Faith in Freedom: Propaganda, Presidential Politics, and the Making of an American Religion

By Andrew R. Polk

In Faith in Freedom, Andrew R. Polk argues that the American civil religion so many have identified as indigenous to the founding ideology was, in fact, the result of a strategic campaign of religious propaganda. Far from being the natural result of the nation's religious underpinning or the later spiritual machinations of conservative Protestants, American civil religion and the resultant "Christian nationalism" of today were crafted by secular elites in the middle of the twentieth century. Polk's genealogy of the national motto, "In God We Trust," revises the very meaning of the contemporary American nation.

Polk shows how Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, working with politicians, advertising executives, and military public relations experts, exploited denominational religious affiliations and beliefs in order to unite Americans during the Second World War and, then, the early Cold War. Armed opposition to the Soviet Union was coupled with militant support for free economic markets, local control of education and housing, and liberties of speech and worship. These preferences were cultivated by state actors so as to support a set of right-wing positions including anti-communism, the Jim Crow status quo, and limited taxation and regulation.

Faith in Freedom is a pioneering work of American religious history. By assessing the ideas, policies, and actions of three US Presidents and their White House staff, Polk sheds light on the origins of the ideological, religious, and partisan divides that describe the American polity today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501759246

Book preview

FAITH IN FREEDOM

PROPAGANDA, PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS, AND THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN RELIGION

ANDREW R. POLK

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Rachel

Now and Forever

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PARTONE: ROOSEVELT

1. Removing Unnecessary and Artificial Divisions

2. Uniting against a Common Foe

PARTTWO: TRUMAN

3. Building a Better World

4. Filling the Void

PARTTHREE: EISENHOWER

5. Creating the Space between Church and State

6. Being Religious in America

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is my first and, consequently, is not only the product of years of research, writing, and revision but also the culmination of decades of experiences and conversations that shaped me as a scholar and a person. I could never hope to thank all of the people who have shaped my life over the years, but there are a great many who have had such an impact on my academic and personal development that they deserve special mention here. At Lipscomb University, I was blessed with many fine teachers and mentors, including Mark Black, John York, and Lee Camp, who gave of their time, energy, and seemingly unending patience. I want to especially thank Richard Goode, who instilled in me both a love of America’s religious history and a healthy distrust of the intellectual and bureaucratic vagaries of the academy. At Yale, Jon Butler, John Demos, Joanne Freeman, Randall Balmer (on loan from Columbia at the time), Adela Yarbro Collins, and Harry Stout together expanded my thinking and imagination, while grounding me in the scholarship of the past. At Florida State University (FSU), John Corrigan, Amy Koehlinger, and Adam Gaiser challenged my assumptions and forced me to grow, whether I liked it or not. Finally, Amanda Porterfield was a wise and patient adviser. She is still as kind as she is brilliant, and I will forever be grateful for her ability to steer me in the right direction while still allowing me to forge my own path.

Although I have heavily revised it in the ensuing years, this work owes a great deal to conversations with my fellow graduate students at FSU. Their insight and intellect made this work better, in both its original and present forms. I have been helped in my research by numerous archivists and librarians, particularly at the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience at FSU, the Presbyterian Historical Society, Yale Divinity School Archives, and the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower Presidential Libraries. I am grateful to FSU’s Graduate School for awarding me a research grant that allowed me to travel to these essential archives. I would also like to thank Cambridge University Press for giving me permission to use much of the material in chapter 1, which was previously published as an article in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture in September 2013.

I am especially grateful for those who have supported me as I have revised this work over the past several years. I am indebted to my colleagues at Middle Tennessee State University, particularly the excellent scholars and teachers of the History Department. The demands on junior faculty can be intense; the fact that my colleagues not only wanted me to succeed but also actively gave of their time and wisdom to ensure that I did made all the difference. Michael McGandy at Cornell University Press helped lead me through what turned out to be a meandering process with many fits and starts. I appreciate his patience and support throughout the process. I am also grateful to Cornell’s readers, who not only evaluated the book but also took the time to offer insightful and incredibly helpful ways to improve its argument and impact. Likewise, Mark Fisher, Eric Collins, and Julianna Coughlin took the time to read the work at various stages, noting my many errors and offering valuable advice. I would particularly like to thank Ryan Korstange, who went through an earlier draft with a fine-tooth comb. His deft hand at editing is matched by his generous spirit and steadfast friendship.

Finally, I would like to thank those whose love and support have sustained me over the years and enriched my life in innumerable ways. Clint Walker and Brent Hamric have proved to be better friends than I deserve, but without whom I would not be the person I am today. My parents, Bobby and Marie, and sister, Kristy, have shown me what unconditional love really is, and I am humbly aware of how blessed I have been to have such a supportive family. Similarly, I would like to thank my children, Eva, Ender, and Ronan, who could not care less about this book or any titles or awards I have collected over the years. They love me because I am their dad, and that is enough. I will always try to be worthy of their love. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Rachel. Like our children, she loves me regardless of any accomplishment, yet constantly supports me and sacrifices to make sure I can achieve my goals. A Valkyrie through and through, she has enriched my life in ways I can barely fathom, but for which I am eternally grateful. It is to her that I dedicate this book.

Introduction

Religion, War, and Unity

Dwight D. Eisenhower sat calmly at his desk, flanked in the foreground by two phones and in the background by two American flags. His speech started off rather predictably. Eisenhower expressed his good wishes to his successor and his thanks to Congress and the American people. As he had done so many times before, he then lauded the nation’s free and religious people and warned against the constant threat of the Soviets, a foe global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.¹ It was January 17, 1961, and Eisenhower would soon turn over the White House to a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. George Washington began the tradition of farewell addresses, and virtually every president since has followed suit, but few men between America’s first and thirty-fourth presidents had chosen to leave office in such a way.

Eisenhower went out with a rhetorical bang. After repeating his common tropes of America’s moral strength and foundational religious heritage, he pivoted in a surprising direction. He first counseled Americans to seek balance in their public and private affairs and then identified two potential threats to that balance, threats that served both to warn of future peril and to criticize the nation’s current state of affairs. The first derived from America’s military establishment. Although he maintained that it was a vital element in keeping the peace, Eisenhower also noted the immense size of America’s military and its increasing reach in American society. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea, he asserted. The threat, he explained, was the expanding influence the military establishment had on American life. We must guard, he famously declared, against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. In his view, Americans must make sure that the nation’s machinery of defense was always in line with its values. Although scholars have rightly focused on his warning against the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower went on to identify another threat to American balance and prosperity, namely, its increasing consumerism and economic shortsightedness. He was concerned that Americans had forgotten to balance short-term desires with long-term essentials. Specifically, he worried that Americans too often concentrated on fulfilling their own immediate desires for new products and the latest trends without considering how their actions might affect their, or the nation’s, future. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage, he cautioned. After warning Americans of these two potential pitfalls in their newfound prosperity and global dominance, he concluded his speech with a note of hope for the future. Protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength, he declared, Americans must strive to achieve a peaceful world and never give in to despair over the many barriers to that peace. You and I—my fellow citizens—need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice.²

Eisenhower’s warning that the nation’s increasing militarism and consumerism were affecting its spiritual well-being was almost laughably hypocritical. First, social critics had been pointing out these tendencies for many years, and this criticism would only intensify as the nation’s wealth gap widened and its interventionist policies further entrenched it in foreign conflicts.³ However, those critics rightly noted that Eisenhower had long promoted those same policies. If, as Eisenhower claimed, the military had grown so large by 1961 that the fighting men and women of World War II and Korea would not recognize it, that growth came under Eisenhower’s watch and, by most accounts, with his approval. Although the military’s size and budget certainly shrank after the close of the Korean War, Eisenhower did not dismantle the military as American tradition dictated. For instance, military expenditures reached a high of 13.5 percent of gross national product by 1953, yet this only dropped to around 10 percent after the war and remained at that level for the rest of the decade.⁴ Economists Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy have actually argued that the difference between the deep stagnation of the 1930’s and the relative prosperity of the 1950’s is fully accounted for by the vast military outlays of the ’50s.⁵ Furthermore, Eisenhower did not seem terribly concerned with mortgaging the material assets of the nation’s youth when he twice enlisted the aid of the Advertising Council (or Ad Council), an assembly of advertising executives eager to loan their expertise to the U.S. government, during periods of economic slowdown to encourage Americans to buy goods without worrying about the future.⁶

Yet Eisenhower’s disingenuous critique of his own policies is not the most glaring hypocrisy of his farewell address; it is the fact that he warns against their threat to America’s religious heritage and its spiritual foundations. Not only did Eisenhower help bring about the developments he laments in his farewell address, but he also spent eight years using religious propaganda to justify and garner support for those same policies. The supposed religious heritage Eisenhower claimed to value so dearly was the product of a coordinated campaign of religious propaganda that he adopted and expanded from his two immediate predecessors. For example, when Eisenhower directed the Ad Council to bolster Americans’ material consumption, the organization subsequently mounted public relations campaigns to explain that buying goods demonstrated Americans’ faith in the American way of life and their dedication to both the nation’s essential religious freedoms and its God-given place in the world.⁷ In fact, Eisenhower had made so many declarations of America’s religious heritage during his presidency that years before he left the office his staff had begun denying requests for speaking events so that the president’s seemingly endless religious references would not annoy the public.⁸ Although Eisenhower’s religious rhetoric is well known, scholars have yet to examine adequately the ways he and his immediate predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, constructed an American religion to advance their political objectives. In truth, the extent to which so many political, military, and business leaders coordinated with the White House to advance public policies through religious propaganda during the mid-twentieth century is astounding.

This book exposes the ways that these three presidents, in coordination with other politicians, advertising executives, and military public relations experts, employed religious propaganda to create an American religion that best suited their purposes and promoted their preferred policies. The political propaganda of the period was not religious because its chief advocates were intent on crafting an American religion as an end unto itself; they were concerned with influencing the American public. They found, early in the Second World War, that religion best suited their purposes, and so they created an American religion that advanced their own agendas and then sold that religion to the American public. Roosevelt called this America’s faith in freedom, a term that both Truman and Eisenhower adopted, though they both adapted the specifics of that faith for their own purposes.⁹

America’s faith in freedom was purposefully vague, centering on appeals to an ill-defined Judeo-Christian tradition on which the nation had supposedly been founded. Borrowing from a long tradition of patriotic and militant religion, midcentury propagandists reinterpreted the trope of America’s providential destiny for their own uses and applied it most forcefully to the organization of a militaristic, Cold War state.¹⁰ In keeping with their own individual and sometimes competing aims, they also imbued their preferred American religion with the necessity of a large military force and the essential need for a consumer-driven economy, while tying all three elements together in an ambiguous appeal to freedom. Social unity was the principal selling point of their propaganda efforts, even if it was primarily a means to other ends. Consequently, Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, along with their various allies, intentionally concealed America’s growing racial divide by subsuming race under religion and insisting that confronting racial injustice inevitably divided and, consequently, weakened the country. The religious patriotism and facade of national unity that the period’s religious propaganda produced was not an accident, but they were not the point, either. They were the by-product of a political project. This book exposes and examines that project, a multifaceted campaign of religious propaganda that spanned three presidential administrations.

Religious leaders and organizations were certainly involved in the period’s religious propaganda. Several works have rightly noted the centrality of religion during the mid-twentieth century or placed religious elites as central players in many developments of the period.¹¹ For example, some religious elites were assiduously transforming America from a Protestant nation to a tri-faith country of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews.¹² Others leveraged their cultural and even political influence to advance their vision of God’s totalitarianism in a new world order.¹³ During Eisenhower’s administration, several pastors, notably Billy Graham, worked directly with the president even as they coordinated with conservative business interests to overturn New Deal policies and promote an American faith that fit their interests and vision.¹⁴ Eisenhower certainly shared a common understanding of America’s providential place in the world with Graham, but Eisenhower’s view did not originate with Graham or Graham’s business associates. The faith Eisenhower promoted, though certainly molded by his own personal upbringing, was also an extension and escalation of a program of religious propaganda already established by Roosevelt and Truman. Simply put, despite their promotion and even manipulation of the period’s religious propaganda, religious leaders were not its primary architects.¹⁵ Instead, they were commonly, though often unknowingly, reacting to the machinations of political operatives who held little regard for the religious content or ramifications of their creations. During the 1940s and 1950s, the principal religious propagandists were not ministers, priests, or rabbis; they were agents of the state: advertising executives, politicians, and military commanders.

This book is not the first to examine the supposed consensus, intersection of religion and politics, or expansion of the government during this period. Rather than discount these previous works, this book connects, compliments, and advances these studies by exposing the central project that united these actors and developments: the White House’s religious propaganda. For instance, several works have rightly noted the role that religion played in America’s understanding of the Cold War, especially in its rhetorical fight against godless communism.¹⁶ Others have correctly argued that the consensus narratives of the mid-twentieth century were not natural developments but a political project that sought to create at least the veneer of national consensus through the promotion of the American Way.¹⁷ However, this work enhances both of these perspectives by demonstrating that the American Way of the period was strategically centered on a faith in freedom that was, itself, a product of religious propaganda.

The source of that propaganda and the religious nationalism it promoted is important for understanding both its origins and its repercussions. The period’s propagandists can rightly be said to have borrowed from a long tradition of civil religion, which sociologist Robert Bellah identified in the late 1960s.¹⁸ However, that term was problematic from its very inception, a fact that Bellah freely admitted.¹⁹ Sociologist Marcela Cristi has already demonstrated that most of the weaknesses in Bellah’s concept stem from his assumption that America’s civil religion arose spontaneously from the collective beliefs and hopes of the public, with no outside or top-down influence.²⁰ Instead, she refers back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s original concept of civil religion as a coercive invention of governmental elites both to validate and to gain popular support for their rule. Cristi argues that in America and throughout the world, elites often intentionally create or endorse civil religion to force group identity and to legitimize an existing political order, by injecting a transcendental dimension or a religious gloss on the justification.²¹ It is this political aspect of civil religion that I examine in America’s mid-twentieth century, a period that demonstrated its most explicit manifestation. Speaking of these political constructions as religious propaganda rather than civil religion both avoids confusion with Bellah’s original notion of the nascent beliefs of the American public and more accurately labels the explicit and strategic machinations of these presidential administrations to create an American religion that supported their preferred policies.

The term religious propaganda is, of course, problematic for a variety of reasons. Apart from the seemingly inherent polemic of labeling anything propaganda, designating something as religious propaganda seems particularly troubling, especially since, as cultural anthropologist William M. O’Barr has rightly noted, propaganda, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.²² However, the informational and public relations campaigns detailed in this study easily fit into the accepted scholarly definitions of propaganda. For instance, scholar Richard Alan Nelson defines propaganda as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels.²³ The campaigns also fit media historian Philip M. Taylor’s shorter definition of propaganda as a deliberate attempt to persuade people, by any available media, to think and then behave in a manner desired by the source.²⁴ Through religious language and images, the individuals, groups, and their public relations campaigns examined in this book sought to define America and Americans in a specific and limiting way, in order to promote desired policies and behaviors.

