America's revivals weren't simply religious revivals in the narrow sense, however. America's revivalists, including Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, generally saw their revivals not only in religious terms but also in nationalist or Americanist terms. Such a linkage should not be surprising given that nationalism itself is, at the very least like (and actually is) a religion in that it is a meaning system (ideologies) that takes cultural and institutional form (symbols, rituals, icons, stories, bureaucracies) and has its own chosen people, its own chosen land, its own chosen myths, its own chosen mythic heroes, its own chosen economic system, capitalism, and its own chosen political system, "democracy". As a consequence many of America's revivalists saw the revivals not only as divine occurrences that spread the good news of Christ, as they interpreted him, but also as a divine occurrence that strengthened what was for them an inherently Christian nation or, more accurately, an inherently Protestant Christian nation, the United States of America. For many of America's Protestants, Christianity, as they understood it, was thus American Christianity and the United States of America, as they understood it, was a if not the, Christian nation, and both, as they understood them, were inextricably linked to one another since America was god's chosen land and god's chosen religion was their religion, "mainstream" or dominant American Protestantism.
The ties between American "mainstream" or politically and demographically dominant Protestantism and the American political culture have not gone unnoticed by those who have studied and continue to study America. As historians have noted over the years the First Great Awakening, a revival often tied to the efforts of George Whitfield, played a major role in laying the foundations of a common identity among America's colonists, an identity grounded in the distinction between the colonial "us" from them, the colonising "other", Great Britain. The Second Great Awakening, a revitalisation tied to Charles Finney, many historians tell us, helped provide Americans and America itself with a hegemonic or dominant meaning system grounded in "mainstream" Protestantism. Even more Americans came to believe, as a consequence of the second great revival, that the United States was god's nation, at least potentially and that they should help make it so, that the United States was, at least potentially, a chosen land populated, at least potentially, by god's chosen people, and that they should help make them so, and that the American nation was, at its best, a light unto a world in varying degrees of darkness. Many of America's missionaries who conflated American Protestantism and Nationalist Protestant Americanism thus helped spread not only the gospel of Christianity at home and abroad but also, given the links between American Protestantism and American nationalism, the good news of America itself, that promised land of capitalist get rich quick milk and "democratic" honey, across the nation and around the world.
A number of social scientists and historians, including, perhaps most notably William McLoughlin, have taken note of the link between Christian revival and American nationalist revitalisation. Many of America's revivals, after all, occurred around the same time as heightened great power tensions and great power wars. Revivals in Colonial New England occurred at a time of heightened tensions between France and Great Britain. Some, have argued that the Salem Witch Trials with its denunciations and its torture and execution of "witches", for instance, was a product of these great power tensions. The First Great Awakening occurred in an atmosphere of tensions between Great Britain and the colonials. Some have argued that the new sects of this revival, Baptists and Methodists, helped give birth to a "democratic" current in colonial America. The Second Great Awakening occurred in the context of tensions over who was and who was not an American. This era saw attacks on Masons, Mormons, and Catholics for being "un-American" in their behaviours and for being members of social groups or social groups that were perceived as autocratic or authoritarian. The revival of the Great War era was characterised by the modernist anti-modernist crusade of Billy Sunday, an awakening where evolution and modern biblical criticism were linked to the evil Hun who many believed was the essence of evil in the modern world, who many believed was Hitler before Hitler. This revival era saw the deportation of aliens (particularly political and ideological "aliens") from America's shores, limits on freedom
of speech, and the deportation of labouring men and women from Arizona who were crammed into cattle cars and dumped in the
deserts of New Mexico simply for having the audacity to organise for wage
increases and better working conditions. This early twentieth century revival eventually split American Protestant evangelicalism into "traditionalist" and "modernist' or liberal camps, split American denominations, most notably, the Presbyterian Church, into "traditional" and "liberal variants, split schools of theology into "traditional" and "modernist" variants, most famously Princeton Theological Seminary, and led, at least in part, to the rise of American fundamentalism, a social movement centred on the defence of the literal interpretation of the Bible and of Victorian norms and values. The Cold War anti-modernist revival most associated with Billy Graham painted the evil godless communism of the USSR as a threat not only to American Christianity but to America itself. In response the federal government once again went after "alien" "heretics" within, including members of the Communist Party, Socialists, homosexuals, and New Deal Liberals. During this era the Cold War faithful were able to change the American "Pledge of Allegiance". The Pledge, which had been written by a Christian socialist, was revised during the Cold War (it had been revised before) to include " under God", while "In God We Trust", was added to American paper money. This change in the American Pledge and the addition of the "in God we Trust" mantra on American paper money nicely shows the links between American Christian Protestantism, the American nation, and between American Christianity and American capitalism, the "American faith".
