God-fearing and free [electronic resource] : a spiritual history of America's Cold War / Jason W. Stevens.
Stevens, Jason W., 1975-
2010
BR526 .S74 2010eb
Available Online

Linked e-resources

Linked Resource Online Access

Details

Title God-fearing and free [electronic resource] : a spiritual history of America's Cold War / Jason W. Stevens.
Author Stevens, Jason W., 1975-
ISBN 9780674055551 (alk. paper)
0674055551 (alk. paper)
9780674058842 (electronic book)
Publication Details Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2010.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (xiii, 434 p.)
Call Number BR526 .S74 2010eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 277.3/082
Summary Religion has been on the rise in America for decades -- which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country's mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism. Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation's internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the "American Century" renewed the impetus to religion. Covering a wide selection of narrative and cultural forms, Stevens shows how writers, artists, and intellectuals, the devout as well as the nonreligious, disseminated the terms of this cultural dialogue, disputing, refining, and challenging it -- effectively making the conservative case against modernity as liberals floundered. - Publisher.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Linked Resources Online Access
Record Appears in Online Resources > Ebooks
All Resources
Introduction: Going beyond modernism from World War I to the Cold War
Pt. 1. How a theologican served the opinion elite, and how an evangelist startled them. Christianity, reason, and the national character
Origins of an ailing polemic
Pt. 2. Narratives of blindness and insight in an era of confession. Guilt of the thirties, penitence of the fifties
McCarthyism through sentimental melodrama and film noir
Pt. 3. Cold War cultural politics and the varieties of religious experience. The mass culture critique's implications for American religion
Jeremiads on the American arcade and its consumption ethic
Pt. 4. Versions of inwardness in Cold War psychology and the neo-Gothic. Controversies over therapeutic religion
Locating the enigma of Shirley Jackson
Pt. 5. The styles of prophecy. Voices of reform, radicalism, and conservative dissent
James Baldwin and the wages of innocence
Epilogue: Putting an end to ending our innocence.

Browse Subjects

Show more subjects...

Statistics

from
to
Export