study of World Day of Prayer Projects. New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., 1953. Worrell, Ruth Mougey. The Day Thou Gavest: The Story of the World Day of Prayer. New York: United Church Women (National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.), 1956. Yaremko, Jason M. U.S. Protestant Missions in Cuba: From Independence to Castro. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Young, Marilyn B. The Vietnam Wars 1945–1990. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

articles and chapters Adams, William C. ‘‘American Public Opinion in the 1960s on Two Church-State Issues.’’ Journal of Church and State 17, no. 3 (1975): 477–494. Barkun, Michael. ‘‘Politics and Apocalypticism.’’ In The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Apocalypticism in the Modern Period and the Contemporary Age. Vol. 3. Ed. Stephen J. Stein. New York: Continuum, 1998. Baskerville, Barnet. ‘‘The Cross and the Flag: Evangelists of the Far Right.’’ Western Speech 27 (Fall 1963): 197–206. Bellah, Robert N. ‘‘Civil Religion in America.’’ Daedalus 96 (Winter 1967): 1–21. Betancourt, Ernesto F. ‘‘Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro: A Participant’s View of the Cuban Missile Crisis.’’ Society 35, no. 5 (July/August 1998): 77–86. Boyer, Paul. ‘‘The Middle East in Modern American Popular Prophetic Belief.’’ In Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America. Ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002. ———. ‘‘Two Centuries of Christianity in America: An Overview.’’ Church History 70, no. 3 (September 2001): 544–556. Boyle, Peter G. ‘‘Review Article: The Cold War Revisited.’’ Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 3 (2000): 479–489. Brady, Leslie S. ‘‘The Role of Cultural and Educational Exchanges in Soviet-American Relations.’’ Slavic and East European Journal 6, no. 3 (Autumn 1962): 197–213. Brewer, John C., and Kenneth W. Rea. ‘‘Dr. John Leighton Stuart and U.S. Policy toward China, 1946–1949.’’ In United States Attitudes and Policies toward China: The Impact of American Missionaries. Ed. Patricia Neils. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990.

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Brinkley, Alan. ‘‘The Illusion of Unity in Cold War Culture.’’ In Rethinking Cold War Culture. Ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Brodhead, Richard H. ‘‘Millennium, Prophecy and the Energies of Social Transformation: The Case of Nat Turner.’’ In Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America. Ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002. Bush, Perry. ‘‘The Political Education of Vietnam Christian Service, 1954–1955.’’ Peace and Change 27, no. 2 (April 2002): 198–224. Butler, Jonathan M. ‘‘Prophecy, Gender, and Culture: Ellen Gould Harmon [White] and the Roots of Seventh-day Adventism.’’ Religion and American Culture 1, no. 1 (1991): 3–29. Buzzanco, Robert. ‘‘Commentary: Where’s the Beef? Culture without Power in the Study of U.S. Foreign Relations.’’ Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 623–631. Chilton, Paul. ‘‘Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Culture, and Propaganda.’’ In The Nuclear Predicament: A Sourcebook. Ed. Donna Uthus Gregory. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Cohen, Paul A. ‘‘Time, Culture, and Christian Eschatology: The Year 2000 in the West and the World.’’ American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1615– 1628. Conway, John S. ‘‘Myron C. Taylor’s Mission to the Vatican, 1940–1950.’’ Church History 44 (March 1975): 85–99. Costigliola, Frank. ‘‘ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War.’’ Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (March 1997): 1309–1339. Curry, Dean C. ‘‘Biblical Politics and Foreign Policy.’’ In Evangelicals and Foreign Policy: Four Perspectives. Ed. Michael Cromartie. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1989. Dalin, David G. ‘‘The American Element in the Thought of Will Herberg.’’ American Jewish History 81, nos. 3–4 (1984): 296–308. Dean, Robert. ‘‘Commentary: Tradition, Cause and Effect, and the Cultural History of International Relations.’’ Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 615–622. Doyle, Edward P. ‘‘Prayer in the School: A Junior High School Survey.’’ Social Education, January 1964, 18–20. Elliott, Emory. ‘‘Religion, Identity and Expression in American Culture: Motive and Meaning.’’ Social Science Information 24, no. 4 (1985): 779–797. Emmerson, Richard K. ‘‘The Secret.’’ American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1603–1614. Enns-Rempel, Kevin. ‘‘The Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches and the Quest for Religious Identity.’’ Mennonite Quarterly Review 63, no. 3 (1989): 247–264. Eskridge, Larry. ‘‘A Sign for an Unbelieving Age: Evangelicals and the Search for Noah’s Ark.’’ In Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective. Ed. David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. FitzGerald, Francis. ‘‘The American Millennium.’’ New Yorker, 11 November 1985, 88–113.

