Days of protest: The Century and the war in Vietnam
Part of the fabric of public life in America during the post–World War II years, perhaps the cross-stitch that held the symbolic boundaries in place, was anticommunism. Most mainline church editors were part of it. The launching of Sputnik in 1957 provoked a “crisis” and, explained a Century editorial, exploded the “assumption of a kind of general, built-in American superiority” (January 1, 1958). Over the next few years, the editors became certain there existed an absolute incompatibility between Christianity and communism.