The Rest Is History - 153. God and the American Empire

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

On today's episode Tom and Dominic are joined by Friend of the Show, Professor Andrew Preston, to talk about the relationship between the US and religion, both at home and abroad in the 20th and 21st centuries. Why have there been such low levels of anti-clericalism in the US compared to the rest of the world? What's behind the sustained and growing numbers of religious believers in the United States? Was the Cold War really a religious crusade against godless communism? Tune in to hear the boys drill down into American Exceptionalism, the Marketplace of Faith and whether 'US isolationism' is an ahistorical term. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest is History. Now today we're once again joined by a friend of the show, Professor Andrew Preston of the University of Cambridge. Yesterday we were talking about American Crusades, about the Puritans, about the War of Independence, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and so on. And today we're moving on into the 20th century, Spanish-American War, and so on. And today, we're moving on into the 20th century, what some people have called, of course, the American century. And we're going to be talking about America's relationship with religion, both at home and

abroad. So we're going to be talking about American exceptionalism, we're going to be talking about the Cold War, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Donald Trump, of course. But first of all, let's jump right back to the First World War. All the combatants in the First World War invoke God a lot, and religion plays a huge part in mobilizing their home populations. That's less true in Britain and France, let's say, in the Second World War, but it's still very true of the United States. So would you say the first, I mean, this is a massive question, obviously, it's a classic question that Europeans ask about America. Is it pretty much the first half of the 20th century, would you say, where you start to see a divergence between the United States and Western Europe? And if that's the case, or whenever it is, I mean, it's such a massive question. I'm

embarrassed to be asking it. Why? Why are Americans still so much more religious, overtly religious, and much more comfortable? Yeah, overtly. Okay, fine, Tom. But even Tom, who thinks that everybody is still a Christian, would have to agree that Americans are overtly far more religious than their British, Danish, Belgian, Dutch, French counterparts. I mean, it's a massive question, but why? It's very much still a part of the American political culture in a way that isn't in some other countries. So I'm not sure that it necessarily changes in that period, although that is where the US begins to diverge from Western Europe. But I think the reasons for that go deeper. If we think about American

exceptionalism, why is America, you know, American exceptionalism means America is exceptional in two ways. One, that it's different from other countries. And the other way is that it's better. So it's exceptionally, it's exceptional in that it's different or it's exceptional in that it's better. And sometimes, especially to Americans, the sense that America is better, better, excuse me, slip of the Freudian slip of the tongue, that it's better stems from this sense of American difference, that it's somehow unique in the world. And religion is very much a part of that.

It's always been. And when social scientists were asked and who predicted social scientists who predicted that as the world becomes more modern, it will become less religious, that that's the iron law of development. Modernization sort of crushes religion before it. And they were always asked, the social scientists were always asked, well, what about the United States? Because it's the most modern society in the world or one of the most modern societies. And yet not only is religion not dying, it actually seems to be increasing so that you get to the middle of the 20th century and America's in the midst of another great awakening, extremely religious 1950s. And so why is that? And I think a lot of that is

embedded much earlier in American political culture through things like the separation of church and state, which means that when the state is discredited, as it is in a lot of countries where there is no separation of church and state, like Russia or Mexico or France or elsewhere, when there's a revolution against the political authorities, there's then not a revolution against the church either. And the church isn't discredited along with politics, because politicians are always discredited. There's almost no anti-clericalism in American history. And that is, I don't want to say unique, because somebody always pops up with an exception, but it's very, very, very unusual. And I think it's very unusual had to compete. And so it gave rise to what sociologists call the marketplace of faith, which is a quintessentially American metaphor. The marketplace of faith where there has to be constant competition and innovation.

And so not only are the sort of long established churches, your Methodists, your Baptists, your Episcopalians, your Catholic, a little bit true within Catholicism as well. Not only are they competing with each other for adherence, you also have new faiths spring up through the 19th and early 20th centuries as a process or as a product, rather, of that process of competition. So you have the invention of new religions throughout this whole period in Mormonism and Seventh-day Adventism and the Nation of Islam and Reform Judaism, which began in Europe, but isn't really, doesn't become a big thing until the US. Well, so Andrew, just to ask about the Jews, because they become a very influential part