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Fogleman, Aaron. ‘‘Comment on Part One: The Failure and Success of Millenarianism in American Religious Culture.’’ In Visions of the Future in Germany and America. Ed. Norbert Finzsch and Hermann Wellenreuther. New York: Berg, 2001. Foglesong, David S. ‘‘Roots of ‘Liberation’: American Images of the Future of Russia in the Early Cold War.’’ International History Review 21, no. 1 (March 1999): 1–284. ‘‘Fuller Theological Seminary Statement on Jewish-Christian Relations, 1976.’’ Missiology: An International Review, October 1976. Gerber, David A. ‘‘Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past.’’ In Anti-Semitism in American History. Ed. David A. Gerber. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Gianakos, Perry E. ‘‘The Black Muslims: An American Millennialistic Response to Racism and Cultural Deracination.’’ Centennial Review 23, no. 4 (1979): 430–452. Gill, George J. ‘‘The Truman Administration and Vatican Relations.’’ Catholic Historical Review 73, no. 3 (1987): 408–423. Glass, William R. ‘‘Southern Fundamentalism and Anticommunism at the Beginning of the Cold War: The Controversy between J. Frank Norris and Louie D. Newton.’’ In The Impact of the Cold War on American Popular Culture. Vol. 36. Ed. Elaine McClarnard and Steve Goodson. Carrollton: State University of West Georgia Studies in the Social Sciences, 1999. Hackett, David G. ‘‘Gender and Religion in American Culture, 1870–1930.’’ Religion and American Culture 5, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 127–157. Harding, Susan. ‘‘Imagining the Last Days: The Politics of Apocalyptic Language.’’ In Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements. Vol. 4. Ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Hart, D. G. ‘‘The Failure of American Religious History.’’ Journal of the Historical Society 1, no. 1 (2000): 1–31. Hill, Patricia. ‘‘Commentary: Religion as a Category of Diplomatic Analysis.’’ Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 633–640. Hollinger, David A. ‘‘The ‘Secularization’ Question and the United States in the Twentieth Century.’’ Church History 70, no. 1 (March 2001): 132–143. Hutchison, William R. ‘‘Americans in World Mission: Revision and Realignment.’’ In Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985. Ed. David W. Lotz with Donald W. Shriver Jr. and John F. Wilson. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989. Iriye, Akire. ‘‘The China Hands in History: American Diplomacy in Asia.’’ In The China Hands Legacy: Ethics and Diplomacy. Ed. Paul Gordon Lauren. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987. Janzen, David H. ‘‘My People, I Am Your Security.’’ In Waging Peace: A Handbook for the Struggle to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Ed. Jim Wallis. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982. Juster, Susan. ‘‘Demogogues or Mystagogues? Gender and the Language of Prophecy in the Age of Democratic Revolutions.’’ American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1560–1581. Kendall, Willmoore. ‘‘American Conservatism and the ‘Prayer’ Decisions,’’ Modern Age, Summer 1964, 245–259.

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Reid, Alvin L. ‘‘The Spontaneous Generation: Lessons from the Jesus Movement for Today.’’ Journal of the ASCG 11 (Spring 2000). http://www.ascg.org/journal/ 11Spg00/Reid.html (accessed April 21, 2007). ‘‘Religious Dissent.’’ Problems of Communism 17, no. 4 (July–August 1968): 96–102. Robert, Dana L. ‘‘ ‘The Crisis of Missions’: Premillennial Mission Theory and the Origins of Independent Evangelical Missions.’’ In Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980. Ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1990. ———. ‘‘From Missions to Mission to beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II.’’ In New Directions in American Religious History. Ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Robinson, Beverly J. ‘‘Faith Is the Key and Prayer Unlocks the Door: Prayer in African American Life.’’ Journal of American Folklore 110 (1997): 408–414. Roeber, A. Gregg. ‘‘The Migration of the Pious: Methodists, Pietists, and the Antinomian Character of North American Religious History.’’ In Visions of the Future in Germany and America. New York: Berg, 2001. Rosenberg, Emily S. ‘‘Rosenberg’s Commentary.’’ In American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68. Ed. Ernest R. May. Boston: Bedford Books, 1993. Rosenfield, Geraldine. ‘‘Zionist Activities.’’ In American Jewish Yearbook. Vol. 49. Ed. Harry Schneiderman and Morris Fine. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947–1948. Rotter, Andrew J. ‘‘Christians, Muslims, and Hindus: Religion and U.S.-South Asian Relations, 1947–1954.’’ Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 593–613. Rowley, David G. ‘‘ ‘Redeemer Empire’: Russian Millenarianism.’’ American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (December 1999): 1582–1602. Roxborough, Ian. ‘‘Cold War, Capital Accumulation, and Labor Control in Latin America: The Closing of a Cycle, 1945–1990.’’ In Rethinking the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Sanneh, Lamin. ‘‘Comparative Millennialism in Africa: Continuities and Variations on the Canon.’’ In Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America. Ed. Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002. Schmalz, Mathew N. ‘‘When Festinger Fails: Prophecy and the Watchtower.’’ In Expecting Armageddon: Essential Readings in Failed Prophecy. Ed. Jon R. Stone. New York: Routledge, 2000. Shelley, Bruce. ‘‘The Meaning of History: Posing the Problem.’’ Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society 7, no. 4 (1964): 101–110. Shub, Louis. ‘‘Zionist and Pro-Israel Activities.’’ In American Jewish Yearbook. Vol. 51. Ed. Morris Fine. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1950. Siegel, Seymour. ‘‘The Meaning of Israel in Jewish Thought.’’ In Evangelicals and Jews in Conversation on Scripture, Theology, and History. Ed. Marc H. Tanenbaum, Marvin R. Wilson, and A. James Rudin. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978. Smith, Ryan K. ‘‘The Cross: Church Symbol and Contest in Nineteenth-Century America.’’ Church History 70, no. 4 (December 2001): 705–734.

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Index

Abington School District v. Schempp, 69 Abolitionism, 11–12, 191 Abortion, evangelical attitudes toward, 5, 171, 173, 187, 189–190, 192, 203. See also Pro-life movement; Roe v. Wade Abyssinian Baptist Church, 178 Acheson, Dean, 44 Air pollution, evangelical attitudes toward, 171 Al-Aqsa Mosque, 165 Alert America Campaign, 37 All American Conference to Combat Communism, 86 Allen, George, 97–98 American Artists Professional League, 98 American Association for Jewish Evangelism, 138, 149 American Baptist Convention, 70, 126, 181 American Board of Missions to the Jews, 91, 138 American Christian Palestine Committee, 139, 147, 150 American Civil Liberties Union, 27

American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC), 40–41, 42, 43, 72. See also International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC) American Council of Christian Laymen (ACCL) anticommunism of, 41, 42 anti-Semitism of, 45, 148–149 letters to, 38, 43, 45–46 on the National Council of Churches, 45–46 American Forum for JewishChristian Cooperation, 153, 164 American Institute of Holy Land Studies (Jerusalem University College), 91, 156 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 141, 174 American Jewish Committee (AJC), 158, 160, 163 Interreligious Affairs Commission, 158 National Executive Board, 159 American Legion, 57 ‘‘Back to God’’ program, 67–68 American National Exhibition (Moscow), 77, 87, 97–99

