Swords and Plowshares

American Evangelicals on War, 1937–1973

Timothy D. Padgett

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781683591078
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

Evangelicals are warmongering nationalists—right? Many assume that evangelicals have always shared the ideology and approach of the Moral Majority. But the truth is much more complex. Historically, evangelical rank and file have not held to one position about war; instead, they are strewn across the spectrum from love of peace to glorying in war.Timothy Padgett presents evangelicals in their own words. And in so doing he complicates our common perceptions of evangelical attitudes towards war and peace. Evangelical leaders regularly wrote about the temporal and eternal implications of war from World War II to the Vietnam War. Padgett allows us to see firsthand how these evangelicals actually spoke about war and love of country.Instead of blind ideologues we meet concerned people of conviction struggling to reconcile the demands of a world in turmoil with the rule of the Prince of peace.

1

Introduction

As the United States drew near to war with the Axis in the late 1930s, President Roosevelt and his officials could be excused if they paid evangelical Christians scant attention. With their dwindling influence and their uncontroversial support of the coming war, they would hardly have stood out from the crowd. Thirty-five years later, when President Nixon’s administration was seeking peace with honor in Vietnam, they could count on finding staunch support, and a measure of opposition, from a movement that had defied expectations of a quiet retirement and had emerged as a growing force in the American socio-political landscape. In all the conflicts of that tortuous period, American evangelical leaders responded to their nation’s martial endeavors with a remarkable consistency. The fervency of their faith and the stubbornness with which they held to their theological principles combined with a mandate to engage the watching world and led them to call on their followers and wider society to live out the ideals of the Bible in America’s foreign policy. Whether it was a call to arms or an appeal to lay them down, US evangelical leaders rooted their counsel and criticism in the application of the moral law of God to the contemporary situation.1

In both the popular and academic imaginations, evangelicals are often portrayed in a less than complimentary manner. In many ways evangelicals can find their public image to be entirely unrecognizable to what they see in the people they rub elbows with at their local church. This is hardly a new phenomenon. In the 1920s we see Sinclair Lewis satirizing the gullibility of the religious populace and deriding the character of church leaders in his novel, Elmer Gantry. By the 1960s we have the fictionalized account of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” with Spencer Tracy boldly standing up against religious irrationality in the movie Inherit the Wind. Like some moustache-twisting ne’er-do-well of silent films, the image of the theologically conservative Christian leader has become a standardized villain in movies and on TV. Now, this sort of thing should never be taken very seriously. After all, the 1990s hit show The X-Files once manifested the depth of its research when one of the oh-so-educated special agents referred to the time in the Bible when St. Ignatius practiced teleportation.2 Trying to get an accurate impression of religious reality from movies and TV is like picking up your understanding of physics from cartoons.

However, particularly when discussing their impact on national security, this caustic image of evangelicals has escaped from its confines on the silver screen and has made its way to the pages of books chronicling evangelicalism. Speaking specifically of the role of evangelicals in US foreign policy, some authors have suggested that American Christian conservatives are embarked upon a dangerous crusade to gain socio-political control of the United States and the world. With God on Our Side: One Man’s War against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military suggests nothing short of a cabal threatening the very liberties of ordinary Americans and the peace of the world. The authors argue that evangelicals will embark on a crusade, using the US military to convert the globe by force.

Is it really such a stretch to extrapolate spiritual warfare into the realm of actual bullets and bloodshed? Are we at risk of arming and equipping an army of our own fanatics single-mindedly focused on ushering in the kingdom of God by converting, or killing, every last unbeliever? This isn’t my formulation. The evangelical credo is clear on this point: the gospel must be preached to all the world. Every knee will bow and every tongue confess. That’s a mission of conquest.”3

This is a characterization more likely to be found in the imaginations of evangelicalism’s critics than among evangelicals themselves.

While mischaracterizations like this can and should be dismissed, even those projects which are more nuanced and well-researched can paint evangelicals with overly stark tones. Very often evangelicals are shown as reflexively hawkish on foreign policy, though allowance is sometimes given to the evangelical left as being reflectively dovish. Aside from strict pacifists there are few who would object to the support given by evangelical writers to the American war to defeat Nazism and Japanese militarism.4 The same equanimity was not granted to evangelical advice given during the Vietnam War, even though the substance of their commentary was at the very least analogous during each conflict. The idea in this book is to examine evangelical comments about American wars from the so-called “Good War,” World War II, beginning in the late 1930s up through the so-called “Bad War,” the Vietnam Conflict, coming to an end in the early 1970s and to examine these responses as the manifestation of their ideas in all their complexity.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

During the Second World War theological conservatives in the United States were struggling to reconstitute their shattered place in society. As new leaders began to rise and new organizations began to take shape, some conservatives became more isolationist while others adopted a more interventionist attitude with the creation of institutions such as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942. Others still sought to remain on good terms with both those in the new denominations as well as with so-called mainline groups like the Federal (later, National) Council of Churches. Having lost the denominational battles of the previous decades, they could no longer rely upon institutions or access they once had as these had been largely appropriated by the mainline Protestants.5

While many mainline denominations opposed any kind of war on the principle that it was incompatible with a Christian view of the world,6 many evangelicals supported America’s entry into the Second World War. In fact part of the impetus toward the creation of the NAE came from the desire to counter the mainline monopoly on chaplaincy in the armed forces.7 Evangelical periodicals sought to bring their readers around to their viewpoints on the building conflagration. Throughout the conflict both the Fascism of America’s European enemies and the militarism of its Japanese foe were roundly condemned, even as qualifying remarks were made warning against overzealousness in Christians’ support for the Allies or expectation of divine favor. For example, Moody Monthly warned against both a complacent attitude toward Allied sins and a hateful stance toward Axis people. The end of the war brought unambiguous relief and rejoicing which was, nonetheless, tempered by concern over the new potential of atomic warfare.8

