IMPERIAL LIBERALISM? RELIGION, EDUCATION, AND THE COLD WAR

In: Modern intellectual history: MIH, Band 7, Heft 1, S. 185-195

Abstract

A few years ago I found myself at the Ogden, Utah rodeo with thirty schoolteachers from all over the world. They were participants in a Fulbright-supported American studies institute, and the trip to Utah was part of a weeklong foray into a part of America quite different from Amherst, MA, where the bulk of lectures and discussions had taken place in the previous three weeks. Our visit happened to coincide with "Armed Services Day," and the spectacle my students encountered proved even more impressive than the riding and roping they had expected. The principle feature of that spectacle had to do with the organizers' almost total confounding of religion and patriotism. At the high point of the event, over the roar of military band music and military helicopters passing overhead, the booming voice of the announcer declared that "God's helicopters" were protecting America and the rest of the world from tyranny. The books under review here endeavor to explain the spectacle in Ogden on that summer day—along with the train of events that, over sixty years ago, launched a crusade against "godless communism" and, a few decades later, made "the Christian right" a major force in American politics.