God-Fearing and Free

Jason W. Stevens tracks the quest of Cold War America to be “God-fearing” and “free,” purged of “innocence in order to behave responsibly in a world where there are no clean hands” (p. xi). He does so with an ambition inspired by the American studies tradition. Drawing on an array of cultural forms, including “liberal conscience movies, Gothic romances, sentimental melodrama, journalism, and confessional biography,” Stevens teases out new connective tissues in Cold War society that few scholars have considered (p. viii). His is a sweeping dissection of the American mind that would please Perry Miller. Stevens argues that this mind was shaped by “countermodernism,” a sacred discourse that traded the utopian accents of “modernism” for dystopian emphases on human fallibility and divine judgment. Countermodernism had several strains, ranging from Catholic and Jewish to black radical, and Stevens explores them all, while focusing on two: Reinhold Niebuhr’s “tragic realism” and Billy Graham’s “neofundamentalism.” Both men, he emphasizes, helped the nation “rediscover its ... capabilities for evil as well as the evils of its enemies” (ibid.). Graham did so by demanding revival before the apocalypse, Niebuhr by draining liberalism of its “moral naïveté” (p. 41). Together they blamed totalitarianism on “modern philosophies,” warned of judgment even as they “restored to the nation a portion of its exceptional ... status” and adopted the Manichean language of imperialism (p. 42). Although destined for opposing sides in the “culture wars” (a clash Stevens blames on Graham’s strain), they were, in Stevens’s final estimation, “torn halves of the same flag” (ibid

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