Copyright National Affairs, Inc.  
The National Interest
1998 SUMMER
LENGTH: 9004 words

HEADLINE: Religion and American Foreign Policy: The Story of a Complex Relationship

BYLINE: Leo Ribuffo

BODY:
Congressional consideration of the Freedom from Religious Persecution bill introduced by Representative Frank Wolf and Senator Arlen Specter has precipitated a small-scale debate about a little-studied subject: the connection between American religion and foreign relations. If passed, the Wolf-Specter bill will establish an office in the State Department to monitor religious persecution and withdraw "non-humanitarian" aid from countries that fail to meet our standards. Even in the absence of such an office, many Americans have always been concerned about religious freedom abroad and the State Department has intermittently protested persecution since the early days of the republic. The debate on the bill would be enhanced by a historical perspective.

The historical connection between American religion and foreign relations may be explored on four levels. First, to what extent and in what ways have religious beliefs contributed to the widely shared but amorphous assumption that the United States is an exceptional nation with a unique role in the world? Second, to what extent have religious "interest groups" at home and religious issues abroad influenced government foreign policies? Third, to what extent and in what ways have serious religious ideas--including esoteric theological doctrines--affected those interest groups, as well as important international relations theorists and policymakers? Finally, to what extent have foreign involvements affected the domestic religious scene?

Not the least of our conceptual problems is that everyone involved in the contemporary "culture war" homogenizes this country's religious history in one way or another. Whereas the Left tends to view white Protestants as an undifferentiated mass, the center and Right optimistically postulate an ecumenical "Judeo-Christian tradition." That term itself only began to enter our lexicon in the 1940s, when many citizens still routinely referred to "Christian Americanism" or even "Protestant Americanism." Similarly, the label "fundamentalist", now applied promiscuously to groups from Tulsa to Tehran, was coined by a Baptist editor in 1920 to describe one branch of theologically conservative Protestantism.

Although two recent presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, liked to underscore American uniqueness by citing Puritan John Winthrop's admonition to build a "city upon a hill", the relationship between Reformation-era Protestantism and the American sense of mission has never been simple. Almost all white residents of the thirteen colonies on the eve of independence thought Protestantism superior to Catholicism. Even so, Congregationalists and Quakers defined their respective worldly missions very differently. The large German pietist population paid slight attention to inspiring the wider world. Instead of salvation, a small Enlightenment elite spoke of "virtue" in an idiom both cosmopolitan and classical. Especially in these circles, there were doubts as well as hopes concerning the success of the American experiment in republican government. Perhaps most important, from the outset some Americans defined their country's international mission as that of leading the world by moral example, while others favored direct intervention to spread virtuous American ways.

The actions of what we now call religious interest groups can be deemed legitimate by reason of longevity. They were involved in the first and foremost foreign policy decision, whether or not to create an independent country. The rebellious colonists seriously though mistakenly believed that the British planned to reduce them to "slavery", and one sure sign of this for Congregationalists and Presbyterians was the lingering threat of a resident Anglican bishop. From the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted special privileges to French Canadian Catholics, the heirs to Puritanism and the first Great Awakening inferred that the tyrannical Crown was consorting with tyrannical popery. Quakers and Mennonites who refused to serve in the army were subject to fines, confiscation of property, and imprisonment. At the same time, most of the 25,000 Catholics in the thirteen colonies supported independence because they thought, quite rightly as things turned out, that the new republic would grant them greater rights.

The victorious revolutionary coalition began to crack almost immediately. Some of the fissures occurred along religious lines. An incongruous alliance of deists and dissident Protestants ensured that there would be no religious test for federal office and began the process of disestablishing state churches (a process that continued until the 1830s). By the 1790s, no more than 10 percent of the population formally belonged to churches.

Disagreements about both religion and foreign affairs shaped the first party system in the 1790s. The Jeffersonian Republicans, the ancestors of the Democrats, were religiously more diverse, tolerant, and (in terms of government policy) neutral than the Federalists. These sins were compounded by the Jeffersonian tilt toward revolutionary France and against Great Britain, a country the Federalists admired for attempting to spread pure--that is, Protestant--Christianity around the world. These issues came to a head when the United States and Britain went to war in 1812.

The causes of the war, which are still hard to rank in order of importance, were essentially secular and psychological: free trade in wartime, British impressment of American sailors, and a craving for territory in the West. Once the conflict began, however, rival religious factions offered their own distinctive interpretations of events. Federalist Congregationalists and Presbyterians reiterated their admiration for British Protestantism, damned Napoleon as an autocratic ally of Pope Pius VI, and characterized impressed sailors as runaway Irish Catholics unworthy of sympathy. Even President James Madison's proclamations of national fast days were deemed theologically deficient because he recommended but did not require participation. Pro-war Baptists and Methodists denounced the autocratic Church of England, hailed Madison as a friend of religious liberty, and noted that the Pope was allied with Britain and imprisoned by Napoleon. Although no Protestant spoke well of the Pope, there were few denunciations of American Catholics, in part because they already served disproportionately in the armed forces.