268

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American Russian Mission, 43 Antichrist, 8, 14, 19, 118, 135, 209n24 calculations of the end-times and, 26 communism and, 44, 84, 85 identification of, 8, 142, 148, 151, 166, 202 666 and, 129 Anticommunism Catholicism and, 47–48, 105–106 as a Cold War weapon, 26, 94, 95, 123 ‘‘culture of urgency’’ and, 76 eschatology and, 16, 17, 22, 26, 34–40, 81, 85, 99, 121, 172, 173, 199 evangelicals and, 13, 19, 28, 102, 108, 119, 126, 128, 131, 133, 180, 182, 199, 200 missionaries and, 77, 84, 87, 89, 109 national identity and, 53, 54, 171, 172 in post–World War II America, 3, 12 See also McCarthyism Antinuclear movement, 171, 186, 191, 195–196, 198 Anti-Semitism Christian millennialism and, 138, 147 before the Cold War, 149–150 evangelicals and, 136, 159, 163 Jewish community’s fear of, 163 postmillennialism and, 137 Protestant far right and, 45, 147–149 Apocalypse, 7, 10 four horses of, 117 missions and, 78, 82 nuclear, 114 secular, 18 signs of, 31, 40, 129 See also Apocalypticism Apocalypticism in the antebellum United States, 10 anti-Semitism and, 147 Cold War and, 51, 53, 68, 94, 99, 171 counterculture and, 188 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 103, 114 definition of, 6 European, 8, 207n15 evangelicals and, 14, 22, 61, 83, 121, 171, 172, 196–197, 203

nuclear age and, 26 prayer and, 56, 57, 69, 72–73 Protestant far right and, 40 secular, 22, 33, 54, 73, 78 three styles of, 14–15 U.S. government and, 17 World War II and, 96 See also Apocalypse; Eschatology; Millennialism Arab-Israeli War, 1948, 138, 164 Arabs, American evangelical attitudes toward, 81, 135, 150–152, 154, 156, 164 Ararat, Mount, 29–30 Armageddon battle of, 6, 76, 136, 145, 152 evangelical expectations of, 60, 144, 174 filmstrip on, 84 sermon on, 116 See also Megiddo Armstrong, Benjamin, 164 Army-McCarthy hearings, 97 Ashcroft, John, 201 Assemblies of God, 14, 105, 111 Atomic bomb Cold War and, 31, 41, 51, 203 ending World War II, 4, 49 Hopi prophecy and, 208n23 relationship between evangelicals and the American mainstream, 31–34, 44, 203 relationship between science and religion, 28 as a sign of the times, 18, 25–26, 29, 31, 41, 48, 50 See also Hydrogen bomb; Nuclear age; Nuclear arms race ‘‘Atomic Cocktail,’’ 32 Austin, David, 51 Austin, Warren R., 88 Bancroft, George, 18 Baptist Peacemaker, 195 Baptist Students Concerned, 185–186 Baptista Film Mission, 34, 49

index Barrett, Edward, 94 Barrows, Cliff, 25, 157 Barth, Karl, 19 Batista, Fulgeˆncio, 102, 109–110 ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’’ 10, 93 Bay of Pigs (Playa Giroń), 95, 102, 114, 130 Beat generation, 15, 68 Becker, Frank J., 69, 71–72 Begin, Menachem, 156, 159 Bellah, Robert, 52–53. See also Civil religion Ben-Gurion, David, 141, 229n18 Benson, Ezra Taft, 65 Benton, William, 97 Berg, David, 188. See also Children of God Beria, Lavrenty, 96 Betancourt, Ernesto F., 113, 227n34 Betto, Frei, interview with Fidel Castro, 110–111 Bevel, James, 176 Bible Presbyterian Church, 22 Black Elk, 206n9 Black freedom movement. See Civil rights movement Black Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, 14 Blessitt, Arthur, 189 Bloom, Sol, 139 Bordeaux, W. Harllee, 42 Boyer, Paul, 4, 18, 32, 34, 137, 138 Brethren in Christ Church, 105, 111, 112 Bright, Bill, 169–170 Brotherhood Week, 95 Brown, John, 10 Brown, Robert McAfee, 180–181 Bryan, William Jennings, 27 Bush, George W., 167, 168, 236n13 Cadena Cultural Panamericana, 105 Calvary Chapel, 174 ‘‘Campaign of Truth,’’ 36–37, 94, 97 Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), 158, 169–170

269

Captive Nations Declaration, 66–67 Carlson, Frank, 60, 64 Carter, Jimmy, 172, 186, 236n13 Case, Arthur E., 148 Castro, Fidel, 129 American attitudes toward, 199 American evangelical attitudes toward, 103, 109–110, 111–112, 119–124, 127 conception of Christianity, 110–111 exilic Cuban community and, 130 policies toward evangelicals, 101–102 popularity of, 95 turn to communism, 103, 105 26th of July Movement, 102 U.S. government opposition to, 96, 11, 124–125 Catholicism in Cuba, 107–108, 130 evangelical attitudes toward, 19, 105–108, 151 in Latin America, 104, 107 Protestant far right and, 47–48 Celler, Emanuel, 71 Chafets, Zeey, 159 Chapman, H. Bruce, 156 Cheng, Samuel W. S., 84 Children for Christ, 79 Children of God, 170, 188. See also Berg, David Children’s Christian educational programs 78–79, 146. See also Sunday school Chile, 121 Chiliasm, 205n1. See also Millennialism China. See People’s Republic of China; Republic of China China lobby. See Committee of One Million Choctaw prophecy, 207n9 Christian and Missionary Alliance Church, 181 Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (CACC), 59, 86, 120–121 Christian Crusade, 40

