Review: Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment By William Inboden

 By Paul Fine - Posted at The Heidelblog:

Published August 29, 2024

In early July 2024, at the fourth annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington D.C., Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Doug Wilson, Pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, ID, met to discuss Christian nationalism in America.1 During a panel, the two agreed that the state should maximize its Christian commitments as a way of addressing the crisis of morality and meaning in American. Implicit in their discussion is the claim that Christianity provides the vehicle through which society may be restored to a more pristine state. Yet this is not a novel impulse, as William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment demonstrates. This work recounts the efforts of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to revive America’s flagging spirituality and to use religion as a weapon against Soviet Communism in the 1950s, and it provides a helpful lens to better understand the modern Christian nationalist vision.

At the time of its publication in 2008, Religion and American Foreign Policy was the most comprehensive study of the religious aspects of U.S. foreign policy in the late 1940s and 1950s. This well-written contribution—a winner of the Brewer Prize for outstanding work on the history of Christianity—is still a must-read for anyone seeking to understand what I like to refer to as America’s “Third Great Awakening” during the early years of the Cold War.2 The prose and pace of the book are excellent, and the outline is easy to follow. It argues that religion functioned as both a cause and an instrument in the developing stages of the post-war conflict. Inboden successfully defends his thesis by demonstrating the centrality of religious rhetoric and belief in both the private and public spheres of post-war America.

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