World War II brought many significant changes to religious life in the United States. One of the most obvious ways that it did this was by exposing young men in military service to a diverse range of faiths and promoting religious toleration. The idea that America was “Judeo-Christian,” a category with some inclusion of Jews and Catholics, rather than simply Protestant, was partially a creation of the Second World War.

Promoting Tolerance: The Story of the National Conference of Christians and Jews

In 1928, the National Conference of Jews and Christians (Protestant and Catholic) was formed; this would later become known as the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ). The NCCJ promoted the idea of religious cooperation between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews through events and ads. Starting in 1933, the NCCJ started promoting speaking tours about religious toleration by groups of three clergy members: a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a Jewish Rabbi. Media dubbed these groups “tolerance trios.” During the war, the U.S. government used the NCCJ and military chaplaincy as part of an effort to try to argue against religious bigotry.

Soldiers were taught that they were fighting against religious hatred as part of the war effort, and it was equated with Nazism. The NCCJ distributed nine million interfaith prayer cards to soldiers, with prayers from Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish traditions. NCCJ officials spoke or presented to nine million people. There were larger efforts to promote this vision of interfaith cooperation. After Pearl Harbor, the NCCJ-created holiday “National Brotherhood Week” become a widespread event, and President Franklin Roosevelt was made honorary chairman of the event in 1943. In his address, he stated that “all men are children of one Father and brothers in the human family,” arguing all three faith groups shared the same God and an American identity.

The Four Chaplains

American also celebrated the heroism of the “Four Chaplains.” These were four military chaplains who were aboard the troop transport ship USS Dorchester when it was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk in 1943. Two of these chaplains were Protestants, one a Catholic priest, and one a rabbi. The ship did not have enough life jackets for all the men on board. When the ship was sinking, the chaplains gave up their life vests to other sailors, calmed the men down, and then were said to have linked arms together and prayed as the ship went down. After they died, they were honored as heroes. The U.S created a postage stamp, and in 1961 a medal to celebrate them. The vision of the four men of different faiths, working and dying together, was heavily promoted by the U.S. government.

Conclusions on Tolerance

It’s not an exaggeration to say that a kind of new, widespread religious toleration was created during World War II, thanks in part to government propaganda efforts. This had limits, extending only to Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, but was significantly more progressive than earlier ideas of national belonging. In 1943, when artist Norman Rockwell painted the “Four Freedoms” President Roosevelt had listed, his image for “Freedom of Worship” included a Catholic, Jew, and Protestant praying. At the time this was a remarkably expansive vision.

Many Answers to World War II’s Effect on Religion

This is an extremely broad and large question, and I have just tried to show one small impact of World War II on American society. It wrought many changes. Just a few:

* Japanese Buddhists in the U.S., in internment camps, dropped the use of the swastika in worship to avoid the association with Nazism. Buddhism took on a worship style that often more closely resembled Protestantism.

* Many European Jews sought to enter the U.S. to escape persecution. Most were not allowed entry, and many died in the Holocaust as a result. Some communities and individuals, however, did settle in the United States either during or after the war.

* Religious conscientious objectors to war who refused to join the military were placed in the Civilian Public Service, a government agency that ran a series of labor camps and other sites. The historic peace churches, including the Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers, assisted the government with running these camps. Some of the religious conscientious objectors resisted efforts at government control and were sent to prison. Some scholars have suggested a continuity between the pacifists sent to prison and the early civil rights movement.

* New England Jesuit theologian John C. Ford wrote an article in 1944 “The Morality of Obliteration Bombing.” Ford accepted the morality of war but thought bombing civilians was immoral. Ford’s ideas would later inform anti-nuclear writers.

The effects of the war were as widespread and diverse as the effects of the war on the rest of American society, so it’s hard to give just one answer.

Sources

The section on the NCCJ is heavily indebted to Schultz, Kevin M. Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America To Its Protestant Promise. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Other works consulted:

Brock, Peter. Against the Draft: Essays on Conscientious Objection from the Radical Reformation to the Second World War. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Goossen, Rachel Waltner. Women Against the Good War: Conscientious Objection and Gender on the American Home Front, 1941 - 1947. Chapel Hill, NC:University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Hedstrom, Matthew S. The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Stahl, Ronit Y. Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Williams, Duncan Ryūken. American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2019.