• Ultimately, "a world government of delegated powers."



• Complete abandonment of U.S. isolationism.



• Strong immediate limitations on national sovereignty.



• International control of all armies & navies. • "A universal system of money ... so planned as to prevent inflation and deflation." • Worldwide freedom of immigration. • Progressive elimination of all tariff and quota restrictions on world trade. • "Autonomy for all subject and colonial peoples" (with much better treatment for Negroes in the U.S.). • "No punitive reparations, no humiliating decrees of war guilt, no arbitrary dismemberment of nations." • A "democratically controlled" international bank "to make development capital available in all parts of the world without the predatory and imperialistic aftermath so characteristic of large-scale private and governmental loans."

YESTERDAY MORNING, conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty drew my attention to this 1942 Time article detailing the programme for a "just and durable peace" adopted by "375 appointed representatives of 30-odd [Protestant] denominations called together at Ohio Wesleyan University by the Federal Council of Churches." This is what the best and brightest of American protestantism settled on around the time my parents were born, as the bloodiest war in human history raged on:

Can you believe this was ever the politics of "organised Protestantism" in America? I would note that the Federal Council of Churches is a forebear of the National Council of Churches, which has a history of liberal politics. But favouring liberal immigration reform and taking a stand against gun violence, as the NCC did this year, is a far cry from "Worldwide freedom of immigration" and "International control of all armies & navies"! What happened?

I had this very question on my mind yesterday when, over lunch, I flipped on the TV to find an episode of PBS's "God in America" series, which more or less answered my question. (You can watch online. See episode five, "The Soul of a Nation", chapters one and two.) What happened? In short: Communism and Billy Graham.

I had long understood that popular affirmation of Christian religious identity was an explicit part of the American government's strategy for combating the sinister influence of atheistic communism. But I hadn't known that Billy Graham goaded President Eisenhower into getting baptised while in office, that Eisenhower led the charge to insert "under God" into the "Pledge of Allegiance", or that "In God We Trust" didn't become the official United States motto until Eisenhower signed a 1956 congressional resolution. Nor did I know that Billy Graham had been launched onto the national stage because of his resolute anti-communism. Impressed by the charismatic young evangelist's fiery anti-communist message, press baron William Randolph Hearst commanded the overseers of his influential national network of propaganda broadsheets to "Puff Graham". (These are, apparently, "two of the most famous words in all of American religious history", which goes to show how much I know about American religious history.)

Soon enough, Mr Graham was undertaking nationwide "crusades", selling out huge sports arenas, and precipitating the rapid rise of a more evangelical strain of "born again" American Protestantism."[T]he principles of Christ," Mr Graham declaimed, "form the only ideology hard enough to stop communism. When communism conquers a nation, it makes every man a slave; when Christianity conquers a nation, it makes every man a king." For Americans in the swelling ranks of Graham-style anti-communist Protestantism, the stakes of the cold war could hardly have been higher.

In 1942, before Americans came to see the Soviets as their mortal enemy, the ideas of "Strong, immediate limitations on national sovereignty" and "International control of all armies and navies" could seem an enlightened path to the abolition of war. But by the war's end, it quickly became apparent that this sort of thing would amount to an impracticable power-sharing agreement with communist regimes. And as Americans became more and more likely to believe that only a more thoroughly Christian nation could save the world from godless communist tyranny, the principled, cosmopolitan globalism of the Federal Council of Churches swiftly came to seem a dangerous absurdity and practically communist itself. Anyway, that's what I think happened to the Federal Council of Churches' 1942 platform. Of course, it's now been a good while since we were haunted by the spectre of communism. Yet America's oddly religion-soaked politics remains in many ways the creature of its mid-century anti-communist reaction. Isn't it a bit depressing to think that American national political and religious life has yet to recover from the red scare?

Before yesterday it had never occurred to me that America's distinctive brand of evangelical conservatism—its peculiar marriage of mythic American nationalism with a personal, emotionally intense relationship with Jesus Christ—is not an entirely bottom-up phenomenon, but is to some extent the creation of Eisenhower-era government propaganda and the PR heft of William Randolph Hearst. (That's what certain secular-humanist documentary producers want us to believe!) I look forward to one day seeing this remarkable chain of historical influences mapped out more fully on Glenn Beck's revelatory blackboard.

(Photo credit: Warren K. Leffler, via Library of Congress, via Wikipedia)