He then settled in the Quaker community of Richmond, Indiana, intending to help spur the growth of Earlham College from a small regional religious school into a nationally recognized institution of higher learning.
His Yokefellow funders included some of his past students, such as planned community developer Charles Samuel Coble, whom Trueblood taught and also coached in track in the late 1920s at Guilford College.
He was a political conservative who supported Nixon's foreign policy, including the Vietnam War, and gave the invocation at the 1972 Republican National Convention.
Nonetheless, he was known for maintaining an internationalist perspective, serving for many years as the permanent representative from the global Quaker community to the World Council of Churches, an organization he helped bring into being.
Elton Trueblood wrote 33 books, including: The Predicament of Modern Man, The Life We Prize, Alternative to Futility, Foundations for Reconstruction, Signs of Hope, The Logic of Belief, Philosophy of Religion, Robert Barclay, Abraham Lincoln: Theologian of American Anguish, The Idea of a College, The People Called Quakers, The Incendiary Fellowship, The Trustworthiness of Religious Experience (1939 Swarthmore Lecture), A Place to Stand, Your Other Vocation and The Humor of Christ.
[3] Elton wrote a shorter version of this basic thesis for Reader's Digest, which generated volumes of mail; he reportedly responded to every letter.
Trueblood's book on Abraham Lincoln caught the attention of Nancy Reagan, who talked about it in an interview with Good Housekeeping in September 1981.
[5] Trueblood told several students and reviewers that he sought to provide the general audience with many readable works to promote a depth of religious thought among his readers.
While on sabbatical in England in 1950, Trueblood completed the manuscript for The Life We Prize at Charney Manor, near Oxford, which he later described as the book by which he hoped to be judged.
Jackson, Eisenhower's psychological warfare advisor recommended that the administration hire Trueblood to head the religious propaganda operations of the United States Information Agency.
These and other official events were then turned into propaganda material which were subsequently printed and sent abroad or were broadcast behind the Iron Curtain on the Voice of America radio stations.
In short, Trueblood was intimately involved in the development of America's civil religion / religious nationalism during the 1950s under Eisenhower, which historian Jonathan Herzog has referred to as the "Spiritual-Industrial Complex."
They first met when Elton was the chaplain and a faculty member at Stanford University and Hoover had retired to Palo Alto, California.