The PWC centers around the traditional interpretation of numerous elements of War World II as it relates to some main players such as Churchill, and the degree of the severity of the Holocaust.  The challenge to the PWC is being called antisemitic.  In other words, the standard narrative popular after the war (Post-War Consensus) of the players and events during WWII is being challenged.

I am a retired minister in the PCA.  I am also a theonomist (of the Rushdoony type).  As such I keep up with what is going on among some of the Rushdoony offspring such as the Moscow contingent (Doug Wilson) and other warrior children such as those located in new places like Ogden, Utah (Brian Suave), and Georgetown, Texas (Joel Webbon).

Recently, a disagreement has arisen between some of the followers of Wilson and Webbon.  At nearly the same time the Antioch Declaration was released to the public, of which the collaborators say was unrelated to this particular tension.  Although the major participants remain friends, a division has arisen among many of their followers. It is mainly a disagreement over the concept behind the term Post-War Consensus (PWC).

The PWC centers around the traditional interpretation of numerous elements of War World II as it relates to some main players such as Churchill, and the degree of the severity of the Holocaust.  The challenge to the PWC is being called antisemitic.  In other words, the standard narrative popular after the war (Post-War Consensus) of the players and events during WWII is being challenged. I personally don’t have a problem with revising historical narratives, if enough evidence supports it.  As a Southerner, I believe that the PWC of the Civil War is very misleading. Abraham Lincoln is not one of my favorite presidents. Thus, a reinvestigation of some elements of the American narrative of WWII is not a problem with me.  One major qualification of any such investigation is that any conclusions about “secular history” must not be made a test of Christian orthodoxy in the Church.

To me PWC extends far beyond the issues surrounding WWII.  When I think of the PWC, I think of much more than the issues in this debate.  What were some of the general beliefs following WWII that might help us to understand the culture of the day in which they lived?  How have things changed from living in the post-war 1950s to living in the 2020s?  It is my contention that the change has been dramatic, and almost unidentifiable to Millennials and to Generation X, and even to most Baby Boomers themselves.

History for most of us is about a time in which we never lived.  However, I lived in history, at least in the early Baby Boomer generation.  I remember the way things were in the 1950s and I know how things are today. I remember very clearly the struggles of my parents, how they thought, and what it was like living in their household. This is a benefit of old age. Let me list only a few differences of how things have changed. My goal here is just to lead us to think more about assumptions that perhaps we need to revisit.