The American civil religion, civic faith, or public religion saw perhaps its largest split in the 1960s as an American prophetic civil religion emerged from the margins and challenged, at least in the minds of America's political, economic, and cultural elite, the official priestly civil religion that had dominated the United States almost since it was born. The, what might be called silent majority
revival, which had strong ties to political and economic elites, categorised "dissidents", civil rights dissidents and anti-Vietnam War dissidents, as un-American thereby justifying and rationalising attacks, physical and verbal on them by a variety of bullies and thugs, since they were seen as threats to the American way of life and American law and order. The counterculture of
the 1960s has been vilified ever since by many on the right, including Gertrude Himmelfarb in her polemic One Nation, Two Cultures, as responsible for a host of America's ills
including a rise in the divorce rate, a rise in out of wedlock births, a
rise in cohabitation rates, an increase in sexual immorality, an
increase in drug use, and a host of other decadences that are putting,
many believed, the chosen nation and the chosen people at risk of god's wrath and, as a consequence, decline or devolution.
The latest major nationalist revival of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was the revitalisation movement that occurred after the 9/11 terror attacks. The War on Terror revival led to attacks on "heretics" like the
Muslims and the Sikhs, the latter a religious group that was attacked because those who attacked them had no comprehension of the historic and cultural differences between the Sikh faith and Islam, something that shows the lowest common denominator nature of many if not most of these nationalist revivals. This latest of American national revitalisation movements would eventually give us the cult of Donald Trump, a cult cobbled together, in
the midst of a War on Terror, from right wing Christianity, right wing
ultra nationalism, White supremacism, and conspiracy theory fabrications and delusions. This cult was led by and centred on a
flim flam salesman turned right wing politician, demagogue, and messiah-prophet. That this bully demagogue learned his demagogic lessons of innuendo and
demonisation for economic and political gain from Roy Cohn, the chief
counsel of that once celebrated and still celebrated in some quarters,
demagogic grand inquisitor of the Cold War himself, former Wisconsin
senator Joseph McCarthy, should not be surprising to any historian of the American national faith.
Stephen Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, second edition, 1999) is a superb exploration of the culture, official and popular, of one of the United States's many nationalist revival and revitalisation movements, the Cold War nationalist revival movement. Whitfield explores the self-righteous, self-satisfied adolescent bully boys reliving their glory days in the school yard as arrested development adults and cynical demagogues who led the crusade against heretics during the Cold War. He explores the impact of a narrowed American nationalism on politics, books, films, television programmes. It was a culture, as Whitfield notes, in which political denunciations that negatively impacted peoples lives, particularly the lives of those "heretics" who were members of the Communist Party, USA, former members of the Communist Party, "fellow travellers of the party from the late 1940s to the 1960s, New Deal liberals, and homosexuals, anyone, in other words, who didn't conform to a selected national myth. That all this became commonplace in the self proclaimed land of free speech and "democracy"but not to those that know the history of ideological inquisitions in the United States.
Whitfield trods a middle path in his interpretation of the Cold War. Whitfield argues that while the Soviet Union and its spies were a threat to the American way of life, so were--perhaps even more--the anti-communist intellectuals, demagogues, and the masses they demagogued, something that makes them akin to the true believers in the cult of Stalin in the USSR with its orthodox cum communist meaning system and its own periodic nationalist revivals such as that aimed at the Old Bolsheviks and symbolically expressed in the show trials of the 1930s and in which denunciation was a central ritual, and, the Soviet revival in 1950s that led to conspiracy theory in which cosmopolitan intellectuals and professionals (translation Jews) were trying to kill the great cultic leader, Stalin. The national faith of the US was also similar to that of the USSR, for instance, in its emphasis on conformity. That a nation like the US, which claimed that individualism and freedom lay at its doctrinal core, also emphasised conformity to a very narrow catechism of that national faith is one of the fascinating absurdities of human history and American history.
