Harry Truman

From 1945 to 1947 as the United States and Soviet Union moved toward the Cold War, Christian realists writing for Reinhold Niebuhr’s journal, Christianity and Crisis, responded to global dilemmas. Here are five impressions of those articles, along with lessons for today.

After traveling through Europe in 1947—including to Scotland, Amsterdam, and Switzerland—Reinhold Niebuhr wrote some reflections, including on state churches, the Truman Doctrine, Christian political parties, and more.

“Unless we accept the Russian view of the nature of man, we cannot work with the USSR to a common end for human society.”

During an address to the US Congress on March 12, 1947, President Harry Truman called for military and economic aid to Turkey and Greece to counter communist threats. This began the Truman Doctrine, and Christian realists responded a month later.

We are told that a policy of firmness must inevitably lead to war, while conciliation could guarantee peace. In the Nazi days this was called appeasement.

Strikes by meat packers and mine workers in 1946 prompted Henry P. Van Dusen and Liston Pope to consider the ethics of strikes and how the church should respond.

With Ukraine languishing outside the safety of the NATO alliance, the consensus seems to be that there is little the alliance can do as Putin enforces his latter-day Brezhnev Doctrine. That consensus view is wrong.

“The resistance to Russian expansion in Europe is right. The spectacle of American progressives supporting Wallace in opposing that resistance brings dismay to most European democrats.”

Keynoting a “Beat Dewey” rally at Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace warned Americans against the Truman administration’s “get tough with Russia” policy. Reinhold Niebuhr responded.