ABSTRACT
Introduction to Chapter 5: This chapter takes up the subject of religion in America during the 1940s and 1950s, a time of hot and cold war, and at the point at which the visible trappings of religion – church membership, attendance, and “God talk” – flourished. Several factors influenced the course of American religion during this period, but perhaps the best indicator of the underlying mood of the nation, which drove Americans toward a closer engagement with religion, was publication in 1947 of W. H. Auden’s aptly titled “The Age of Anxiety.” It was a long dramatic poem in six parts dealing with man’s quest to find substance and identity in the postwar era. As historian Martin Marty has written, during the World War II and Cold War years, there emerged “the need for national unity and harmony” based on “common symbols and energies.” Americans sought that unity and harmony in a civil religion that grew out of the nation’s struggle against “atheistic communism.” At the same time, the United Sates Supreme Court’s stepped up its concern with First Amendment provisions for the free exercise of religion and separation of church and state, and the nation entered into its postwar civil rights movement.
