Christianity, Dissent, and the Cold War: A. J. Muste's Challenge to Realism and U.S. Empire*

Abstract

“If Dachau was a crime,” peace activist A. J. Muste wrote in his 1947 book on the bomb, Not by Might, “then Hiroshima is a crime.” He warned that, unless Americans repented of the “hideous sin” of atomic warfare, international control of atomic energy would remain a chimera. By dropping the bomb, Muste argued, the United States had “introduced a profound tension into international relations. We are suspected and feared, and we are ourselves suspicious and afraid. Presently we shall be hated—in some places we are already—unless we reverse our course.”1 Muste was indeed a prophetic figure, whose principled dissent and championing of civil liberties during the Cold War resonated with his contemporaries and remains prescient today. In particular, he offered an incisive analysis of U.S. foreign policy and a sharp critique of realism, which came to dominate Protestant and liberal circles after World War II. Muste believed that the arms race and the Vietnam War grew directly out of contradictions within realist thought as well as racist and nationalist assumptions that went unexamined by its practitioners. He drew on his religious faith to construct his own existentialist solution to the problem of anxiety in the nuclear age, one that bore moral witness to the practices and values of U.S. empire and that anticipated the New Left's confrontation with Cold War liberalism over the war in Vietnam. As this essay will show, his example demonstrates that Christianity shaped resistance as well as accommodation to the Cold War and reminds us that religion, like all powerful cultural constructions, is contested and politically versatile.