Religion and the Cold War

A Global Perspective

Philip E. Muehlenbeck

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780826518538, 9780826518521
• eBook ISBN: 9780826518545
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The lines of armed conflict, and the catastrophic perils they portended, were shaped with shocking clarity in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Less clear is the role religious ideology played in the conflicts that defined the Cold War era. All too often, beliefs held sacred by some became tools to motivate action or create friction. In Religion and the Cold War, Philip Muehlenbeck assembles an international team of specialists to explore how religion informed the ideological and military clashes across the globe in the second half of the twentieth century.

Students and scholars will find in this volume a level of comprehensiveness rarely achieved in Cold War studies. Each chapter reveals that the power and influence of ideas are just as important as military might in the struggles between superpowersand that few ideas, then as now, carry as much force as religious ideology. As Muehlenbeck and his contributors demonstrate, no area of the world, and no religious tenet, was safe from the manipulations of a powerful set of players focused solely on their own sphere of influence.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Religious Cold War
• 1. An Early Attempt to Rip the Iron Curtain: The Pomak Question, 1945-1947
• 2. The Western Allies, German Churches, and the Emerging Cold War in Germany, 1948-1952
• 3. From Sermon to Strategy: Religious Influence on the Formation and Implementation of US Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War
• 4. Hewlett Johnson: Britain's Red Dean and the Cold War
• 5. Rising to the Occasion: The Role of American Missionaries and Korean Pastors in Resisting Communism throughout the Korean War
• 6. The Campaign of Truth Program: US Propaganda in Iraq during the Early 1950s
• 7. Religion and Cold War Politics in Ethiopia
• 8. Soviet Policies toward Islam: Domestic and International Considerations
• 9. Bosnian Muslims during the Cold War: Their Identity between Domestic and Foreign Policies
• 10. Religion, Power, and Legitimacy in Ngo Dinh Diem's Republic of Vietnam
• 11. Brazil: Nation and Churches during the Cold War
• 12. Service with Body and Soul: The Institutionalized Atheism of the Security Service Officers in Communist Poland, 1944-1989
• 13. Political Islam, the Jamaat-e-Islami, and Pakistan's Role in the Afghan-Soviet War, 1979-1988
• Contributors
• Index