These political and religious battles occurred within a larger consensus of opinion that the United States should expand its territory, trade, and power. In his patriotic American Geography, published in 1789, Rev. Jedidiah Morse looked forward to the "largest empire that ever existed [including] millions of souls . . . West of the Mississippi." Even before that, Rev. Ezra Stiles said in 1783 that the example of the United States would spread the "empire of reason" and thus hasten the establishment of God's kingdom on earth. George Washington, less conventionally devout than these Congregationalists, had the precedent of ancient Rome in mind when he predicted that the American "infant empire" would soon grow and mature.

Manifest Destiny

Although the War of 1812 ended in a draw, and the British burning of the White House might have given pause, Americans came out of the conflict with a heightened sense of mission. Between 1810 and the 1850s, most wanted to expand the country's boundaries. With the exception of Quakers, Mennonites, and some Unitarians, they expressed few qualms about using force to do so.

The Democratic publisher and diplomat John O'Sullivan caught the prevailing mood when he coined a famous phrase in 1845. The American claim to Oregon was "by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the great experiment of liberative and federative self-government entrusted to us." "Manifest destiny" coincided with a second Great Awakening that energized Protestantism, precipitated numerous theological disputes, and produced new faiths such as Seventh-Day Adventism and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Yet theology per se had slight impact on the expansionist consensus. As O'Sullivan's declaration suggests, the rhetoric of manifest destiny exuded more Enlightenment republicanism than sectarianism. Claims to the continent were based on what historian Norman Graebner calls "geographic predestination." Within the expansionist consensus, debate centered on geopolitical and racial questions. Did the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Ocean represent the "natural limits" of the United States? Would the great bay at San Francisco facilitate trade with Asia? Would Canada ultimately throw off British "slavery" and join the United States? Could the republic absorb the "mongrel race" of Mexicans? And most important, would the new territory be slave or free soil?

Yet religious concerns related to foreign policy remained. In addition to the second Great Awakening, the pre-Civil War expansion coincided with a surge of non-Protestant immigration, a strong nativist response, and the creation of a second party system that arrayed Jacksonian Democrats against the culturally more conservative Whigs. In this context, Democratic expansionists attributed manifest destiny to an ecumenical Providence partly because the bulk of Catholic and Jewish immigrants supported their party. On the other hand, the prominent Whig nativist, Rev. Lyman Beecher, issued a famous "plea" to save the American West from the "slavery and debasement" of Catholicism. Despite nativist fears that they would aid the papist enemy, Catholic soldiers, including at least two generals, helped to defeat Mexico in the 1840s. Democratic President Franklin Pierce considered establishing diplomatic relations with the Papal States. Unfortunately, Archbishop Gaetano Bedini, sent by the Pope to discuss the issue, was driven from the country by mobs in 1854; some of his assailants were nativists, but many others were anticlerical immigrants who resented Bedini's role in suppressing the Italian republican movement in 1848.

As the population became religiously more diverse, so too did diplomatic personnel, foreign policy issues, and domestic political pressures. Mordecai Noah, a Jew, began his long political career in 1813 as consul in Tunis, where he negotiated the release of several Americans held captive. In 1840 the United States joined European governments in protesting the imprisonment of Syrian Jews for allegedly committing a ritual murder. Ten years later, a commercial treaty with Switzerland conceded the right of individual cantons to exclude Jews, and in at least one instance an American Jewish merchant was expelled. After American Jews protested, with support from such prominent gentiles as Henry Clay and Lewis Cass, the Fillmore administration renegotiated the treaty. But the changes were cosmetic, and both protests and quiet diplomacy continued until Switzerland adopted a new constitution in 1874.

The imbroglio over the Swiss treaty provides an early illustration of the complicated religious alliances and animosities that persisted despite the widely shared belief that the United States was an exceptional nation with a unique role in the world. Many Protestants supported the Jewish protests not only because they valued the republican principle of equal treatment for all white Americans, but also because they wanted to set a precedent for receiving equal treatment in Catholic countries. Conversely, Catholic Archbishop John Hughes ridiculed the notion that sovereign states should change their policies whenever a U.S. citizen arrived "with a full measure of American atmosphere, American sunbeams, and American religion."

Catholics and Jews also clashed over the Mortara affair in the late 1850s. Edgaro Mortara, a Jewish child in Bologna, was secretly baptized by a servant and then removed from his family by the Church on the grounds that since Mortara was now a Catholic, he should not be raised by Jews. Protests against the Church's action were widespread in Europe and the United States, but President James Buchanan, caught between Catholic and Jewish constituents, refused to join them. It was "neither the right nor the duty" of the American government, claimed Buchanan, to "express a moral censorship over the conduct of other independent governments, and to rebuke them for acts which we may deem arbitrary and unjust towards their own citizens or subjects."

The most significant intersection between religion and foreign relations in the nineteenth century was the extraordinary burst of Protestant missionary activity initially spurred by the second Great Awakening. Indeed, some missionaries became what we would now call lobbyists and their "interest group" often allied with less devout expansionists. On this continent, they promoted the settlement of Oregon and urged President James K. Polk to stand firm against British claims. The most important missionary activities, however, occurred across the Pacific, where conversion, commerce, condescension, and promotion of Protestant American values usually went hand in hand. Charles Denby, an American diplomat in China, called them "pioneers of trade and commerce." Horace Allen, who arrived in Korea as a Presbyterian medical missionary, later became the U.S. government representative, actively promoted American investment, and established himself as the most influential foreigner in the country. In Hawaii, however, missionaries were criticized for warning the king about sharp American business practices.