270

index

Christian Right Christian far right, 39, 40–48 New Christian Right, rise of, 12, 13, 16, 28, 134, 163, 173–175, 186, 187–190, 192, 201, 203 Christian World Liberation Front, 188 Choctaw, prophecy of, 206n9 Church of the Nazarene, 14, 111 Church World Service (CWS), 181 Civil Defense Program, 36–37 Civil religion, 52–53, 65, 67. See also Bellah, Robert Civil rights movement American political culture and, 171, 190, 197 black churches in, 176, 177–178 evangelicals and, 171, 172, 173, 175–180, 235n8 influence on the American image abroad, 99 Civil War, 10, 11, 20 Clark, Aurel, 115 Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV), 181, 184–185, 191–192 Clifford, Clark, 139–140 Coffin, William Sloane, Jr., 181 Coggins, Wayne T., 128, 130–131 Colbert, James, 86 Colombia, 31, 92–93, 107, 121 Committee of One Million, 76, 77, 87, 88–90, 223n44 Communism, 97, 115 American Cold War attitudes toward, 12–17, 36–38, 64, 92 Catholicism and, 106 Christian far right and, 39, 40–48 in Cuba, 102, 105, 108, 109, 110, 112, 119, 120, 121, 123, 124, 127 eschatology and, 14, 84, 145, 209n24 evangelical attitudes toward, 3–4, 31, 34–36, 38, 39, 59, 116, 126, 129, 184, 210n39 in the Middle East, 143 mission efforts and, 84–87, 90–91, 104 prayer in public schools and, 70

Voice of America and, 94–95 See also Marxism Comstock law, 12–13 Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 104, 143 Cook, Robert A., 66 Corson, Fred Pierce, 89–90 Coughlin, Charles E., 45 Council of Federated Organizations, 176 Counterculture, 176 evangelical responses to, 16, 171, 174, 186, 187–190 Crawford, Percy, 135 Crimmins, John, 127 Crystal Cathedral, 174 Cuba Evangelistic Association, 105 Cuban Missile Crisis American population, impact on, 114–119 apocalypticism of, 103, 104, 199 churches’ response to, 116, 117 as Cold War climax, 102, 112–113, 114, 131 evangelicals and, 4, 199, 202 Graham on, 116–117 nuclear fallout, public awareness of, 34 Voice of America and, 95–96 Cuban Revolution, 102 American Christian reaction to, 125 American evangelicals and, 109 anti-Americanism and, 108 Christianity in Cuba, impact on, 122 Latin America, impact on, 120 mission efforts after, 104, 111 See also 26th of July Movement Culture wars, 4, 198 evangelical conservatives and, 171, 190, 203 Supreme Court prayer cases and, 51 Dallas Theological Seminary, 135, 167 Daniel, book of, 26, 135 Darby, John Nelson, 8, 9, 10 Darrow, Clarence, 27 Darwinism, 11, 27–28 Davies, John, 77

index Death-of-God theology, 68 Dilling, Elizabeth, 35 Dirksen, Everett, 72 Dispensationalism. See Premillennial dispensationalism Dobrynin, Anatoly, 114 Dome of the Rock, 165 Douglas, Paul, 88 Douglas, William O., 53 Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 18, 26, 33 Drugs, evangelical attitudes toward, 171 Dulles, John Foster, 16–17 anticommunism of, 40 as Secretary of State, 64–65, 87–88, 90, 140 Ecumenism criticism of, 45 Protestant, 126 in the United States, 19, 65, 69, 220n5 Edison, Charles, 88 Edwards, Jonathan, 9, 209n25 Eisenhower, Dwight D. American National Exhibition (Moscow), 99 appeals to, 88, 93, 95 on Israel, 140 on religion, 65, 67–68 Emergency Christian Mobilization, 86 Engel v. Vitale, 65, 69–72 Engstrom, Ted, 196 Episcopal Church, 14, 126 Equal Rights Amendment, evangelical responses to, 173 Eschatology American eschatological narrative, 6–12, 52, 203 anticommunism and, 84–85 Christian eschatology, 6, 48, 83, 162, 206n8 in the Cold War United States, 3, 12, 14, 131, 134, 137, 200 commentaries on, 8 on Cuba, 129

271

Cuban refugees and, 130 European eschatology, 7–8 evangelical left and, 172 evangelicals and, 16, 17, 22, 31, 77, 79, 144, 146–147, 149, 152, 165 failed predictions of, 166 Graham on, 81–82, 142, 159 history and, 18, 20 Internet and, 202–203 Israel and, 144 Jesus movement and, 188 Jewish eschatology, 159, 160–162 Native American eschatology, 7, 206n9 Newton, Isaac on, 26 in prophecy conferences, 9 red heifers and, 165 See also Apocalypticism; Millennialism; Postmillennialism; Premillennial dispensationalism Eshleman, Paul, 169–170 European Common Market, premillennial interpretations of, 14 Evangelical Fellowship of Missions Agencies (EFMA), 78 on Cuba, 108, 111–112 Executives’ Retreat, 106 U.S. government and, 130–131, 151 Evangelical Information Center, 119 Evangelical left, 6, 172, 173, 190–198 Evangelicals for Social Action, 193 Evangelicals United for Zion, 153, 164 Explo ’72, 158, 169–170 Ezekiel, book of, 29, 142–143 Falwell, Jerry, 198 on the Antichrist, 148 on defining evangelical, 5 Israel and, 156, 159 Moral Majority, 163, 172, 196 on political action, 15, 189 on signs of the end-times, 29 Family Life Bureau, 65 Family Research Council, 173 Farrell, General Thomas F., 17

272

index

Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), 36–37 Federal Council of Churches. See National Council of Churches (NCC) Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, 191 Feminism, evangelical responses to, 203 Festinger thesis, 166, 232n64, 235n110 Flanders, Ralph E., 35 Four Chaplains Day, 67 Free Will Baptist, 105, 112, 119 Freedom Ride (1961), 176 Frey, John B., 7 Fulbright, J. W., 124 Fuller Theological Seminary, 19, 141, 157–158 Fundamentals, The, 27 Garside, B. A., 88–89 Gause, Norma Neal, 55 Gay rights, evangelical responses to, 203 Genesis 12:3 Committee, 153, 159–160 Gilbert, Arthur, 162 Goldwater, Barry, 97, 124, 173–174 Goyim for Israel, 153, 164 Graham, Billy American Jewish Committee and, 158–159 Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, 62 on the civil rights movement, 179, 180 on communism, 39, 85 crusades, 13, 19, 26, 32, 57, 85 on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 116–117, 118 on the end-times, 59–60 on evangelism, 82, 185 Explo ’72 and, 169, 170 on history, 19–21 Hour of Decision, The, 3, 35, 144, 145 on Israel and the Middle East, 141–142, 149, 152, 162 on ‘‘national immorality,’’ 64 on personal salvation, 20, 41, 144, 166 on prayer, 57–58, 61 reports of anti-Semitism and, 163 on space travel, 30

