Masculinity, Christianity, and the Cold War American Empire

The boundaries of scholarship on U.S. foreign relations have shifted in fruitful ways in the last couple of decades.  Gender, race, ethnic and religious difference, sexuality, and even emotion, have been employed as central organizing principles in the analysis of discourse and practice in the context of the Cold War and American imperial ambitions.  This roundtable presentation will explore some of the ramifications of the ideological underpinnings of Cold War imperial policy in the intersection of assumptions about “manhood” and Christian belief during the early cold war era.  Both Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State, and John Foster Dulles, who took the position in the Eisenhower administration were the sons of Protestant clergymen. Each served during the virulent Lavender Scare, a purge of homosexuals intertwined with the counter-subversive purges of the period, centered largely on the State Department itself.   In an era characterized by anxiety about the “decline of manhood,” and fears of political and sexual subversion, each clung to a vision of global order rooted in a sort of Neo-stoic Christian masculinity, embracing anti-communist strongmen around the world as proxies in the struggle against the rival Soviet empire.  Dictators who espoused right-wing Catholicism, or even the martial monotheism of Islam, received the blessing and support of the U.S. for their presumed willingness and capacity to serve as bulwarks of containment.  Acting outside of strictly bounded geo-political strategic logic, These policymakers invested a moral (and gendered) authority in figures like Ngo Dinh Diem, Shah Reza Pahlavi, Ayub Khan, and others, based in part on religious conceptions of social and political order.