of America's cultural matrix. How are they absorbed into the sense of America as a Christian nation? Well, they get it. It's a great question. They get absorbed through the invention of a tradition in the late 1930s, and that's the Judeo-Christian tradition. So Americans never before then talked about being Judeo-Christian, ever. And it's in the late 1930s because as Americans start realizing what's going on in Nazi Germany, as Franklin Roosevelt starts to try and position the US against Nazi Germany, he's looking for in Nazi Germany. As Franklin Roosevelt starts to try and

position the US against Nazi Germany, he's looking for reasons to do so. And he starts emphasizing, at a time when a lot of other people aren't acknowledging what's going on, how Germans are treating Jews in Europe. This is before the war. This is before 1939. And FDR is starting to invoke a Judeo-Christian heritage. And that's what separates. Religious tolerance, religious pluralism, being a people of the book, that sort of thing, is what makes us Americans, as opposed to what's going on in Nazi Germany.

And that's what makes the Nazis our enemy. So he begins to sort of pound away at this message. It really catches on in World War II. And you have all sorts of wartime propaganda posters about catholics and protestants and jews fighting alongside each other that it doesn't matter what faith you are in the foxhole that you know we're all part of the same cause it just matters all that matters is whether you're an american and whether you're behind the cause and then of course you pivot very quickly from world War Two to the Cold War, where you're fighting an explicitly atheistic, anti-religious enemy. And that war isn't between

two nation states, but it's between two systems, two ways of life that's playing out on a global scale. And religion, but not necessarily Christianity, not even Protestantism, religion becomes embedded in American Cold War ideology. And that's what separates, that's what keeps us apart. And so the question, I mean, the question for a long embedded in American Cold War ideology. And that's what separates, that's what keeps us apart. And so the question, I mean, the question for a long time in American history was, you know, the important question is, are you a Protestant or are you a Catholic? And even it gets down to, are you a Methodist or a Baptist or an Episcopalian? And in the 20th century, the question then becomes not, are you a Protestant or a Catholic or a Jew? It's, are you religious or are you not

religious what you were saying andrew is is that um protestants and catholics and jews are being summoned i guess we could call it a crusade but certainly to an idea that their opponents are evil and the concepts of good and evil are obviously religious ones they're kind of bred of, let's call it Judeo-Christianity. So, you know, do you answer the summons to combat evil or do you not? And we have a question here from Harold Stassen. The US also has a long history of isolationism and suspicion of involvement with the outside world. Is this tradition in direct conflict with the history of American Crusades? I would guess you'd say not, because I guess you would say that there are also Christian motivations for not getting embroiled in foreign conflict. Absolutely. Exactly. The only thing I would quibble with with the question is the word

isolationism, which I don't like using because I don't think the United States was ever an isolationist country. If you went back in a time machine, if you hopped in your DeLorean and went back to 1860 or 1890, and if you told, I don't know, somebody from Britain or Cuba or Mexico or Canada or North Africa or China or Japan, which is forcibly opened up by the United States in the 1850s, if you went almost anywhere in the world and you told them that Americans are isolationist and they keep to themselves and they don't engage with the rest of the world, You'd be lucky if they sort of, you know, shouted at you and said you were crazy. You'd probably get punched because most of those people I mentioned at one point or another were at war

with the United States, or at least were injured, you know, had the United States attack them. So the U.S. has never been isolationist, but it has been wary of political commitments to other countries, to the f commitments to other countries, to the fates of other countries. And that changes in the 20th century. But as you said, Tom, both those impulses, the title of a book that I wrote on the religious influence on American war and diplomacy is called Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith. And those two things really speak to the two main impulses in the American Crusades, the sword of the spirit, the kind of warlike aggressive impulse, and then the shield of faith, the more pacifistic reformist impulse. But neither of them are isolationist.

Let's go back then to the Cold War, because that's obviously the point at which America, you don't like the word isolationism, but that's when America is committed to other countries, to the fate of other countries. Yeah, I agree, in a different way than it was before. It's bound to NATO. It's bound to the defense of Western Europe. Does the Cold War have a different flavor in America because of the religiosity? So think about Eisenhower's America, the kind of, you know, in the public mind, I would say that's an America of sort of, you know, people in small towns pledging allegiance to the flag, in God we trust, very, very overtly religious, both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the American civil religion. But does that mean the Cold War is different in America from other Western countries? So in Britain, obviously,

the Cold War is not really that religious. I mean, there are religious people who are... Well, Ernest Bevin was pretty religious but yeah but but by and large the public is becoming much less overtly religious i think tom i did say overtly um and um noted and uh yeah i mean you know sort of scriptural references are are vanishingly rare in british political rhetoric in cold in cold war rhetoric even mr thatcher well. Thatcher, you know, Tom, she does it, and it seems glaring, but she doesn't do it as much as Ronald Reagan does. You know, she polices it, and I think the people around her are anxious about it.

But it helps to cast her as a Cold War warrior, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. It does, but she's unusual. I mean, look, Ted Heath is not kind of quoting the Bible and saying we're committed to a crusade against communism. I mean, the thought that he or Harold Wilson would say something like that is just laughable. But Andrew, so the Cold War must feel different in the United States for that reason, right? Well, I mean, you obviously know more about British history than I do. I don't want to.

I'm not an historian of other countries, but I do think just based on what I know of the Cold War, the answer is yes, that the United States is unusual, certainly compared to Western Europe. And it's not just rhetoric. It's not just a rhetorical commitment to religious values. It's not just sort of using religious imagery in order to justify policies that are really being conducted for other purposes. It's there at the heart of what it means to be an American. It's not the full picture. It's not the full story. And of course, not everyone was religious. But in the 1940s and 1950s, into the 60s and 70s, a little less so, but especially in the 40s and 50s. Absolutely. Being religious, that is America's cause. That's very much a big part of America's cause in the Cold War.

And you see it through the policies of Franklin Roosevelt in World War II, but then through Harry Truman and Eisenhower. And at one point, Truman wants, at the start of the Cold War, as the Cold War is heating up, he decides that he wants a big religious summit of all the world leaders. And he tells his aides, this is the language he uses. He says, you know, contact the Pope and contact the Archbishop of Canterbury and contact the top Buddhist and the top Mohammedan and the top. And these are wonderful memos because he just wants like the

bigwigs of all the world religions to come to Washington, D.C. And his aides kind of, some of his aides kind of scratched their heads because the fight is against atheism. The fight is against communism because they don't believe in freedom of conscience they don't believe in freedom of religion and if they can't believe in conscience or or freedom of religion then they can't believe in democracy and that makes them aggressive and and then it takes this is wonderful story where he asks his ambassador to turkey to ask the turkish government who the top Muslim is. What else is good? Well, he says, as you'd expect, he says,

well, we don't really have a top Muslim anymore. But actually, Mr. Ambassador, this is the Turkish diplomat saying this to the American ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, doesn't your country have enshrined a constitutional separation of church and state? And yet you're making religion the basis of your policy. Okay, let's take a quick break here. And we'll come back with your question, Tom. We'll see you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host

The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com welcome back now, you were poised. We've talked about America as a Protestant nation, and we've talked about how Catholics and Jews kind of get woven into it. But does the Cold War enhance that sense that Catholics and Jews are allies of Protestantism? Because you said, get the Pope on the phone. John Paul II in particular, I mean he he's seen by reagan by

thatcher as a key ally and the other thing of course that happens after the second world war and through the cold war is the role that's played by israel and america's alliance with israel and the sense that evangelicals in america have that somehow the establishment of israel is a fulfillment of god's plan um and do those two you know know, the Catholic and the Jewish dimensions of Cold War policy, do they have blowback on domestic religious interfaith relations? Yeah, there's a constant interplay. I mean, Truman is, of course, also the president who recognizes the state of Israel. And he does so against the advice of a lot of his

diplomats, because it's going to enrage the Arab world. And he quotes, I forget what you'll probably know, Tom, but he quotes the, he says, he turns to his aides and he says, I am Cyrus, who freed the Jews. And his aides have no idea what he's talking about, his diplomats. Because throughout this process, the American diplomatic corps is actually not very religious. It's very professionalized. It's very secular. They have no idea what he's talking about. But Truman is very proud to be the first leader to recognize the state of Israel. So they do come in. And that's also part of the Cold War. That's part of sort of not just a commitment to the freedom of the Jews, but also to promoting religion against the forces of irreligion, because the forces of irreligion, because the

forces of irreligion are also the forces of aggression, the forces of tyranny. And that's how it all comes to be tied up in American Cold War ideology. When we get to the end of the Cold War, so obviously Reagan is president, and Reagan is obviously an absolutely, he's so elusive, he's so ambiguous, he's fascinating. He appears to be incredibly irreligious with his store of kind of Hollywood dirty stories and, you know, he's divorced and all this stuff. But, and he's also hard to pin down in religious terms, isn't he? Because he believes in ghosts and astrology and all kinds of wacky stuff. But he believes in evil.

He believes in God too, and he believes in Jesus. He believes in evil he believes in god too and he believes in jesus he believes in it all but the evangelical movement kind of adopts reagan or they adopt each other at the end of each other they adopt each other um they adopt each other and from that point do you think there is i mean is it fair to say there is a tonal shift from the 1980s onwards that leads to the rhetoric of george w Bush? Or am I wrong in seeing that as any kind of break? Because obviously Carter had previously been very religious. Oh, yeah. I mean, Nixon was a Quaker. He didn't invoke God an enormous amount, I wouldn't have said Nixon.

Well, Nixon is the first president to start signing off his speeches, God bless America. Is he? That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was purely for political reasons. I was about to say, I mean, nobody does sincerity better than Richard Nixon. Although he does, you know this story, Dom, where he does ask during Watergate, he asks Kissinger to get on his knees and pray with him. Yeah, we did. We covered that in our Watergate podcast.

Such a terrible moment, isn't it? Because he says to, he prays with Kissinger and then he says, Henry, whatever you do, don't tell anybody about this. Don't rush it out. Get some Twitter. Yeah. to and then he says um henry whatever you do don't tell anybody about this rushes out gets on twitter yeah but is reagan a break um in bringing evangelical language into politics or is it all is it in presidential politics he just revives it okay he he's not a break he revives it and he revives it in a very in a way that freaks a lot of people up and in a way that's also very politically skillful you know he of course i mean, he describes the Soviet Union as an evil empire after a period of daytime. And it's very

scary to a lot of people that he does that, including to a lot of his own aides. But people forget that he gave that speech to the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, the most powerful religious organization in the United States, not just religiously powerful, but especially politically powerful. And he chooses that forum to call the Soviet Union an evil empire after 15 years of detente. And religion is very much that kind of religious, that sort of sword of the spirit is very much at the heart of the Reagan doctrine and Reagan's anti-communism. But interestingly, also is the shield of faith. So when Reagan makes his pivot in 1984 away from that cold warrior rhetoric and

looks for a way out of the Cold War, looks to try and end the Cold War, and he finds a partner in Mikhail Gorbachev and they begin to negotiate. He also, in a much more subtle way, uses religion as a way to, as both method, but also objective in trying to more subtle way, uses religion as both method but also objective in trying to find a way out of the Cold War. So in terms of method, I won't go into all the details, but in the late 70s, there was a family of Pentecostals, another invented American religion in the early 20th century. Pentecostalism was born in Los Angeles. And so there's a group of Pentecostals in Siberia. They were called the Siberian Seven. And they, in the name of religious liberty, they went to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, traveled all the way wouldn't let them leave. And of course, the Americans wouldn't let them out of the embassy because who knows what would happen to them. And it became a huge issue, a really big deal politically. And Reagan talked about it a lot in his more aggressive phase as an evidence, this is why they're evil and they're denying people the

freedom of conscience and democracy and religion and all that sort of thing. But in 1983-4, when he's looking for a way out, he approaches the Soviets and he says, he says, we can do this quietly. And if you if you let them leave the country and eventually settle in the United States, I won't make a big deal politically about it. And he does that. He's good to his word. And that's the first confidence building measure that the Americans and the Soviets do that paves the way for detente. And later on, when he meets Gorbachev and they're flying around in helicopters and summits in Reykjavik and Vienna and places like that, Reagan keeps lecturing to him. And Gorbachev later says, why on earth is he telling me this?

Cause I really don't care. But Reagan keeps lecturing to him. He says, he keeps lecturing to him about the importance of religious freedom and the importance of individual choice over religion, which is a very Protestant notion. And, and he says,

this is what you, and this, and he says, if you just recognize this and embrace it, then it will lead to better things. So that's a kind of argument for liberal democracy, American civil religion, all that kind of thing. When the Cold War ends, the famous slogan that sums it up is the end of of history written by francis fukuyama who is the son of a protestant minister i actually didn't know that i actually didn't know that yeah so so so fukuyama is absolutely from this kind of protestant interesting uh universal understanding of of you know and essentially it seems to me that his vision of the end of history is a kind of secularized vision of the end times. It's, you know, the universal values of liberal democracy have spread. So, and America then comes, that's what America comes to cast itself as the defender

of. So in a sense, you could say that since the Cold War, to that degree, America has remained true to that idea of itself as a defender of what is good, as opposed to what is evil. And I suppose that if you're talking about Judeo-Christian civilization, notoriously with 9-11 and its aftermath, that then starts to rub up against the other great religion of the book, which is Islam. And going into the 21st century, how do you see that as a kind of a problem for America's sense of itself as a crusader? In fact, I mean, absolutely on that question we have from Captain Insano, do you think George Bush's crusade comment around the war on terror was a slip of the tongue that reflected existing thoughts and attitudes to US foreign policy? To that last question? Absolutely. Yes, I think it was a genuine slip of the tongue. I think he had no clue about the historical context and resonance that that would

have in other parts of the world but i think the use of the word absolutely well i'm just agreeing with the question yes it absolutely reflected the fact that he reaches for that word he reaches for that he doesn't even reach for it it's just there he just the fact that it's accidentally there because he's steeped in that kind of yeah in that sense i don't think it's deliberate i wouldn't say no exactly yeah yeah exactly but what about so george shibli bush obviously he's even he's an evangelical he's comfortable with the language of um of protestant evangelicalism and that's what he reaches for after 9-11 and so you have that sort of tendency in american foreign policy which is there throughout the early 21st century. And then you have also Republican, very different, the America first kind of tendency of epitomized by Donald Trump.

And is the Trump sort of tendency, do you think that is, I mean, that seems so different from so much of what we've been talking about, because is there any religious components of that at all? He's compared to Cyrus, isn't he he is yeah exactly yeah yeah and that's part of it but just on the before that george toby bush there's another yes he he has the evangelical sort of crusading rhetoric um and he has and then the other strands i forget what they were but you mentioned some other strands but then there's also he also explicitly invokes that that tradition of pluralism, of religious pluralism that goes back to Franklin Roosevelt and to Harry Truman and others that is supposedly pluralistic, but has at its heart a Protestant core, Al-Qaeda does not represent true Islam. They're not true Muslims. And he also says that the way forward here is through religious tolerance and religious pluralism. And it's a message that Obama continues.

His most famous foreign policy speech, the address in Cairo in June of 2009. He says the Middle East is wracked by, and it sucks in great power competition, and war begets war. What's the way out of this? And he says, religious tolerance, religious pluralism, because without that, you can't have peace. And without peace, you can't have stability and democracy. And if you basically, you have to have religious tolerance and religious pluralism, which is something we've had for a long time in the American tradition. So it's not just George W. Bush who's saying that sort of thing. But what about Trump? Is Trump different?

No, I mean, as Tom said, he's, you know, so he's got the one, he's very, very pro-Israel, and he's in large part he's pro-Israel because that's a big part of his political base. White evangelicals vote for Trump in much greater numbers and a greater proportion of their numbers than they did even for George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. Trump himself is very, very irreligious. But as you said, Dom, you don't have to be personally religious to have support from the religious right or any religious community. So he's not religious, but he says all the right things. He does all the right things. I think he says that, talking about the Bible, that it's even better than the art of the deal.

Yeah, that's right. He's obviously never read it. Well, two books he's never read because he didn't even write art of the deal. He never read that either. The art of the deal. When he marches over to the church across from the White House during the Black Lives Matter protests, and he's holding up a Bible in front of the church,

he holds it upside down for a while. Yeah, he's not a man of faith. But he was close to Reverend Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s, who I believe married, presided over his first marriage. And Peale was the author of, you know, those self-help books from the 1950s. What are they called? Jesus Wants You to Be Rich kind of books.

No, but religious but secularized in a way. The Power of Positive Thinking. That's Norman Vincent Peale and all of those books. And Trump very much believed in those too. So it's not really religious, but it's – to go back to a question Tom or a statement Tom made towards the beginning of the podcast, if it suffuses everything, when does it stop becoming religious? It never does.

It never does. That's a perfect note on which to end. Just encouraging Tom, which is not good to hear. No, Andrew, very wise, very wise. It's a brilliant book, by the way, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith. And it won a prize, didn't it,

in your Native Canada? Top book of the year. Best Canadian book ever written. Wasn't that the that the prize something like that i think you and margaret atwood are the uh the two top two top canadians and davies yeah right andrew thank you very much uh thank you for all of you uh for listening and we will see you next time on the rest is history goodbye bye-bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening and access to our chat community please sign up at rest isorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.