Religion and the Historical Profession
“Several scholars respond to the news that the proportion of historians who specialize in religion continues to climb, and to reflect on both the causes and the significance of of this distinct, and now confirmed, trend in historical studies.” The respondents are Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, John Schmalzbauer, Jonathan Sheehan, and Grant Wacker.

Brodie, Fawn. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1971. 499 pages. ISBN: 0394469674.

Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Knopf, 2005. 740 pages. ISBN: 1400042704.

As part of a reading list to teach me about how biographies are written, I recently read two noted biographies about Joseph Smith. The two biographies were Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) and Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). Joseph Smith was, of course, a nineteenth century visionary, author or translator of the Book of Mormon, and the founder of the Latter Day Saints. Any historian who handles Smith must deal with the supernatural occurrences and claims that pervaded his life. The question I put to myself as I was reading was this: How should a historian treat supernatural? How should a historian write about alleged visions and miracles and prophecies?

Like many historians of religion, Brodie and Bushman have personal connections to their subject. Fawn Brodie was born into the LDS church as the daughter of a bishop and the niece of an apostle and president. While in graduate school at the University of Chicago, she lost her faith. She then wrote her critical biography of Smith, for which the LDS Church excommunicated her. Richard Bushman, on the other hand, is a professional historian who has retained his Mormon faith. Many of Bushman’s works (one of which won the Bancroft prize) deal with early American history, but his biography of Smith has received perhaps the widest discussion.

Because of their different conclusions on Mormonism, Brodie and Bushman wrote very different biographies of Joseph Smith. These differences might be summed up in the way they treat Smith’s visions. Brodie plainly thinks that Smith was a charlatan and a hoax. She is almost mean-spirited in the way that she goes about debunking Smith and the Book of Mormon. I wished at times that she would simply report what Smith did or said, rather than taxing my patience by repeatedly explaining the obvious. The effect is to make Smith a flat character. In Brodie’s telling, he is always the adolescent trickster with scarcely any room to develop into a man who believed his own message.

Bushman, on the other hand, finds believable most, if not all, of what Smith claimed. Consequently, he writes as if Moroni had actually appeared to Smith, as if he had actually translated the golden plates, and if he had actually received revelations. This is not so problematic; as Bushman points out in his preface, a historian can scarcely be expected to add the words alleged or purportedly before every such statement. More problematic is the way Bushman structures his materials. For example, Bushman reports very little about Smith’s treasure seeking until after he discovers the golden plates. The effect, at least to this reader, was that Bushman presented a Joseph Smith whose mind or inner life was much more believable than Brodie’s, at the expense of leaving what actually happened much less certain.

As for style, both Brodie and Bushman have written good biographies, though neither is the summit of the biographer’s art. Brodie’s is much the better story. Where Bushman’s narrative is often interrupted by tedious justifications of Smith, Brodie’s book is well-crafted with an unswerving narrative. Bushman’s biography, though, is far better at explaining Joseph Smith’s teachings. One can read Brodie’s nearly five hundred pages and learn surprisingly little about what Smith thought or taught. The differences in style between Brodie and Bushman is not simply a result of the commonly invoked dichotomy between narration and explanation. Rather, the difference is due at least in part to the way they treat the supernatural. Brodie is able to dismiss Smith’s experiences as hoaxes and his teaching as nonsense, and so she can get on with her story. Bushman is obligated both to treat them as genuine and to provide scholarly explanations, so he sometimes gets bogged down in justifications.

My sympathies lie with both authors. Like Brodie, I have not a shred of faith in what Joseph Smith taught, and so I find her narrative of Smith’s life more compelling than Bushman’s. But like Bushman, I am a believing historian who writes about the history of religion and faith. As such, I would like to think it is possible to write about religious history, even supernatural occurrences, in a way that is different from unbelievers but that is still rigorously scholarly. Despite their admirable work, I think that neither Brodie nor Bushman has quite succeeded in the way they treat the supernatural.

What, then, is the proper way for a historian to handle visions and dreams and prophecies? The extreme of skepticism assumes there is nothing supernatural. The extreme of credulity treats such occurrences uncritically. My method, which is admittedly ad hoc, strikes what I hope is a balance between those extremes. I frankly distinguish between what I believe is supernatural and what I believe is not, leaving room for what is doubtful. After all, not every spiritual claim is true, and life is too short to give every opinion an equal hearing. But at the same time, I try to treat all religious beliefs as genuinely held, in order to give them their due influence in the lives of those who hold them.

Is there a better way?