on the Supreme Court, 71 on the Vietnam War, 184 Great Awakening, 9, 209n25 Great Commission definition of, 75–76 evangelical interpretations of, 81, 83, 169 missionaries and, 61, 96 Grew, Joseph, 88 Grounds, Vernon, 196 Group Publishing, 168 Gulf War, and eschatology, 166 Gustafson, R. W., 145 Hagee, John, 153 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 177 Hargis, Billy James, 40–44, 46 Harris, Frederick Brown, 56–57, 89 Harrison, W. K., 183 Hart, D. G., 21–22 Hatfield, Mark, 185, 197 Hebrew Christian Alliance, 149 Henry, Carl, 64, 181 Hill, E. V., 169 Hillis, Dick, 106–107 His Land, 157 His Place, 189 Holocaust, 45, 136, 138, 147, 150 ‘‘Holy Land Adventure,’’ 168 Holy Land tours, 91, 134, 145–146, 147, 155–156 Hoosiers for Peace, 185 Hope of Israel mission, 137 Hopi, 7, 10, 207n9, 208n23 Hosman, Sarah, 81, 92 Hour of Decision, The on communism, 3, 35 on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 116 Graham and, 82, 144 on the latter days, 145 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 16, 40, 46–47, 98 How Red Is the National (Federal) Council of Churches, 45–46 Howl, 68

index Hydrogen bomb, 3, 58, 99. See also Atomic bomb; Nuclear age; Nuclear arms race Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, 75, 92 Indian Christian Crusade, 86 Inherit the Wind, 28 Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, 78 International Christian Leadership (ICL), 54 on communism, 38, 85 Far Eastern Conference, 59 global connections of, 54, 84 on prayer, 59 prayer breakfasts and, 50, 53, 54 See also International Council of Christian Leadership (ICCL) International Council of Christian Churches (ICCC), 42, 76, 78, 84. See also American Council of Christian Churches (ACCC) International Council of Christian Leadership (ICCL), 54. See also International Christian Leadership (ICL) Internet, prophecy Web sites and, 166, 202–203 Irwin, James, 169 Israel America as a ‘‘new Israel,’’ 43 Arab-Israeli War, 1948, 138, 164 creation of, 16, 139–140, 203 evangelicals and, 4, 45, 63, 91, 92, 134, 146–147, 150, 152, 153, 158, 159, 164, 168, 200 Jewish attitudes toward, 160–162 Jewish-evangelical cooperation over, 164 in Late Great Planet Earth, The, 14 premillennial interpretations of, 58, 133, 134–136, 138, 141–143, 144–146, 149, 152–155, 157, 162–163, 164, 165, 167–168, 173, 200, 203 refugees from, 151

273

Six-Day War, 152, 164 tourism in, 62, 155–156 U.S. support for, 140–141, 167 Jackson, Donald L., 46 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 166, 235n110 Jenkins, Jerry, 4, 202 Jerusalem evangelical attitudes toward, 141, 142, 143, 150, 152–153, 157, 162, 165, 229n18 Jewish attitudes toward, 160–161 tourism in, 156 Jesus movement, 174, 186, 187–189 Jews for Jesus, 138. See also Messianic Jews Jiang Jieshi, 88, 89 Joachim of Fiore, 8 Johnson, Lyndon B., 54 Graham and, 184 ‘‘memorial to God’’ proposal, 66 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and, 177 1964 campaign, 173 Vietnam and, 180, 182, 192 Jones, E. Stanley, 42 Jordan, Clarence, 178 Judd, Walter H., 88–89, 223n44 Kaub, Verne P., 41–44, 46, 48, 148 Kelso, James I., 154, 164 Kennedy, John F. Cuban Missile Crisis, 95–96, 112–114 foreign policy of, 113 Israel and, 141 at prayer breakfasts, 65 prayers for, 50 Vietnam and, 180 Kennedy, Robert, 114 Kent, Sherman, 113 Kesler, Jay, 196 Key ’73, 158 Keyser, F. Ray, Jr., 50 Khrushchev, Nikita, 37, 97, 114 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 176, 178, 181, 184–185

274

index

Kingdom of God civil rights movement and, 177 evangelical conceptions of, 19, 21, 39–40, 55, 178–179, 197 postmillennialism and, 9, 19, 39 Kirban, Salem, 84, 153–154 Koinonia Farm, 178–179 Koinonia Foundation, 62 Korean War, 14, 59, 88 La Conferencia Cubana, 111 La Grange Declaration, 163 LaHaye, Tim, 4, 15, 202 Lansdale, Edward, 113 Laos, 113 Late Great Planet Earth, The, 14, 134, 155, 175 on moon travel, 30 racism in, 81 Lawson, James, 176–177 Left Behind, 4, 202 Liebman, Marvin, 90 Lindsay, Freda, 133, 152–153 Lindsay, Gordon, 41, 59–60, 189 Lindsey, Hal, 198 on the end-times, 59 on the Jewish people, 136 on the Jewish temple, 165 Late Great Planet Earth, The, 14, 30, 81, 155, 175 on nuclear destruction, 29 Lores, Rubeń, 130 Luce, Henry Robinson, 89 Lutheran World Relief, 181 Lyons, Roger, 94 Mackay, John, 122–123, 125 Magog, 29, 142, 153, 166 Malenkov, Georgi, 96 Mao Zedong, 37, 94, 111 March for Victory, 182 March on Washington, 178 Marxism, 34, 111, 120, 127. See also Communism Matthews, Joseph B., 46 Matthews, Troup, 94

