When on March 4, 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt stood before a joint session of Congress to deliver a speech commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Congress, isolationist sentiment remained quite strong in the Capitol and across the nation. The experience of the Great War—ostensibly the war to end all wars—had left many averse to U.S. involvement in foreign affairs. Do not the vast Atlantic and Pacific oceans afford the U.S. a natural fortification sufficient to protect and defend its borders? Why then sacrifice our boys to solve trans-oceanic problems? And for many Americans, this isolationism comported nicely with the teachings of the Bible, with some even seeing the end of the Great War as a fulfillment of the prophetic image of swords becoming plowshares (Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3). But the rapid resurgence of Germany under its new and charismatic Führer could not be easily ignored, and by the late 1930s the president was becoming increasingly convinced of the need for a more engaged role abroad. The problem, however, was to convince a skeptical electorate and Congress.
“Shall we by our passiveness,” Roosevelt intoned, “by our silence, by assuming the attitude of the Levite who pulled his skirts together and passed by on the other side, lend encouragement to those who today persecute religion or deny it?”
With these words the president unsheathed one of his most potent rhetorical weapons, the Bible, in an effort to persuade Americans to beat their plowshares back into swords. And this was not the first appearance of the Good Samaritan in Roosevelt’s speeches. In a campaign address in the fall of 1936 the president deployed the story to undergird a robust domestic agenda emphasizing the federal government’s responsibility to aid those mired in the muck of the Great Depression. In 1936 the Good Samaritan was a good New Dealer. By 1939, however, the Good Samaritan was fast becoming a good global interventionist.
This brief glimpse at Roosevelt’s use of the Good Samaritan story highlights the extent to which the Bible constitutes a textual protagonist whose influence transgresses the boundaries of church and synagogue, reaching deep into the heart of political power. The primary goal of this book is to examine and understand the place, function, and impact of the Bible within presidential discourse. The chronological parameters of this study concentrate on the nearly four decades spanning the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt through Lyndon B. Johnson, a period characterized by a series of domestic and international crises—most notably the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Civil Rights, and the Vietnam War—that contributed to the creation of what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. designated the imperial presidency. The social and political upheavals of this era, manifested in fierce debates over competing views on economics, global alliances, war, immigration, and race (among other important issues), offer fertile ground to explore how this malleable collection of ancient Jewish and Christian documents is adaptable to any number of modern ideologies or political positions.
The overarching thesis of this analysis is that the Bible functioned in part as a crucial rhetorical weapon that reinforced and enhanced executive power, facilitating efforts to persuade the public of the need for bold and aggressive actions on domestic and international fronts. The Bible furnished a language, a moral and ethical vocabulary that worked to justify an expanding welfare state, to defend involvement in a global war while galvanizing Americans for the prospect of painful sacrifices, to establish international political networks that would prevent another global war, to frame the Iron Curtain as a boundary between good and evil, to articulate a moral imperative for legislating civil rights, and to legitimize the deployment of American troops in what was increasingly seen as an illegitimate war in Southeast Asia.
This book is organized into seven chapters sandwiched between a prologue and an epilogue. Chapter One establishes the theoretical and conceptual framework for my analysis while providing an overview of the story of the Bible in American politics, using the inaugural addresses from George Washington through Donald Trump to synthesize and categorize the varied functions of scripture in presidential discourse. Chapters Two and Three focus on the Roosevelt years, first looking at his use of scripture to bolster his New Deal agenda and then examining how the Bible worked to elicit support for intervention in the European war. Chapters Four and Five encompass the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies respectively, with a particular focus on the use of scripture as a lens through which to frame global alliances and the emerging Cold War. Chapters Six and Seven turn to the Bible’s role in navigating the complexities of civil rights and the Vietnam War during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The Prologue and Epilogue provide a contemporary frame for my analysis, using the Bible’s ubiquitous place in the 2016 presidential campaign (Prologue) and (presumably) in the 2020 campaign (Epilogue) as an opportunity to underscore the current relevance of this study while surfacing the critical research questions that animate my analysis.