James Kurth, a retired political scientist from Swarthmore College, is perhaps best known for his variation on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. In the early ’90s Huntington proposed that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of a global contest between people groups and nations that would be predicated upon cultural and religious cleavages. Huntington’s idea became de rigueur with the rise of global Islamic terrorism. But whereas Huntington’s clash was a matter for foreign policy, Kurth believed that the greatest crisis would surface in domestic affairs as a battle between liberal multiculturalism and the Judeo-Christian inflected Western tradition.

Significantly, Kurth rooted both opposing streams of American culture in America’s Protestant heritage. As an evangelical (he’s a deacon at Proclamation Presbyterian Church pastored by Peter Lillback, President of Westminster Theological Seminary), Kurth argues that theologically liberal Protestantism has morphed into a psuedo-religious secular multiculturalism. This is the “Protestant Deformation.”

Kurth begins by positing that the anti-hierarchical and anti-communitarian emphases of the Protestant Reformation bled over into the secular realm. Thus American Protestants were historically supporters of free markets and liberal democracy, secular corollaries to religious individualism and egalitarianism.

But over time, these emphases changed. Kurth lists six stages of Protestant declension: salvation by grace, grace evidenced through good works, salvation by works, the Unitarian Transformation, the American Creed, and universal human rights. Historic Protestantism believed that eternal salvation was ensured by grace alone, God’s unmerited favor towards desperate sinners. But as Protestant communities grew, it became hard to distinguish the nonbelievers from the elect. So, as observed by Max Weber, works became a litmus test for the saved community.

Eventually, the theological concept of grace lost favor in some Protestant circles, creating a de facto belief in salvation by works. This works-based theology transformed into Unitarianism, a deemphasis of the person and work of Jesus Christ. A personal savior had been replaced by a distant Supreme Being. Over time, even that abstract, remote idea of god was relinquished, creating the secular American Creed. This Creed was no longer distinctly Protestant, but “it was clearly the product of a Protestant culture and was a sort of secularized version of Protestantism.” Finally, the American Creed became universalized and reformulated as a belief in human rights.

Kurth’s “Protestant Deformation” is a pretty convincing explanation of the development of American civil religion from an evangelical perspective. It also speaks to historians in a wide variety of fields, like diplomatic, religious, and political history.

Do you find the “Protestant Deformation” convincing? Why or why not?

Bonus: I particularly like this article by Kurth. I sympathize with his politics, including his opposition to the idea of American exceptionalism and his isolationism. I suspect that he is a fellow confessional libertarian in the mold of Gresham Machen.

Lorenzo Dow

In the antebellum United States, more children were named after Lorenzo Dow than any other person. It is likely that more people heard Dow speak in person than any one else. His writings were so widely read and reprinted that Dow made a small fortune. In an age known for religious eccentricity, Dow could give any eccentric a run for his money. But despite his eccentricities, or because of them, Dow was a representative of American religion after the Revolution—a prophet of democracy. [1]

Dow was a child of the Revolution, born in Connecticut in 1777. He was converted in his early teens and began itinerant preaching when he was nineteen. Dow was frequently at odds with the Methodist conferences and bishops that were the authorities within the denomination. At first his age, and soon his idiosyncratic preaching and prophet-like personality made other Methodist ministers reluctant to support Dow. They licensed Dow to preach, but he was never ordained. In the 1790s and especially in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Dow preached at camp meetings throughout the United States, including some of the western territories. He also made three trips to Great Britain, in 1798–1801, in 1805–1807, and in 1818–1820. Dow cultivated his reputation as an American John the Baptist. He wore disheveled clothes, long hair, and a beard. In his preaching, he used the types of antics that are normally associated with later evangelists like Billy Sunday.[2]

If Dow was a preacher of the gospel, he was also a preacher of American democracy. Democracy was the root of Dow’s beliefs about how people obtain salvation. Dow rejected the Calvinism of his upbringing. Salvation, he preached, was not a matter of God’s election but of man’s choice to choose or reject Christ. Nor could salvation be judged by church authorities, but only by the immediate apprehension of the believer. Dow was not unique in these doctrines, for many Christians contemporary with him were moving away from Calvinism towards the revivalism epitomized by Charles Grandison Finney a few decades later. What made Dow important was that he explicitly connected this change in preaching salvation to the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy: “If all men are ‘BORN EQUAL,’ and endowed with unalienable RIGHTS by their CREATOR, in the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—then there can be no just reason, as a cause, why he may or should not think, and judge, and act for himself in matters of religion, opinion, and private judgment.” Dow was clear that politics were driving his theology. [3]

