God-Fearing and Free : : A Spiritual History of America's Cold War / / Jason W. Stevens.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Archive 1893-1999
• VerfasserIn: Stevens, Jason W.,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2011]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (448 p.)

This challenging work argues for the importance of spirituality in Cold War America. It was the first period when the nation, teetering between patriotism and doubt about the global future, became a superpower. It was also the last period during which America’s leaders and ministers regularly proclaimed that the nation was not free of sin. Stevens traces two movements in the culture of this time. The first is a recoiling from the alleged innocence of the 1930s-- the Red Decade-- and the formation of a Cold War sensibility in the late 1940s-50s. This sensibility was grounded in sobriety, in the rejection of utopia, in a neo- Judeo-Christian image of human nature tainted by sin and in the tacit or explicit support for a pro-American anti-communism. The second movement is the fragmentation of this early Cold War sensibility and its passing into obsolescence by the 1960s. Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms – including theology, fiction, film noir, journalism, and confessional biography –Stevens demonstrates how writers, artists, and intellectuals-- the devout as well as the non-religious-- disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Prologue -- Introduction: Going beyond Modernism from World War I to the Cold War -- PART ONE. How a Theologian Served the Opinion Elite, and How an Evangelist Startled Them -- 1. Christianity, Reason, and the National Character -- 2. Origins of an Ailing Polemic -- PART TWO. Narratives of Blindness and Insight in an Era of Confession -- 3. Guilt of the Thirties, Penitence of the Fifties -- 4. McCarthyism through Sentimental Melodrama and Film Noir -- PART THREE. Cold War Cultural Politics and the Varieties of Religious Experience -- 5. The Mass Culture Critique’s Implications for American Religion -- 6. Jeremiads on the American Arcade and Its Consumption Ethic -- PART FOUR. Versions of Inwardness in Cold War Psychology and the Neo- Gothic -- 7. Controversies over Therapeutic Religion -- 8. Locating the Enigma of Shirley Jackson -- PART FIVE. The Styles of Prophecy -- 9. Voices of Reform, Radicalism, and Conservative Dissent -- 10. James Baldwin and the Wages of Innocence -- Epilogue: Putting an End to Ending Our Innocence -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index