Mattison, Gordon H., 151 McCarthy, Joseph, 16, 40, 41, 94–95, 97 McCarthyism American citizens and, 14 American national culture and, 28 civil liberties and, 53 criticism of, 28 culture of dissent and, 171–176 definition of, 12 premillennialism and, 81 separation of church and state and, 46 See also Anticommunism McGinn, Joseph P., 91–92 McIntire, Carl, 40–41, 43, 47, 72, 182 McKee, Frederick C., 88 Megiddo, 136, 141, 145, 156. See also Armageddon Meir, Golda, 158 Mekeel, Herbert S., 106 Mencken, H. L., 27 Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), 181 Mennonite World Conference, 191 Messianic Jews, 149, 165. See also Jews for Jesus Millenarianism. See Millennialism Millennialism definition of, 6 See also Apocalypticism; Eschatology; Millennium; Postmillennialism; Premillennial dispensationalism Millennium American colonial expectations of, 8–9, 136, 209n25 Augustine on, 8 in Christian eschatology, 6, 206n8, 209n24 politics and, 14–15 premillennialism on, 6, 136, 137, 166 in secular apocalypticism, 33 See also Millennialism Miller, William, 9, 11, 232n64 Millerites, 9, 166 Missionaries attitude toward communism, 84–85, 86–87

index biases of, 79–81, 221n5 to children, 78–79 China and, 88–89, 90–91, 220n5 in the Cold War, 77–78, 97, 220n5 in Colombia, 92–93 in Cuba, 102, 103, 104–105, 107–108, 109–110, 111–112, 122, 125–128 Cuban refugees and, 128–129 ‘‘culture of urgency’’ and, 76, 200 as diplomats, 91–92 effectiveness of, 84 end-times and, 61, 76–77, 81–83 in India, 42 in Japan, 34 to Jews, 137–138, 149, 157–158, 163 in Latin America, 104, 105, 107 methods of, 79 motivations of, 78, 83 to Native Americans, 7 in Palestine, 150 politics and, 87–88, 93, 128, 200 prayer and, 57, 61, 68 strategies of, 83 trumpet imagery and, 75–76 in Vietnam, 182 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 177 Mohammed, 151, 165 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 96 Moody Memorial Church, 57 Moon travel, evangelical interpretations of, 30–31 Moral Majority evangelical ‘‘coming generation’’ and, 192 Falwell, Jerry, 159 foundation of, 163, 189 Holy Land tours by, 156 political involvement of, 93, 134, 172, 173, 191 Sojourners Fellowship, clash with, 196 Moravians, 9 Moriah, Mount, 165 Mormonism, 9, 208n19 Morse, Wayne, 93, 124 Muggletonians, 8

275

Murrow, Edward R., 95 Muslims African Muslim practices, 208n20 evangelical attitudes toward Islam, 135, 150–151, 164–165, 201 evangelical conversion efforts toward, 83 Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 140–141 National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) on abortion, 190 on communism, 38, 85–86 as an evangelical ecumenical organization, 14, 19 on a ‘‘memorial to God’’ proposal, 66 missions and, 78, 92–93 on morality in the United States, 187 National Council of Churches and, 90–91, 126–128 on the 1970s, 171 on nuclear holocaust, 194–195 in post–World War II America, 13 Protestant far right and, 22, 41 on race relations, 179, 180 Reagan and, 174 on a Roman Catholic as president, 105–106 on U.S. foreign policy, 31 on the Vietnam War, 195 on the Voice of America, 97 National Council of Churches (NCC) American Council of Christian Churches and, 40 on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 117 funds to Cuba and, 126–128 involvement in the civil rights movement, 178, 179 missions and, 78 National Association of Evangelicals and, 14, 126 on prayer, 55 Protestant far right and, 39, 41, 44, 45–46 on a U.S. ambassador to Vatican City, 225n10

276

index

National Council of Churches (continued) on U.S. recognition of the People’s Republic of China, 90 on the Vietnam War, 181, 184 See also World Council of Churches (WCC) National Security Council (NSC) Paper No. 68, 36, 37, 214n43 Nativism, 137, 150 New Left, 172, 187 Newton, Isaac, 26, 29 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 31, 181 Nixon, Richard M. cartoon of, 121 Graham and, 158, 163, 184 kitchen debate, 97 law and order and, 187 Vietnam War and, 185 Nuclear age American culture and, 34, 43–44 apocalypticism and, 26 premillennial dispensationalism and, 12, 14, 16, 17–21, 26 relationship between church and state, effect on, 43 relationship between science and religion, effect on, 28 See also Atomic bomb; Hydrogen bomb; Nuclear arms race Nuclear arms race, 194–195, 196, 205n1. See also Atomic bomb; Hydrogen bomb; Nuclear age ‘‘Nukespeak,’’ 33 Ockenga, Harold John, 30 On the Beach, 26, 32, 33 Operation Mongoose, 113 Operation Patriot, 68–69, 183 Ordell, Don, 143 Orphaned-mission churches, 127–128 Ottoman Turks, Christian eschatological speculation on, 142 Oxnam, G. Bromley, 46–47 Pantex, 17 Parkhurst, Irving B., 108–109

Peale, Norman Vincent, 50, 89, 90 Pelley, William Dudley, 45 Pentecostal churches, 14, 120, 229n18 People’s Christian Coalition (PCC), 170, 185. See also Sojourners Community People’s Republic of China (PRC) Committee of One Million and, 87, 88–90 evangelicals and, 90–91 International Council of Christian Churches and, 42–43, 76 premillennialism and, 14, 81 U.S. recognition of, 88, 126 Pledge of allegiance, 14, 65 Pocket Testament League, 181 Pollock, Jackson, 98 Polygamy, evangelical attitudes toward, 12, 81 Pornography, evangelical attitudes toward, 12, 173, 187, 189, 190 Postmillennialism definition of, 6 in early America, 136–137, 209n25 kingdom of God and, 19, 39–40 premillennialism and, 11–12, 15, 39–40, 138 social reform and, 11 See also Eschatology; Postmillennialism; Premillennial dispensationalism Posttribulationists, 6 Prayer anticommunism and, 46, 66–67, 84 attitude of young evangelicals toward, 62–64 ‘‘Back to God’’ program and, 67–68 Billy Graham Crusades and, 25, 57–58 Castro and, 109 Christian citizenship and, 61–62, 124–125 civil religion and, 52–53 in Congress, 56–57 in Cuba, 120