1. Military Hegemony. After WWII America became a super-power in the world. Defeating Hitler’s Germany in WWII (along with the Russians) gave us a pride which was legitimate. Americans coming home from the war thought surely this would be the “war to end all wars.” This was part of the PWC, and it still exists today to some degree.  However, such pride soon became our enemy.
2. America later came to believe that she was the lone military and moral power in the world. We came to believe that democracy was the best form of government for all nations.  We believed that any war overseas was our war.  Any dictator overseas could be crushed, and since we helped defeat Hitler, we could do it for all nations.  Every tyrant was the next Hitler (including Putin), and it was our duty to stamp out all new Hitlers, just as we did in WWII.  This was not part of the PWC. This came later.
3. Needless to say, this globalist policy became the reason for the deaths of multitudes of American soldiers overseas in wars in places they could not identify on a map. Just consider View Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine. We have spilled the blood of young American boys, and wasted billions of dollars because of our belief that God had called us to police the world. Things have changed since the PWC.
4. Reductionism of Christianity. America was once known as a Protestant nation. It was a pluralism of Protestant denominations including such groups as Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans, and Methodists. They were mainline, and each guarded their distinctive beliefs. We were a Christian Nation.  American soldiers overseas were fighting for their homes and for a Christian homeland.  This was part of the PWC. A couple of decades after WWII a new religious principle arose which downplayed the distinctives of each denomination, and Christianity was reduced to a simple presentation an altar-call gospel.  Billy Graham was the central figure in this movement.  It often goes by the name of evangelicalism.  Thus, within a few decades there was a reduction of Christianity, and a new perspective which downplayed the distinctives of the various mainline denominations.  Doctrine became unimportant and numbers became the mark of success. Since rigorous theological discussion was no longer in vogue, multi-religious, non-mainline denominations appeared such as mega-churches, and celebrity pastors.  This was a change from the PWC.
5. Rise of Multicultural Pluralism. America had been a Protestant nation with pride in the Protestant work ethic. When John F. Kennedy ran for President, most of the members of my small church voted against him because he was Roman Catholic.  It was alright to be friends with Catholics, but they should not be part of the Civil Government.  With a Roman Catholic in the White House, the next thing might be the rule of America by the Pope. Again, it was clear that America was a Protestant Christian Nation. This was part of the PWC.  But soon America became a conglomeration of everything beyond Protestantism to include such outliers as Judaism and Islam.  For example, the “Protestant work ethic” (which was part of the PWC) was replaced by the term “Judeo-Christian heritage.”  Not only was Christianity reduced to its minimum elements, but it also began to accept a multitude of alien religions. Religion became democratized. Muslims and Jews in the Congress of the United States was unacceptable to the post-war generation (as would have been homosexuals and transgenders). The was not part of the PWC
6. The Rise of Debt. With the post WWII generation, debt was almost as sinful as adultery. My parents never went into debt for anything.  They purchased a house and a car with cash.  It was cash that they saved, for probably decades. They had lived through the Great Depression and they had seen the danger of debt.  Maybe some of them interpreted Paul’s admonition literally to “owe no man anything (Rms. 13:8).”  My parents owned a few shares of GM stock (an investment), but they avoided all debt.  People lived in smaller houses, but they were free from debt.  In my family of eight, we lived in a small house with one bathroom, about as big as a modern-day closet. We lived on what we had.  There were no malls and no credit cards.  There were no vacations.  We might visit my grandparents in the adjacent county once a month, but otherwise, we never got out of our own county.  If there was a car in the family, there was only one.  Teenage boys who had their driver’s license had to depend on a gracious father to use the family car. We “thumbed” a lot.  All five of the children commuted to a local college and received our degrees.  Debt for college was too much of a risk for the survival of the family. This was part of the PWC.
7. The Inevitability of Progress. The generation of the PWC were suspicious of anything new. Eventually, because technology produced so many new gadgets and inventions, the inevitability of progress guided by the experts became a basic expectation of life. First the radio, then the television, and eventually the microwave oven.  However, because it seemed as if expert engineers could produce all of these items, those after the post-war generation came to believe that experts could produce a great society (LBJ and his Great Society).  They were unaware that technical advances did not guarantee a future sane culture.  Man came to trust in technology and experts rather than in the God of the Bible.  A managerial class was created in both civil government and big business that deceived those after the PWC generation into believing that moral progress was as inevitable as technical progress. Today, many of those have come to understand that this is not true, and that they were lied to (Generation X).
8. The Disappearance of the Family. Where I was raised (in West Virginia) the normal size of a family of my father’s generation included 12 children.  The PWC generation average size family included 5 children.  This was mainly because there was no birth-control or legal abortions.  However, it was the norm. A large family was a major challenge for parents, but it produced one of the greater blessings of life which God gave man which is a big family.  Normally, the blessing of a large family was part of the PWC. Today, with women in the workplace and the importance of personal advancement and careers, the average number of children in the family is probably around 2.  Hence, the old Protestant Christian culture of the post-war generation (PWC) is dying out.

The PWC is real, even though it no longer found as a chapter in our history books.  Whether it is applied to the past events during WWII (per Wilson and Webbon) or to the nature of a Christian Nation following after WWII (Ball), people today are beginning to understand the reality of a PWC.  Probably the election of Donald J. Trump as president was part of a hope that not only would make America great again, but partly it was a hope to return America to the blessings enjoyed by the post-war generation (and even their PWC).

Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tenn.