So, here’s the kicker for me:

Dulles believed that the heritage of the United States, which he described as “in its essentials a religious heritage,” placed Americans under a special obligation. He felt what he called “a deep sense of mission, ” a conviction that “those who found a good way of life had a duty to help others to find the same way.” Like his father, he was a born preacher; like his grandfather, a missionary. When the 1950s dawned, he was looking for a way to channel his “Christian insight and Christian inspiration” into the fight against “the evil methods and designs of Soviet Communism.”

The best way to do that, Dulles quite reasonably concluded, was to become secretary of state. He thought he had the job in 1948, when his old friend Thomas Dewey seemed poised to take the presidency from Harry Truman, but voters frustrated his ambition by giving Truman an upset victory. Determined to try again, he spent the next several years expanding his network of Republican contacts and publishing articles about Communism and the Soviet threat.

In the spring of 1952, Eisenhower declared his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. He had spent his adult life in the army, far from the refined circles in which Dulles moved. A mutual friend, General Lucius Clay, suggested that Dulles fly to Paris to meet Eisenhower, who was then serving as supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Dulles found this a fine idea, and arranged to give a speech in Paris as a way of disguising the true purpose of his trip. He and Eisenhower met for two long conversations. The general was much impressed. He relied on Dulles throughout his presidential campaign and soon after the election named him secretary of state.

Dulles was then sixty five years old. He had been shaped by three powerful influences: a uniquely privileged upbringing, a long career advising the world’s richest corporations, and a profound religious faith. His deepest values, beliefs, and instincts were those of the international elite in which he had spent his life. One of his biographers wrote that he was “out of touch with the rough and tumble of humanity” because “his whole background was superior, sheltered, successful, safe.”
—Overthrow, p. 115

Here’s another word of endearment: profound. The closing description in the above quote where a biographer describes Dulles as “out of touch with the rough and tumble of humanity” , immediately following Kinzer’s use of the phrase “profound religious faith, is like fingers on a chalk board. What is “profound” about that? Nothing. It is a pretty embarassing indicator to me of how compassion and reconciliation and unity get completely ignored when it is inconvenient to particular interests where our sense of “advantage” is at stake. The fact that there are people throughout history who “Christianize” their otherwise brazenly open “nationalist agenda” and defend the use of violent force as means to some perceived ends, and inflict severe economic effects upon those in foreign lands who are “in the way” of our achieving our national/corporate/econmonic goals, is an embarassment.

The hubris with which Dulles carried out his “mission” to this effect makes me wonder which force is providing the motivation here: the nationalistic agenda and its “benefits” to its adherents and practicioners, or the “faith-based”. It seems to me that the former wags the latter. The “energy” seems to come from the politics, and is used to “ignite” the “faithful” with patriotic energy masquerading as “faith”, so that the patriotic zeal gets a “expresso shot” from the “faith-zeal”. I notice this when Condaleeza Rice, speaking to the Southern Baptist Convention, gets more of a rise out out of the audience with political “ideals” slogans than the preachers do with their sermons. People are all teary eyed and cheering loudly about “America” and ho-hum by comparison about everything else dealt with at the convention (or in their churches).