For example, the Ad Council and the American Heritage Foundation, a conglomeration of business and advertising executives, Hollywood moguls, labor organizers, politicians, and religious leaders, collaborated with the U.S. attorney general, Tom Clark, to promote an American identity that cast free market economics as the political and spiritual foil to godless communism in 1947. Their campaign, called the Freedom Train, toured the country with many of the nation’s founding documents, all while working with local groups to organize patriotic revival meetings.²⁵ When a full third of the nation participated in the campaign’s events, the organizers taught them through images, songs, speeches, and television and radio programs that Americans were joined together through a dual love of God and freedom. The group considered using equality or democracy as defining elements, but ultimately chose freedom because it was conveniently ambiguous and held fewer troublesome implications, especially in the American South.²⁶ Attorney General Clark saw the campaign as an essential way to blend [the nation’s] varying groups into one American family through indoctrination in democracy.²⁷ Thomas D’Arcy Brophy, the Ad Council executive who organized the campaign, put it another way; the Freedom Train was about re-selling Americanism to Americans.²⁸

The fact that many of the organizations charged with carrying out such campaigns considered their activities to be domestic propaganda, including the Office of War Information (OWI), Ad Council, United States Information Agency (USIA), and American Legion, further supports their inclusion as such.²⁹ For further corroboration, one need only look to 1947, when Congress convened a special subcommittee to investigate the public relations activities of the Army Ground Forces in promotion of their Fort Knox Experimental Unit, which was explicitly designed to convince the American people that service in the army would strengthen the moral and spiritual fiber of America’s youth. After an extensive investigation, Congress ultimately censured the army for propaganda activities against the American people.³⁰ Although they might not fit the popular understanding of propaganda as psychological warfare enacted abroad, the domestic nature of such programs does not disqualify them as avenues of propaganda. Along these same lines, historian Kenneth Osgood has expertly demonstrated that these same organizations blurred any lingering distinctions between ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ propaganda by both ‘targeting’ the American people and enlisting them as active participants in the war of persuasion being waged abroad.³¹

For the purposes of this book, religious propaganda is defined as a strategic public rhetoric that uses religious language and imagery both to promote an advantageous definition of American identity and to support specific policy goals. This term is employed in much the same way scholar Shawn J. Parry-Giles writes of propaganda during the presidencies of both Truman and Eisenhower. Parry-Giles connects the many ways the two presidents formalized and institutionalized previous wartime propaganda techniques for the sake of their rhetorical presidencies during peacetime. By expanding the concept of the rhetorical presidency beyond the bully pulpit to coordinated and tangential activities of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Parry-Giles demonstrates that state-sponsored propaganda became a vital way that these presidents defined both themselves and the nation in light of their political goals. Unfortunately, Parry-Giles fails to account for the extensive role religion played in these presidents’ propaganda, even while noting religion’s essential place in Eisenhower’s rhetorical presidency.³² In truth, this religious rhetoric was a vital tool for civic leaders of the day and scholars must account for it in any accurate investigation of these presidents and the period as a whole.

The religious propaganda of the mid-twentieth century did not have a straightforward or simple development, but the byzantine nature of that development is key to understanding how the propaganda’s legacy became a commonplace part of American politics and the American imagination. Consequently, the book is arranged chronologically. In broad strokes, the propaganda was first developed and employed during Roosevelt’s presidency, adopted and developed during Truman’s, and extended and institutionalized during Eisenhower’s. Roosevelt’s first attempts to use religion to promote national unity in the lead-up to America’s entry into the Second World War did not go well. Although he sought both to woo and to compel religious institutions to support his efforts, religious leaders never backed him to the extent he desired, and his efforts tended to expose more divisions than create unity. After America entered the war, Roosevelt only increased his efforts. Although he continued to court religious leaders, the OWI and the War Advertising Council (WAC) proved to be more willing and capable allies. All agreed that religion was a better framework for promoting national unity than class, race, or ethnicity were, so their public relations campaigns began portraying religion as quintessentially American. As Roosevelt and his allies toiled to convince Americans that they were joined together by common religious traditions, military members crafted a similar form of religious unity, but their brand of American religion eschewed religious distinctions to an extent far beyond which either Roosevelt or his military commanders were comfortable. Ultimately, the elevation of national identity over denominational or religious distinctions proved to be a vibrant template for the type of religious propaganda that emerged after the war.

Truman, for his part, sought to capitalize on both that template and Roosevelt’s previous efforts in order to support his postwar goals of military expansion in the new world order. However, like his predecessor, Truman found religious institutions too cumbersome for his purposes, despite numerous efforts during the first years of his administration to harness their influence in support of initiatives like universal military training (UMT) and an international condemnation of communism as antireligious. After rejecting religious institutions as allies, and the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC) specifically, he utilized professional propagandists to promote the type of religious unity he desired, most notably the Ad Council and U.S. Army public relations experts. As Truman collaborated with these groups to develop an American religion that could support their overlapping and sometimes competing aims, all agreed that racial divisions were the principal threat to the religiously maintained unity they envisioned. Consequently, they intentionally ignored race in their religious propaganda.

Unlike his predecessors, but because of their example, Eisenhower immediately looked beyond religious institutions to craft and promote his own brand of religious propaganda. Although he adopted and utilized the same faith in freedom as Roosevelt and Truman, Eisenhower was more interested in using it to advance national security than national unity. His extensive use of nonreligious agents like the USIA, American Legion, and Foundation for Religious Action in the Social and Civil Order (FRASCO) produced initial church-state conflicts, but the subsequent creation of what these agents termed social issues that were supposedly neither religious nor political defied the traditional church-state dichotomy. Eventually, several religious leaders and organizations came to Eisenhower either in opposition to or in solidarity with the social issues he and his allies promoted. Most notably, Protestant evangelicals, led by Billy Graham, adopted Eisenhower’s social issues and the supposed religious heritage they endorsed, even while the veneer of national unity those same issues were supposedly protecting unraveled. The lasting legacy of the period’s religious propaganda solidified as liberal and conservative Protestants began both arguing about and defining themselves in relation to the American religion created over the previous two decades by politicians in support of their own political aims.

With a few exceptions, the civic leaders in this study, though intentionally employing religious rhetoric in their propaganda, were not particularly concerned with theological content or proper religious ritual in that propaganda. Although they might have personal opinions or even deeply held beliefs about doctrine or practice, they were more concerned with the benefits of religion for their own political ends and the creation of a particular type of American religion that advanced their agendas. Consequently, this study will spend far more time investigating how and why these actors crafted America’s faith in freedom rather than the accuracy or authenticity of the religious propaganda they employed or the societal value of the policies they used to promote it.

There were certainly numerous facets to America’s holy fifties, and the individual experiences of everyday Americans are far too complex to be wholly attributed to public relations campaigns. However, the fact that advertisers, politicians, and military leaders chose to define American identity in religious terms to suit their own ends is itself important, especially since that same patriotic religious rhetoric has come to define the period during which they employed it. Examining how these civic leaders crafted religious propaganda, as one of Eisenhower’s allies put it, to prompt religiously-motivated action toward common political goals also sheds light on the ways others have used and continue to use religion to promote their own agendas.³³ In truth, although their contexts and policy goals have changed over time, most of the presidents since Eisenhower have adopted America’s faith in freedom.³⁴ However, since the 1980s, the conflation of free market economics and military strength with religious nationalism has been closely associated with white evangelical Protestants, the Republican Party, and the many organizations and leaders who blur the lines between the two. Donald J. Trump, who garnered the votes of more evangelical Protestants than any presidential candidate in American history, won the White House in 2016 by promising to make America great again in part by stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values.³⁵ Yet both the criticisms that Trump characterized as attacks and the so-called Christian nationalism of his most ardent supporters were as much a by-product of the mid-twentieth century’s religious propaganda as the alignment between conservative Protestants and politicians that propelled Trump to the White House.³⁶ In other words, the formation of two seemingly incompatible notions of America that has plagued American society over the past decades actually emerged from the project of a unified nation in the 1940s and 1950s. The fact that those who still sell America’s faith in freedom seem as much, if not more, interested in particular economic and military policies as in theological or ethical commitments is not a coincidence; it was the very purpose of the enterprise from the beginning.

