“One Nation Under God": Religion, Nationalism, and Global Politics during World War II and the Cold War

In 1955, Will Herberg argued in Protestant-Catholic-Jew that “virtually every civic enterprise…is today organized along interfaith – that is, tripartite – lines…The interfaith idea has become one of the accepted aspects of the American way of life.”  Herberg overstated the case, but his comment points to a crucial shift in the relationship between religion and American public life in the mid-20th century, a shift that is closely related to America’s fight against fascism and communism.  Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, no form of nativism was more widespread or virulent in the United States than anti-Catholicism.  Anti-Semitism too surged after the turn of the century.  Yet during World War II and the Cold War, the longstanding equation in public discourse of “Americanism” with Protestantism gave way rapidly, if incompletely, to the notion that the U.S. was a Judeo-Christian or “tri-faith” nation.
    This paper explores the reasons for that transformation, noting that the very notion of Judeo-Christianity was distinctively American.  To a nation trying to define itself against enemies deemed anti-religious or atheist (the Axis powers and the USSR), the “interfaith idea” proved particularly useful: religion could serve as a symbol of both unity and pluralism.  During World War II, the Roosevelt Administration, the military, the USO and various private groups promoted the notion that the U.S. was a “Protestant-Catholic-Jewish” nation, united by its belief in God.  After the war, as communism replaced Nazism as America’s most serious global challenge, ecumenical nationalism emerged at the center of public and private efforts both to propagate what historians have called the “Cold War consensus” and to carry America’s message abroad.  The reconfiguration of pluralism—and the corresponding articulation of an “American Way” rooted in religious concord—contributed to the postwar “de-racing” of white ethnics, even as it often reinforced the black-white racial divide.