index Cuban Missile Crisis and, 117 diplomacy and, 54–55 Eisenhower administration and, 65 evangelicalism and, 5, 50–51, 54, 57–58, 73, 200 gender roles and, 55–56 Jewish prayer, 160, 163 Lord’s Prayer, 21, 33 ‘‘memorial to God’’ proposal, 66 missions and, 61, 78, 87 nation, 49, 51–52, 57, 64, 65, 66, 68 prayer services, 195 prophecy and, 51, 52, 59–60 for public officials, 50, 64–65 Roman Catholic prayers, 107 school prayer, 173, 192, 200 See also Prayer amendment; Prayer breakfasts; Supreme Court prayer cases; World Day of Prayer Prayer amendment, 71–72, 73. See also Prayer Prayer breakfasts foundations of, 50, 51, 54 gender and, 56 International Christian Leadership and, 53, 54 speeches at, 59, 60, 65 See also Prayer Premillennial dispensationalism, 6, 8, 9, 14–15, 22–23 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, 175 anticommunism and, 34–40, 41, 199 atomic bomb and, 28–29, 31–33, 48 in Christian communes, 188 civil rights movement and, 177 Cold War and, 10–12, 16–17, 44, 54, 58, 73, 91, 107, 121 conceptions of time, 17–21, 25–26 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 102–103, 113, 117, 118, 131 ‘‘culture of urgency’’ and, 76, 93, 99, 108 end of the Cold War and, 165–167 interpretations of American society, 32, 200

277

interpretations of Islam, 202 on Israel, 134–136, 143, 145–146, 152–157, 159–160, 162–163, 164, 165, 167–168, 200 Jewish people and, 136–139, 148, 149, 158 Late Great Planet Earth, The, 14, 81 missions and, 76–77, 78–79, 82–84 prayer and, 57, 58–61 science and, 26 trumpet and, 75–76 U.S. policy and, 113–114, 119, 126 worldviews of, 4, 48, 173, 201–204, 210n39 See also Eschatology; Millennialism; Postmillennialism Presbyterian Church (USA), 14, 118, 125, 126 Pretribulationists, 6, 135, 136. See also Rapture Prince, P. V. D., 150 Pro-family movement, 13, 172, 186 Progressivism, 11 Prohibition, 11, 12 Project Look Up, 55, 79 Pro-life movement, 13. See also Abortion, evangelical attitudes toward; Roe v. Wade Prophecy. See Apocalypticism; Eschatology; Millennialism; Postmillennialism; Premillennial dispensationalism Prophecy conferences, 9, 137 Radio Marti, 227n34 Rao, Ch. Devananda, 86 Rapture children’s lessons about, 79 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 118 films on, 82 premillennialists on, 6, 84, 135 signs on, 169 trumpet and, 75 World Day of Prayer and, 39 See also Pretribulationists

278

index

Reagan, Ronald ascendancy of, 13 on the evil empire, 172, 174 Falwell on, 5 on prophecy, 174 religious right and, 174, 186, 196 Refugees Cuban, 119, 128–131 Palestinian, 151, 164 Religious right. See Christian Right Religious Roundtable, 173 Republic of China (ROC), 76, 84 Revelation, book of, 8, 29, 52, 81, 96, 200 Richards, Cliff, 157 ‘‘Roadmap to peace,’’ 168 Robertson, A. Willis, 59 Robertson, Pat, 59, 168 Rockford Institute, 41 Rockwell, Stuart W., 92 Roe v. Wade, 189. See also Abortion, evangelical attitudes toward; Pro-life movement Rosen, Moishe, 138 Russia communism and, 37, 43, 84 in the end-times, 29, 135, 142–143, 145 See also Soviet Union Sallman, Warner, 33 Salt Company Coffee House, 188–189 Santerıá, 130 Saudi Arabia, 160 Schaeffer, Francis, IV, 189 Schaeffer, Franky, 189 School of Anti-Communism, 13, 40 Schuller, Robert, 174 Schwarz, Fred anticommunism of, 40, 41, 59 Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, 86 on Latin America, 120–121 School of Anti-Communism, 13, 40 Science communism and, 40 religion and, 11, 26–31 science fiction and nuclear warfare, 33

Scopes trial, 11, 27–28, 53 Seabrook nuclear plant, 195 Second coming, 6, 39, 136 in children’s lessons, 79 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 117 history and, 19, 20 Israel and, 167 Jews and, 159 marriage vows and, 52 Operation Mongoose and, 113 prayer for, 60 signs of, 30 Six-Day War and, 63 social justice and, 193 Second Coming, Inc., 84, 153–154 Second Red Scare, 13 Separation of church and state anticommunism and, 46, 47 Cold War missionaries and, 92 prayer and, 62 Roman Catholic president and, 105–106 Supreme Court and, 51, 70, 71 U.S. ambassador to Vatican City, 225n10 Service, John, 77 Seventh-Day Adventist Movement, 9, 206n6 Sharon, Ariel, 168 Shea, Beverly, 25 Sheen, Fulton J., 48, 106 Shoemaker, S. M., 62, 90 Sider, Ronald J., 193, 194 Siegel, Seymour, 161 Signs, of the end-times American immorality and, 171, 200 Cold War and, 20, 76, 84, 104 in European Christianity, 8 evangelical left on, 191, 194 Graham on, 25 Late Great Planet Earth, The, 14 missions and, 76 in premillennialism, 35–36, 57, 58–59, 134, 166 Sheen on, 48 Simple lifestyle movement, 193, 194

index Sioux vision quests, 207n9 Six-Day War, 1967, 152 evangelical descriptions of, 165 premillennial interpretations of, 63, 134, 152–153, 154–155, 162, 165 Six Flags Over Texas, 115 Skinner, Tom, 179–180 Smiley, Tavis, 5 Smith, Aaron J., 30 Smith, Bailey, 163 Smith, Chuck, 175 Smith, Gerald L. K., 45, 147 Smith, Joseph, 9 Smith, Oswald, 58–59, 142, 143 Smith, Wilbur, 28, 29, 32, 141, 230n33 Smith-Mundt Act, 94 Social Gospel, 11, 178, 189 Sojourners Community antinuclear movement and, 195–196, 235n8 on foreign policy, 200–201 foundations of, 171 opposition to, 196 prophecy and, 172, 196 on the Vietnam War, 185 See also People’s Christian Coalition (PCC) Sojourners Peace Ministry, 195 Song Meiling, 89 Sorenson, Thomas, 96 South Asia, U.S. Cold War relations with, 17, 229n4 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), 126–127, 163, 184, 185–186 Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 178 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 178 Soviet Union American National Exhibition (Moscow), 97–99 Arab nations and, 151 atheism in, 200 Cold War American perceptions of, 12, 35, 53 as a Cold War threat, 36

