Religion in Postwar America

U.S. Religious History

Suburbia and Religion

Phenomenal growth of churches, 1945–60

Baby Boom

New modernist sacred architecture

Politics and Cold War

Anticommunist unity, 1950-1965

Religious belief distinguishes America from godless Communism

Catholic conservatism and anti-Communism: Joseph McCarthy

Catholic Church in Europe staunchly anti-Communist, weakening American anti-Catholicism

Atomic weapons and Israel, 1948, encourage dispensational premillennialists

Anti-New Deal Republican millionaires link politics and Christianity

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953-1961

“Under God,” 1954, and “In God we trust,” 1956

Moderate evangelicalism dominates: Billy Graham

Supreme Court and Church-State Relations

Jehovah’s Witnesses cases, 1943 (and many others)

No pledge; conscientious objectors; right to proselytize

Schools

Bible-reading dropped in Northern schools, 1870s-1880s

Court tests: “secular purpose”; no “excessive entanglements”

No state-written prayer, 1962, or Lord’s Prayer, 1963

No religious school funding, 1972

Religion versus freedom: “right to privacy”

Contraceptives: Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965

Abortion: Roe v. Wade, 1973

Protestant Postwar Theology:
Neo-Orthodoxy

Return to traditional language of Protestantism

Not Fundamentalist: no inerrancy

Keep emphasis on this world, like the Social Gospel

Religion interconnected w/economics, society, ethics, politics

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971): Christian Realism

Serenity prayer

Neo-Orthodoxy dies with its leaders

Liberal Protestant Theology Fragments

Vietnam War shatters anticommunist unity, 1965-1973

Jews in Postwar America

World War II & Cold War

Shock at Holocaust and fear of McCarthyist anti-Communist hysteria

Political moderation: From radicals to liberal Democrats

Assimilation

Suburbanization

Barriers drop in the 1960s; acceptance at highest levels of society

High rate of intermarriage: threat to future of Judaism?

Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, 1967, promotes Zionism among Americans

Vatican II: New Directions

Controversy over John F. Kennedy’s candidacy, 1960

Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, 1962-5

Liberalization: no more Latin

New ecclesiology: body of bishops

New focus: social justice

Black Churches: Glory Years

Southern churches in crisis

Revitalization during Civil Rights Era

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton

James Cone: black theology of liberation

The challenge of Malcolm X

Black Power & decline of activism