‘What Marx, Lenin, and Stalin needed was . . . to be born again’: Evangelicals and the special relationship between church and state in US Cold War foreign policy

Historians of international relations have long recognized the important role played by business, nonprofits, think tanks, professional organizations and similar societal entities in shaping and implementing American foreign policy. In a liberal polity marked by the separation of powers, checks and balances, and an ideology of limited government and free enterprise, mobilizing society in the name of the ‘national interest’ generally relies more upon government incentives than state authority. ‘Special relationships’ between the state and nongovernmental actors thus frequently form the ‘corporatist’ or ‘associationalist’ bedrock of US public policy. In the words of historian Michael Sherry, they throw ‘a smokescreen of symbolic anti-statism over deepening government responsibility’.1