The second way in which Dow mixed democracy and religion was by his constant resistance against ecclesiastical authority. Some of this resistance must be attributed to Dow’s naturally contrary personality. But much of it was principled, as can be seen in his tract on “Strictures on Church Government.” In that tract, Dow rejected the notion that episcopal succession was the source of Methodist authority. That argument justified Anglicans, or even the tyrannical Catholics, better than it justified Methodists. Rather, Dow argued, the only legitimate authority for the church was the sovereignty of the people. And Dow was willing to take the principle of democratic egalitarianism much farther than most contemporaries, even to include other races. The main example that Dow used to justify his ideas of church government was the case of Richard Allen, a black laymen who had founded his own Methodist church, of which he eventually became a bishop. Even Dow’s editor, though reluctantly admitting that Dow was too sharp in his opinions on church government, thought that tract and others “evince a mind deeply imbued with the spirit of Democracy.”[4]

The key to Dow’s experience were the visions and dreams that he saw throughout his life. These visions guided Dow’s decisions and informed his theology. For example, Dow had two visions of John Wesley that led to his conversion and his call to preach. Perhaps visions are key to more than just Dow’s experience. Historians have noted that democratized religion in the United States was at once extraordinarily open and extraordinarily authoritarian. People were free to pick the denomination, sect, or clergyman of their choice, and they exercised that freedom frequently. Yet people tended to pick leaders who were authoritarian. Christian democracy was not so much inside any particular church as it was among the churches. Perhaps visions and dreams are part of the explanation for this paradox. [5]

The Protestant teaching that every person could read the Bible for himself can lead to egalitarianism in religion. If people are permitted to understand God’s word for themselves, and to correct their ministers from the Bible, then the Bible has a leveling effect. Reading the Bible can also lead to religious mobility, as laymen look for a church that matches their interpretation, or else found their own. An example contemporary with Dow are the Christians and Disciples of Christ of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone, who founded new denominations to return to the primitive Christianity of the Bible. Visions and dreams, though, can have a more complex effect. In Dow’s case, visions convinced him to disregard the authority of the Methodist bishops and conferences, and thus to influence Methodism towards increased openness. But visions also gave Dow the authority to preach in a way that was right in Dow’s own eyes. Those visions were necessarily anti-democratic, because they were accessible only to Dow and not to his followers, and because visions are so intensely personal that they are nonnegotiable. It is not much of a leap from Dow’s visions to those of other innovative but authoritarian religious leaders of the same period. For example, both Joseph Smith and Robert Matthews (later Matthias) claimed visions as their basis for establishing very authoritarian sects. [6]

Though Dow was the prophet of American democracy, Dow also typifies the international characteristic of evangelicalism in early America. Dow had visions of John Wesley at both his conversion and his call to preach. He traveled to Ireland and England first for his health and then to preach, where he made connections with British Methodists and also Quakers. Like many revivalists, from George Whitefield to D. L. Moody to Billy Graham, Dow made his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Dow was not necessarily well-received in Britain, for the American camp meeting style was far less appealing to British Christians than, say, Moody’s Victorian morality and sentimentality would be a half-century later, but Dow spent nearly as much time preaching in Britain as he did America. Perhaps the most important clue to Dow’s transatlantic identity is the curious term that Dow chose for himself, “Cosmopolite.” This term often stands in for Dow’s name, as in the title of Dow’s published journal, The History of Cosmopolite; Or, Lorenzo’s Journal. Dow titled one particularly bizarre segment of his journal “A Short Account of ‘Eccentric Cosmopolite.’” These sections are clearly autobiographical, but Dow writes about himself in the third person without using his name. The meaning of the term cosmopolite—“citizen of the world”—is plain enough, but precisely what Dow meant by it is more difficult to know. Perhaps Dow meant that though he was a citizen of the United States and an advocate for its democracy, yet he was not bound by the confines of one nation. Neither Methodism nor the United States could hold Dow, though he typified them both. [7]

