US propaganda framed the Cold War as religious faith against godless communism.
Evidence
The Orientalists who helped shape this strategy were convinced that the largely secular ideology of nationalism and atheist communism would hold little weight in the “Muslim world.” At a conference organized and sponsored by the government at Princeton University in 1953, Orientalist scholars, policymakers, and various native informants (including Ramadan) concluded that the United States must use religion to win hearts and minds, ignoring the popularity of nationalist movements. US propaganda efforts at the time thus emphasized the Christian and religious roots of American culture in contrast to the godlessness of the USSR. The National Security Council reasoned in 1952 that the “three monotheistic religions in the area have in common a repugnance to the atheism of communist doctrine and this factor could become an important asset in promoting Western objectives in the area.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 388
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Shows a religiously-inflected Cold War framing that prefigures the ‘clash of civilizations’ rhetoric of the War on Terror.
Related
- US cold war propaganda framed Christianity and Islam as allied against atheist communism (similarity 0.91)
- US cold-war strategy deliberately weaponized religion against nationalism and communism in Muslim regions (similarity 0.86)
- The government sponsored Orientalist conferences to weaponize religion (similarity 0.84)
- Orientalist knowledge became enlisted in Cold War counterinsurgency and national-security manipulation (similarity 0.81)
- During the early Cold War, Islam was coded positively in US discourse (similarity 0.80)
- Key Islamophobic organizations trace their lineage to Cold War-era neocons (similarity 0.79)
- Early US think-tank debate treated Islam instrumentally, not ideologically (similarity 0.78)