Unitarians questioned the propriety of converting any country from its ancient religion. When a treaty signed in 1858, which had been composed in part by missionaries, protected the religious activities of Protestants and Catholics in China (including Chinese believers), some Jewish leaders also protested that Christianity was being written into the law of the land.

The religious disorder of the late nineteenth century was no less consequential in its sphere than the better remembered social upheaval. Sometimes social and religious issues were intimately related, as in the case of a large "new immigration" of Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe. Protestants not only confronted these immigrants, but they also faced the intellectual challenges of Darwinism and biblical "higher criticism." Some responded by becoming theological liberals; they accepted evolution, denied original sin, doubted biblical miracles, and emphasized Jesus' ethical teachings. A minority of these theological liberals also became advocates of a politically liberal or radical social gospel. New faiths emerged, notably Christian Science, several Pentecostal Protestant groups, and the International Bible Students' Association (known as Jehovah's Witnesses since the early 1930s).

Not surprisingly amid this turmoil, the election of 1896 produced the most devout pair of presidential nominees in American history, William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley. Nor is it surprising that the amalgam of ideas sanctioning the next phase of "manifest destiny" (a phrase President McKinley still used) contained a larger religious component than its pre-Civil War counterpart. Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong became a major ideologist of expansion with the publication of Our Country in 1886. Mixing geographic determinism, missionary zeal, and a sense of "Anglo-Saxon" superiority, Strong concluded that the United States would be the "elect nation for the age to come"--but only if non-Protestant immigrants were successfully Americanized. For most expansionists new concerns seemed at least as pressing as the old sense of mission. They sought foreign markets as a solution to the depression of the 1890s, cheered military adventure as an antidote to national softness, and argued that the "closed" frontier would produce a domestic social explosion unless energies were diverted abroad.

Onto a Larger Stage

The most dramatic foreign policy event of the late nineteenth century, the Spanish-American War, was rooted in sympathy for Cuban rebels fighting for independence. Attempting to achieve that goal without war, McKinley half-heartedly pursued papal mediation and used Archbishop John Ireland as an intermediary with the Vatican. Most Catholic spokesmen favored this approach and criticized "bloodthirsty" Protestants for demanding quick military action. No Protestant denomination showed greater enthusiasm for war than McKinley's own, the Methodist Episcopal Church. Intervention in Cuba, McKinley finally told Congress in April 1898, would fulfill American aspirations as a "Christian, peace-loving people." In subsequent proclamations, he thanked the "Divine Master" for granting victory with few casualties.

Debate about the peace treaty centered on the acquisition of the Philippines. In a famous interview with Methodist leaders, McKinley said that after prayer and reflection, he had concluded that the United States must "uplift and civilize and Christianize [the Filipinos], and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died." The debate about ratification turned on secular issues: the propriety of a republican empire, the threat posed by a non-white colony, and the perennial dream of the great China market. Most Quakers and Unitarians opposed acquisition, but Catholic bishops and Protestant social gospelers, like the country at large, were divided. The prospect of a new missionary field influenced some proponents of the treaty.

An empire in Asia proved more troublesome than anticipated. The squalid little war to suppress the Filipino independence movement kept alive secular and religious opposition to annexation. Meanwhile, religious groups carried their American conflicts to the Philippines. While Protestants assailed "greedy friars" with large land holdings, Catholics complained about desecration of Church property and pointed out that most Filipinos were already Christians. Meanwhile, in the face of rising nationalist opposition and grassroots assaults, missionaries extended their enterprise into the Chinese interior and became increasingly involved in Chinese affairs; the United States ultimately joined in Western gunboat diplomacy to protect them. In the worst confrontation, the Boxers highlighted their animosity to foreign influence by killing almost two hundred missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians.

The foremost presidents of the Progressive era, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, were more complicated than can be inferred from their place in international relations courses as exemplars, respectively, of "realism" and "idealism." Roosevelt expounded often on "righteousness", and his eagerness to enter World War I was hardly based on a sober evaluation of reality. A pro forma member of the Dutch Reformed Church, who may have doubted the existence of God and an afterlife, T.R. showed that a strong sense of American mission needed no theological underpinning. On the other hand--and H.L. Mencken, President Victoriano Huerta of Mexico, and countless scholars to the contrary--Wilson is not usefully interpreted as a latter-day Puritan. A theologically liberal Presbyterian like his minister father, he paid scant attention to doctrinal disputes, easily accepted evolution and higher criticism, and almost never discerned God acting directly in history (Wilson's explanation of his own election was an exception to this generalization). Certainly theology did not shape Wilson's version of the venerable belief that the United States was an exceptional nation with a unique role in the world.

Although less enthusiastic than Roosevelt about the military ethic as an antidote to national softness, Wilson proved no less willing to use force abroad. Despite these similarities, however, their successors in the White House are more aptly called Wilsonians than Rooseveltians. From Washington's baptism of an "infant empire" to T.R.'s celebration of the onward march of civilization, presidents had often spoken candidly about pursuing American interests at the cost of somebody else's. After Wilson, they were much more likely to stress that what was good for the United States was also good for the rest of the world.

