The West fought the Cold War partly as a war of faith. American public religion was rebuilt around the confrontation: the words under God entered the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and In God We Trust became the national motto in 1956, explicit answers to godless communism, while preachers from Billy Graham to Fulton Sheen made anticommunism a pulpit theme and the CIA and Western governments quietly funded religious broadcasting and emigre churches. The Vatican, which had excommunicated communists in 1949, moved in the 1960s and 1970s to the patient negotiation of Ostpolitik, trading recognition for breathing room for the churches behind the Iron Curtain, a policy argued over inside the church to this day.
The confrontation's turning point had a religious face. The election of Karol Wojtyla as John Paul II in 1978 put a Pole on the throne of Peter, and his 1979 pilgrimage to Poland, where a third of the country came out to see him, restored a public identity the state could not control; the Solidarity movement that followed carried the church's imagery through the shipyards. A decade later the East German revolution of 1989 gathered in churches, the Monday prayers at the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig swelling into the demonstrations that brought down the wall.
After 1991 religion returned across the former bloc in force, rebuilt cathedrals and restored patriarchates alongside new entanglements of church and state, and the scholarship gathered by Dianne Kirby has made the Cold War's religious front a field of its own.