Cold War evangelists framed sexual morality as a matter of national security

Evidence

With an urgent call for repentance, Graham brought the residents of Los Angeles to their knees: “Communism is a religion that is inspired, directed and motivated by the Devil himself who had declared war against Almighty God,” he inveighed. In this war it was clear that America was on God’s side, but it was time that Americans started acting like it. Their city was third on the list of Soviet targets, he warned, not because of its strategic significance but because of its reputation as a “city of wickedness and sin”—a city plagued by crime, drinking, rampant sexual immorality, and the dissolution of marriages. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 62

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The fusion of nuclear annihilation, Soviet atheism-as-devilry, and personal sexual morality into a single national-security frame is exactly the machinery that made ‘strong nation = virtuous nation’ load-bearing — a dense, paradigm-shifting knot worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on moral panics and on ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ — where ‘sexual morality as national concern’ gets weaponized politically.