The CIA and the Study of Religion
by Michael Graziano
An example of USIA propaganda. “Come South,” August 5, 1954, RG 306: Records of the U.S. Information Agency, 1900–2003. U.S.I.A. Bureau of Programs, Press and Publications Service, Publications Division, 1953–1978, National Archives.
Studying the Central Intelligence Agency can be a frustrating experience. The Agency’s documents are protected by law, becoming visible to the public only through a haphazard and glacial declassification process. At the same time, the CIA engages in deliberate obfuscation, leaking inaccurate information about itself to cloud the historical record. My book, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA, was profoundly shaped both by archival availability and suspicions about the limitations of those very same archives. The story I found was what US intelligence officers in the Second World War called the “religious approach” to intelligence: a concerted effort by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and its spiritual successor, the CIA, to study and operationalize religious knowledge in the service of US policy. As the book’s coverage grew, however, data collection felt like playing Jenga in reverse—a memo here, a transcript there—with each additional piece teetering towards a portrait of an agency that defies depiction. Rather than write an overarching history of the CIA, I chose to focus on deeper, narrower examples that illuminated how US intelligence officers worked with religion and how, in turn, religion worked on them.
It is an honor to have my work read and engaged by Katherine Moran, Candace Lukasik, and Elayne Oliphant, scholars who each bring their own formidable expertise in key areas of research. By generously putting Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors in conversation with their own work, each reader’s illuminating and challenging contribution shows how the book’s arguments could be extended in a number of productive ways.
Katherine Moran brings her expertise on the relationship between Catholicism and empire to bear on US intelligence services, noting how they were haunted by the specter of an “all-powerful pope” and a “unitary Catholicism.” Attentive to the influence of anti-Catholicism on American Catholics, Moran considers how longstanding anti-Catholic themes were employed by the OSS and CIA to “structure widespread definitions—even positive ones—of Catholicism itself.” Popular anti-Catholic tropes certainly had a boomerang effect in the intelligence services. Led by the American Catholic William Donovan, the OSS spent World War II imagining the Vatican as a rigid, authoritarian church, except now rigid in support of religious freedom and American values, rather than in opposition.
Moran points to the distinction between theorizing about religion and shaping religion: were the OSS and CIA misunderstanding Catholicism or shaping their preferred form of it? In the book, I demonstrate how theorizing about religion and shaping it are two sides of the same coin, especially when you have the resources and political will, as these agencies did, to theorize in order to shape. While there was certainly confusion about the Church within the intelligence services, their officers nonetheless labored to shape a preferred strand of Catholicism. For the OSS and CIA, the appeal of using Roman Catholicism as a model for religion writ large could be found in the qualities that ostensibly made it easy to study: the Church lent itself to mapping on an organizational chart, a tidy pyramid with the pope on top. These kinds of simple visual aids were designed to help officers theorize. They were especially useful to those who joined the OSS from the corporate world. As intelligence officers theorized how to best work with the Church, they shaped the US government’s understanding of the Church and, later, the way US Americans thought of it, too.
The OSS and CIA could also easily reach out to prominent members of the hierarchy, mistaking the dominant group within the tradition for the tradition itself. As I show in the book, this is precisely why the Second Vatican Council was so surprising—and troubling—to the CIA. From the CIA’s point of view, the Council witnessed Church leaders suddenly disagreeing on core Catholic ideas and even, in the Agency’s view, coming dangerously close to Soviet talking points. That these internal Church rifts existed before the Council is exactly the point: blinded by the assumptions outlined by Moran, the Agency suddenly found itself grappling with a “unitary Church” that was no longer quite so unitary. It challenged the CIA’s theories for understanding the Church because it challenged their very notion of what the Church was and how it operated.
Finally, I think Moran’s observations about the long (and long overlooked) history of partnerships between Catholic institutions and the US state is a crucial one. Fortunately, this topic is receiving more attention, including Moran’s, in her forthcoming work on nineteenth-century carceral institutions. Moran ends her piece by asking, “What if, in other words, the history of US empire, intelligence, and incarceration is also Catholic history?” What if, indeed.
Candace Lukasik takes the final sentence of my book and runs with it. Every author should be so fortunate. While I end the book by talking about the consequences of CIA operations for people around the world, Lukasik points to examples of these stories running parallel to my own narrative and considers how these stories illuminate the larger relationship between religion and US empire.
The intelligence agencies did indeed understand religion, in Lukasik’s words, as a “problem to be solved for the purposes of imperial expansion.” Solving that “problem” often meant that the CIA and similar institutions directed violence and misery at people they deemed threats to US national security. My book focuses on how the CIA set apart certain groups, whether through the Agency’s institutional rhetoric or as targets for its institutional violence. Lukasik makes an important observation when she notes that while intelligence agencies may have marked distinct groups with specific negative attributes (like comparing Kurdish people to children), these markings were monolithic in the sense that they cemented these groups as racialized, timeless others—detached from historical time and always different from the West. While these representations were by no means positive, Lukasik also extends her analysis to consider the damage done by an absence of representation. In other words, for the CIA to consider whether their efforts might damage a particular group, the Agency had to pay attention to that group in the first place.
In so doing, Lukasik demonstrates how my choices about the book’s coverage dictated the legibility of certain consequences. Drawing from her own forthcoming work, Lukasik shows how these consequences could include the erasure of entire populations, such as Middle Eastern Christians, who did not easily fit into the mental models of the CIA’s imagined geographies of US empire. Lukasik makes a sharp connection between the “exemplary persecution” of Middle Eastern Christians today—caught within imperial geographies and moralities—and the book’s example of Vietnamese Catholics who found their country repeatedly invaded, with new governments propped up by the Cold War superpowers.
Of course, the thing about having sharp readers is that they might offer more persuasive interpretations of the very sources you include in your book. That’s what Lukasik does with the story of the young Vietnamese refugee who, after being bathed by a US Navy sailor, tells her mother that the sailor “baptized me American” (125). Lukasik brilliantly interprets this as an act of conscription: to make a Vietnamese Catholic child “one of us” through a theopolitical ritual onboard a US Navy warship, which was in turn packaged for popular consumption by the CIA. Lukasik places this scene in the larger framework of what she calls the “dueling dynamic of religious inclusion and racial exclusion in the service of empire.”
Elayne Oliphant begins by putting my work in conversation with early Christianity. She sees parallels between US intelligence officers and fourth-century Christian theologians in how both groups engaged in “non-reflexive thinking.” One thing that strikes me about the historical CIA was their conviction that they were reflexive thinkers who constantly evaluated and incorporated new information.
One of the major reasons this self-understanding was not quite accurate is something Oliphant touches on elsewhere, namely, the “religious” work that the CIA was doing as it tried to both secure and surveil. I appreciate the connections to Kathryn Lofton’s work, and I agree that the CIA is an interesting institution to view as, in Lofton’s words, “mass producing relations of value.” Yet the CIA’s efforts at “ideological control” or their “teleological confidence,” to use two terms from the book, were not distinct from that process. Indeed, the CIA’s attempts to shape and maintain particular views about Whiteness or capitalism were part of this larger whole.
Those attempts often involved violence, and even when they did not, the possibility of violence always loomed in the background. Writing about that violence, in ways that help readers appreciate the scale of it, is a challenge. One example that sticks with me is the case of Edward Lansdale, an intelligence officer who bragged about his operational employment of indigenous Filipino folklore while combating the allegedly-communist Hukbalahap Rebellion during the 1940s. Lansdale simulated attacks by a blood-drinking aswang—a creature said to feed on the morally devious—by piercing the necks of captured Filipino rebels, draining them of blood, and publicly hanging them upside-down in contested areas. Lansdale thought the entire story an important illustration of the operational benefits of manipulating belief, and he shared the story with apparent glee when he trained people from the US military and intelligence community (132–133). It is a challenge to tell this history without exoticizing the violence or exploiting the victims, particularly when the archival sources are slanted in favor of those who executed this violence. Yet Lansdale’s pride in the story, and the pride with which he told it, is part of that history. So too are the institutional behaviors that enabled this violence on a global scale, as well as the bureaucratic and legal mechanisms that shielded this story—and countless others like it—from public scrutiny. Because while this is only one story, it is an important one. I think Americans should know the things that were done in their name, under a tree in the Philippines, more than a half-century ago.
Oliphant also raises an important, and related, point about how the knowledge we produce is used. As I show in the book, one’s desire to advise the CIA is not a necessary condition for the Agency to benefit from one’s work. I am also unsettled, as Oliphant is, that the CIA’s efforts to move past the world religions paradigm coincided with similar conversations in the academy. The CIA’s decision was influenced by assessing that paradigm as no longer operationally viable. What about us?
One theme of the book and each of the three responses is the simultaneous importance and difficulty of rigorous self-reflexivity. The OSS and CIA deployed religious knowledge because it addressed a perceived problem, rendering it valuable with real, tangible benefits. There are important connections here to disciplinary challenges facing those of us in religious studies and the history of American religion. I take up some of those questions in my current project, which explores the history of religion and public education in the United States—especially teaching religious literacy—and its links to broader questions of policy and national security. I work at an institution that trains many public school teachers, and so I spend a lot of time working with students and local teachers on issues of religious diversity and how to teach about religion. I work with local schools on understanding why some of their Jewish students don’t attend Friday night football games, or why some of their Muslim students can’t just “move their prayer times” until after the algebra test.
Of course, the CIA and public schools are different, but there are echoes. Both are government institutions that teach, mold, and discipline. Studying either quickly leads us to the central question of why we do what we do—how we teach and research and serve our communities—and make abundantly clear the challenge of maintaining that rigorous self-reflexivity.
Michael Graziano is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Northern Iowa. His research and teaching focus on law, education, and national security in American religion. He is the author of Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA (University of Chicago Press, 2021). You can follow him on Twitter @grazmike.