PART ONE

Roosevelt

CHAPTER 1

Removing Unnecessary and Artificial Divisions

The first manifestation of the mid-twentieth century’s religious propaganda did not emerge from some smoky back room of an elite social club near the National Mall. Nor was it the opening salvo of a calculated, national public relations campaign, though there would be plenty of those over the next two decades. It was more of a recce mission or scouting trip, whereby the president could test the waters of public opinion and see how amenable religious leaders were to open cooperation with the White House. Throughout 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was increasingly concerned with the evolving situation in Europe, and though the American people had been clear they wanted the nation to stay out of what looked to be yet another European conflict, he was certain the nation needed to become more involved. To garner support for a more forceful response to Adolf Hitler’s expansionist agenda, Roosevelt decided a unified denunciation of German aggression by America’s, and perhaps even the world’s, religious leaders would put diplomatic pressure on the Nazi Party and elicit public support for his own policies.¹

Consequently, on December 24, 1939, Roosevelt’s Office of Communications widely disseminated to national and international media outlets three personal letters addressed to the respective leaders of the three more dominant religious traditions in America and, as far as Roosevelt was concerned, the world. Roosevelt’s administration painstakingly constructed the letters over the preceding weeks and held them in strict secrecy until it released them to the media. The letters were portrayed as both a goodwill gesture and a Christmas greeting from the president. The administration chose Rabbi Cyrus Adler, president of Jewish Theological Seminary, to represent American Jews and George A. Buttrick, president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC), for American Protestants. The last letter went to Pope Pius XII, head of the Roman Catholic Church. Roosevelt offered each man warm wishes and his hearty thanks for all that each had done for his people and the world. Yet Roosevelt also noted the fear and uncertainty of the time; war had again come to Europe and threatened to envelop the globe. It was the responsibility of all people of goodwill, Roosevelt insisted, to come together in any way they could for the cause of peace. He hoped the three men and those they represented would put aside religious differences and join together for the common good. He also proposed that the three men, or representatives of their choosing, should regularly come to the White House to share with him the opinions and concerns of their respective congregants. Such visits would also allow Roosevelt to share with them his own concerns for people of faith throughout the world.²

Roosevelt had often lobbied for the common good during his implementation of the New Deal, though he had only recently expanded the appeal to international affairs, and the letters were the president’s first overt petition to a national religious community. The administration certainly had ulterior motives behind the letters, not least of which was the letters’ assumed positive public reception on the eve of an election year. However, President Roosevelt, at least, saw the effort as a necessary step to gaining the type of public support he sought. Germany and the Soviet Union had invaded Poland merely three months prior, and many in the administration believed the war would only escalate in the coming months. Roosevelt thought getting American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews both to publicly cooperate in matters of humanitarian aid and to present a united front to the world would go a long way to securing the strategic peace he sought, a peace that, he assumed, corresponded to the type of peace for which each tradition advocated. The Christmas letters were his first public overture toward such collaboration and his first foray into employing religion as a central element in domestic propaganda. The letters also provided the first evidence that religious institutions were insufficient promoters of that propaganda; they were too unruly and resisted Roosevelt’s efforts to define an American religion on his own terms and for his own purposes.

Roosevelt had reasons for his initial optimism, though. Since the close of the First World War, calls for reconciliation and cooperation had become popular in America, particularly among Protestants. Northern and Southern Methodists, divided since before the Civil War, negotiated a merger in the spring of 1939. In a letter of congratulations on the unification, Roosevelt wrote that he hoped those outside of the Methodist fold would see the