Religion, the Cold War State, and the Resurgence of Evangelicalism in the US, 1942 - 1990

Although many observers consider the Bush administration’s “faith-based initiative” a unique breach in the wall of separation between church and state, close ties between the federal government and religious agencies are no novelty in the history of American public policy. Since the end of the Second World War, billions of dollars of public funds have been made available to religiously-affiliated hospitals, nursing homes, educational institutions, and social services - institutions which were regarded as vital to Cold War preparedness. By the same token, government use of religious foreign aid agencies, the donation of surplus land and military facilities to religious charities, and the funding of the chaplaincy in the armed forces have undergirded Cold War foreign policy goals. Based on the principle of subsidiarity, post-war public policy thus integrated religious groups into the framework of the welfare and national security state in ways which underwrote both the expansion of the federal government and the growth of religious agencies. Crucially, public funding relations involved not only mainline Protestant, Jewish and Catholic organizations, but also white evangelicals, who had traditionally been the most outspoken opponents of closer ties between church and state. Cold War Anti-Communism, the fear of Catholic or secularist control of public funds, and pragmatic considerations, however, ushered in the gradual revision of their separatist views. Ironically, the programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, so vilified by the Christian Right, pioneered many of the funding streams most beneficial to evangelical providers. Considering that since 1945 the sprawling and loosely organized evangelical movement has become the largest single religious faction in the US, and that conservative Protestants now form the most strongly Republican group in the religious spectrum, these findings are of particular importance. They suggest that Cold War state-building and the resurgence of Evangelicalism mutually reinforced each other in ways which have been largely ignored by scholarship on conservatism and its focus on the “backlash” against the political and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Based on newly accessible archival materials and a comprehensive review of secondary literature, this paper suggests that the institutional and ideological ties between evangelicals and the state, which developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, are as important in understanding the political mobilization of conservative Protestants as the more recent “culture war” sentiments.Beobachter der amerikanischen Politik deuten die so genannte „faith-based initiative” der Bush-Regierung, die eine staatliche Mitfinanzierung religiöser Sozialeinrichtungen ermöglicht, zumeist als einen Versuch, die traditionelle Trennung von Kirche und Staat in den USA zu unterminieren. Bei näherem Hinsehen zeigt sich jedoch, dass bundesstaatliche Gelder bereits seit dem zweiten Weltkrieg in großem Umfang zum Aufbau religiöser Krankenhäuser, Universitäten, internationaler Hilfsorganisationen und sozialer Dienste beigetragen haben. Unter der Ägide des Kalten Krieges wurden religiöse Gruppen institutionell und ideologisch in die Staatsbildung der Nachkriegszeit integriert, die weder eine Rückkehr zum „Nachtwächterstaat” der zwanziger Jahre darstellte, noch auf dem Staatsbegriff des New Deal beruhte. Stattdessen war das spezifische Merkmal des „Cold War state“, dass er auf dem Prinzip der Subsidiarität aufbaute, welches den Staat in erster Linie als Geldgeber für den Aufbau einer von privaten, gemeinnützigen und kirchlichen Einrichtungen getragenen sozialstaatlichen Infrastruktur ansah. Zu den besonderen Charakteristika des sich daraus entwickelnden neuen Verhältnisses zwischen Kirche und Staat gehörte, dass konservative protestantische Gruppen, die bislang auf einer strikten Trennung beider Bereiche bestanden, zunehmend in die subsidiaristischen Strukturen eingebunden wurden. Vor allem die Identifikation der Evangelikalen mit dem Antikommunismus und ihre Furcht vor katholischer Dominanz bei der staatlichen Förderung trug zu ihrer neuen Staatsnähe bei. Darüber hinaus profitierten konservative Protestanten insbesondere während der Ausweitung des Wohlfahrtsstaates in den sechziger Jahren (Great Society), die sie ansonsten als Beginn des moralischen Verfalls und staatlichen Versagens angreifen, zunehmend von öffentlichen Mitteln. Dies wirft die Frage auf, welche Rolle diese neue Hinwendung zum Staat für die politische Mobilisierung der Evangelikalen spielte, die in der Forschung zumeist erst in den achtziger Jahren als Resultat der Ablehnung gegenkultureller Impulse angesiedelt wird. Unter Rückgriff auf Theorien der sozialen Bewegungen zeigt der Beitrag auf, dass die ideologische und institutionelle Integration in den Staatsbildungsprozess seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg ebenso wichtig war für das politische Wiedererwachen der Evangelikalen wie ihre Reaktion gegen „sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll” seit den späten siebziger Jahren

Closing the gap between atomic-scale lattice deformations and continuum elasticity

