Sex and Secularism by Scott Joan Wallach;

Author:Scott, Joan Wallach; [Scott, Joan Wallach;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691160641
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Freedom of Religion

In March 1946, British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he coined the phrase “iron curtain” to refer to the nations under Russian domination. In it he called for an Anglo-American alliance to prevent the spread of communism in the rest of the world, and he made an explicit connection between Christianity and democracy. “Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization. These are somber facts for anyone to have to recite on the morrow of a victory gained by so much splendid comradeship in arms and in the cause of freedom and democracy, but we should be most unwise not to face them squarely while time remains.”9 Two years later, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, seeking to downplay the Labor Party’s socialist tendencies in order to secure an alliance with the United States, offered a plan: “We cannot hope successfully to repel Communism only by disparaging it on material grounds … and must add a positive appeal to Democratic and Christian principles, remembering the strength of Christian sentiment in Europe. We must put forward a rival ideology to Communism.”10

The equation of “freedom and democracy” with “Christian civilization” consolidated the anticommunist alliance. Historian Samuel Moyn notes that freedom of religion soon became the organizing principle against communism. It was internationalized and Europeanized, he writes. “Soon enough, the Cold War featured a saturation of politics by Christianity in noncommunist Europe as much as transatlantically in a common project uniting ‘Western’ politicians and churches.”11 Important players in constructing the alliance were the World Council of Churches (founded in 1948 in Amsterdam), consisting of various Protestant denominations, and the Vatican, as well as numerous political leaders—those responsible for the increasing prominence of Christian Democratic parties in many noncommunist European countries (Italy, Germany, Austria).

The blending of religion and politics in this period is sometimes depicted as primarily an American phenomenon and, indeed, there is evidence for this in the 1950s. President Eisenhower considered it prudent to begin regular church attendance, and he defined God as essential to “the most basic expression of Americanism. Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life.”12 In 1953 “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance to the flag, and “in God we trust” was printed on all US currency after 1954, becoming the motto of the nation in 1956. But the movement was, from the beginning, international. As early as 1939, the Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King, referring to both fascism and communism, warned of “the forces of evil … loosed in the world in a struggle between the pagan conception of a social order which ignores the individual and is based upon the doctrine of might, and a civilization based upon the Christian conception of the brotherhood of man with its regard for the sanctity of contractual relations [and] the sacredness of human personality.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.