Kevin Fernlund, ed.;, The Cold War American West (1998) CHAPTER SEVEN CRUSADERS AGAINST COMMUNISM, WITNESSES FOR PEACE Religion in the American West and the Cold War MARK STOLL In 1952 the Korean War still raged. The United States and the Soviet Union were testing and expanding their nuclear arsenals. The specter of Communist spies and infiltrators haunted the nation. That year Hollywood released a movie of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds. Set in California among a painfully wholesome group of Americans, the film captured in a science-fiction story popular fears about invasion, the terrors of modern war, and annihilation of civilians and civilization. Invincible invading Martians with their heat rays de-stroyed everything in their path. But whereas the only religious figure in Wells's novel had been a curate gone mad, Hollywood made religion the film's central theme. In one scene, for example, a venerable clergyman from the "Community Church" walks toward the menacing Martians, reciting the Twenty-third Psalm and holding aloft a Bible with a gleaming silver cross on its cover, only to be incinerated by their heat ray. Later, when the Martians attack Los Angeles, its streets are empty-the population is in the city's houses of worship praying for a miracle. At the exact moment when the Martians aim their weapons at the churches, they die-struck down by bacteria, against which they have no immunity. The narrator concludes that mankind had been saved by the littlest things that God had put on this earth, and the film ends with a hymn. The moral of this Cold War morality play was that God, and only God, could save the United States against an enemy who was not only godless but rejected the offer of redemption-an enemy such as the Communist Soviet Union. The Cold War signified many things: a political rivalry between two great powers; an economic competition; an arms race; a struggle for global influence. But Americans did not generally think about the Cold War in terms of naked12o Mark Stoll Crusaders Against Communism, Witnesses for Peace 121 struggle for world dominance between to self-interested nations. The Cold War for most Americans was a moral confrontation with the earthly embodiment of evil, a struggle for the world's hearts and minds-and souls. With World War 11, a "good war" against manifest evil, fresh in memory, inevitably Americans imagined the Cold War as a contest between Christian (and Jewish) democratic liberty and atheist totalitarian slavery. Westerners had a distinctive impact on American religion during the Cold War, even though the West does not, like the South, have a distinctive regional denominational character. The geographical denominational distribution across the West corresponds to historical migration patterns. Some northern churches spread in a band from the Midwest to the Northwest, while conservative denominations associated with the "Okies" are strongly represented in the Southwest and Southern California. Strong in much of the West (7o percent of American Catholics live west of Denver), the Roman Catholic Church benefits from the region's proximity to Latin America and predominates along a broad swath that stretches across the Southwest from San Francisco to Brownsville, Texas. Mainly migrants from New York, western Jews are primarily urban, with a particularly large presence in Los Angeles. Unique among western denominations, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormon church, dominates only one region, in and around Utah, in the heart of the West. That no one church characterizes the West does not mean, however, that the West has no real religious identity. Strong individualists, western Protestant believers tend less to be churchgoers and have weaker denominational identi-fication, while western Jews have more of a cultural than a religious identity. Due in part to their individualism, westerners have a greater tendency to take up more extreme positions on the religious right or left. Isolation of West Coast denominations from the rest of the nation has also tended to make sectarianism more exaggerated. Consequently, western religious responses to the Cold War have been particularly extreme, prominent, and vocal. The issues of the Cold War, of course, had no sectional boundaries. All ma-jor American denominations are national, and no significant religious group exists solely in the West. On the institutional level, the religious response to the Cold War is a national one. Nevertheless, many western individuals, churches, movements, and actions made their distinctive marks on the religious history of the Cold War in America. One thing to note about the religious response to the Cold War is that a brief history such as this one can be misleading, particularly about gender issues. Probably due to the weight of religious history, practically no women appear in the leadership of major religious organizations. But on both the religious right and left, women usually make up the majority of members, and sometimes the great majority. Women also often operate as lieutenants and organizers in groups and movements ranging from Robert Thieme's ministry to Sanctuary. Religious response to the Cold War breaks into three general periods. In its earliest phase, from World War II to the early 196os, religious bodies united nearly unanimously behind the effort to contain "godless Communism." A second period followed Vatican II's condemnation of nuclear weapons and modern war, which inspired other denominations to rethink their support of American Cold War policy. Religious opposition to American Cold War pol-icies increased throughout the Vietnam War era. Deep polarization of the religious community on foreign policy issues characterized the third period, from the late 1970s to 1989, when President Ronald Reagan revitalized Cold War rhetoric and policy with the enthusiastic backing of the religious right, but without the religious unanimity of the 1950s. CRUSADING AGAINST COMMUNISTS, 1949-1963 For most religious leaders in the 1940s, there was no hesitation about linking arms in a common front against the Communists. Not only did Communist totalitarianism threaten virtually every traditional American value, it was of-ficially atheist and materialist. Prewar radicals and participants in the peace movement fell silent or climbed aboard the anti-Communist bandwagon. Mormons and Catholics, two groups who had traditionally distanced themselves