:Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism

Abstract

Angela M. Lahr makes a compelling case in this book for the Cold War as the crucial venue in the forging of the contemporary U.S. Christian Right. In her well-documented account, Christian anticommunism is the principal means by which the evangelicals negotiated their way out of their decades-long separatism after the Scopes trial and back into the national conversation mainstream. In particular, she emphasizes their success in constructing and disseminating a widely appealing apocalyptic interpretation of the Cold War that was rooted in their premillennialist eschatology yet generic enough to meet the existential questing of many secularists as well. As she cogently summarizes, the atomic bomb provided the “exigency” for the evangelicals' rejoining of the American mainstream, with anticommunism the “tool” and premillennialism the “interpretive framework” (p. 44). These claims are fleshed out in a series of case studies on evangelical and fundamentalist responses to the atomic bomb, the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam, and the Cold War tribulations of the state of Israel. In addition, Lahr has written an insightful chapter on religious missions as Cold War agencies and another on the Presidential Prayer Breakfast and the grass-roots prayer circles that proliferated in the 1950s. She argues that these prayer circles helped evangelicals to reconnect with and further shape American civil religion. Public prayer and missionary work offered usable templates for the Cold War state's propaganda war against the Soviet Union, with evangelicals becoming “deputized” (p. 16) by the state in the process. The result was an “ultrapatriotic evangelicalism” (p. 16) that remained in creative tension with the valuations of the secular state but often did sacralize the “American Way”. Politically inactive and culturally separatist it was no more.