153. God and the American Empire

Summary

This The Rest Is History conversation with Andrew Preston explains why religion remained unusually visible in modern American political culture and how it shaped foreign-policy language from the Second World War through the Cold War, 9/11, and Donald Trump. Its central synthesis joins American Religious Persistence, Judeo-Christian National Identity, American Exceptionalism, and Religious Moral Framing of U.S. Foreign Policy: church-state separation and religious competition helped preserve public faith, while changing coalitions repeatedly cast American power as a struggle among good, evil, freedom, tyranny, religion, and irreligion.

Key Claims

• Preston argues that American modernization did not produce the degree of secularization expected by older modernization theory; church-state separation insulated churches from state failure, while a competitive religious marketplace encouraged innovation.
• The episode treats American Exceptionalism as a belief that the United States is different from, and often better than, other countries; religion supplies one important vocabulary for that national distinction.
• A public Judeo-Christian national identity emerged only in the late 1930s and 1940s, when anti-Nazi and later anti-communist politics encouraged Catholics, Protestants, and Jews to be narrated as partners in a shared American cause.
• Preston rejects a simple isolationist-versus-interventionist divide. American religion supported both a warlike “sword of the spirit” and a reformist or restraint-oriented “shield of faith,” while the United States remained active abroad even when it avoided formal commitments.
• Harry S. Truman’s proposed world religious summit and recognition of Israel illustrate how biblical identification, religious pluralism, and strategic policy could overlap, although the episode does not reduce either decision to religion alone.
• Ronald Reagan revived moral and evangelical language without simply inventing it. His “evil empire” rhetoric represented confrontation, while the negotiated departure of the Siberian Seven and continuing pressure on Mikhail Gorbachev over religious freedom show a quieter confidence-building route.
• The hosts interpret Francis Fukuyama’s post-Cold War universalism as a secularized providential story in which liberal democracy spreads toward a final horizon; this is an episode-level interpretation rather than a complete account of Fukuyama’s theory.
• George W. Bush’s post-9/11 “crusade” slip drew on an available American vocabulary, but his insistence that al-Qaeda did not represent Islam also continued the pluralist strand of American religious politics.
• The closing discussion treats Trump’s strong white-evangelical support and pro-Israel politics as evidence that religiously shaped coalitions can rally around a personally irreligious leader who performs their expected political commitments.

Key Quotes

“marketplace of faith” - Preston’s explanation for how disestablishment could encourage religious competition and innovation.

“sword of the spirit” and “shield of faith” - the episode’s paired metaphors for militant and reformist religious impulses in foreign policy.

“evil empire” - Reagan’s moral-religious description of the Soviet Union, delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals.

Connections

• Andrew Preston, American Religious Persistence, and American Exceptionalism - guest and domestic structures used to explain religion’s continued political force.
• Judeo-Christian National Identity, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Catholic Church, and Israel - wartime and Cold War expansion of national religious belonging.
• Religious Moral Framing of U.S. Foreign Policy, Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan / 罗纳德·里根, and Mikhail Gorbachev / 米哈伊尔·戈尔巴乔夫 - moral language, religious freedom, and Cold War diplomacy.
• Francis Fukuyama / 福山, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump - post-Cold War universalism, post-9/11 pluralism, and coalition politics.

Contradictions

• No settled contradiction was adopted. The episode broadens the existing American Exceptionalism page beyond rule-exception behavior in sport by adding a religious-national mission, but the two mechanisms are compatible rather than mutually exclusive.
• The “Judeo-Christian” dating, Truman’s inner motives, religion’s causal weight in recognizing Israel, Reagan’s private belief, the Siberian Seven’s diplomatic importance, Fukuyama’s providential inheritance, and explanations for evangelical support of Trump remain episode-attributed or interpretive.