When the Soviet Union successfully obtained working nuclear weapons technology in 1949, the peoples of the world were forced to face the prospect of their potential annihilation if the United States and the USSR entered the war. direct conflict. During the Cold War, the resurgence of domestic religious activity in the United States influenced the government's portrayal of the conflict with the Soviet Union as moral and spiritual in nature. Although this reinvigorated religious activity was initially a superficial and vague form of Judeo-Christian civil religion, by the end of the Cold War major national religious movements had evolved into groups like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. I argue that after World War II, religion served as one of many explanations for why the United States and the Soviet Union were so opposed to each other, and it also functioned as one of many weapons in the arsenal American to go to war. Furthermore, although the domestic religious landscape of the United States has influenced American foreign policy in various ways, its influence has been neither consistent nor predictable. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay While the religious dimension of the Cold War is often downplayed, it is not insignificant. Indeed, religion was part of the ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. After the October Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Party passed a series of laws that significantly limited the power of the Russian Orthodox Church. As Marxists, achieving the perfect communist state involved ridding the former Russian empire of religion and other institutions that distracted the proletariat. After the Great Terror of the late 1930s, the Soviet government successfully destroyed most of the institutional structure of the Russian Orthodox Church. In a change of heart that some scholars attribute to Stalin's need to rally domestic support for World War II, in the fall of 1943 Stalin called an official meeting with the four remaining Russian Orthodox bishops in the Kremlin and granted the clergy a series of concessions . this contradicted the previous three decades of policy towards the church. If religion had been an insignificant component of the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev would not have denounced Stalin's warming relations with the church and would not have restored policies of militant atheism. Given the history of the Soviets persecuting religious adherents, the USSR positioned itself as the ideological opposite of the United States. While America's founding documents claimed the nation was dedicated to freedom and the protection of civil liberties, the USSR was committed to suppressing such things. In addition to helping explain why the United States fought the USSR in the Cold War, religion also functioned as something else. weapon in the American arsenal, and was therefore part of how the Cold War was fought. The early Cold War presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower set the precedent for describing the conflict in highly moral and religious terms. Truman, the first Cold War president, once said in an audience “the international communist movement…denies the existence of God…God created us and brought us to our present position of power and strength for some great purpose.” At the highest levels of American government, some officials were deeply convinced that religion was the missing link in America's Cold War foreign policy. Among those who believed that religion could be used as a weaponAmerica's secret secret to fighting the Cold War was Harry Truman, who proclaimed that "only religion can answer the cry of desperation of twentieth-century humanity." The religious rhetoric employed by senior government officials, including numerous Cold War-era presidents, was in some sense a mobilization tactic to curry favor with another period of costly wars. Rather than simply intervening in the civil wars of Korea and Vietnam, the nation's leaders framed their actions as part of a moral responsibility to those at risk of being subjected to communism's militant atheism. It wasn't just presidents who were involved in the moralization of the Cold War. Religion was a vital factor in the formation of George Kennan's “Long Telegram.” A devout Presbyterian, Kennan's main conclusion in the “Long Telegram” was that the United States and the Soviet Union had irreconcilable differences in goals and values ​​that made negotiation between the two superpowers impossible. Therefore, with negotiations and the military defeat of the USSR momentarily impossible, Kennan advanced the idea of ​​containment as America's best foreign policy option. In 1959, thirteen years after his infamous 1946 telegram from Moscow, Kennan reiterated in a public speech that he still saw communism as an “abomination to God” and an “apocalyptic threat.” The Cold War era also shows evidence of the American perception of the Cold War as a moral struggle. Filled with religious language, the document paints America as a virtuous land of freedom and the Soviet Union as a nation that subjects its people to slavery. Early on, the authors write that the USSR, “unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatical faith, antithetical to ours.” Instead, the “fundamental purpose” of the United States has been described as “to ensure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded on the dignity and worth of the individual.” Although some parts of the document read like a call to arms, it was not declassified for the public until 1975, suggesting that the religious rhetoric often used in the early Cold War was not all empty rhetoric aimed at the public, but rather reflected the genuine faith of Americans at the highest levels of government. Another religious element of the NSC-68 and the general political discourse in America during the Cold War was the idea that the primary goal of communism was world domination, a goal that, if achieved, would spell the end of the style of Western life that Americans were accustomed to. Although the world would not literally end if Marx's global communist revolution came to fruition, American leaders often made it seem as if the world would actually end. Although NSC-68 was a political proposal, it included a number of vague references to the nation's morals without clear political directives to achieve the stated goals. On page 29, the authors wrote “we must make ourselves strong… in how we assert our values ​​in the conduct of our national life.” The authors go on to state that “it is only by developing the moral and material strength of the free world that the Soviet regime will be convinced of the falsity of its assumptions.” While proposals for strengthening the material part of the free world are clearly expressed in the document suggesting that the US government triple defense spending, there is no direct guidance for strengthening the nation's morals. Rather, the authors continually return to the importance of “moral strength,” but seem uncertain about its place in an official political relationship. Towards the end of the