Soviet technology vs the Presbyterian Church

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 251.

“Although Dulles was the more cerebral of the two, Ike had the edge in a key respect, for as a former general he was calmer in the face of major setbacks, never allowing the detail to obscure the big picture. Religious faith was important in cementing their relationship. A day before his inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized into the National Presbyterian Church by a pastor, Edward Elson, who had served as a military chaplain in occupied Germany. Ike personally insisted on prefacing his inauguration speech with a prayer of his own devising. He opened his first cabinet session with a prayer, and the practice was institutionalized at the urging of his Mormon Secretary for Agriculture. The President also held regular National Prayer Breakfasts, where religious leaders mingled with the powerful, as well as, from 1954 onwards, a National Day of Prayer. ‘In God We Trust’ became the national motto and henceforth appeared on US banknotes. The Pledge of Allegiance was emended to include the phrase ‘one nation under God’.

The symbolic elaboration of an older civic religion was important to a nation whose global enemy marched under the banner of materialistic atheism. America of the 1950s may have been ‘about McDonald hamburgers, Holiday Inns, Levittown suburbs, Lucille Ball, Elvis, Marlon, Marilyn and James Dean, but it also witnessed an astonishing religious revival. ‘I believe fanatically in the American form of democracy, a system . . . that ascribes to the individual a dignity accruing to him because of his creation in the image of the supreme being,’ wrote Ike to a friend in 1947. The US may have been a deeply consumerist society itself, but Ike deprecated the Soviets’ obsession with technology, secure in the knowledge that the US was, and would remain, far ahead without having to make the sacrifices that the Soviet leadership imposed on their people. When the Soviets scored a major propaganda coup on launching the first space satellite in October 1957, which did little more than emit beeps to radio hams, Ike responded by helping raise $20 million to build a new National Presbyterian Church in Washington, while continuing to invest quietly in Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) and in the long-term development of a spy satellite system to replace the interim U-2 spy plane.