Influence of OTL Cold War on US religiosity

How much do you think the Cold War against the atheistic Soviet Union affected the development of the various American religious denominations since 1945, or, to ask a different but equivalent question, how do you think they would have fared had the US ended up in a Cold War against a state whose ideology had no strong feeling on religion (say, Nazi Germany, or the Kaiserreich, or the British Empire)?
 
The phrase 'In God We Trust' was famously added to US Dollar bills for this precise reason.

The soviet union wasn't the only think to affect American christianity during that period. The Civil Rights movement also had a substantial impact. Swap the soviets for another enemy, and the Pope will be affected too, who will also have an impact. Finally there are evolutionary reasons why certain 'brands' of religon are generally more successful than others (the recent upswing in megachurches spring to mind) which have absolutely nothing to do with communism.

[edit:]It's also not entrely accurate to call the soviet union atheistic. It oscilated between opposition and apathy to the subject, but it is strongly debatable how much of this was based upon political control, rather than theological issues.
 
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If a cold war was with a far right state as enemy, maybe we would see the reverse (a rise in laicity feeling, critic of churches, etc) - depending on this far-right's flavour, of course..
 

GarethC

Donor
A different USSR which wholeheartedly embraced a combination of Orthodox Christianity and Central Asian Islam might have led to a de-emphasis on religion, particularly in the US armed forces. If the rhetoric of Soviet propaganda had lent weight to the holiness of their cause, then I could see some shift - but still, "religion" is a pretty broad, ahem, church in the US.

I am concerned it's a bit ASB, but I guess you could...

If the USSR had embraced the Orthodox church pretty much straight away after the RCW (which reads a 9 on my spacebatometer) then that might be an avenue to seek to turn Greek public opinion more strongly northeastward and maybe have a very different colonels' coup (hey, the meter apparently goes up to 11!).

A Soviet Russian Orthodox Church offers the possibility of some rapprochement between the Orthodox and Catholic faiths as a transparent cover to try to get the Vatican behind a Communist Italy (which either requires "Communist" to mean something quite ahistorical, or I'll need to change the meter's scale to read in kilobats).

It's at that point, when a Red Rome offers a propaganda channel to particularly Italian- and Polish-Americans, and to Latin and South America, that whatever US administration is in power will start to re-evaluate how much place there is for God in the American Way. Or maybe create an antipope.

As an aside, Franco would be in an interesting pickle.
 
While some of the rise of religiousness during the early stage of the cold war can be attributed to the cold war I think that a more significant factor was the end of WWII and the subsequent prosperity. When people came back from WWII they had fought and defeated a truly evil state. They then settled down into a comfortable middle class life. This was very different from the expericence of fighting for nothing and coming back to poverty that happened at the end of WWI. Under those conditions I would say that the rise of religiousness in the 50s and 60s was, not inevitable, but more likely then not to happen.
 
I think the Cold War with the anti-religous Soviet Union had little to do with US religiousity, other than to provide epithets like "Godless Communists" and addition of things like "...under God" to the pledge of allegiance. The US was highly religious because of its own internal history, and had the Cold War been against a slightly less "atheistic" totalitarian fascist state like Nazi Germany, they might just as well be called anti-religious by US propagandists - because they basically were. Something like Wilhelmine Germany would be a different story, but whoever the enemy was, it would probably have little influence on US religious life.
 
I'll add another vote for it not mattering so much since the religious revivals of the postwar period all seemed to follow the general Great Awakening patterns which have been common the US since the 18th century.
 
Gore Vidal wrote a great essay in the 1980's on American Presidents and their religion Hypocrisy. The American Voter elects men as President who claim to be Christian. We were in a cold war against Godless Communist. If any of the Presidents had follow their Religious belief to the logical end, then they should launch a nuclear War, The US as a Christian Nation, population would go to Heaven and the Godless Russians would go to Hell. How ever we have elected men who turn out to be Hypocrites and have not follow their Religious beliefs.
 
Sans Cold War ant-communism, I think Billy Graham might have remained just a regional (South+rural Midwest) celebrity rather than becoming an "important" national figure who met with presidents, etc.
On the other hand, it's been argued that evangelicalism was the mirror image of the hippie counterculture;both were reactions against prosperous mid-20th cent.US society that some found incomprehensible, indefensible, or both.
edit-ISTR Leo Strauss posited that
 
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