document,the authors conclude that "the only sure victory lies in the frustration of the Kremlin's design through the constant development of the moral and material strength of the free world and its projection into the Soviet world in such a way as to bring about internal change in the Soviet system." President Eisenhower also recognized the role that the domestic flourishing of religion could play in the nation's fight against its Cold War enemy. In public statements, Eisenhower often described his country's conflict with the Soviet Union as a kind of crusade, once asking "what is our battle against communism if not a fight between anti-God and belief in 'Almighty?' Eisenhower used religious rhetoric to describe America and its people to draw a clear distinction between the United States and the Soviet Union. He firmly believed that democracy “is meaningless unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith” and repeatedly referred to communism as “godless.” While he was in office, Congress passed legislation making “In God We Trust” the national motto and adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. After signing the legislation that made the addition to the Pledge of Allegiance official, Eisenhower remarked "from this day forward, millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, in every village and rural school, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty”. Furthermore, he described the modification of the pledge as a method of “constantly strengthening those spiritual weapons which will forever be our country's most powerful asset.” It is important to note that these advances for the American Judeo-Christian civil religion occurred at a time when forced prayer and Bible reading were still legal components of the public school curriculum. Only in 1962, in the landmark Supreme Court case Engel v. Vitally, school prayer was ruled unconstitutional, and school-sponsored Bible reading was not ruled unconstitutional until the following year in Abington School District v. Schempp. Thus, although the Constitution mandated the separation of church and state, it was not until the 1960s that the state's appropriation of religious rhetoric to promote a strengthened civil religion for the Cold War was successfully countered. Cold War rhetoric was evangelist Billy Graham. Although Graham had been well known in the evangelical community for a long time, it was not until his 1949 Los Angeles campaign that Graham gained national recognition. Exploiting the Soviet Union's recent acquisition of nuclear weapons and the victory of Mao's Communist Party in China, Graham painted a grim picture of the world's future lest his American audience take up his call to crusade against empire of the evil of the USSR. Graham warned the American people that “communism is not just an economic interpretation of life: communism is a religion inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself who has declared war on Almighty God.” With his unique blend of Christianity, anti-communism and fervent patriotism, Billy Graham became one of the central figures in harnessing domestic political opinion and directing it towards the foreign policy of fighting communism. Despite being against the state-sponsored atheism of the Soviet Union, not all Soviet citizens obeyed and many continued to practice their religion, even if they had to do so in private. In connection with state-sponsored humanitarian aid to Soviet countries, the American people expressed concern about the plight of Christians in Russia during the Cold War. A 1994 government report fromCommittee on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), entitled “CSCE to examine repression against evangelicals in the former Soviet Union” noted that “although state-sponsored atheism and religious repression have, apparently, ended in many ways, many religious minorities are still at a huge disadvantage.” Of particular concern to the report were the continued murders of clerics after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian-American Institute for Adaptation wanted press coverage of those killings in media in the United States and Russia, and turned to the U.S. government for help. Additionally, the report included a two-year list of “martyrs.” This source indicates that there was substantial public interest among the U.S. population in helping Christians in the Soviet Union, despite the extreme tension that existed between the governments of the two nations during the Cold War. It also demonstrates that relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were not always black and white. Furthermore, the Cold War's use of religion as a weapon against “godless communism” consolidated the Judeo-Christian alliance that had been absent for so long. After World War II, Truman turned to Pope Pius XII to secure his help in fighting communism. Beyond simple religious rhetoric from the nation's leaders, leaders took steps to forge a new American civil religion that included those from Judeo-Christian traditions and aggressively opposed communism. Truman observed that “minor, and even major, differences in the way we choose to worship God seem to me of comparatively little importance in the face of an aggressive enemy that threatens to destroy all freedom of worship.” Concerned about secularization resulting from increasing modernization, religious leaders and their communities overwhelmingly embraced the Cold War-inspired religious revivals spreading across the nation. However, as the Cold War progressed, government support for Christianity transformed into more general and ambiguous support for religion in general. Perhaps the most significant faith-based U.S. foreign policy initiative during the Cold War was the recognition of the State of Israel. in 1948. The case of Israel, more than any other state, demonstrates the impossibility of clearly separating religion and politics. Home to the holiest sites of the three Abrahamic religions, the land that now belongs to the Israeli state has been hotly contested for centuries. When President Truman decided to extend diplomatic recognition to the newly formed Israeli state, he did so without the support of many of the senior officials he appointed at the State Department. However, Truman's personal faith and the overwhelming domestic support for the Israeli state sparked by the post-World War II religious revivals led him to recognize Israel anyway. On the other hand, President Eisenhower, also a religious man, was skeptical of his administration's alliance with the Israeli cause. Despite their shared faith, these two U.S. presidents came to very different conclusions about how to deal with Israel during the Cold War. Thus, while religion was certainly a factor in a number of foreign policy initiatives during the Cold War, its influence was varied and did not always lead to similar policy decisions among those who shared a faith. Both men openly admitted the influence of their faith on their respective policies, but in the context of the Cold War, with an ever-changing domestic religious landscape and myriad ways in which each individual decision, 1993.