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Renewed debate over the direction of U.S. foreign policy has focused on several contending schools of political thought: Wilsonian idealists, Kissinger realists, liberal interventionists, and the neo-conservatives. Though the debate is important in that it takes big ideas seriously, there is a hollow quality to much of it: a remarkable inattention to the role of religious belief in the formation and execution of public policy.
This problem has become institutionalized in our foreign policy enclaves. In college classrooms, textbooks such as American Foreign Policy Since World War II somehow manage to discuss the Cold War without mentioning the stark religious divide between atheistic communism and the American democratic creed. Henry Kissinger, the quintessential Cold War realist, produced an 800-page tome, Diplomacy, that fails to reference religion in its index. The U.S. State Department still functions largely as though the First Amendment precluded the promotion of America's greatest contribution to democratic government, namely, freedom of conscience and religion. It's as if the great forces moving the hearts of men and nations were indifferent to their deepest appetites and aspirations.
With the publication of William Inboden's Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment, the conventional, secular approach to political science and public policy seems conspicuously deficient. We learn, for example, that in early 1951 the State Department held a two-day conference with Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and other national figures to help the United States develop an "ideological offensive against international communism." This was the era of the Truman doctrine, the U.S. policy to contain Soviet communism, and the administration understood that a political theology defined the conflict between the two superpowers. That meant the government needed all hands on deck—yes, even the hands of ministers and theologians, of whatever faith. "I share your apprehension over the threat to Christian civilization," Truman wrote to Pope Pius XII in an effort to court domestic Catholic support for his policies. "All who cherish Christian and democratic institutions should unite against the common enemy. That enemy is the Soviet Union, which would substitute the Marxist doctrine of atheistic communism for Revelation." The president went on to describe his Marshall Plan, the U.S. program to rescue postwar Europe from economic ruin, in frankly religious terms.
Part of what makes Inboden's book so necessary and so rewarding (full disclosure: the author is a friend) is that he combines the skills of an intellectual historian with a practitioner's awareness of the limits of converting ideas into policies. After getting his PhD in history from Yale, Inboden served in the State Department in the Office of International Religious Freedom and then held a senior post on the National Security Council in the Bush White House. Such sobering experiences might have produced a work that was cynical or hostile to faith. Instead, the author treats religion on its own terms—intelligently, even sympathetically, but without illusions about its capacity for mischief.
This scholarly approach is especially important for the period under consideration, the early phase of the Cold War. For it was the Truman Administration, Inboden says, that designed a "systematic effort by the U.S. government to employ religion as an ideological weapon in the effort to contain Soviet communism." That program continued, unabated, under Dwight D. Eisenhower, despite his personal disdain for his predecessor. What they shared, it seems, was a set of convictions about the bedrock importance of religion to American democracy: the biblical roots of human rights, the spiritual (not merely political) evil of atheistic communism, and the divine mission of America in the world.
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