1. The assertion about children being named after Dow is taken from Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 281, n.27. There is no recent biography of Lorenzo Dow. The best secondary sources on his life are American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo”; Charles Coleman Sellers, Lorenzo Dow, the Bearer of the Word (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1928); Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. Dow also appears in Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 610. This paper is drawn from those sources, and from a collection of Dow’s works, Lorenzo Dow, History of Cosmopolite; or The Four Volumes of Lorenzo’s Journal, Concentrated in One: Containing His Experience and Travels, from Childhood to 1815, Being Upwards of Thirty-Seven Years. Also, His Polemical Writings . . ., 6th ed. (Wheeling, Virginia, 1849).
2. American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo”; Dow, History of Cosmopolite.
3. Quoted in American National Biography, s.v. “Dow, Lorenzo.”
4. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, v, 543-58.
5. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, 10, 27-28.
6. An account of Campbell, Stone, and Smith can be found in Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). For Matthews, see Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
7. Dow, History of Cosmopolite, 10, 27-28, 78-94, 253-303. The OED reports that the term cosmopolite was revived in the nineteenth century “and often contrasted with patriot, and so either reproachful or complimentary”; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “cosmopolite.” Two works which stress the international aspects of evangelicalism in this period are Mark A. Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys, A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements, and Ideas in the English-speaking World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003); John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers, and Finney, A History of Evangelicalism: People, Movements, and Ideas in the English-speaking World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007).

While reading William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy, I came across several sentences that caught my eye. Inboden dedicated a chapter of his book to a discussion of US Senator H. Alexander Smith, a prominent anti-Communist and ardent prayer warrior. Inboden was interested in Smith’s epistemology, the source of his certainty that God had told him how to fight the Cold War. The senator spent much time each day in prayer asking for divine intervention in his own personal struggles as well as for guidance in Congress. Thankfully, Smith journaled about his prayer life. Representative of the quotes that Inboden included was Smith’s prayer asking God to “make me true to thine principles which are true and guided by thee and not those which are merely expedient or vote-getting.” Commendable, but not extraordinary.

But these quotations grabbed my attention: “God is with me and will guide me or I will make a failure in a big [illegible]. Of course God will not fail me but I must be consecrated” (Inboden 196).

A little bit later: ‘“I have had bad days because I am tired and I need God. I have been smoking my pipe which I do enjoy, but I wonder if it has meant that I am not getting that feeling of guidance that I so much need.” A couple of months later he complained of “not being up to my normal spiritual vigor” and noted “it comes to me to make an experiment: Does my smoking keep me from God’s guidance? I will try for this week and see what the effect is” (Inboden 196).

Where had I heard language like this before? Boom, it suddenly hit me…these are Keswickian ideas!

Several months ago I read an article-length version of Andy Naselli’s dissertation on Keswick theology. Andy is a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and D. A. Carson’s research assistant. (I heartily recommend the article for anyone interested in Protestant theology or modern church history; indeed, I myself was astounded at the influence of Keswickian thought on my own upbringing.)

In summary, Keswick theologians taught that there were three categories of people: unbelievers (those who had not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior), carnal Christians (those who were saved, but who had not defeated their sinful natures), and consecrated Christians (those who had surrendered known sin to God and acknowledged Christ as Lord of their life). It is the distinction between carnal and consecrated Christians that concerns us here.

Keswickians are often associated with the phrase, “Let go, and let God.” Carnal Christians needed to exercise their free will by confessing sin in an act of consecration. This was the letting go. The Spirit of God would then sanctify the believer, counteracting their sin nature. Now these consecrated Christians were empowered for service, confident that they were in the center of God’s will.

Logically following from this concept of consecration was the Keswickian’s constant search for known sin. If sin had not been discovered and confessed, then God could not consecrate that believer. So Keswickians earnestly dredged their souls looking for sins that might be holding them back .

But, like all believers, Keswickians often struggled with doubts and feelings of inadequacy. Keswickians interpreted these struggles as signs of unconfessed sin in their lives. They knew something was wrong, and they knew it wasn’t God’s fault, so they urgently looked for as yet unconfessed sins.

To use Senator Smith’s smoking as an example of Keswickian thought in action, the Senator noticed a lack of “normal spiritual vigor.” This indicated to him that some specific, unconfessed sin must be separating him God’s guidance. Smith believed that he needed to find the sin responsible for his condition, confess it, and then God would consecrate him.

Inboden describes Smith’s thought process this way: “Nothing seems to have bothered Smith more than the feeling that he might be alienated from divine counsel and comfort, and when such feelings overtook him he tried frantically to diagnose the cause, be it smoking or stress or political complications” (Inboden 197).

Speaking more broadly, I believe that Smith frequent mood swings – described by Inboden as “periodic bouts of guilt and self-doubt” (Inboden 197) – fit into a pattern of behavior that Naselli diagnoses as common among Keswickians. When the consecrated believer is on an emotional high following their confession of sin, they are empowered by the Spirit and woe be to all who might question their authority or opinions. But when the cycle reverses, depression is the understandable result of frantically searching for any sin that might be debilitating the Spirit’s work.

