God's Country: Christian Zionism in America by Samuel Goldman

Author:Samuel Goldman [Goldman, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812294941
Google: owVKDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2018-02-02T07:06:49.908215+00:00

Judeo-Christian Civilization and the Cold War

On December 22, 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a speech at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York to the Freedoms Foundation, an educational organization of which he had been appointed honorary chairman. Recounting wartime discussions, the president-elect described the difficulty he experienced in explaining American democracy to Soviet military commander Georgy Zhukov. According to Eisenhower, Communists like Zhukov could not understand America because “our form of Government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judo-Christian [sic] concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.”31

Eisenhower’s remark was not widely noticed when it was delivered. It achieved proverbial status a few years later, when Will Herberg, a labor activist, sociologist, and associate of Reinhold Niebuhr, made it the centerpiece of Protestant, Catholic, Jew, his groundbreaking analysis of religion in mid-century America. In Herberg’s opinion, “[e]very American could understand” that Eisenhower’s statement was “the expression of the conviction that at bottom the ‘three great faiths’ were really ‘saying the same thing’ in affirming the ‘spiritual ideals’ and ‘moral values’ of the American Way of Life.”32 The “Judeo-Christian concept” was a way of including all Americans—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—in a common front against Soviet tyranny.33

Judeo-Christianity had mixed implications for the new Jewish State. On the one hand, it implied that Christians were bound to Jews, and to the State of Israel, in a fundamental manner that overrode their many disputes. German-born theologian and ACPC supporter Paul Tillich answered the question “Is there a Judeo-Christian tradition?” in the affirmative.34 Among the points of agreement that Tillich identified was a common attitude toward history. Rather than a cycle or a random flux of events, Christians and Jews understood history as a process oriented toward a divine purpose.35 Herberg noted that this understanding was inseparable from the promise of return to the Promised Land: “The destiny of Israel begins and ends in Zion.”36

On the other hand, the emphasis that Eisenhower placed on confronting the Soviet Union suggested that history pointed in a different direction. Such was the view of his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, who had come to public attention as a Presbyterian layman, whose service included work as an advocate for Harry Emerson Fosdick in his ecclesiastical trial for heresy. For Dulles, America’s importance for Christianity lay in its stand against Communism.37 Jews and Judaism played only a minor role in his conception of God’s will.38

Dulles was not hostile to Israel per se. Although he maintained connections with anti-Zionist Christian circles, he resigned from the ACJ-affiliated Holy Land Emergency Liaison Program because it was too critical of Israel.39 Even so, the Eisenhower administration sought a rebalancing of American influence in the Middle East.40 In the words of the National Security Council planning staff, “Israel will not, merely because of its Jewish population, receive preferential treatment over any Arab state; and thereby demonstrate that

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