279

communism and, 36, 40, 42, 53, 54, 114 Cuba and, 102, 105, 121, 129 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 95–96, 112, 114 dissolution of, 165–166 Eastern Europe and, 66–67 evangelical left and, 172 as an evil empire, 172, 174 people of, 97, 111, 154, 226n27 prophecy and, 143, 201 recognition of Israel, 139–140 religious persecution in, 92, 95 ‘‘signs of the times’’ and, 14 United Nations and, 44 United States and, 4, 30, 128, 145 Voice of America on, 94–95, 96, 224n63 See also Russia Space race, evangelical interpretations of, 30–31 Spanish World Gospel Broadcasting, 129 Spellman, Francis Cardinal, 106 Stalin, Joseph, 111 evangelical attitudes toward, 37, 44, 59 Voice of America on, 94, 96 State Department ‘‘Advancing American Art’’ exhibition, 98 Cuba and, 123, 126–128, 130–131 evangelical missionaries and, 77, 87, 91, 92–93 on Israel, 140 McCarthy and, 41, 94 recognition of the People’s Republic of China, 90–91 Voice of America and, 94, 224n63 Staubach, Roger, 169 Stein v. Oshinsky, 72 Stevenson, Adlai, 114 Stiles, Ezra, 136 Stuart, John Leighton, 77 Student movement, 171, 176 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 176–177, 178 Suez Canal, 140

280

index

Sun and Shadow, 34 Sunday, Billy, 13, 183 Sunday school, 109, 146. See also Children’s Christian educational programs Supreme Court prayer cases, 51, 65–66, 69–73. See also Prayer Taiwan. See Republic of China Tanenbaum, Marc H., 158–159, 160–161, 162, 163 Taylor, Clyde, 91, 92, 108–109, 111–112, 151 Taylor, Myron C., 106 Taylor, Richard K., 193–194 Temple Mount Faithful, 165 Three Minutes to Twelve, 149 Thurman, Samuel, 139–140 Tribulation, 6, 135, 167, 183 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 118 descriptions of, 37 144,000 in, 138 predictions of, 188 pre-tribulation tribulation, 15 Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 171 Truman, Harry S. ambassador to Vatican City, 106, 225n10 ‘‘Campaign of Truth,’’ 36–37, 97 on the Cold War world, 36 on Israel, 139–140, 141 letters to, 44 Voice of America and, 94 Trumpet biblical images of, 61, 75–76, 81, 135 in song, 7, 10 Turner, Nat, 9–10 Tuwaletstiwa, 7 20th Century Reformation Hour, The, 43 26th of July Movement, 102. See also Cuban Revolution United China Relief, 89 United Church of Christ, 116, 125–126, 181 United Jewish Association, 139

United Methodist Church, 14, 126 United Nations Christian far right on, 38, 42, 44, 45, 148 evangelicals on, 39, 143, 152, 154 National Association of Evangelicals on, 32 Palestinian refugees and, 151 People’s Republic of China and, 87, 88, 90 premillennial views on world government and, 19, 45, 144 support for, 39, 139 United Nations Special Session on Disarmament, 195 U.S. Department of State. See State Department U.S. Information Agency (USIA), 92, 94, 95–96, 98 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). See Russia; Soviet Union Velde, Harold H., 16 Vereide, Abraham, 54, 84 Vietnam Christian Service (VNCS), 181 Vietnam War civil rights movement and, 171 consequences for the United States, 173, 175, 201 evangelical left and, 171, 196, 197 evangelicalism and, 4, 12, 172, 173, 175, 180–186, 187, 190, 195, 235n8 religious opposition to, 191–192 Voice of America (VOA) allegations of communist leanings, 94 apocalyptic language of, 96 creation of, 93–94 Cold War, role in, 76, 77, 87, 94–97 Cuban Missile Crisis and, 95–96 religious transmissions on, 91–92, 94–95 Walker, Edwin, 43 Wallis, Jim, 5, 170, 185, 196–197, 203 Walter, Francis E., 38, 98–99 Walvoord, John F., 135

index Warner, George R., 61 Washington, George, 52–53 Wells, Bob, 13 ‘‘When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,’’ 7 White, John Wesley, 60 Wier, Roy W., 64 Williams, Don, 188 Williams, Wheeler, 98–99 Winrod, Gerald B., 45, 147, 148 Winthrop, John, 7 World Council of Churches (WCC) Committee of One Million on, 90 ecumenism and, 19, 126 as the ‘‘false world religion,’’ 144 funds to Cuba and, 127–128 opposition to, 45–46 See also National Council of Churches (NCC) World Day of Prayer, 53 foundations of, 55 gender and, 55–56 kingdom of God and, 39 services, 49, 50, 51, 55, 233n92

281

Voice of America on, 95 See also Prayer World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF), 128 World Gospel Mission, 61 World Vision, 181, 196 Wright, J. Elwin, 145 Young, G. Douglas, 91, 156, 164 Youth for Christ, 13, 196 Youth on the March, 135 Zechariah, book of, 152 Zionism American Christian Palestine Committee and, 147 evangelical support for, 163, 229n18 Jewish attitudes toward, 161 U.S. recognition of Israel and, 138–140, 141 Zionist Jabotinsky Award, 159 Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), 139

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