The Religious Response to the Atomic Bomb

THE RELIGIOUS RESPONSE TO THE ATOMIC BOMB

"I Am Become Death."

"I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds," a line from the Bhagavad Gita, was J. Robert Oppenheimer's only thought after the blinding flash of the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945. The August bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a less literary relation to death: hundreds of thousands died in the blasts or from the radiation sickness that followed. Such devastation and the technology that made it possible naturally evoked much commentary from theologians and the clergy. Despite the fact that the public overwhelmingly approved of the atomic bomb, America's religious leaders responded to the bomb less unanimously. Their doubts and misgivings about living in an atomic world soon became part of American popular culture.

Protests

Most Americans agreed with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, because it was "used to save the lives of thousands of American soldiers who would otherwise have perished on the beaches of Japan." The vast majority of Protestant and Catholic clergy deplored the presence of atomic weapons but maintained that their use to end the war was justified—and perhaps would be justified in the future. Protestant layman Arthur H. Compton went further, seeing in the American development of the bomb a sign of God's providence. "Atomic power is ours," Compton told an Episcopal Church conference, "and who can deny it was God's will that we should have it?" Some clergy, however, dissented from such thinking. Immediately after the bombing a group of thirty-four clergy denounced the bomb as "an atrocity of a new magnitude," stating that its "reckless and irresponsible employment against an already virtually beaten foe will have to receive judgment before God and the conscience of humankind." Niebuhr was sufficiently ambivalent about the use of the bomb to sign a 1946 report by the Federal Council of Churches, which condemned the bombing as "morally indefensible." "As the power that first used the atomic bomb under these circumstances," the report stated, "we have sinned grievously against the law of God and against the people of Japan."

Apocalypse

Some religious observers interpreted the development of the atomic bomb as presaging the end of the world. To them, the destructive power of the weapon made possible the apocalypse prophesied in the Bible. One Manhattan Project scientist wrote that "humanity stands on a tiny ledge above the abyss of annihilation." A 1948 fundamentalist periodical argued, "The hands of the clock of Bible prophecy appear to be moving onward and upward to the time when it must strike—the mid-night hour." In 1949 Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, conducting a revival in Los Angeles at the same time President Harry S Truman revealed that the Soviet Union also possessed the atomic bomb, urged people to repent their sins immediately because, he said, "An arms race unprecedented in the history of the world is driving us madly toward destruction!"

Humility

Most religious interpreters viewed the development of the atomic bomb as an occasion for increased humility on the part of individuals. Niebuhr stressed the paradox of the bomb's development, that the greatest technological achievement of humanity quite possibly could lead to its extinction. As such, an increased sense of Christian humility was necessary to prevent the irresponsible use of such weaponry. The Christian Century in a 15 August 1945 editorial said that instead of indulging in self-congratulation, Americans "should now be standing in penitence before the Creator of the power which the atom has hitherto kept inviolate." Jewish theologians argued much the same. In 1945 Rabbi Beryl D. Cohon of Temple Sinai in Brookline, Massachusetts, said, "We have drawn from the infinite storehouse of God's world enormous powers, and have converted them into instruments of destruction.…Unless we discipline the revelation of atomic power by the revelation of Mount Sinai, making it subservient to the Moral Law, we shall…reduce our earth to a dead cinder spinning in space in infinite futility."

Activism

A corollary to the argument that the atomic bomb occasioned increased humility was the demand that moral individuals work harder to achieve a harmonious, peaceful world where atomic war was impossible. "We must recognize that a desperate struggle is on for the soul of the world," one Methodist minister maintained, a struggle that "requires…a great godly company of men and women with no axe to grind, desiring only to save, serve, help and heal." A 1946 American Scholar symposium on the bomb called for a "moral transformation" to eliminate war, A Michigan rabbi demanded that humanity enter its "adulthood" in order to control the bomb. Lewis Mumford in his book Program for Survival (1946) called for the mobilization of religion to instruct men and women in the art of self-control. All the great religions, he said, had sought to curb destructive impulses and foster love. In a nuclear age, he argued, religion must-go-further and reduce conceit, complacency, and pride. Richard M. Fagley, a member of the Federal Council of Churches Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, wrote just two months after the bombs were dropped on Japan that the only alternative to total world disaster was "repentance and regeneration." The fate of the world, he said, "depends upon the ability of the moral and religious forces…to call men effectively to repentance, worship, service." Such advocacy led religious practitioners in two directions: toward moral judgment of the self and regeneration and toward the social activism necessary to prevent war in the future. Both responses would be important in the coming decades, becoming a permanent part of American culture and contributing to the social conformity of the 1950s, the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, the neoconservatism of the 1970s and 1980s, and the antinuclear movement of the early 1980s.

Sources:

Paul S. Boyer, By The Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985);

Richard W. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1985);

Edward L. Long, The Christian Response to the Atomic Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1950);

Mark Silk, Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988);

Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).