Crystal lattice deformations can be described microscopically by explicitly accounting for the position of atoms or macroscopically by continuum elasticity. In this work, we report on the description of continuous elastic fields derived from an atomistic representation of crystalline structures that also include features typical of the microscopic scale. Analytic expressions for strain components are obtained from the complex amplitudes of the Fourier modes representing periodic lattice positions, which can be generally provided by atomistic modeling or experiments. The magnitude and phase of these amplitudes, together with the continuous description of strains, are able to characterize crystal rotations, lattice deformations, and dislocations. Moreover, combined with the so-called amplitude expansion of the phase-field crystal model, they provide a suitable tool for bridging microscopic to macroscopic scales. This study enables the in-depth analysis of elasticity effects for macro- and mesoscale systems taking microscopic details into account.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, Supporting Information availabl

CDM afforestation and reforestation baseline methodologies: An analysis of the submission and approval process

Afforestation and Reforestation (A/R), also widely termed LULUCF have been an important field of conflict in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. The first methodology for A/R projects has been submitted only by October 2004 and the first project was registered only in November 2006, two years after the first project in the energy sector. Like energy efficiency and transportation methodologies, A/R methodologies also suffer high rejection rate. 20 A/R CDM methodologies evaluated by the CDM Executive Board have been analyzed in this paper with respect to their approval history. On an average it took 4-5 months for approval of A/R methodologies in contrast to the long approval time taken in case of other methodologies (9-10 months). Most methodologies has been rejected because of not properly defining land eligibility, incomplete baseline scenario selection, lack of methods to prove additionality and insufficient treatment of uncertainties. --

Northern Hemisphere interdecadal variability: A coupled air-sea mode

A coupled air–sea mode in the Northern Hemisphere with a period of about 35 years is described. The mode was derived from a multicentury integration with a coupled ocean–atmosphere general circulation model and involves interactions of the thermohaline circulation with the atmosphere in the North Atlantic and interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere in the North Pacific. The authors focus on the physics of the North Atlantic interdecadal variability. If, for instance, the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation is anomalously strong, the ocean is covered by positive sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies. The atmospheric response to these SST anomalies involves a strengthened North Atlantic Oscillation, which leads to anomalously weak evaporation and Ekman transport off Newfoundland and in the Greenland Sea, and the generation of negative sea surface salinity (SSS) anomalies. These SSS anomalies weaken the deep convection in the oceanic sinking regions and subsequently the strength of the thermohaline circulation. This leads to a reduced poleward heat transport and the formation of negative SST anomalies, which completes the phase reversal. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans seem to be coupled via an atmospheric teleconnection pattern and the interdecadal Northern Hemispheric climate mode is interpreted as an inherently coupled air–sea mode. Furthermore, the origin of the Northern Hemispheric warming observed recently is investigated. The observed temperatures are compared to a characteristic warming pattern derived from a greenhouse warming simulation with the authors’ coupled general circulation model and also with the Northern Hemispheric temperature pattern associated with the 35-yr climate mode. It is shown that the recent Northern Hemispheric warming projects well onto the temperature pattern of the interdecadal mode under consideration

Collective Motion of Polarized Dipolar Fermi Gases in the Hydrodynamic Regime

Recently, a seminal STIRAP experiment allowed the creation of 40K-87Rb molecules in the rovibrational ground state [K.-K. Ni et al., Science 322, 231 (2008)]. In order to describe such a polarized dipolar Fermi gas in the hydrodynamic regime, we work out a variational time-dependent Hartree-Fock approach. With this we calculate dynamical properties of such a system as, for instance, the frequencies of the low-lying excitations and the time-of-flight expansion. We find that the dipole-dipole interaction induces anisotropic breathing oscillations in momentum space. In addition, after release from the trap, the momentum distribution becomes asymptotically isotropic, while the particle density becomes anisotropic

Attraction and unbinding of like-charged rods

We investigate the effective interaction between two like-charged rods in the regime of large electrostatic coupling parameters using both Molecular Dynamics simulation techniques and the recently introduced strong-coupling theory. We obtain attraction between the rods for elevated Manning parameters accompanied by an equilibrium surface-to-surface separation of the order of the Gouy-Chapman length. A continuous unbinding between the rods is predicted at a threshold Manning parameter of 2/3.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Controlling the energy of defects and interfaces in the amplitude expansion of the phase-field crystal model

One of the major difficulties in employing phase field crystal (PFC) modeling and the associated amplitude (APFC) formulation is the ability to tune model parameters to match experimental quantities. In this work we address the problem of tuning the defect core and interface energies in the APFC formulation. We show that the addition of a single term to the free energy functional can be used to increase the solid-liquid interface and defect energies in a well-controlled fashion, without any major change to other features. The influence of the newly added term is explored in two-dimensional triangular and honeycomb structures as well as bcc and fcc lattices in three dimensions. In addition, a finite element method (FEM) is developed for the model that incorporates a mesh refinement scheme. The combination of the FEM and mesh refinement to simulate amplitude expansion with a new energy term provides a method of controlling microscopic features such as defect and interface energies while simultaneously delivering a coarse-grained examination of the system.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure