One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (49 page)

Religion played an even more prominent role in the race for the Republican nomination. In a November 2007 debate, CNN showed a videotaped question from a voter who held up a Christian version of the Bible and said, “How you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you: Do you believe every word of this book?” The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer insisted that the candidates should have answered that it was “none of your damn business,” but instead all of them “bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism.” Indeed, the Republican field seemed especially eager to outdo one another's professions of piety. Arizona senator John McCain, who had boldly denounced Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance” in his losing bid in the 2000 primaries, spent much of his second run mending fences with them. He made a major address at Falwell's Liberty University, where he asserted, despite all evidence to the contrary, that “the Constitution established the United States of America
as a Christian nation.” New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, proudly won Robertson's endorsement. Not to be outdone, Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, attributed his strong showing in the polls to “the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people.”
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No Republican candidate, however, was challenged more by questions of faith than Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. The first Mormon to make a significant run for the presidency, he found his campaign struggling to overcome distrust by evangelical voters at the party's base. Romney staged a major speech on “Faith in America” at the presidential library of George H. W. Bush. Though he stood by his faith and made clear that he shared common ground with more traditional Christians, Romney only used the word “Mormon” once. Instead, the bulk of his address focused on the proper place of faith in American politics. “Freedom requires religion,” he argued, “just as religion requires freedom.” He promised never to force his own values on the nation as a whole, but also said he believed that religious principles in general were essential to the continued health of the nation. The Constitution rested on a “foundation of faith,” Romney said, and its framers “did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘under God,' and in God we do indeed trust.”
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T
HESE INVOCATIONS REVEAL THAT THE
rhetoric and rituals of public religion detailed in this book have lived on to the present day. Indeed, if anything, such touchstones of religious nationalism have only become more deeply lodged in American political culture over time, as the innovations of one generation became familiar traditions for the next. But as these religious notes have been drummed into the national consciousness, almost by rote, we have forgotten their origins. More than that, we have forgotten they have origins at all.

And their origins, it turns out, are rather surprising. The rites of our public religion originated not in a spiritual crisis, but rather in the political and economic turmoil of the Great Depression. The story of business leaders enlisting clergymen in their war against the New Deal is one that has been largely obscured by the very ideology that resulted from it.
Previous accounts of the tangled relationship between Christianity and capitalism have noted the “uneasy alliance” between businessmen and the religious right which helped elect Ronald Reagan and end the New Deal order, but the careers of the Christian libertarians in the 1930s and 1940s show that their alliance was present at the creation of the New Deal. Their ideology of “freedom under God” did not topple the regulatory state as they hoped, but thanks to the evangelism of conservative clergymen such as James Fifield, Abraham Vereide, and Billy Graham, it ultimately accomplished more than its corporate creators ever dreamed possible. It convinced a wide range of Americans that their country had been, and should always be, a Christian nation.

In the early 1950s, the long crusade of the Christian libertarians apparently reached its triumphant climax with the election of Dwight Eisenhower. But the new president proved to be transformative in a sense his corporate backers had not anticipated. Although he was certainly sympathetic to the secular ends they sought, Eisenhower proved to be much more interested in the spiritual language they had invented as a means of achieving those ends. Uncoupling their religious rhetoric from its roots in the fight against the New Deal, he considerably broadened its appeal, expanding its reach well beyond the initial circle of conservative Protestants to welcome Americans across the political and religious spectrum. In doing so, Eisenhower ushered in an unprecedented religious revival, one that temporarily filled the nation's churches and synagogues but permanently altered its political culture. From then on, the federal government, which the Christian libertarians had long denounced as godless, was increasingly seen as quite godly instead. Congress cemented these changes, adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and adopting “In God We Trust” as the nation's first official motto. Hollywood and Madison Avenue, meanwhile, helped promote this understanding of America as a religious nation and Americans as an inherently religious people.

The new rituals of public religion crafted in the Eisenhower era were seen at the time as symbolic flourishes with little substance to them. But the rites and rhetoric that Eugene Rostow dismissed as mere “ceremonial deism” in 1962 were soon revealed to have incredible political power. National controversies over school prayer—which unfolded first in the Supreme Court and then in Congress—demonstrated that the symbols and
slogans of the Eisenhower era, instituted less than a decade earlier, had quickly been embraced by many Americans as ironclad evidence of the nation's religious roots. As conservatives fought to restore school prayer and to roll back other social changes in the turbulent 1960s, they rallied around phrases like “one nation under God.” As a result, the religious rhetoric that had recently been used to unite Americans began to drive them further apart. At the decade's end, Richard Nixon helped complete this polarization of the nation's public religion, using it to advance divisive policies both at home and abroad.

