Peripheral visions: American mainline Protestants and the global Cold War

Abstract

This essay challenges the underlying assumption that American religion in the Cold War was nationalistic, militant, and blindly obsessed with anti-communism. Instead, it draws attention to liberal mainline Protestants who, from their experience in the ecumenical and missionary movements, called for decolonisation, nuclear and conventional disarmament, and unconditional dialogue with the Soviets and recognition of China; they were also concerned with racism, poverty, and disease. In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, these religious Americans not only represented the first serious challenge to containment from within, they also anticipated the global nature of the Cold War and the dominant transnational concerns of the post-1960 international system.