Transcript: "Has Religion Influenced American Diplomacy and War?" with Andrew Preston.
Chris: United States foreign policy is of great interest to all Americans because of the important thread in the American narrative that says we should use our blessings of freedom and wealth to benefit the world: Foreign policy matters. The burning question for us on this podcast is how did religion influence American foreign policy and war if at all? To help us answer this question, we will talk with Andrew Preston, professor of American history at the University of Cambridge and author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. Mr. Preston specializes in the history of American foreign relations, specifically the intersection between national and international, including the influence that domestic politics and culture, particularly religion, have had on conduct of US foreign policy.
Also as with each episode in our podcast series, Religion in the American Experience, we hope listeners come away with a better comprehension of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and thus more fully comprehend the necessity of this idea of religious freedom to America in fulfilling her purposes in the world.
Thank you, Andrew, for being with us today. Your book is absolutely fantastic. I read it years ago and it revealed to me an entire part of American history that I had not really heard of and that's almost endless in its influence and that is, religion's role in US foreign policy. So before I start any specific questions, can you tell us just generally how religion has influenced US war and diplomacy?
Andrew: Well, thanks for having me, Chris. I should say that first off. It's a real pleasure to be here. And thanks for the questions and the, and the discussion around my book. When I wrote this book almost 10 years ago, you said you read it a while ago, not many people were working on religion and US foreign policy. And now it's a whole subfield in political science and in history. So it's really, it's been, it's been really exciting. The religious influence in American foreign policy has been sometimes tricky to demonstrate because you don't always find policymakers saying I want to do A, B, or C or X, Y, Z because of my religious beliefs, especially when you're talking about high-level diplomacy. You don't always find that kind of record in NSC meet meeting minutes or, you know, things like that.
Andrew: So sometimes you have to read between the lines. Sometimes it's tricky but once historians and political scientists began to know what to look for, the job became easier. And it also became much more interesting because, as you said, it all of a sudden opened up this whole vista on how we should see American foreign policy. And then to get, to get back to your question, what is the general influence? Religion has over time, over a long period of time acted as a kind of conscience for American foreign policy and for American foreign policy makers, even for policymakers who themselves weren't religious because of American domestic politics, because of the the very vibrant role that religion plays in American domestic politics. And then the fact that domestic politics and political actors then apply pressure to policymakers and force them to confront moral questions in foreign policy. Religion has in, in that way had a huge influence on the conduct of American foreign policy and not just in the last 10 or 20 years, but the last 200 years.
Chris: Okay, so it took some sleuthing on your part to get at those tools that allowed you to see the influence. So it was a little bit of a, a job to do, I guess.
Andrew: Absolutely, and that's what, that's what is fun about it. That, that's the, that's the most fun you can have as an historian is, is piecing things together and reading between the lines and getting to know the context and getting to know the people.
Chris: Sure, absolutely. Well, thank you for doing that because it's just super revealing. So the second sort of introductory question would be tell us about the title. The title grabbed me. It just grabbed me in all ways. Tell, tell us about that title, where it came from? Why you used it?
Andrew: The title comes from the Book of Ephesians and it's where Paul is telling new Christians what they need to do. They need to what they need to wear effectively, he is using this metaphorically. And they need to wield the sword of the spirit and also brandish the shield of faith, along with another number of other accouterments. And he doesn't use those two phrases side-by-side in Ephesians in this, in this passage. But I put them together uhh because to me they capture exactly what the religious influence on American foreign policy was and still is all about.
Andrew: So on one hand, you have the sword of the spirit, which is the kind of, which is familiar to a lot of people. That's the kind of interventionist Messianic, we are going to reform the world type of ideology that has been present in American foreign policy from Manifest Destiny all the way up to the present. And in fact, when I began my book, I began my book during the, the years of the George W. Bush administration and at the height of the Iraq War. And a lot of people a friend of mine actually put it like this. A lot of people assumed that I was sort of writing a history of the Bush administration's foreign policy. And when I told a friend that actually I was going back much further in time uhh 200 years, I ended up going back 400 years. But he said, "Are you're writing a history of Bush backwards?" Basically the use of religion to justify war and empire and all that kind of thing. And that's definitely a part of the story and that's the sword of the spirit. But as I did more research, the shield of faith was also extremely important.
Andrew: And historians had not paid nearly enough attention to internationalism and pacifism and solving conflicts and promoting interfaith dialogue, promote, using religion as a, as a tool for peace. And so I have called that the shield of faith. And where the religious influence is most powerful is a blend of the kind of reformist interventionist impulse and the more pacifistic kind of internationalist impulse and where the two have combined in order to produce this very, very compelling moral vision for American foreign policy. And that, that's why the book is called Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith. If I could say one more thing about that, it I, I can't claim any credit. I can't claim credit for thinking of that, even though I came across that John Foster Dulles used the, used those those verses.
Woodrow Wilson did, lots of my historical actors in the book talked about the sword of the spirit and the shield of faith. But my wife and I were I, I live in England and based in England. We were going for a walk in the country with our dog and one of the things we love to do is to stop into these little village parish churches that are, you know, like a thousand years old and full of history. And we went into one in Northamptonshire, which is a neighboring county to, to where I'm from, Cambridgeshire. And there was a large memorial plaque on the wall of the church, this beautiful little church in the middle of nowhere. And it was to the dead of the two World Wars which is very common in English village churches. And this plaque had the, the passages, had the verses rather, and my wife said because I was, we were just talking about my book and I was just talking about what I would later identify as the sword of spirit and the shield of faith. And she said, "There it is. There is your title right there," because it just perfectly captures the book.
Chris: I agree. It perfectly captures it. So let's dive in. Andrew, thanks for that helpful foundation you laid there for us. We are just going to cover four of your thirty chapters. So we are going to talk about FDR and his faith, the religion and religious freedom used by the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, the Vietnam War, religion's influence on that, it's prosecution and then we are going to touch lightly on the epilogue of 9/11 a little bit after that. So Andrew, can you paint for us a religious portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Andrew: He was - so if I was painting just a quick portrait, he was by instinct non-theological as in non-doctrinal. To him, religion was a living thing. It was about spirituality, but it was also about ethics. But it wasn't something that you would think about, think a lot about. He wasn't a theologian but his religion was very deep. It was very profound. His wife Eleanor, who wasn't a religious person as far as we know, said that that was the most it was the thing that he felt deepest and was most mysterious in him was his faith. He was an Episcopalian and he was also by instinct as well as I would say not by doctrine because I just said he wasn't doctrinal. But to him, religion was inherently interfaith. He was an Episcopalian. As I just said, he was a Protestant. But to him, religion was a force for community, a force for coming together as well as a source of ethics. And he thought that religious commonalities inherently trumps religious differences and that should be then the basis not the only basis but a basis for politics and foreign policy.
Chris: Okay, and I should say we are starting with FDR but there is a whole, I don't know the chapter number of that chapter. But there, we're, we're skipping all this other religion, religious influence on American foreign policy pre mid-20th century and yeah.
Andrew: It's a big book. It's a big book, you know, so you can just go and say... [chuckles]
Chris: Uhh so anyways, people should read it and, and from the beginning.
Andrew: Oh thank you.
Chris: Okay, so that’s the portrait. That's helpful. I just visited Hyde Park last summer and you know, was moved by his religion sort of in the same spirit of what you relate there. I'm going to quote something from your book regarding FDR, "Building on Lincoln's ecumenical civil religion, Roosevelt was the first president to prioritize faith itself as opposed to Protestantism or even Christianity as the essence of American democracy." Can you tell us, Andrew, about how FDR used his religious beliefs and his faith in the prosecution of foreign policy, its significance and ramifications?
Andrew: Yeah. It's, it's a huge question. I should, I should sort of prefaced my answer by talking about that quote that you just read and say that I wanted to sort of pay due respect here to previous presidents who also made gestures to what we now call or what came to be called in this, in FDR's period in the 1930s and 40s, the Judeo-Christian tradition. So George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson spoke in very vague terms and not very often in ways that we would later call the Judeo-Christian tradition. So looking at how Christianity owes its roots to Judaism and how Jews and Christians should cooperate in American politics and American society and in American culture.
Chris: Right.
Andrew: But it was FDR who really elevated that notion to something that we might, to, to something that was included in the American civil religion and even I would say in the American body politic and the political fabric of the nation. This idea that Will Herberg in 1955 called the idea of a nation as Protestant, Catholic Jew. And from there, we can talk about this perhaps later in the podcast if you want, although other historians have, have talked about this a great deal from, from that notion of this kind of tri-faith America, what the historian Kevin Schultz calls tri-faith America. You then have it opens up spaces for further and further religious pluralism. For FDR in the 1930s, it was a way of distinguishing what was good about America and what was bad about what was going on elsewhere in the world, especially in Nazi Germany, but also in the Soviet Union as well as, well, to a lesser extent in Japan. But really it was about Nazi Germany.
And for FDR the religion was important for the reasons I already said because it was a source of personal comfort, a source of spirituality, a source of ethics. But for him, it was a source of democracy. And the reason it was a source of democracy is because without freedom of conscience, you couldn't have a democracy and without democracy you couldn't have peace. Peace either at home or in the context of the late 1930s and early 1940s, you couldn't have peace abroad. And one of the reasons why the freedom of religion was so politically important and geopolitically important to FDR is because if everything rested on freedom of conscience, you couldn't have, you couldn't have freedom of conscience without the freedom of religion. And he talked about this endlessly in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It's there in the Four Freedoms, in the second of the Four Freedoms, in the freedom of worship.
And it's there in some of his most important speeches leading up to World War II. Remember, this is a time when most Americans did not want to get involved in Europe. And his biggest task was convincing not the people we now call isolationist. Your Charles Lindberghs and your Gerald Nuys, people like that. His biggest task was because the isolationists, those sort of hardcore isolationists weren't the majority. The biggest task was convincing probably a plurality of Americans who were very internationally-minded, including Christian pacifists, including a lot of Protestant and Catholic and Jewish leaders. Very internationally-minded but did not want to get involved in Europe. And so one way of, of co-- of winning this argument was by appealing to what was starting to be called the Judeo-Christian tradition in a way that meant this is what is good about America, but even if Nazi Germany isn't going to attack us, this is why we have to worry about the Germans because what they're doing is they are snuffing out the freedom of religion.
And if we go back to this idea of what we might call FDR's faith-based democratic peace theory, democracies don't go to war with one another. You can't have peace without democracy. You can't have democracy without freedom of conscience. You can't have freedom of conscience without freedom of religion. That's why Americans should pay attention to what was going on in Germany. That's why they should worry about what the Germans were doing to religion. And if you're listening to this podcast or watching this video and you're interested in this, just do a quick Google "1939 State of the Union Address". And FDR's 1939 State of the Union just begins by laying that all out. Here is why we should care about freedom of religion because it's not just about what is happening to Jews and some German Christians. It's really about the fate of the world.
Chris: In the chapter that you call interestingly "The Revolutionary Church In A Revolutionary Age." And in that chapter, you write, I'm quoting here, "Perhaps without realizing it, Kennedy and Johnson reflected a shift that was taking place in religion's influence on politics and especially on foreign policy. In a modernizing society that was both increasingly secular and pluralistic, religion's role could never again be assumed. The presidents could look to faith but they could not rely on it." Why did you use the term "Revolutionary Church" in the chapter's title? And can you take us through a few examples of how the Kennedy and Johnson admin-- administration saw religion and religious freedom as part of their foreign policy toolkit or not?
Andrew: One more thought about FDR. One of the reasons I enjoyed, I did not expect to do anything on FDR when I began this book because if you read much of the biographical literature on him, including by people who knew FDR better than I ever will, people like Arthur Schlesinger, they either ignore his religious values and his, his religious faith. Or they say that it was a kind of on, you know, it was kind of superficial that he would go to church on Sundays sometimes. And that, that I kind of took that at face value took that assessment. And the more research I did, the more interesting if FDR became, FDR's religion became because it, religion was such a central part of his life. It was a very, very important part of his life and it was a very important part of his, his politics and then he made it a very important part of his foreign policy.
Chris: Yup.
Andrew: One of the trickiest chapters or the, the two of the trickiest chapters that, that I wrote that we're going to discuss I think in the 1960s deal with those, that deal with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And partly because of Kennedy's Catholicism, which a lot of people have written about, but I'm not sure anyone is really, politically there is a lot of really good stuff on, on the politics of Kennedy's Catholicism. But I'm not sure we've got to the bottom, just like I'm not sure we had got to the bottom of FDR's Anglicanism. I'm not sure we've got to the bottom of JFK's Catholicism as a personal faith. Although Fred Logavell's biography on JFK that came out recently just starts to get us there. He doesn't deal with the presidency in this volume, but it starts to get us there. And LBJ was this like a lot of other presidents like Ronald Reagan was like some other presidents had and sort of was wonderfully but frustratingly eclectic and diverse in his religious views, not just in religions he respected or read or but he would dabble in all sorts of religions and I don't mean in a superficial way but in a fairly, I would say in a fairly profound way.
And you ask why the revolutionary church, one of the really interesting things in writing these chapters in the 1960s was trying to get to grips with JFK and LBJ and some other people too. I've got some stuff that I found really interesting on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his faith in the Vietnam War. But it was also trying to get to grips with their religion in this time of incredible turbulence, socially and culturally, including in religion. And so the revolutionary church is about Vatican II. It's about the Death of God Movement. It's about Liberal Protes--Mainline Protestantism and a lot of the activism that Mainline Protestants took part in in civil rights and second like feminism and all sorts of things. And then of course, it's also I have a later chapter about, I don't want to call it the backlash because I think that does an injustice to conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists and conservative Catholics. But then you have this kind of counter, what I call the Counter Reformation of the 1960s coming in as well.
Chris: Okay, you write in this chapter this "Neither Kennedy nor Johnson nor most of their advisers understood the new American religious landscape or grasped the importance of religious pluralism in a globalizing world." Why did you say that and what were the effects of this?
Andrew: Yeah, so this is one of the, the trickiest things about these about these chapters. So Kennedy and Johnson, especially Kennedy, came in as a modernizing pre-- not just a modern president but a modernizing president. And he surrounded himself with modernization theorists, people who called themselves modernization theorists. And inherently tied up in modernization theory is this assumption of secularization, that is it, you know, it goes back to Freud and it goes back to Weber, it goes back to all sorts of thinkers from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then as societies become more modern, they will become more secular. And it's just, it's, it's an inescapable process. And people like Walt Rostow and other modernization theorists in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations weren't that concerned with religion. But as far as I can tell, they did have this, this kind of assumption that as the world was becoming more modern, it would become more secular.
And therefore, they didn't have to deal with religion. By the same token, Kennedy's Catholicism, which of course was a white-hot subject in 1964 for liberals as well as conservatives. I mean, for a lot of people, a lot of a lot of people who supported the Civil Rights Movement said they weren't going to vote for Kennedy because he was a Catholic. I mean, it's, it, it, it just seems so foreign to us today when the Supreme Court has a Catholic majority and Catholics are just part of the mainstream. It's easy to forget just how visceral anti-Catholicism was as late as the early 1960s. Even more so, I would say, than Mormonism is for political candidates in today in politics, where people like Mitt Romney have to deal with that issue of Mormonism and there where some people just wouldn't vote for him no matter what because he is a Mormon.
Andrew: The point here is that after Kennedy gets elected in 1960 because Catholicism is such a third rail he doesn't want to deal with religion. He talks in very vague platitudes about religion, but he is not going to go down the route that FDR and Truman and Eisenhower did in using religion as a political tool because if he does that he tries to use it as a political tool. The risk that this is going blow up in his face is really, really enormous. So he just tries to contain it and move it aside and that, as I was saying, it works quite nicely with his administration because most of them, even the religious ones like Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, but they are happy to deal with foreign problems in this containerized way where religions is, is just not a part. And the consequences for foreign policy for that I argue in the book were actually quite profound because it made them miss a lot of the ferment, the growing ferment in for lack of a better term what was happening in world religions. What was happening in the 1960s with Islam and into the 1970s, what was happening in Southeast Asia. There, there is this quote that I, in the, in the book, I don't have it in front of me so I, I hope I don't mangle it but what?
Chris: I have it. But I have it, yeah.
Andrew: Is this the one about, is this the one about the Buddhist Crisis?
Chris: Yeah. Should I read it?
Andrew: Right, you please do. Thank you.
Chris: As we got it. Yeah.
"The 1963 South Vietnam Buddhist Uprising caught the Kennedy administration flat-footed. ‘How could this have happened?’ A perplexed JFK asked his advisors about the Buddhists, 'Who are these people? Why didn't we know about them before?'"
Andrew: Yeah, it's an amazing and I think I go on to say something like it's shocking that Kennedy was shocked that, that by the Buddhist Uprising.
In 1963, the Catholic leader of South Vietnam ,because there was a substantial uhhm uhh population of Catholics because Vietnam had once been a French colony. And Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam was a Catholic. His brother, his brother, his older brother was the bishop of Hue. They weren't just Catholics. They were a prominent, very active Catholic family and they were America's allies in the fight against communism in South Vietnam. And in 1963 uhh the Buddhists who felt repressed under the Diem government launched a peaceful, a, a series of peaceful protests. This is, these are the protests that led to that very famous and, and very troubling image of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burning himself alive in protest. Probably one of the most famous if not the most famous photo image from the Vietnam War.
And this is what Kennedy is talking about when he says who are these people because he doesn't know the Buddhist themselves, you know, but of course, they are the largest religious group in Vietnam. They are absolutely essential to politics and the fact that Kennedy, the president of the United States who is escalating the conflict that would be later, not much later become the Vietnam War. The fact that he is perplexed by, by these people just is, is to me still baffling when I think about that. And the, the Kennedy administration just didn't have a handle and I argue in the book that they didn't have a handle on it just as they didn't have a handle on the early signs of the Shia Revolution in, in Iran because they just didn't want to deal with religion. They just didn't, they thought religion was a dying force that it, it was politically irrelevant that you had these kind of wild-eyed mystics either and in terms, in terms of Muslim clerics or Buddhist monks or whoever. And the fact that they were burning themselves to death in protest just showed how irrational they were and these people aren't the way of the future. And that of course was just a, it wasn't only a fundamental misreading of what was happening because they weren't taking religion seriously. It, it was a fundamental error and it was a basic error in the conduct of American foreign policy.
Chris: Right. You talked about, a few minutes ago Robert McNamara, and then you mentioned the Buddhist who burned himself alive? Can you tell us that story about the Quaker who left his home one morning and asking his wife what can I do to help him stop this war?
Andrew: It's right. This is, this is Norman Morrison. So this is in 1965 and Norman Morrison was very idealistic and very, very much against the war. And he drove to the Pentagon and got close enough. He was right under McNamara's window, but got close enough to McNamara's window where McNamara could see him. And he covered himself with gasoline and was still holding his daughter. And then somebody who realized what he was about to do, people who were kind of mystified as to what was going on and they saw what he was about to do, told him to, to, to put the baby down so the baby wouldn't be hurt, which he did. And then he, in protest against the escalating war in Vietnam, burned himself to death. And that shook, we know that that shook McNamara up, even though McNamara was a very, very buttoned-up guy and didn't talk about his feelings and just wanted to repress that image and just not deal with it and just move on. And he was like that with everything in life.
He was known as an IBM machine on legs and as somebody who is extremely clever, very rational, one of the founders of systems analysis when he was at Harvard Business school. Ran the Ford Motor Company, brought it back to profitability in the 1950s. Was a master of data. It was always stats, stats, stats with McNamara. So a very rational man, but also it turns out quite spiritual. So there is this, this kind of, you know, we talked before about how do you get to know someone's faith? Well, it's a mysterious thing. It's a very powerful, powerful thing. And McNamara later turned against the war without saying he turned against the war. But he started testifying in Congress as to how badly the war was going and how it wasn't going to go well and he was implying that the US should leave.
This is in 1967 and privately at the, in the, at the Pentagon in, in the White House, he would have these breakdowns into 1966-67 and early '68 where he would burst into tears. I think a psychologist would probably say it's because he wasn't talking about his problems. He wasn't talking about the war directly. He was trying to bottle it all up. And I argue that this, that this, this moral act of conscience by Norman Morrison, the guy who burned himself in protest, contributed to McNamara's spiritual crisis about the Vietnam War. And it awakened in him a lot of the values that he held as a Christian, as a Presbyterian. And also his, his sort of his ethical compass. It sort of set his ethical compass off. And it made for him the war, this war that was going badly, that was costing the United States so much not just in, in blood and treasure but also in terms of the, of the the conscience of the nation, the morality of the nation. As Martin Luther King said in 1967, it really caused McNamara to have this breakdown on the war and to leave the administration.
Chris: Do we know anything about his religiosity besides that he was a Presbyterian?
Andrew: Well, he was an Elder. He wasn't just, you know, a, a notional Presbyterian. He was a, he was, he was an active Presbyterian. He read widely in, not just sort of conventional Protestant books in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, but he read widely on ethics and spiritualism morality and how religion either influenced or in-- intersected with a lot of those currents of thought that were becoming of course extremely popular in the 1950s and 60s. So he was certainly well-versed in a lot of these, in a lot of these issues.
Chris: Okay. Thank you. Again with this, with this chapter we could go on and on and on, but we have to move on.
We are talking with Andrew Preston, professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy.
Now, to Vietnam and the religious beliefs that supported it or agitated against it. Andrew and so then influenced American political processes in the US prosecution of that war, I want to talk about two sides of the coin here. I want to talk about the religions and religious influences that supported it and those that criticized it. I'm going to start with the latter by quoting Martin Luther King in 1967. In his “A Time To Break Silence”, responding to criticism of his anti-Vietnam War stance, "Have they the critics forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them. What can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?" Andrew, what is this representative of in context of American religious reaction to the Vietnam War?
Andrew: I think first and foremost what historians have recovered over the last 10 or 15 years, it is, it's first and foremost about Martin Luther King's own, the importance of his own spirituality and his own theology and his own Christian witness. And I think we, we do him an, an injustice if we forget that first and foremost, he was a man of faith and a preacher. But it also speaks to a wider crisis of conscience and a crisis of ethics in the United States. Vietnam was a difficult war to explain, right? It was the, I mean, the Johnson administration had difficulty explaining it even just to the general public. The Johnson administration had difficulty explaining it why America was fighting, had difficulty explaining it to the, to the Congress, to the national media. So it was a, it was a very, very tricky war to justify. That's not to say that Johnson didn't believe in what he was doing. I think he did. I think he was tormented about it and he would ask the Secret Service to drive him to churches in the middle of the night so he could sit in silence and pray. So he was tormented about it.
And it didn't matter what church, this again speaks to Johnson's inherent, his instinctive ecumenism. It's no coincidence that FDR was Johnson's hero on almost everything but also on religion which is something we often forget. But King speaking out in 1967, not for the first time. It's a myth that that's and he partly contributed to the myth by calling it a time to break silence, calling his address the time to break because it wasn't a sermon. It was just, it was, it was a speech but it was in Riverside Church and he, he called it a time to break silence. But he had spoken out against the war in March of 1965 just as it was beginning to take off and he got so much pushback on that from all quarters, including people within the Civil Rights Movement that he then kept quiet for another two years. And when he did speak out against it, it was, it was actually he was a latecomer in the sense to this angst, this moral angst that, that a lot of the country, not all of the country but a lot of the country was having about the war.
Andrew: How do we justify, you know, the, the most powerful nation in the history of the world. The richest with the most powerful military, this industrial giant that can project power halfway across the world and rain down devastation on this incredibly impoverished, non-industrial society that was fighting for national independence, right? I mean, if you put communism to one side, which a lot of historians of the Vietnam War do or at least separated from Vietnamese nationalism, at the heart of what the Vietnamese were fighting for was national self-determination, which is, you know, going back to Woodrow Wilson, going back to the founders. That's a very American thing. So it was a, it was a, it was a really it was a really tough war to support and it was a very tough war to remain silent about. And King's, King's speech is the most eloquent testimony to that.
Chris: Can you mention some of the religions that would have sided. You say Martin Luther King was a latecomer. What, what religious traditions were generally opposed to the war? Is that a fair question?
Andrew: It, it's a fair question but it's a difficult one to answer because it was pretty much across the board. So certainly Mainline Protestants the, the National Council of Churches and a lot of their affiliates, the main, the mainline denominations, most of the leadership of those organizations and churches were opposed to the war, some earlier than others. I should say in defense of King, one of the reasons he was a, a slightly latecomer to this is because when he did, when and when he was one of the first to speak out about it, there was a worry in the Civil Rights Movement that he was going to damage the Civil Rights Movement by getting on the wrong side of Johnson. So it was a political decision to, to, to then be quiet about that.
But American Jews were very critical of the war from a very early point. Quite a few Catholics, obviously, there were also quite a few Catholics who were supportive of the war because it was a very complicated thing for America, for not just American Catholicism, but for the Catholic church because of the prevalence of Catholicism within Vietnam and the religious issues in, at play in Vietnam. But a lot of Jesuit priests spoken against the war most famously the Berrigan Brothers. And eventually an organization formed called CALCAV, Clergy And Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. And it was led by Richard Newhouse a Lutheran later Catholic but at the time Lutheran. Abraham Heschel and Daniel Berrigan. So Protestant-Catholic-Jew, tri-faith nation. And they, they were one of the earliest along with new left student organizations like SDS. They were one of the earliest segments of American society to, to, to campaign against the war.
Chris: Okay. Well, let's flip that coin over and I'm going to quote something from also a 1967 statement, this one from the American Council of Christian churches, which supported the war, "America must win Vietnam. There is no other acceptable course. To surrender or show weakness before the communist onslaught would be the greatest disaster ever to befall America. The conflict with communism is God versus anti-god, Christ versus Antichrist." What does this represent Andrew?
Tell us about the, the religious influence supporting the Vietnam War.
Andrew: So that represents a lot of things. But at heart, it represents two things. One is just the, the fervency of American anti-communism in the Cold War. And I'll, I'll unpack that a little bit. But the other it represents is just what Vietnam came to stand for by the time that statement was issued in what we now call the cul-- or what would later come to be called the culture wars, which don't begin in the 1990s when the term was coined but I would argue began in the 1960's and 1970's. And so when people are forced to choose sides and if, if the other side is uhh seen as unpatriotic and critical of America in a time of crisis and so on and so forth, then the people who are naturally inclined to support the president's or to fight communism are gonna double down. And there is this kind of something that, that we see in American society or indeed in lots of societies. Bur we have seen in American society uhhm periodically, but I would say unfortunately increasingly up to, up to the present.
Andrew: And so in the 1960s what the American Council of Christian Churches wanted to highlight was the fact that yes, this is a difficult war to support in some ways. But when you boil it right down to its, its essence, it's what Reagan would later call a noble cause. This is a, a struggle against communism, Godless communism. Communism that was if you, if you inverted everything that communism stood for, this is what people used to say during the Cold War. If you inverted everything that communism stood for, Americanism was on the other side. So you'd have the dictatorship of the proletariat and you'd have a liberal democracy. You would have atheism and you would have freedom of religion. You would have a command economy and then you would have the free market and so on and so forth. So it was, it was kind of the ultimate other and it was assumed to be and there was a lot of evidence for this that it was inherently aggressive and that communism wanted to spread. Uhhm and so, there are moments where fault lines, it could be in China, it could be in Korea, it could be a Vietnam, Latin America, Berlin, or other places in Europe where, where communism was see-- was being seen to advance.
And this gets to the kind of almost eschatological flavor of that statement that you've just read that you quoted from my book that if communism wins in one place, it's going to keep winning. And it's going to snuff out everything that America stands for and eventually it's gonna snuff out those freedoms in the United States itself. Now, it seemed far-fetched to a lot of people at the time that Vietnam would be that important uhhm but to a lot of other people it made total sense. And by this time, by the late 60s, there is this inexorable logic to that, right? We go back to Franklin Roosevelt and what I said about FDR and the, and the Germans. That's the exact same argument that FDR made about the Germans. And then when the Nazis are gone from 1945 when they're defeated and as the Cold War begins to escalate, Harry Truman and then later Dwight Eisenhower applies it to the Soviet Union. It's the exact same logic and as I said, given that what was, what was happening in world politics in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s there is, you know, there was, it wasn't like the people like Carl McIntire were making this up out of whole cloth. Now, what they were doing was following that logic to its, to the nth degree, to the absolute end of that logical chain in making Vietnam so important in this global struggle against communism.
Chris: Right and they definitely, you know, put it into a very stark religious language. God and [crosstalk]
Andrew: Can I, can I say one more thing about that too.
Chris: Absolutely.
Andrew: So it is, it is, so and so I don't mean to drone on a bit but, so really interestingly Billy Graham in the 1960s paid a lot of attention to what was going on in world politics and also in Vietnam. And Billy Graham is one of the people who of course helped launch the Cold War crusade in a very ideological sense in the 1940s and 50s. But by the 1960s, he certainly hadn't lessened his anti-communism. He still didn't like communism at all. But what was going on in Vietnam? This is why Billy Graham perfectly symbolizes the struggles of the 1960s. The struggles I was referring to earlier about what a difficult war it was to support with conscience and also to argue in favor of and to justify. Billy Graham stood by his friend Lyndon Johnson. He stood by his friend Richard Nixon. But privately, we know that he was anguished about what was going on in Vietnam. And so, to me, Billy Graham's dilemmas, his struggles this kind of turmoil that he saw in the world and where Vietnam didn't really fit into any of those neat categories in the 1950s and seeing him struggle with that to me is very profound but also very telling of the turbulence of the decade.
Chris: I agree. I, I have read a biography, a couple biographies of Billy Graham and I think you're right, right on there. We are out of time just about but I don't want to end the podcast without giving you a chance to at least bring us up to speed through a decade after 9/11. Give us in a nutshell religion's influence on America's response to 9/11and everything that sort of has, sort of has come after that with regard to war in, in the Middle East.
Andrew: Well, as I said earlier when I began this book in I began in 2003. That's when I began research on it and began telling people I was writing it and I said that a friend of mine said, "Oh you're writing a history of Bush backwards." And there is certainly there has been over the last 20 years, there has been a strong religious strain of supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, a kind of American exceptionalism to remake the world, to spread democracy, and especially to protect religious freedom. But that's not the only part of the story. And even that part of the story is much more complicated than we allow for. So Bush is remembered for Iraq and I think that's probably right. That's the, the most important thing that he did as president and that is what historians are going to be spending most of their time trying to puzzle out and work through in the coming decades.
But Bush was also the president who did more to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa than any other president. He made it a real cause of his including at the height of the Iraq War. He would take time away from the war planning in the war on terror to consider HIV/AIDS. And I don't think you can really comprehend that without understanding Bush's own personal faith, the faith of some of his advisers like Michael Gerson and others and then how that faith then translated into politics. So I would say about Bush that he is more complicated than I think we realize now and we won't sort of like with Eisenhower where our understanding of Eisenhower underwent a real revolution in the 1980s because of scholarship finding new sources and thinking, having time to reflect about Eisenhower. I think something similar might happen with George W. Bush, certainly with his religion.
Andrew: And then Obama is, is no easier to figure out in a lot of senses. And, and I don't mean in a lot of senses of the way that people talk about in, in highly political terms, in highly politicized terms. Obama's heroes were a lot of peace activists and community developers, but it was, it was also Reinhold Niebuhr and he cited Reinhold Niebuhr is his favorite philosopher and he actually very bravely invoked Niebuhr in his speech in Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and saying look, I'm, I'm an American president. I, I can't live a pacifistic life. I can't be a pacifistic president. There are times where I might have to, as Niebuhr said, choose the lesser evil, but do so for moral reasons. And to be a Christian realist. To be a realist but to have Christianity kind of be his moral compass through there. So I found both Bush and Obama very interesting. I, I only deal with them as you said very briefly in an epilogue to at the end of a very long book that was published in 2012. But I do conclude by saying that both Bush and Obama, in their very different very eclectic ways, fit perfectly within the tradition of the religious influence on American war and diplomacy.
Chris: Thank you for bringing us up into the 2000s. Andrew, as we conclude, do you want to share any lessons or takeaways from the book, either in terms of perhaps important historical transformations you have charted or in terms of simply helping us better understand our present moment?
Andrew: I wish I could help us understand our present moment better. If, if I could I would be a very famous man because understanding the present moment is a challenge for us all right now. But the one thing I would take away, I would want people to take away from my book is that religion and politics, it does not just mean, it doesn't just push in one direction. It's not shorthand for the Christian right or the religious right or whatever, whatever shorthand people want to come up with. That it's, that it's more complicated. And as Obama had, said many times that it's also more productive than a lot of people assume. On the other hand, I would also want people who don't need reminding of religion's importance in politics and foreign policy to consider that it's not the only story and that it fits in with a much wider puzzle of what American politics is, what American foreign policy is and what it, what they mean within the American body politic.
Chris: Thank you, Andrew. We have been talking with Andrew Preston, professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. Mr. Preston specializes in the history of American foreign relations, specifically the intersection between national and international, including the influence of domestic politics and culture, particularly religion have had on conduct of US foreign policy. Andrew, thank you for being with us. It has been very enlightening and I hope you have enjoyed the time with us as well.
Andrew: Very much, Chris. Thank you.
Also as with each episode in our podcast series, Religion in the American Experience, we hope listeners come away with a better comprehension of what religion has done to America and what America has done to religion and thus more fully comprehend the necessity of this idea of religious freedom to America in fulfilling her purposes in the world.
Thank you, Andrew, for being with us today. Your book is absolutely fantastic. I read it years ago and it revealed to me an entire part of American history that I had not really heard of and that's almost endless in its influence and that is, religion's role in US foreign policy. So before I start any specific questions, can you tell us just generally how religion has influenced US war and diplomacy?
Andrew: Well, thanks for having me, Chris. I should say that first off. It's a real pleasure to be here. And thanks for the questions and the, and the discussion around my book. When I wrote this book almost 10 years ago, you said you read it a while ago, not many people were working on religion and US foreign policy. And now it's a whole subfield in political science and in history. So it's really, it's been, it's been really exciting. The religious influence in American foreign policy has been sometimes tricky to demonstrate because you don't always find policymakers saying I want to do A, B, or C or X, Y, Z because of my religious beliefs, especially when you're talking about high-level diplomacy. You don't always find that kind of record in NSC meet meeting minutes or, you know, things like that.
Andrew: So sometimes you have to read between the lines. Sometimes it's tricky but once historians and political scientists began to know what to look for, the job became easier. And it also became much more interesting because, as you said, it all of a sudden opened up this whole vista on how we should see American foreign policy. And then to get, to get back to your question, what is the general influence? Religion has over time, over a long period of time acted as a kind of conscience for American foreign policy and for American foreign policy makers, even for policymakers who themselves weren't religious because of American domestic politics, because of the the very vibrant role that religion plays in American domestic politics. And then the fact that domestic politics and political actors then apply pressure to policymakers and force them to confront moral questions in foreign policy. Religion has in, in that way had a huge influence on the conduct of American foreign policy and not just in the last 10 or 20 years, but the last 200 years.
Chris: Okay, so it took some sleuthing on your part to get at those tools that allowed you to see the influence. So it was a little bit of a, a job to do, I guess.
Andrew: Absolutely, and that's what, that's what is fun about it. That, that's the, that's the most fun you can have as an historian is, is piecing things together and reading between the lines and getting to know the context and getting to know the people.
Chris: Sure, absolutely. Well, thank you for doing that because it's just super revealing. So the second sort of introductory question would be tell us about the title. The title grabbed me. It just grabbed me in all ways. Tell, tell us about that title, where it came from? Why you used it?
Andrew: The title comes from the Book of Ephesians and it's where Paul is telling new Christians what they need to do. They need to what they need to wear effectively, he is using this metaphorically. And they need to wield the sword of the spirit and also brandish the shield of faith, along with another number of other accouterments. And he doesn't use those two phrases side-by-side in Ephesians in this, in this passage. But I put them together uhh because to me they capture exactly what the religious influence on American foreign policy was and still is all about.
Andrew: So on one hand, you have the sword of the spirit, which is the kind of, which is familiar to a lot of people. That's the kind of interventionist Messianic, we are going to reform the world type of ideology that has been present in American foreign policy from Manifest Destiny all the way up to the present. And in fact, when I began my book, I began my book during the, the years of the George W. Bush administration and at the height of the Iraq War. And a lot of people a friend of mine actually put it like this. A lot of people assumed that I was sort of writing a history of the Bush administration's foreign policy. And when I told a friend that actually I was going back much further in time uhh 200 years, I ended up going back 400 years. But he said, "Are you're writing a history of Bush backwards?" Basically the use of religion to justify war and empire and all that kind of thing. And that's definitely a part of the story and that's the sword of the spirit. But as I did more research, the shield of faith was also extremely important.
Andrew: And historians had not paid nearly enough attention to internationalism and pacifism and solving conflicts and promoting interfaith dialogue, promote, using religion as a, as a tool for peace. And so I have called that the shield of faith. And where the religious influence is most powerful is a blend of the kind of reformist interventionist impulse and the more pacifistic kind of internationalist impulse and where the two have combined in order to produce this very, very compelling moral vision for American foreign policy. And that, that's why the book is called Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith. If I could say one more thing about that, it I, I can't claim any credit. I can't claim credit for thinking of that, even though I came across that John Foster Dulles used the, used those those verses.
Woodrow Wilson did, lots of my historical actors in the book talked about the sword of the spirit and the shield of faith. But my wife and I were I, I live in England and based in England. We were going for a walk in the country with our dog and one of the things we love to do is to stop into these little village parish churches that are, you know, like a thousand years old and full of history. And we went into one in Northamptonshire, which is a neighboring county to, to where I'm from, Cambridgeshire. And there was a large memorial plaque on the wall of the church, this beautiful little church in the middle of nowhere. And it was to the dead of the two World Wars which is very common in English village churches. And this plaque had the, the passages, had the verses rather, and my wife said because I was, we were just talking about my book and I was just talking about what I would later identify as the sword of spirit and the shield of faith. And she said, "There it is. There is your title right there," because it just perfectly captures the book.
Chris: I agree. It perfectly captures it. So let's dive in. Andrew, thanks for that helpful foundation you laid there for us. We are just going to cover four of your thirty chapters. So we are going to talk about FDR and his faith, the religion and religious freedom used by the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, the Vietnam War, religion's influence on that, it's prosecution and then we are going to touch lightly on the epilogue of 9/11 a little bit after that. So Andrew, can you paint for us a religious portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Andrew: He was - so if I was painting just a quick portrait, he was by instinct non-theological as in non-doctrinal. To him, religion was a living thing. It was about spirituality, but it was also about ethics. But it wasn't something that you would think about, think a lot about. He wasn't a theologian but his religion was very deep. It was very profound. His wife Eleanor, who wasn't a religious person as far as we know, said that that was the most it was the thing that he felt deepest and was most mysterious in him was his faith. He was an Episcopalian and he was also by instinct as well as I would say not by doctrine because I just said he wasn't doctrinal. But to him, religion was inherently interfaith. He was an Episcopalian. As I just said, he was a Protestant. But to him, religion was a force for community, a force for coming together as well as a source of ethics. And he thought that religious commonalities inherently trumps religious differences and that should be then the basis not the only basis but a basis for politics and foreign policy.
Chris: Okay, and I should say we are starting with FDR but there is a whole, I don't know the chapter number of that chapter. But there, we're, we're skipping all this other religion, religious influence on American foreign policy pre mid-20th century and yeah.
Andrew: It's a big book. It's a big book, you know, so you can just go and say... [chuckles]
Chris: Uhh so anyways, people should read it and, and from the beginning.
Andrew: Oh thank you.
Chris: Okay, so that’s the portrait. That's helpful. I just visited Hyde Park last summer and you know, was moved by his religion sort of in the same spirit of what you relate there. I'm going to quote something from your book regarding FDR, "Building on Lincoln's ecumenical civil religion, Roosevelt was the first president to prioritize faith itself as opposed to Protestantism or even Christianity as the essence of American democracy." Can you tell us, Andrew, about how FDR used his religious beliefs and his faith in the prosecution of foreign policy, its significance and ramifications?
Andrew: Yeah. It's, it's a huge question. I should, I should sort of prefaced my answer by talking about that quote that you just read and say that I wanted to sort of pay due respect here to previous presidents who also made gestures to what we now call or what came to be called in this, in FDR's period in the 1930s and 40s, the Judeo-Christian tradition. So George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson spoke in very vague terms and not very often in ways that we would later call the Judeo-Christian tradition. So looking at how Christianity owes its roots to Judaism and how Jews and Christians should cooperate in American politics and American society and in American culture.
Chris: Right.
Andrew: But it was FDR who really elevated that notion to something that we might, to, to something that was included in the American civil religion and even I would say in the American body politic and the political fabric of the nation. This idea that Will Herberg in 1955 called the idea of a nation as Protestant, Catholic Jew. And from there, we can talk about this perhaps later in the podcast if you want, although other historians have, have talked about this a great deal from, from that notion of this kind of tri-faith America, what the historian Kevin Schultz calls tri-faith America. You then have it opens up spaces for further and further religious pluralism. For FDR in the 1930s, it was a way of distinguishing what was good about America and what was bad about what was going on elsewhere in the world, especially in Nazi Germany, but also in the Soviet Union as well as, well, to a lesser extent in Japan. But really it was about Nazi Germany.
And for FDR the religion was important for the reasons I already said because it was a source of personal comfort, a source of spirituality, a source of ethics. But for him, it was a source of democracy. And the reason it was a source of democracy is because without freedom of conscience, you couldn't have a democracy and without democracy you couldn't have peace. Peace either at home or in the context of the late 1930s and early 1940s, you couldn't have peace abroad. And one of the reasons why the freedom of religion was so politically important and geopolitically important to FDR is because if everything rested on freedom of conscience, you couldn't have, you couldn't have freedom of conscience without the freedom of religion. And he talked about this endlessly in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It's there in the Four Freedoms, in the second of the Four Freedoms, in the freedom of worship.
And it's there in some of his most important speeches leading up to World War II. Remember, this is a time when most Americans did not want to get involved in Europe. And his biggest task was convincing not the people we now call isolationist. Your Charles Lindberghs and your Gerald Nuys, people like that. His biggest task was because the isolationists, those sort of hardcore isolationists weren't the majority. The biggest task was convincing probably a plurality of Americans who were very internationally-minded, including Christian pacifists, including a lot of Protestant and Catholic and Jewish leaders. Very internationally-minded but did not want to get involved in Europe. And so one way of, of co-- of winning this argument was by appealing to what was starting to be called the Judeo-Christian tradition in a way that meant this is what is good about America, but even if Nazi Germany isn't going to attack us, this is why we have to worry about the Germans because what they're doing is they are snuffing out the freedom of religion.
And if we go back to this idea of what we might call FDR's faith-based democratic peace theory, democracies don't go to war with one another. You can't have peace without democracy. You can't have democracy without freedom of conscience. You can't have freedom of conscience without freedom of religion. That's why Americans should pay attention to what was going on in Germany. That's why they should worry about what the Germans were doing to religion. And if you're listening to this podcast or watching this video and you're interested in this, just do a quick Google "1939 State of the Union Address". And FDR's 1939 State of the Union just begins by laying that all out. Here is why we should care about freedom of religion because it's not just about what is happening to Jews and some German Christians. It's really about the fate of the world.
Chris: In the chapter that you call interestingly "The Revolutionary Church In A Revolutionary Age." And in that chapter, you write, I'm quoting here, "Perhaps without realizing it, Kennedy and Johnson reflected a shift that was taking place in religion's influence on politics and especially on foreign policy. In a modernizing society that was both increasingly secular and pluralistic, religion's role could never again be assumed. The presidents could look to faith but they could not rely on it." Why did you use the term "Revolutionary Church" in the chapter's title? And can you take us through a few examples of how the Kennedy and Johnson admin-- administration saw religion and religious freedom as part of their foreign policy toolkit or not?
Andrew: One more thought about FDR. One of the reasons I enjoyed, I did not expect to do anything on FDR when I began this book because if you read much of the biographical literature on him, including by people who knew FDR better than I ever will, people like Arthur Schlesinger, they either ignore his religious values and his, his religious faith. Or they say that it was a kind of on, you know, it was kind of superficial that he would go to church on Sundays sometimes. And that, that I kind of took that at face value took that assessment. And the more research I did, the more interesting if FDR became, FDR's religion became because it, religion was such a central part of his life. It was a very, very important part of his life and it was a very important part of his, his politics and then he made it a very important part of his foreign policy.
Chris: Yup.
Andrew: One of the trickiest chapters or the, the two of the trickiest chapters that, that I wrote that we're going to discuss I think in the 1960s deal with those, that deal with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And partly because of Kennedy's Catholicism, which a lot of people have written about, but I'm not sure anyone is really, politically there is a lot of really good stuff on, on the politics of Kennedy's Catholicism. But I'm not sure we've got to the bottom, just like I'm not sure we had got to the bottom of FDR's Anglicanism. I'm not sure we've got to the bottom of JFK's Catholicism as a personal faith. Although Fred Logavell's biography on JFK that came out recently just starts to get us there. He doesn't deal with the presidency in this volume, but it starts to get us there. And LBJ was this like a lot of other presidents like Ronald Reagan was like some other presidents had and sort of was wonderfully but frustratingly eclectic and diverse in his religious views, not just in religions he respected or read or but he would dabble in all sorts of religions and I don't mean in a superficial way but in a fairly, I would say in a fairly profound way.
And you ask why the revolutionary church, one of the really interesting things in writing these chapters in the 1960s was trying to get to grips with JFK and LBJ and some other people too. I've got some stuff that I found really interesting on Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his faith in the Vietnam War. But it was also trying to get to grips with their religion in this time of incredible turbulence, socially and culturally, including in religion. And so the revolutionary church is about Vatican II. It's about the Death of God Movement. It's about Liberal Protes--Mainline Protestantism and a lot of the activism that Mainline Protestants took part in in civil rights and second like feminism and all sorts of things. And then of course, it's also I have a later chapter about, I don't want to call it the backlash because I think that does an injustice to conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists and conservative Catholics. But then you have this kind of counter, what I call the Counter Reformation of the 1960s coming in as well.
Chris: Okay, you write in this chapter this "Neither Kennedy nor Johnson nor most of their advisers understood the new American religious landscape or grasped the importance of religious pluralism in a globalizing world." Why did you say that and what were the effects of this?
Andrew: Yeah, so this is one of the, the trickiest things about these about these chapters. So Kennedy and Johnson, especially Kennedy, came in as a modernizing pre-- not just a modern president but a modernizing president. And he surrounded himself with modernization theorists, people who called themselves modernization theorists. And inherently tied up in modernization theory is this assumption of secularization, that is it, you know, it goes back to Freud and it goes back to Weber, it goes back to all sorts of thinkers from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Then as societies become more modern, they will become more secular. And it's just, it's, it's an inescapable process. And people like Walt Rostow and other modernization theorists in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations weren't that concerned with religion. But as far as I can tell, they did have this, this kind of assumption that as the world was becoming more modern, it would become more secular.
And therefore, they didn't have to deal with religion. By the same token, Kennedy's Catholicism, which of course was a white-hot subject in 1964 for liberals as well as conservatives. I mean, for a lot of people, a lot of a lot of people who supported the Civil Rights Movement said they weren't going to vote for Kennedy because he was a Catholic. I mean, it's, it, it, it just seems so foreign to us today when the Supreme Court has a Catholic majority and Catholics are just part of the mainstream. It's easy to forget just how visceral anti-Catholicism was as late as the early 1960s. Even more so, I would say, than Mormonism is for political candidates in today in politics, where people like Mitt Romney have to deal with that issue of Mormonism and there where some people just wouldn't vote for him no matter what because he is a Mormon.
Andrew: The point here is that after Kennedy gets elected in 1960 because Catholicism is such a third rail he doesn't want to deal with religion. He talks in very vague platitudes about religion, but he is not going to go down the route that FDR and Truman and Eisenhower did in using religion as a political tool because if he does that he tries to use it as a political tool. The risk that this is going blow up in his face is really, really enormous. So he just tries to contain it and move it aside and that, as I was saying, it works quite nicely with his administration because most of them, even the religious ones like Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk, but they are happy to deal with foreign problems in this containerized way where religions is, is just not a part. And the consequences for foreign policy for that I argue in the book were actually quite profound because it made them miss a lot of the ferment, the growing ferment in for lack of a better term what was happening in world religions. What was happening in the 1960s with Islam and into the 1970s, what was happening in Southeast Asia. There, there is this quote that I, in the, in the book, I don't have it in front of me so I, I hope I don't mangle it but what?
Chris: I have it. But I have it, yeah.
Andrew: Is this the one about, is this the one about the Buddhist Crisis?
Chris: Yeah. Should I read it?
Andrew: Right, you please do. Thank you.
Chris: As we got it. Yeah.
"The 1963 South Vietnam Buddhist Uprising caught the Kennedy administration flat-footed. ‘How could this have happened?’ A perplexed JFK asked his advisors about the Buddhists, 'Who are these people? Why didn't we know about them before?'"
Andrew: Yeah, it's an amazing and I think I go on to say something like it's shocking that Kennedy was shocked that, that by the Buddhist Uprising.
In 1963, the Catholic leader of South Vietnam ,because there was a substantial uhhm uhh population of Catholics because Vietnam had once been a French colony. And Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam was a Catholic. His brother, his brother, his older brother was the bishop of Hue. They weren't just Catholics. They were a prominent, very active Catholic family and they were America's allies in the fight against communism in South Vietnam. And in 1963 uhh the Buddhists who felt repressed under the Diem government launched a peaceful, a, a series of peaceful protests. This is, these are the protests that led to that very famous and, and very troubling image of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burning himself alive in protest. Probably one of the most famous if not the most famous photo image from the Vietnam War.
And this is what Kennedy is talking about when he says who are these people because he doesn't know the Buddhist themselves, you know, but of course, they are the largest religious group in Vietnam. They are absolutely essential to politics and the fact that Kennedy, the president of the United States who is escalating the conflict that would be later, not much later become the Vietnam War. The fact that he is perplexed by, by these people just is, is to me still baffling when I think about that. And the, the Kennedy administration just didn't have a handle and I argue in the book that they didn't have a handle on it just as they didn't have a handle on the early signs of the Shia Revolution in, in Iran because they just didn't want to deal with religion. They just didn't, they thought religion was a dying force that it, it was politically irrelevant that you had these kind of wild-eyed mystics either and in terms, in terms of Muslim clerics or Buddhist monks or whoever. And the fact that they were burning themselves to death in protest just showed how irrational they were and these people aren't the way of the future. And that of course was just a, it wasn't only a fundamental misreading of what was happening because they weren't taking religion seriously. It, it was a fundamental error and it was a basic error in the conduct of American foreign policy.
Chris: Right. You talked about, a few minutes ago Robert McNamara, and then you mentioned the Buddhist who burned himself alive? Can you tell us that story about the Quaker who left his home one morning and asking his wife what can I do to help him stop this war?
Andrew: It's right. This is, this is Norman Morrison. So this is in 1965 and Norman Morrison was very idealistic and very, very much against the war. And he drove to the Pentagon and got close enough. He was right under McNamara's window, but got close enough to McNamara's window where McNamara could see him. And he covered himself with gasoline and was still holding his daughter. And then somebody who realized what he was about to do, people who were kind of mystified as to what was going on and they saw what he was about to do, told him to, to, to put the baby down so the baby wouldn't be hurt, which he did. And then he, in protest against the escalating war in Vietnam, burned himself to death. And that shook, we know that that shook McNamara up, even though McNamara was a very, very buttoned-up guy and didn't talk about his feelings and just wanted to repress that image and just not deal with it and just move on. And he was like that with everything in life.
He was known as an IBM machine on legs and as somebody who is extremely clever, very rational, one of the founders of systems analysis when he was at Harvard Business school. Ran the Ford Motor Company, brought it back to profitability in the 1950s. Was a master of data. It was always stats, stats, stats with McNamara. So a very rational man, but also it turns out quite spiritual. So there is this, this kind of, you know, we talked before about how do you get to know someone's faith? Well, it's a mysterious thing. It's a very powerful, powerful thing. And McNamara later turned against the war without saying he turned against the war. But he started testifying in Congress as to how badly the war was going and how it wasn't going to go well and he was implying that the US should leave.
This is in 1967 and privately at the, in the, at the Pentagon in, in the White House, he would have these breakdowns into 1966-67 and early '68 where he would burst into tears. I think a psychologist would probably say it's because he wasn't talking about his problems. He wasn't talking about the war directly. He was trying to bottle it all up. And I argue that this, that this, this moral act of conscience by Norman Morrison, the guy who burned himself in protest, contributed to McNamara's spiritual crisis about the Vietnam War. And it awakened in him a lot of the values that he held as a Christian, as a Presbyterian. And also his, his sort of his ethical compass. It sort of set his ethical compass off. And it made for him the war, this war that was going badly, that was costing the United States so much not just in, in blood and treasure but also in terms of the, of the the conscience of the nation, the morality of the nation. As Martin Luther King said in 1967, it really caused McNamara to have this breakdown on the war and to leave the administration.
Chris: Do we know anything about his religiosity besides that he was a Presbyterian?
Andrew: Well, he was an Elder. He wasn't just, you know, a, a notional Presbyterian. He was a, he was, he was an active Presbyterian. He read widely in, not just sort of conventional Protestant books in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, but he read widely on ethics and spiritualism morality and how religion either influenced or in-- intersected with a lot of those currents of thought that were becoming of course extremely popular in the 1950s and 60s. So he was certainly well-versed in a lot of these, in a lot of these issues.
Chris: Okay. Thank you. Again with this, with this chapter we could go on and on and on, but we have to move on.
We are talking with Andrew Preston, professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy.
Now, to Vietnam and the religious beliefs that supported it or agitated against it. Andrew and so then influenced American political processes in the US prosecution of that war, I want to talk about two sides of the coin here. I want to talk about the religions and religious influences that supported it and those that criticized it. I'm going to start with the latter by quoting Martin Luther King in 1967. In his “A Time To Break Silence”, responding to criticism of his anti-Vietnam War stance, "Have they the critics forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them. What can I say to the Viet Cong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?" Andrew, what is this representative of in context of American religious reaction to the Vietnam War?
Andrew: I think first and foremost what historians have recovered over the last 10 or 15 years, it is, it's first and foremost about Martin Luther King's own, the importance of his own spirituality and his own theology and his own Christian witness. And I think we, we do him an, an injustice if we forget that first and foremost, he was a man of faith and a preacher. But it also speaks to a wider crisis of conscience and a crisis of ethics in the United States. Vietnam was a difficult war to explain, right? It was the, I mean, the Johnson administration had difficulty explaining it even just to the general public. The Johnson administration had difficulty explaining it why America was fighting, had difficulty explaining it to the, to the Congress, to the national media. So it was a, it was a very, very tricky war to justify. That's not to say that Johnson didn't believe in what he was doing. I think he did. I think he was tormented about it and he would ask the Secret Service to drive him to churches in the middle of the night so he could sit in silence and pray. So he was tormented about it.
And it didn't matter what church, this again speaks to Johnson's inherent, his instinctive ecumenism. It's no coincidence that FDR was Johnson's hero on almost everything but also on religion which is something we often forget. But King speaking out in 1967, not for the first time. It's a myth that that's and he partly contributed to the myth by calling it a time to break silence, calling his address the time to break because it wasn't a sermon. It was just, it was, it was a speech but it was in Riverside Church and he, he called it a time to break silence. But he had spoken out against the war in March of 1965 just as it was beginning to take off and he got so much pushback on that from all quarters, including people within the Civil Rights Movement that he then kept quiet for another two years. And when he did speak out against it, it was, it was actually he was a latecomer in the sense to this angst, this moral angst that, that a lot of the country, not all of the country but a lot of the country was having about the war.
Andrew: How do we justify, you know, the, the most powerful nation in the history of the world. The richest with the most powerful military, this industrial giant that can project power halfway across the world and rain down devastation on this incredibly impoverished, non-industrial society that was fighting for national independence, right? I mean, if you put communism to one side, which a lot of historians of the Vietnam War do or at least separated from Vietnamese nationalism, at the heart of what the Vietnamese were fighting for was national self-determination, which is, you know, going back to Woodrow Wilson, going back to the founders. That's a very American thing. So it was a, it was a, it was a really it was a really tough war to support and it was a very tough war to remain silent about. And King's, King's speech is the most eloquent testimony to that.
Chris: Can you mention some of the religions that would have sided. You say Martin Luther King was a latecomer. What, what religious traditions were generally opposed to the war? Is that a fair question?
Andrew: It, it's a fair question but it's a difficult one to answer because it was pretty much across the board. So certainly Mainline Protestants the, the National Council of Churches and a lot of their affiliates, the main, the mainline denominations, most of the leadership of those organizations and churches were opposed to the war, some earlier than others. I should say in defense of King, one of the reasons he was a, a slightly latecomer to this is because when he did, when and when he was one of the first to speak out about it, there was a worry in the Civil Rights Movement that he was going to damage the Civil Rights Movement by getting on the wrong side of Johnson. So it was a political decision to, to, to then be quiet about that.
But American Jews were very critical of the war from a very early point. Quite a few Catholics, obviously, there were also quite a few Catholics who were supportive of the war because it was a very complicated thing for America, for not just American Catholicism, but for the Catholic church because of the prevalence of Catholicism within Vietnam and the religious issues in, at play in Vietnam. But a lot of Jesuit priests spoken against the war most famously the Berrigan Brothers. And eventually an organization formed called CALCAV, Clergy And Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. And it was led by Richard Newhouse a Lutheran later Catholic but at the time Lutheran. Abraham Heschel and Daniel Berrigan. So Protestant-Catholic-Jew, tri-faith nation. And they, they were one of the earliest along with new left student organizations like SDS. They were one of the earliest segments of American society to, to, to campaign against the war.
Chris: Okay. Well, let's flip that coin over and I'm going to quote something from also a 1967 statement, this one from the American Council of Christian churches, which supported the war, "America must win Vietnam. There is no other acceptable course. To surrender or show weakness before the communist onslaught would be the greatest disaster ever to befall America. The conflict with communism is God versus anti-god, Christ versus Antichrist." What does this represent Andrew?
Tell us about the, the religious influence supporting the Vietnam War.
Andrew: So that represents a lot of things. But at heart, it represents two things. One is just the, the fervency of American anti-communism in the Cold War. And I'll, I'll unpack that a little bit. But the other it represents is just what Vietnam came to stand for by the time that statement was issued in what we now call the cul-- or what would later come to be called the culture wars, which don't begin in the 1990s when the term was coined but I would argue began in the 1960's and 1970's. And so when people are forced to choose sides and if, if the other side is uhh seen as unpatriotic and critical of America in a time of crisis and so on and so forth, then the people who are naturally inclined to support the president's or to fight communism are gonna double down. And there is this kind of something that, that we see in American society or indeed in lots of societies. Bur we have seen in American society uhhm periodically, but I would say unfortunately increasingly up to, up to the present.
Andrew: And so in the 1960s what the American Council of Christian Churches wanted to highlight was the fact that yes, this is a difficult war to support in some ways. But when you boil it right down to its, its essence, it's what Reagan would later call a noble cause. This is a, a struggle against communism, Godless communism. Communism that was if you, if you inverted everything that communism stood for, this is what people used to say during the Cold War. If you inverted everything that communism stood for, Americanism was on the other side. So you'd have the dictatorship of the proletariat and you'd have a liberal democracy. You would have atheism and you would have freedom of religion. You would have a command economy and then you would have the free market and so on and so forth. So it was, it was kind of the ultimate other and it was assumed to be and there was a lot of evidence for this that it was inherently aggressive and that communism wanted to spread. Uhhm and so, there are moments where fault lines, it could be in China, it could be in Korea, it could be a Vietnam, Latin America, Berlin, or other places in Europe where, where communism was see-- was being seen to advance.
And this gets to the kind of almost eschatological flavor of that statement that you've just read that you quoted from my book that if communism wins in one place, it's going to keep winning. And it's going to snuff out everything that America stands for and eventually it's gonna snuff out those freedoms in the United States itself. Now, it seemed far-fetched to a lot of people at the time that Vietnam would be that important uhhm but to a lot of other people it made total sense. And by this time, by the late 60s, there is this inexorable logic to that, right? We go back to Franklin Roosevelt and what I said about FDR and the, and the Germans. That's the exact same argument that FDR made about the Germans. And then when the Nazis are gone from 1945 when they're defeated and as the Cold War begins to escalate, Harry Truman and then later Dwight Eisenhower applies it to the Soviet Union. It's the exact same logic and as I said, given that what was, what was happening in world politics in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s there is, you know, there was, it wasn't like the people like Carl McIntire were making this up out of whole cloth. Now, what they were doing was following that logic to its, to the nth degree, to the absolute end of that logical chain in making Vietnam so important in this global struggle against communism.
Chris: Right and they definitely, you know, put it into a very stark religious language. God and [crosstalk]
Andrew: Can I, can I say one more thing about that too.
Chris: Absolutely.
Andrew: So it is, it is, so and so I don't mean to drone on a bit but, so really interestingly Billy Graham in the 1960s paid a lot of attention to what was going on in world politics and also in Vietnam. And Billy Graham is one of the people who of course helped launch the Cold War crusade in a very ideological sense in the 1940s and 50s. But by the 1960s, he certainly hadn't lessened his anti-communism. He still didn't like communism at all. But what was going on in Vietnam? This is why Billy Graham perfectly symbolizes the struggles of the 1960s. The struggles I was referring to earlier about what a difficult war it was to support with conscience and also to argue in favor of and to justify. Billy Graham stood by his friend Lyndon Johnson. He stood by his friend Richard Nixon. But privately, we know that he was anguished about what was going on in Vietnam. And so, to me, Billy Graham's dilemmas, his struggles this kind of turmoil that he saw in the world and where Vietnam didn't really fit into any of those neat categories in the 1950s and seeing him struggle with that to me is very profound but also very telling of the turbulence of the decade.
Chris: I agree. I, I have read a biography, a couple biographies of Billy Graham and I think you're right, right on there. We are out of time just about but I don't want to end the podcast without giving you a chance to at least bring us up to speed through a decade after 9/11. Give us in a nutshell religion's influence on America's response to 9/11and everything that sort of has, sort of has come after that with regard to war in, in the Middle East.
Andrew: Well, as I said earlier when I began this book in I began in 2003. That's when I began research on it and began telling people I was writing it and I said that a friend of mine said, "Oh you're writing a history of Bush backwards." And there is certainly there has been over the last 20 years, there has been a strong religious strain of supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war on terror, a kind of American exceptionalism to remake the world, to spread democracy, and especially to protect religious freedom. But that's not the only part of the story. And even that part of the story is much more complicated than we allow for. So Bush is remembered for Iraq and I think that's probably right. That's the, the most important thing that he did as president and that is what historians are going to be spending most of their time trying to puzzle out and work through in the coming decades.
But Bush was also the president who did more to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa than any other president. He made it a real cause of his including at the height of the Iraq War. He would take time away from the war planning in the war on terror to consider HIV/AIDS. And I don't think you can really comprehend that without understanding Bush's own personal faith, the faith of some of his advisers like Michael Gerson and others and then how that faith then translated into politics. So I would say about Bush that he is more complicated than I think we realize now and we won't sort of like with Eisenhower where our understanding of Eisenhower underwent a real revolution in the 1980s because of scholarship finding new sources and thinking, having time to reflect about Eisenhower. I think something similar might happen with George W. Bush, certainly with his religion.
Andrew: And then Obama is, is no easier to figure out in a lot of senses. And, and I don't mean in a lot of senses of the way that people talk about in, in highly political terms, in highly politicized terms. Obama's heroes were a lot of peace activists and community developers, but it was, it was also Reinhold Niebuhr and he cited Reinhold Niebuhr is his favorite philosopher and he actually very bravely invoked Niebuhr in his speech in Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace Prize and saying look, I'm, I'm an American president. I, I can't live a pacifistic life. I can't be a pacifistic president. There are times where I might have to, as Niebuhr said, choose the lesser evil, but do so for moral reasons. And to be a Christian realist. To be a realist but to have Christianity kind of be his moral compass through there. So I found both Bush and Obama very interesting. I, I only deal with them as you said very briefly in an epilogue to at the end of a very long book that was published in 2012. But I do conclude by saying that both Bush and Obama, in their very different very eclectic ways, fit perfectly within the tradition of the religious influence on American war and diplomacy.
Chris: Thank you for bringing us up into the 2000s. Andrew, as we conclude, do you want to share any lessons or takeaways from the book, either in terms of perhaps important historical transformations you have charted or in terms of simply helping us better understand our present moment?
Andrew: I wish I could help us understand our present moment better. If, if I could I would be a very famous man because understanding the present moment is a challenge for us all right now. But the one thing I would take away, I would want people to take away from my book is that religion and politics, it does not just mean, it doesn't just push in one direction. It's not shorthand for the Christian right or the religious right or whatever, whatever shorthand people want to come up with. That it's, that it's more complicated. And as Obama had, said many times that it's also more productive than a lot of people assume. On the other hand, I would also want people who don't need reminding of religion's importance in politics and foreign policy to consider that it's not the only story and that it fits in with a much wider puzzle of what American politics is, what American foreign policy is and what it, what they mean within the American body politic.
Chris: Thank you, Andrew. We have been talking with Andrew Preston, professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. Mr. Preston specializes in the history of American foreign relations, specifically the intersection between national and international, including the influence of domestic politics and culture, particularly religion have had on conduct of US foreign policy. Andrew, thank you for being with us. It has been very enlightening and I hope you have enjoyed the time with us as well.
Andrew: Very much, Chris. Thank you.