There are a few areas in The Culture of the Cold War which I think Whitfield could have developed more. While recognising, particularly in the 1999 second edition of the book, that America's has a history of follies--I would call them delusions, fantasies, and forms of social and cultural madness--the book is weak on the history of these follies. Whitfield does a good job of putting the culture of the Cold War in its immediate context but is less better at putting the culture of the Cold War in its broader American revival and revitalisation context.
A related weakness of The Culture of the Cold War is Whitfield's failure to put Cold War great power politics, that between the US and USSR, within broader great power politics. Great power politics, of course, have been around since the rise of large scale agricultural civilisations in the Near East, the Mediterranean, and China. Both the US and the USSR were the dominant great powers in the Cold War era and as such, they behaved somewhat similar to the great powers of the past and they behaved somewhat similar to each other in the present. I have already mentioned their heretic hunting similarities between the two powers chosen by god or history to remake the world in its image. Both the US and USSR were also, like the imperial powers of the past, ethnocentric (us versus them). They were messianic. They were manichean. They were utopian. They were bureaucratic (meaning that they were not democratic but rather oligarchic). And they were, in the end, Smith's and Jones's caught in an ever spiralling and never ending cycle of trying to keep up with each other, something that is characteristic of great power struggles, cold or hot.
Finally, Whitfield's use of the term "totalitarian", a term laden with negative and normative ideological meaning, is problematic. That term, given its cultural history, arose in a particular context and implies, that humans were simply puppets of the Fu Manchuy leader, and that the masses, all the masses, the totality of the masses, can be easily manipulated by their puppet masters. While this may be generally true--advertisers and demagogues in the US, for instance, have been able to manipulate the masses into supporting wars such as the Spanish American War on the basis of fabrications and Trump has made a career out of spewing delusions (facts that raise questions about the selective use of the term totalitarian)--there was dissent, countercultures. There was and is, for example, dissent in the authoritarian Mormon Church, in the autocratic Soviet Union, and in the oligarchic United States. Any of those terms--authoritarian, autocratic, and oligarchic--are, I would argue, better descriptors than the inherently normative totalitarian when talking about modern bureaucratic oligarchies. We should also remember that modern societies, which are dominated by bureaucracies with intherent hierarchical variations in power and authority, are quite similar cross culturally like those in the US and USSR, pointing up the fairy tale that is the manichean us "democratic", them "totalitarian" binary.
Despite these slight concerns, which may or may not be entirely fair given the focus and short compass of The Culture of the Cold War, Whitfield's book is an excellent brief guide through the noirish main streets and back alleys of one variant of American nationalist culture, the Cold War nationalist revival of the 1950s. Everyone or everyone who can and is able, should read this brief book for it is a reflective mirror for what is happening today in an even more fragmented and equally as rageoholic and deluded America, an America that is experiencing yet another in the cycle of American theocratic and near fascist revivals it has since at least the late 19th century.
I want to end this essay by returning to a quote from John Updike that Whitfield's references in The Culture of the Cold War: Is there a reason for being an American if there isn't a war, cold or hot? In the end this question really isn't relevant for a couple of reasons. Identities are socially and culturally constructed around the us versus them binary. Sometimes these binary distinctions are hard, sometimes they are soft, sometimes they are somewhere in between and oftentimes they vary, in complex societies, within countercultures and subcultures. During wars and rumours of war, the us versus them binaries that are at the heart of identity construction and civil religions, tend to harden into a sacred versus profane manichean dualism. And since there will always be wars and rumours of wars coming to a theatre, television screen, or internet page near you, there will always be a reason for those living in powerful nation-states like the US, Russia, or Chima to identity with great megapower America, great power Russian, great power Chinese, or even a non-great power nation-state like Finland where a Finnish citizen is the citizen of a state with economic, political, and cultural ties to the US, a nation-state that is ultimately a junior partner of Imperial America and a nation that has a traumatic past with Imperial Russia. And so it goes...
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