Although the third president of the Progressive era, William Howard Taft, is rarely cited as an exemplar of anything other than girth, his administration was marked by perhaps the most successful instance of lobbying by a religious interest group in U.S. history. A grassroots campaign, conceived by prominent Jews, forced the abrogation of a commercial treaty with Imperial Russia in 1912. This campaign capped a long series of protests against the tsarist regime for discriminating against American Jews and persecuting Russian Jews. For seven decades anti-Semites have cited this abrogation as evidence of a powerful "international Zionist conspiracy." Yet in fact Taft could be prodded into action only because the issue intersected with broad American republican principles. Consequently, Jewish protesters were able to win support from influential Christian clergy, publishers, and politicians.

When the First World War began in 1914, both the American President, Woodrow Wilson, and his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, were Presbyterians convinced that the United States had a special mission in the world. Their divergent responses illustrate the inadequacy of glib generalizations about the connection between religious dispositions and specific foreign policies. Although susceptible to intermittent military enthusiasms, Bryan regarded the pursuit of international peace as his Christian duty. He negotiated more than two dozen "cooling off" treaties, and commemorated some of them by having swords melted down and recast as tiny plowshares. Bryan resigned in 1915 because he thought Wilson was forsaking neutrality. But he also placed his resignation in a broader context. The United States had always "sought to aid the world by example", he said. Participation in European power politics would represent "descent" from this morally superior position. "Our mission is to implant hope in the breast of humanity and substitute higher ideals for the ideals which have led nations into armed conflicts."

Bryan supported the war effort after American entry but a substantial minority of Americans did not. Among religious dissidents, Quakers and Mennonites received better treatment than the more adamant and less familiar Jehovah's Witnesses, who typically went to jail. On the other hand, evangelist Billy Sunday hailed American soldiers as "God's grenadiers." Amid a sordid debate about the bayonet's legitimacy as a Christian weapon, Unitarian Albert Dieffenbach affirmed that Jesus himself would use it against the Germans. Not everyone spoke so zealously. Yet even prominent clergy who had opposed intervention before 1917, including Rabbi Stephen Wise and Rev. John R. Mott, rallied to the cause. The major denominations organized to provide services for their men in uniform. Under the leadership of James Cardinal Gibbons, an interfaith League of National Unity promoted the war across denominational lines.

Even among supporters of the war, however, there was more disagreement than ecumenicism. When Pope Benedict XV offered a peace plan in mid-1917, Protestants thought the proposal too "Austrian"; though more favorably inclined, the Catholic hierarchy nonetheless recognized the futility of urging the plan on President Wilson. Ultimately religion influenced the war effort less than the war affected the domestic religious scene. Adding denunciations of German-American brewers to their stock arguments, Protestants secured the enactment of Prohibition in the face of Catholic and Jewish opposition. Some theological conservatives, attuned to a form of Bible prophecy called premillennial dispensationalism, interpreted the British promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as evidence of Jesus' imminent return.

Between the Wars

Above all, the high emotions generated by the war turned the nation's cultural splits into chasms. Accordingly, as the United States entered the 1920s, not only were Protestants increasingly arrayed against Catholics, but also Protestant theological liberals and conservatives were increasingly arrayed against each other. Yet no more than businessmen or bohemian intellectuals were religious leaders "isolationist." Missionary agencies saw the rising tide of Chinese nationalism and, partly as a means of self-defense, most responded by urging the United States to surrender extraterritoriality and special protection for Christians. Prominent Catholics, and to a lesser extent Protestants, shared the widespread enthusiasm for Benito Mussolini. While Catholics credited Il Duce with Italy's "resurrection", Protestants appreciated his anticlericalism. The Mussolini vogue simultaneously highlights both the persistent belief in American exceptionalism and the restraints this belief imposes on Wilsonian aspirations to reform the rest of the world. Although inappropriate for the United States, "Mussolini methods" suited Italians, Commonweal editorialized. Meanwhile, fundamentalists studied Scripture and world affairs to determine whether or not Mussolini was the Antichrist predicted in the Book of Revelation.

The Soviet Union attracted at least as much attention as Mussolini's Italy during the 1920s. The regime was denounced all along the religious spectrum for promoting atheism and murdering believers. Even so, a significant minority of Protestant theological liberals expressed cautious interest in the "Soviet experiment." Interest grew and caution diminished after the Crash. In the mid-1930s, some social gospelers actively participated in the Popular Front.

What is usually mischaracterized as interwar isolationism was the pervasive belief that the United States must remain aloof from any European war. With varying degrees of sophistication, scholars, pundits, and public figures attributed entry into World War I to economic entanglement with the Allies, machinations by arms manufacturers, and British propaganda. The diverse peace movement that developed in this context contained a large religious element, including many clergy. Some of these activists were full-fledged pacifists, such as the members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (for), War Resisters League, and Catholic Worker group. Yet many more simply regretted "presenting arms" in 1917-18.

From the outset, foreign policy issues related to religion threatened Franklin D. Roosevelt's eclectic coalition. In 1933, Roosevelt tried to minimize opposition to recognition of the Soviet Union by charming prominent anti-communists (including the legendary Father Edmund Walsh of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service) and extracting a Soviet promise to respect the religious freedom of resident Americans. The next year, Catholic criticism precipitated the first major test of the Good Neighbor Policy. The Mexican government's insistence on breaking the political and economic power of the Church sometimes went beyond anticlericalism to outright persecution. In 1934, when Ambassador Josephus Daniels praised the creation of secular schools, American bishops charged the Roosevelt administration with indifference to the plight of Mexican Catholics, 10,000 letters to the State Department echoed the same theme, and 250 members of Congress requested an investigation. While FDR quietly urged the Mexicans to moderate their anticlericalism, the Democratic Party pointedly urged Ambassador Daniels to stay out of the United States during the 1936 campaign.

When the Spanish Civil War erupted that same year, Congress passed (with one dissenting vote) a ban on arms sales to the Republic. The action was unusual in that recognized governments were traditionally allowed to buy weapons in the midst of insurrections. Roosevelt signed the bill primarily because he wanted to coordinate policy with the British and French, feared the spread of war beyond Spain, and at this point shared the anti-interventionist sentiments of his fellow citizens. Nevertheless, the administration derailed efforts to lift the arms embargo even after FDR edged toward a policy of quarantining international aggressors. The President's perception of Catholic opinion was an important though not necessarily decisive factor. According to a Gallup poll in late 1938, 42 percent of Catholics favored the Republic while 58 percent supported General Francisco Franco's rebels. Yet Catholic clergy at all levels were virtually unanimous in hailing Franco as the savior of a Spain that had been Sovietized, and, frequently, as the Spanish George Washington. Most Protestants disagreed, and the resulting conflicts were sometimes vehement. When 150 prominent Protestants signed an open letter criticizing the Spanish Church for supporting Franco, Catholic leaders accused them of fostering a "species of religious war" in the United States.

The acrimonious debate in 1939-41 about aiding the nations fighting Germany centered on three questions. Noninterventionists doubted the ability of these countries to hold out, expected un-neutral acts to draw the United States into the conflict, and warned that any war to save or spread freedom abroad would destroy freedom at home. Roosevelt had faith in the military capacity of the British and the Soviets, believed that an Axis victory would threaten freedom everywhere, and was willing to risk war. These divergent analyses were rarely discussed dispassionately. Indeed, the whole debate was wrapped up in ideological, ethnic, and religious loyalties and animosities.

In Roosevelt's view, religious freedom was one aspect of civilization under threat. In January 1939 he declared, "The defense of religion, of democracy, and of good faith among nations is all the same fight." He also understood the political potency of religious references. In October 1941, justifying further expansion of the undeclared naval war against German submarines, Roosevelt denounced the alleged Nazi plan "to abolish all existing religions--Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike."

As in previous crises, the relationship between faith and foreign policy remained complicated in the country at large. Catholics were less interventionist than Protestants. Many Irish- and German-American Catholics viewed Britain skeptically, some Italian-Americans still admired Mussolini, and all Catholics loathed the prospect of a de facto alliance with the Soviets. At the same time, few Catholics were pacifists in principle. Episcopalians tended to rally behind Great Britain but there were numerous exceptions, including young Gerald Ford, an early supporter of the America First Committee. The anti-interventionist camp included both social gospelers at Christian Century and the anti-Semitic fundamentalists of the old Christian right. The clearest trend was the reduction of pacifist ranks to a devout remnant. Among the defectors, "Christian realist" theologian Reinhold Niebuhr moved from the chairmanship of for in the early 1930s to advocacy of war against Nazi Germany in 1941.

War and Revival

After Pearl Harbor, FDR continued to ask God's blessings on the war effort. Most denominations rallied to the cause, though less zealously than during the First World War. Despite their wariness of internationalism, Catholics again served disproportionately in the armed services. In addition, they remained aloof from the widespread but evanescent enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. The pro-Soviet vogue owed less to agitation by radical social gospelers than to a popular inclination to think well of an ally, as well as to continuing doubts about the likelihood of perfecting foreigners. According to a wartime poll, 46 percent of Americans thought the Soviet Union had a government "as good as she could have for her people." In portrayals of the enemy, the Japanese seemed less human than the Germans, not only because they were Asians but also because Shintoism and emperor worship looked pagan.

Probably no foreign policy issue associated with religion has produced greater controversy than the question of whether more European Jews could have been saved from the Holocaust. American Jews denounced the Nazi regime immediately after Hitler came to power, and then sought government action as reports of genocide reached the United States in 1942 and 1943. As on many previous occasions, they enlisted non-Jewish allies and appealed to generic American values. These appeals fell flat during the 1930s, however, when anti-Semitism was widespread and even tolerant Americans feared losing their jobs to refugees. U.S. entry into the war focused attention on the threat to American lives. The Roosevelt administration took no effective action to aid European Jewry until the War Refugee Board was created in January 1944.

The retrospective judgment that little more could have been done is simply wrong, and those who make it often rest their case on a narrow strategic determinism. Supposedly, policymakers subordinated all such "secondary" issues to the greater good of beating the Axis as quickly as possible. In fact, the United States engaged in numerous actions of dubious military merit in order to achieve non-military ends. For example, the Doolittle bombing raid on Japan was carried out to raise American morale, the invasion of North Africa conciliated the British, and the Philippines-centered strategy in the Pacific fulfilled a popular general's pledge to return. If the fate of European Jewry had elicited comparable concern, more denunciations of the "final solution" would have been forthcoming from officials, more ransom would have been paid in wavering German satellites, and more military ingenuity would have been devoted to disrupting the Holocaust.

Among the many extraordinary changes brought by the war, two stand out for any consideration of religion and foreign relations. First, with "isolationism" thoroughly discredited, debate about the postwar world centered on the kind of internationalism the United States should pursue. Prominent internationalists ranged from publisher Henry Luce--the son of missionaries in China, who envisioned an "American century"--to former Vice President Henry A. Wallace--an unconventional social gospeler and early Cold War dove, who promoted a "century of the common man."

Second, the war sparked a religious revival that was to affect significantly the style of the Cold War at home and abroad. Among theologically conservative Protestants, there was renewed interest in foreign missions. Christian Cold War realist Niebuhr became, in the judgment of historian Walter LaFeber, the most influential American theologian since Jonathan Edwards. George F. Kennan, the conceptualizer of containment, saw himself as a Niebuhrian. Dwight Eisenhower echoed millions of Americans in his repudiation of "Godless Communism." Eisenhower's dour Presbyterian secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, seemed to personify the Cold War as an unambiguous struggle between good and evil.

Interests, not Ideas

Nevertheless, the "fifth great awakening" barely affected the substance of the Cold War. This generalization certainly holds true for the impact of Christian realist theology. The sense of tragedy and irony intrinsic to Protestant neo-orthodoxy is compatible with a wide variety of positions on specific diplomatic issues. During their long careers, Niebuhr and Kennan seem to have taken most of them. By the early 1950s, Kennan was complaining that his theory of containment had been misconstrued, and Niebuhr was denying that the Cold War could be reduced to a conflict "between a god-fearing and a godless civilization." Dulles, like the President he had served at the Versailles conference and his own minister father, was a theological liberal. After regaining his faith in the late 1930s, he seems to have felt a heightened sense of American mission. But his definition of that mission changed significantly during the next two decades. Dulles was in turn a noninterventionist, bipartisan internationalist, partisan proponent of "liberation", and more flexible secretary of state in private than he appeared in public.

Not religious ideas but religious interest groups helped to shape the early Cold War. As communists advanced in China, some missionaries advocated assistance to Chiang Kai-shek in the vain hope of winning a military victory, while others edged away from Chiang in the vain hope of establishing decent relations with Mao Tse-tung. Among missionaries who became major public figures, Representative Walter Judd, a leader of the congressional China bloc, held the former position, while J. Leighton Stuart, the U.S. ambassador to the last nationalist government on the mainland, held the latter. As Eastern Europe fell under Soviet control, Catholics took the lead in highlighting the suppression of religion and abuse of priests. During the late 1950s, the American hierarchy depicted President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam as a Catholic hero. Truth mixed with hyperbole in Clark Clifford's advice to Harry Truman that anti-communism was the decisive factor in the Catholic vote.

The quick de facto recognition accorded to Israel in 1948 represented a victory for one of the great grassroots lobbying efforts in American history. President Truman took this action in the face of opposition from his senior diplomatic and military advisers--as well as from oil companies and some prominent Reform Jews. Certainly he would not have moved so quickly if few Jews had been registered to vote. Yet Truman also acted to minimize Soviet influence in Israel. Moreover, in this instance, Zionists were able to find powerful Christian allies. Not only was there widespread sympathy for victims of Nazism, but also nativists sometimes supported Zionism because they feared that, in the absence of the creation of a state, these victims might come to the United States. To many fundamentalists, the "regathering" of Jews in the Holy Land fulfilled dispensationalist Bible prophecy. Although no group worked harder to infer God's will from the Bible itself, fundamentalists were not immune to world events. In the wake of the Holocaust, they began to reinterpret Scripture in philo-Semitic fashion and concluded that the regathering of Jews did not advance the interests of the Antichrist.

The consensus on foreign policy and the level of religious comity during the 1950s should not be exaggerated. Although anti-Semitism steadily declined, tensions rose between Catholics and Protestants, and the Cold War was one of the reasons. Unlike Protestant social gospelers, virtually no practicing Catholics had drifted into the Popular Front or avidly celebrated the Soviet Union. According to a joke often attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, during this period Fordham graduates in the FBI investigated Harvard graduates in the State Department. Many Catholics, including the formidable Francis Cardinal Spellman, pointedly asked why their patriotism went unappreciated by the Protestant elite. The answer, some members of the Protestant elite responded, was that Catholic patriotism was too crude, and they cited Senator Joseph McCarthy as a case in point. In the long run, however, both World War II and the Cold War served Catholic interests well. Without PT 109 and the post-Sputnik fear of falling behind the Soviets, John F. Kennedy would have lost to Richard Nixon in 1960.

Opposition to the Vietnam War contained a large religious component. Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV), an interdenominational network of doves, was founded in late 1965. Protestant theological conservatives were typically more hawkish than theological liberals. Some evangelical hawks pointed to Indochina as a fertile field for missionaries. Pacifists working in obscurity since Pearl Harbor re-emerged as national figures. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator George McGovern found sanction for antiwar activism in their own versions of the social gospel. Making his latest foreign policy turn within the framework of neo-orthodoxy, Niebuhr praised the "heroic" divinity students who burned their draft cards. None of this was surprising.

