Religious organizations are perfectly situated to perform key roles in global politics. They are some of the largest and best organized civil society organizations, in some instances even more stable than local or national governments. Their networks stretch deep into society, even across state borders, constituting potentially effective channels of communication. Moreover, few can match their ability to formulate norms and values, including influencing public opinion, which provides them with a high moral authority. Together with access to top-level decision makers, this makes religious organizations unique diplomatic players with the ability to influence and frame policy making. 

When the Cold War replaced the Great Alliance of the Second World War, most transnational organizations inspired by this alliance either split, aligned themselves with one camp or crumbled within a few years. However, one of the sole organizations able to resist the escalating East-West tensions and remain relatively independent was a religious organization, the World Council of Churches (WCC). Having faced the breakdown of international order in the 1930s and with Cold War tensions threatening to obstruct the formation of a new one after the Second World War, Christian churches reactivated and reinvented their diplomatic craft through the birth of the WCC’s Commission of the Churches on International Affairs.  

This paper looks at the role the Commission played in bridging East and West in the Cold War, especially the significance of its pioneering of East-West cultural exchange and how it reached out to Christians behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains.