On balance, he tends to sympathize with his protagonists' rhetoric and take it at face value.
THE MOST NOTEWORTHY EXAMPLE OF THE POLICY OF DETERRENCE WAS DRIVERS
As he documents how leaders spoke in such terms and mobilized religious sentiments as Cold War tactics, he remains fairly uninterested in exploring how much of their rhetoric was mere propagandistic window-dressing, ideological (in a sense of exhibiting some form of false consciousness), and/or limited in political weight compared to other drivers of policy. More than most scholars from beyond Inboden's neoconservative precincts (he thanks sources such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Smith Richardson Foundation for supporting his research, and he worked as a policy planner for the National Security Council in the Bush/Cheney White House), Inboden presupposes the moral, political, and rhetorical centrality of a conflict between godless Communism and a Western democracy seen to have spiritual underpinnings.
Through such examples, Inboden adds rich texture to long-appreciated themes and bolsters his case that religious factors in the decade after World War II were more significant-both as motives of US policies and as part of a package of tactics to pursue these policies-than many historians have assumed. Inboden is especially interested in Truman's and Eisenhower's diplomacy vis-à-vis domestic ecumenical groups like the National Council of Churches, as well as on an international stage that included the Vatican, Orthodox bishops in the Soviet sphere of interest, and selected Muslims in the Middle East. Alexander Smith, who as a devotee of the Moral Rearmament movement wrote extensive journal entries about how God was guiding his political decisions. A lengthy opening section traces the stances of Christian leaders toward foreign policy from 1945 to 1960, and subsequent chapters explore the religious-political ideas of politicians including Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, and Senator H. Leighton Stuart became the ambassador to China and Walter Judd became a Congressman). He offers stimulating accounts of such things as the activities of Eisenhower's minister Edward Elson, secret diplomatic negotiations with the Vatican and other anti-communist religious leaders in Europe, and the role of former China missionaries in US politics (for example, J. However, against this background, Inboden does a good job of mining the historical archives for details of his story that have been unknown or underappreciated. Moreover, his argument dovetails with longstanding efforts by religious neoconservatives to valorize the more anti-communist and pro-imperial aspects of this discourse and carry forward the idea that a central divide falls between secularism and "godless" communism, on one side, and spiritually-grounded democracy on the other. As an intervention into patterns of scholarly interpretation, Inboden adds relatively little to longstanding common sense about the prevalence of "God and country" civil religious discourse in the 1940s and 1950s.
William Inboden's Religion and American Foreign Policy is a noteworthy contribution to scholarship on religion and politics during the Cold War era.
0 kommentar(er)