What was surprising--indeed, what would have been virtually inconceivable fifteen years earlier--was significant Catholic opposition to a war against communism. From 1966 onward, the bishops grew steadily more critical of the Vietnam conflict, and in 1972 they endorsed amnesty for draft evaders. Clerical and lay participants in nonviolent resistance attracted national attention and some served prison terms. As Garry Wills noted, the Church now produced both FBI agents and radical priests--occasionally in the same families. Polls in the late 1960s revealed that Catholics were less likely than Protestants to favor military escalation. Ironically, after loyal service in the Cold War and five hot wars since the 1840s had incrementally legitimated Catholics, opposition to the Vietnam War now brought them further into the American mainstream. When Senator Eugene McCarthy ran for president in 1968, almost no one worried about his religion even though he himself discerned a connection between his Catholic faith and his opposition to the war.

After more than a decade of domestic turmoil, the major political parties in 1976 nominated Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the most devout pair of presidential candidates since McKinley and Bryan eighty years earlier. In their efforts to preserve de tente, promote human rights abroad, and mediate a Middle East peace, there was considerable continuity between the Ford and Carter administrations. Yet Carter was distinctive in his calls for American humility, emphasis on world leadership through moral example, wariness of military intervention, and respect for poor and non-white nations. In his own mind, he was applying to world politics Niebuhr's admonitions against national egotism (much to the distress of Cold War Niebuhrians, who thought he missed the larger point, and of many of his fellow southern evangelicals, who celebrated a more interventionist version of American mission). Carter was a Wilsonian, but a Wilsonian with large doses of Bryanism.

Religious interest groups continued to influence foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era. The most important development--again, virtually inconceivable fifteen years earlier--was the move rightward by a significant minority of Jews. The Jackson-Vanik Amendment was an important landmark along the road. This amendment to a trade treaty was introduced by Senator Henry Jackson to pressure the Soviets into increasing Jewish emigration--or to punish them if they failed to do so. At first, Jewish leaders approached the measure cautiously, but most ultimately came around. As was the case with abrogation of the commercial treaty in 1912, a "Jewish" concern attracted widespread support from non-Jews appalled by Russian autocracy. Indeed, the emigration issue provided ample ammunition for critics of de tente during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Carter himself received the smallest percentage of the Jewish vote of any Democratic presidential nominee since the 1920s.

For members of Ronald Reagan's coalition, Carter's diplomatic and military humility was part of the international problem rather than of the solution. As Jeane Kirkpatrick argued, Carter's soft Christianity led him to repudiate friendly authoritarian regimes whose virtues included acceptance of "traditional gods and . . . traditional taboos." In his first substantive meeting with the Soviet ambassador, Reagan himself raised the issue of Russian Pentecostals who, denied permission to emigrate, had been granted asylum at the American embassy in Moscow; they were subsequently allowed to emigrate. Most important, following almost two decades of de tente in fact if not in name, Reagan himself resumed the presidential practice of bluntly denouncing the Soviet Union as the source of atheistic evil. Presidential aides raised in the pre-Vatican II world of Catholic anti-communism worked with Pope John Paul II to crack open the East bloc. In 1984 Reagan sent an ambassador to the Vatican and encountered only minimal grumbling from his allies on the new Christian right. In addition to evangelicals and fundamentalists, Reagan's remarkable religious coalition included working class Catholics, neoconservative Jews, and even a few apostate CALCAV doves.

Opposition to Reagan's foreign policy was also eclectic. With varying fervor and acuity, members of the historic peace churches, a small band of radical evangelicals, Billy Graham, and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops criticized the nuclear buildup that lay at the center of the administration's military strategy. The army chief of chaplains resigned to protest both that buildup and American intervention in Central America. Although odd alliances sometimes flourished, Protestant theological liberals tended to be doves and theological conservatives tended to be hawks. Thus foreign policy issues joined with doctrinal and domestic cultural differences to drive these two groups further apart.

The rituals of civil religion as they relate to foreign policy remained intact after the Cold War. President George Bush invited Billy Graham to spend the night at the White House on the eve of the Gulf War in 1991. Yet these rituals became increasingly complicated as immigration altered the American religious scene. In the midst of his confrontation with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, President Carter took pains to commemorate Islamic holidays and distinguish Muslim friends from Muslim foes. Nor were complications confined to the home front. President Bush's invocations of God prompted some Muslims to complain that he was leading a religious war against Islam itself, rather than a limited effort to roll back the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Meanwhile, military personnel deployed to Saudi Arabia were barred from wearing religious insignia, discouraged from receiving Christmas cards, and obliged to camouflage New Testaments.

Avid Wilsonians who wanted the United States to organize and lead international posses faced an especially difficult problem following the Cold War. After winning the great ideological conflict of this century, Americans across the political and religious spectrums began reverting to their visceral Bryanism. If they were to lead the world at all, they preferred to do so by example.

