Abstract
The article is an examination of the roots of the amalgam of complex forces that informed the ‘religious cold war’. It looks at the near and the more distant past. Naturally this includes consideration of the interwar years and those of the Second World War. It also means addressing divisions in Christianity that can be traced back to the end of the third century, to the official split of 1054 between Catholic and Orthodox, the impact of the Crusades and the entrenched hostility that followed the fifty-seven years imposition on Constantinople of a Latin Patriarch. It surveys the rise of significant forces that were to contribute to, as well as consolidate and strengthen, the religious cold war: civil religion, Christian fundamentalism and the Religious Right. The article examines both western and eastern mobilization of national religious resources for political purposes.
Highlights
The article is an examination of the roots of the amalgam of complex forces that informed the ‘religious cold war’
1054 between Catholic and Orthodox, the impact of the Crusades and the entrenched hostility that followed the fifty-seven years imposition on Constantinople of a Latin Patriarch. It surveys the rise of significant forces that were to contribute to, as well as consolidate and strengthen, the religious cold war: civil religion, Christian fundamentalism and the Religious Right
There have been suggestions that the Vatican was the fore-runner to the Cold War, making the shift between the obsessively anti-Soviet papacy of Pius XII to the changes initiated by John
Summary
‘Wherever there is theological talk, it is always implicitly or explicitly political talk ’. The major Cold War belligerents all had histories marked by the intricate interplay between religion and politics. The 21st century witnessed the emergence of a scholarly consensus that there was a religious dimension to the Cold War and that it was a multi-faceted, multi-faith global phenomenon Generalizing about Christians at all, never mind during the contentious Cold War era, is difficult and dangerous as churches contain members and leaders of all political persuasions. Christianity is a diverse and complex world religion with a wide variety of churches, some of which see others as rivals for the faithful or holding erroneous beliefs. Important were relations between and within churches, because these were to be significantly impacted by the religious cold war. In 1878, he warned against what he called a ‘deadly plague that is creeping into the very fibers of human society and leading it on to the verge of destruction’.3
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