Thus it is significant that Inboden, who never mentions Keswick theology, writes, “Alternatively triumphant and timid, Smith saw himself playing the part of a prophet or even an oracle. The content of the message originated with God, not with him, and yet Smith had to maintain a certain standard of personal piety in order to hear and communicate this divine mandate.” (It is easy to see the interplay between Pentecostalism and Keswick theology. Pentecostals and Keswickians alike emphasize the work of the Spirit and speak of the Spirit’s empowerment as an event that is distinct from justification.)

So what, you ask? H. Alexander Smith spoke like a Keswickian. Big deal. Paul, how do you even know that Smith got these ideas from Keswick theology, that the overlap of ideas is not just a coincidence?

Here’s where it gets good. H. Alexander Smith was an adherent of a group called Moral Re-Armament (MRA, also known as “the Oxford Group”). Although it sounds more like a think tank than a religious group, MRA was founded by Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister. Buchman hoped that the group’s international network of politicians and businessmen would help usher in God’s kingdom on earth. MRA’s members were encouraged to spend time praying and listening to God’s direct commands (Inboden 192).

So what is the connection between MRA and Keswick theology? Frank Buchman was consecrated at the 1908 Keswick Convention. He wrote after hearing Jessie Penn-Lewis speak, “I don’t know how you explain it, I can only tell you I sat there and realized how my sin, my pride, my selfishness and my ill-will, had eclipsed me from God in Christ…. I was the centre of my own life. That big “I” had to be crossed out. I saw my resentments against those men standing out like tombstones in my heart. I asked God to change me and He told me to put things right with them. It produced in me a vibrant feeling, as though a strong current of life had suddenly been poured into me and afterwards a dazed sense of a great spiritual shaking-up.”

Buchman then went to work for the YMCA and was influenced by another prominent Keswickian, Baptist preacher F. B. Meyer. Meyer encouraged Buchman to spend more time each day opening himself up to the Spirit of God. Doing so would allow God to guide Buchman. Buchman followed Meyer’s advice and eventually began to encourage other men to do likewise. It was from these contacts that Buchman eventually formed MRA, which subsequently shaped H. Alexander Smith’s theology.

So why does all this stuff about Smith, Buchman, MRA, and Keswick matter? For political historians it shows the real world consequences of religious belief. Smith’s beliefs shaped his views of American foreign policy during the Cold War. Ideology is not just a cover for national self-interest.

For religious historians it is a reminder that ideas are messy. We should not think of theology as merely a formal system of doctrines. Theology can influence movements and people not normally associated with the theology proper.

For me it is a reminder to keep my eyes pealed no matter what I’m reading. I thought I was just reading a book about the influence of religion on American foreign policy makers during the Cold War. I had no clue that I’d end up learning about Keswick theology and MRA!

PS –Fun tidbit: an offshoot of “the Oxford Group” is Alcoholic’s Anonymous.

PPS – Ironically, D. A. Carson is speaking at next year’s Keswick Convention. Good thing that the organizers don’t know what Carson’s student has been up to! ;-)

This Friday I was reading Timothy Dwight’s papers at Yale. While I was there, Kellen Funk took me to the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven. Buried there are several ministers noteworthy in American religious history: Lyman Beecher, Naphtali Daggett, Timothy Dwight, Jedidiah Morse, Ezra Stiles, and Nathaniel Taylor.

• Pope’s Day in Colonial Boston

  In colonial America, November 5 used to be celebrated as Pope’s Day, an American version of Guy Fawke’s Day. This anti-Catholic holiday is remembered at both the Massachusetts Historical Society’s blog and the Boston Historical Society’s online exhibit.

• Q&A with Joel Carpenter

  An interview with Joel Carpenter, a professor of history at Calvin College and historian of religion, about being a Christian in graduate school. From the Conference on Faith and History.

• New Volume in the Joseph Smith Papers

  A new volume in the Joseph Smith papers has been published: The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations. John G. Turner reviews that volume at Religion in American History.

• Gordon-Conwell hosts "Renewing the Evangelical Mission"
  Gordon-Conwell hosts “Renewing the Evangelical Mission”:

  Evangelicals clash over the future path of evangelicalism.

• Mormonism’s Black Issues

  “While many Mormons would like to forget the Church’s history of discrimination against blacks, an Apostle’s recent statements comparing the post-Proposition 8 Mormon backlash to the Civil Rights-era harassment of black voters have brought that painful past back into the spotlight.” From Religion Dispatches.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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