This problem was particularly acute for Wilsonian Republicans. Theologically conservative Protestants joined the Reagan coalition primarily because they considered the Democrats too liberal on such issues as abortion, gay rights, and school prayer. Aside from a theologically based commitment to Israel, rank-and-file fundamentalists and Pentecostals showed only a routine patriotic interest in foreign affairs even during the Cold War. Both Wilsonian Republicans and Pat Buchanan, who finds his usable diplomatic past in the America First Committee, consider this constituency up for grabs. Whatever its strengths and weaknesses as a matter of diplomatic policy, the proposed Freedom from Religious Persecution Act seems intended to keep theologically conservative Protestants in the Republican and internationalist fold.

A Limited Impact

Amidst rising interest in the relationship between religion and foreign policy, what, in general terms, can we conclude about the American experience? First, a strong republican sense of mission thrived apart from the legacies of Reformation-era Protestantism. In the absence of these Protestant influences, the United States still would have risen to world power and probably would have justified the rise with ideological claims akin to the French "mission to civilize." Moreover, the American sense of mission has been complicated by the Catholic and Jewish presence, by divisions and shifts within Protestantism itself, and above all by secular concerns about economic advantage, national security, and race. Rigorous fundamentalists aside, even the Protestant theological conservatives who still regard the United States as a "city upon a hill" are less likely than their forebears who lived in less affluent times to expect much retribution for personal or national sins. Instead of trembling before divine judgment, they are more inclined to expect God to bless the United States as a matter of course.

Second, although religious interest groups at home and religious issues abroad have affected foreign policy, no major diplomatic decision has turned on religious issues alone. For example, Eisenhower would have aided Diem in the 1950s without the Catholic Church's urging. On the other hand, religious interest groups have significantly affected subsidiary foreign policies. FDR hesitated to help the Spanish Republic partly because most American Catholics supported Franco; Truman recognized Israel partly to woo Jewish voters. In such instances, however, religious interest groups have been most effective when they have found allies outside their own communities and invoked widely shared American values.

Third, serious religious ideas have had at most an indirect impact on policymakers--far less, for example, than strategic, economic, or political considerations, perceptions of public opinion, and the constraints of office. Kennan's Niebuhrian doubts about human perfectibility rendered him more prudent than many of his fellow cold warriors, yet he expressed more caution in retirement than he had shown as a State Department employee. Similarly, Carter was able to advocate international human rights with greater consistency as an ex-president than as president. Equally important, not only can divergent policy prescriptions be inferred from the Bible and other sacred texts, but also even the theories of interpretation have multiplied as the religious scene has become increasingly complex. Carter joked in 1980 that, unlike his critic, dispensationalist Jerry Falwell, he found no passage in Scripture determining whether "you should have a B-1 bomber or the air-launched cruise missile."

Fourth, major foreign policies have significantly affected the domestic religious scene--sometimes in ways that no one anticipated. A war for independence won during the Enlightenment brought about the separation of church and state which, in turn, facilitated a vigorous competition among legally equal denominations. American expansion on this continent fueled Protestant nativist fears that the West might be conquered again--by Catholics and Mormons. The First World War ushered in a decade of religious conflict unparalleled in this century. The war against Nazism helped to banish anti-Semitism from public life. Vigorous Catholic patriotism both legitimated Catholicism and distressed some of the Protestant elite. From the mid-1960s until the end of the Cold War, fundamentalists and social gospelers clashed over Vietnam and de tente as well as Darwinism and biblical criticism.

These general trends will probably persist for the foreseeable future. In the near term, passage of the Wolf-Specter bill would complicate foreign--and perhaps domestic--policy in ways that no one has thought through. Although proponents focus on the persecution of Christians, no government agency can protect one faith and survive constitutional challenge. Accordingly, the president or State Department would have to decide what constitutes legitimate religious practices. This has been no easy matter in the domestic arena. In addition, the president or State Department would have to decide what constitutes persecution. Murder, torture, rape, abduction, forced relocation, and arbitrary arrest or imprisonment obviously qualify. Yet, as critics of the bill suggest, these actions deserve denunciation regardless of whether there is an anti-religious motive.

Certainly there would be gray areas in the definition of both religion and persecution. Moreover, these areas of contention would inevitably multiply as religious interest groups pressured the Office of Religious Persecution Monitoring to broaden its activities, and the law's provision for withdrawing aid from governments that merely acquiesce in persecution would encourage this tendency. Are Muslims--who are cited frequently in the Wolf-Specter bill as perpetrators of persecution--themselves victims of persecution in India? Does Germany persecute Scientologists? Does Israel persecute Reform Jews or the non-Jewish spouses of Jews? Does the domination of Nigeria by Muslims reflect religious bigotry, ethnic solidarity, majority rule, or all of the above? To what extent would victims of persecution be eligible for asylum in the United States? Would the president ask Saudi Arabia to grant Christian and Jewish soldiers stationed there the right to practice openly their own faiths and perhaps to proselytize?

Finally, is it ever acceptable for countries to preserve atheistic systems or religious homogeneity? If not, then non-Christians might plausibly complain that the Wolf-Specter bill promotes the world's foremost evangelical religion, Christianity, which also happens to be the majority religion of the United States. When many Americans remember missionaries in China, they think of their denominational heroes and heroines; but when many Chinese remember missionaries in China, they think of the "unequal treaties" imposed on their country. To some readers of this journal my concern about cultural imperialism may sound like an archaic echo from the Sixties. But the practical and ethical complexities will not disappear.

LOAD-DATE: October 11, 1999