Hi, I'm Shannon, the podcast producer here at C-SPAN, and this week on the Lectures in History podcast, a discussion on how civic faith impacted the Cold War.

Hillsdale College Professor Richard Gamble teaches the class and focuses on how American nationalism incorporated religious elements and symbolism during

the Cold War.

More after this.

C-SPAN's Lectures and History Podcast continues in a moment.

Now back to C-SPAN's Lectures and History Podcast.

Well, good morning, and I hope you had a good weekend, or if the weekend seems like a long time ago already,

that you're anticipating the weekend that's coming.

I know a lot of your parents will be here, and I look forward to meeting them.

So we're going to think about civil religion, continue to think about it,

in the context of the Cold War, but a little bit more

narrow than that. The two readings you have today more directly address the Vietnam War.

The Robert Bella essay is from 1967. The Richard John Newhouse essay is from 1970. So you have the Robert Bella civil religion in America,

or American civil religion, I guess, one way or the other, from 1967. And then Newhouse is the

war, the churches, and civil religion from 1970. And he draws directly, as you've seen, directly inspired by

Robert Bella. He's been reading Bella's essay, and he does some similar things with it, and maybe

takes it in a little bit different direction as well. You've already read this semester selections from Will Herberg's classic Protestant Catholic Jew.

That shows up in the Robert Bella essay, and he disagrees with Will Herberg's take on American civil religion,

the American Way of Life. And you've also read the New York Times account of Eisenhower's informal talk delivered in December of

1952, if I remember correctly, right before his inauguration. And you read an article from the 1980s,

drawing attention to that article and trying to get historians to recognize that in context,

what Eisenhower said about religion as the basis of democracy,

...