For a brief period the United States seemed poised to revert to its prior isolationist stance as its massive wartime armed forces were scaled back rapidly, but this atavism came to an end in short order with the increased tensions of the Cold War. Having seen the greater part of the Western world gobbled up by Nazism before an effective response could be mounted, America and its allies went back to a wartime footing to challenge the perceived new threat posed by the Soviet Communism ruling from central Germany to the Bering Sea. Particularly after the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and its attendant loss of this longstanding Christian missions field, evangelicals supported the new US assertiveness, seeing in Communism the single greatest threat to human dignity and religious liberty in the world. And this support was no longer that of a voice crying in the cultural wilderness. With new inspiration, such as Carl Henry’s Uneasy Conscience9 and new prominence, coming off Billy Graham’s Crusades, evangelicals were returning from exile and engaging the world with a renewed vigor.

Though not fans of one another, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower issued a uniform call highlighting the shared goals of the United States and religion in the early days of the Cold War.10 In slightly different ways each president sought to unite the religious bodies of the nation and the world in a common cause against their common enemy, the Communist Bloc. At the same time many programs were introduced to the US military encouraging religious observance and ethical standards. Although these programs initially received a great deal of support from mainline denominations, evangelicals were less impressed with what they saw as syncretistic calls for general religion over against a genuine, conversion-centered biblical orthodoxy. They saw Communism as a deadly enemy, and preached and wrote accordingly, but they sometimes had little stomach for any nebulous Judeo-Christianity, devoid of the clear convictions which make political cooperation run less smoothly.

Throughout the 1950s evangelicals continued their backing of the American Cold War effort, but they occasionally rebuked the government, not for overly aggressive initiatives but for inadequate reactions to Communist moves. The prospect of an amicable truce in Korea and a passive response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary resulted in admonitions from evangelical leaders across the movement. The newly formed evangelical organ, Christianity Today (CT), gave regular attention to the dangers of Communism, both nationally and internationally, with articles by theologians as well as by government officials such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and US Army General William K. Harrison. However, as the decade came to a close, changes began to emerge. The government began to move away from the religious emphases found in the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, while the mainline denominations tried to strike what they considered a “balanced” pose between the Communist East and Capitalist West, leaving evangelicals as an ever more important constituency in support of US policies. Perhaps most importantly for the future of evangelical responses to American moves, the United States was increasingly involved in reconstituting the Western response to the French defeat in Vietnam.

The decade of the 1960s was bracketed by two psychically scarring geopolitical events, with the US and USSR dancing on the edge of a nuclear apocalypse with 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis and pyrrhic American victory in 1968’s Tet Offensive. The heady years of the Space Race brought with them the development of weapon systems capable of raining atomic devastation anywhere and anytime. While much of American elite culture and the mainline Protestant establishment seemingly looked with equanimity on the respective merits of Western liberal democracy and Eastern Communist dictatorships, evangelicals, on the whole, continued to look at the United States as a contingent good, not at all perfect, but certainly the better choice, given the totalitarian alternative. Seeing Communism as an imminent danger to humanity as a whole, evangelicals preached against any slackening of resolve in combating it.

The year 1973 was a time of great change, both for the US military and for evangelicalism. Though the war would continue for the next two years, it was at this time that came the official end of combat operations by American forces in Vietnam. This event would send the military and its supporters into a time of soul searching, and the “Vietnam Syndrome” would not be purged until the Gulf War nearly twenty years later. This time also saw the rise of both the evangelical left as well as the first stirrings of the religious right. Both sides saw themselves as calling their country to the priorities of the Bible, although for the one it was forward to principles so far ignored and for the other it was back to a righteousness which had been lost.

LITERATURE REVIEW

In the wake of the Cold War, there were those, such as Francis Fukuyama, who predicted an “end of history” now that the political and economic liberalism of the West had triumphed over its Communist foes. It seemed the issue had been settled, and now all that was left was to allow the unstoppable forces of secularization, democracy, and rationality to shake out the remaining difficult areas, as the world entered a new stage of cooperation and left competition in the past. Advocates of this idea were caught unawares at the dawn of the twenty-first century when the United States, now the world’s reigning hyperpower, elected to its presidency, George W. Bush, a man expressing views of the world, morality, and spirituality with a vocabulary starkly different from post-religious lexicon many had come to expect. This event was followed hard upon by the traumatic 9/11 attacks on the centers of global economic and military power, an assault inflicted by Al-Qaeda, a radical Islamic group. Global conflict, it seemed, was not at an end, and it was being driven by religious motivations entirely unfamiliar to enlightened elites of the West. Into this context, and even before, many new works were produced at the popular and academic level seeking to explain, and sometimes explain away, the significance of theological conservatives in reference to the issues of national security and international relations.

In his work, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion, T. Jeremy Gunn suggests that Christianity was commandeered by political and business leaders. Gunn sees the church leaders as willingly adopting a governmental theism, which allowed for no criticism of United States policy. Governmental theism is analogous in many ways to the more commonly used civil religion with the exception that Gunn here emphasizes the way the US government and many religious authorities encouraged a conflation of government and religion.11

In somewhat of a contrast Raymond Haberski argues that civil religion serves a generally constructive role in which the idea, “God,” if not the actual person, stands over against any American pretension of omniscience or moral purity. This is an interesting idea in and of itself, standing, as it does, in opposition to Gunn’s study in which civil religion or governmental theism connote a shallow faith created by the powerful. Haberski warns that a danger for evangelicals has to do with their failure to think critically. For example he uses the word “Manichean” repeatedly to describe the way evangelicals saw the global situation as a stark choice between the forces of good, the United State...