This history reminds us that our public religion is, in large measure, an invention of the modern era. The ceremonies and symbols that breathe life into the belief that we are “one nation under God” were not, as many Americans believe, created alongside the nation itself. Their parentage stems not from the founding fathers but from an era much closer to our own, the era of our own fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers. This fact need not diminish their importance; fresh traditions can be more powerful than older ones adhered to out of habit. Nevertheless, we do violence to our past if we treat certain phrases—“one nation under God,” “In God We Trust”—as sacred texts handed down to us from the nation's founding. Instead, we are better served if we understand these utterances for what they are: political slogans that speak not to the origins of our nation but to a specific point in its not-so-distant past. If they are to mean anything to us now, we should understand what they meant then.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the inspiration and support of countless colleagues, friends, and family. There are not enough pages here to thank them properly or enough time to express the depths of my debt to them all.

First, I must thank the academic community I've been lucky to call home for a decade and a half now. As a member of the faculty at Princeton University, I have been fortunate to have so many colleagues who are both rich with insight and generous with their time. This project has benefited immensely from several workshops in the Department of Religion and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and informal chats with many of my colleagues at the Center for the Study of Religion. Special thanks to Wallace Best, Jessica Delgado, Judith Weisenfeld, and Bob Wuthnow. In one form or another, the entire Department of History—faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students—has helped make me a better historian and this a better book. But for their collegiality and contributions to this project, I owe a special debt to Margot Canaday, Alec Dun, Yaacob Dweck, Shel Garon, Michael Gordin, Molly Greene, Josh Guild, Dirk Hartog, Alison Isenberg, Rob Karl, Mike Laffan, Jon Levy, Erika Milam, Rebecca Rix, Dan Rodgers, Keith Wailoo, Wendy Warren, Sean Wilentz, and Julian Zelizer. I owe my department chair, Bill Jordan, my deepest appreciation for his unflagging support. Our staff, of course, is the backbone of our department, and I thank them for the invaluable help they provide us all every day: Elizabeth Bennett, Brooke Fitzgerald, Judy Hanson, Barb Leavey, Pamela Long, Debbie Macy, Kristy Novak, Etta Recke, Max Siles, Jackie Wasneski, and Carla Zimowsk. My graduate students, past and present, all deserve credit for inspiring me to work as diligently as they do. In particular, conversations with Leah Wright Rigueur and Sarah Milov have helped me fine-tune my thinking on the issues in this book, while Dov Grohsgal has doggedly secured the prints and permissions for the images in it. Olivier Burtin graciously offered to look for material related to the project when he made his own early research trips to the American Legion archives and returned with more than I'd even imagined possible.

Beyond Princeton, countless other scholars have helped this project as well. Sections of the book were presented early on as papers at annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, as well as at smaller conferences, workshops, and invited lectures at Binghamton University, Boston University, Cornell University, Emory University, King's College London, Southern Methodist University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Sussex. Many thanks to the receptive audiences at these events and the scholars who participated: Uta Balbier, Anja-Maria Bassimir, Eileen Boris, Heike Bungert, Jim Cobb, Joe Crespino, Jonathan Ebel, Wayne Flynt, Healon Gaston, Lily Geismer, Sally Gordon, Andy Graybill, Stephen Green, Alison Colis Greene, Darren Grem, Ray Haberski, Matt Hedstrom, Heather Hendershot, John Lee, Nelson Lichtenstein, Emma Long, Jonathan Lurie, John McGreevey, Bethany Moreton, Alice O'Connor, Kathy Olmsted, Steve Ortiz, Andrew Preston, Mark Rose, Bruce Schulman, Elizabeth Shermer, Matt Sutton, Stephen Tuck, Wendy Wall, Clive Webb, Jana Weiss, and Diane Winston. Later on, Brian Balogh did me the great honor of inviting me to present a draft of the manuscript at the 2013 Miller Center Fellowship Spring Conference at the University of Virginia, where three phenomenal scholars—Doug Blackmon, Mike Lienesch, and Darren Dochuk—provided thorough feedback and enthusiastic support. Darren, in particular, has to be singled out for praise, as he not only provided me with several rounds of feedback over the course of this project but also put up with me as we presented our work together in a half-dozen panels and presentations over a year's span.

I owe Ari Kelman and Eric Rauchway a tremendous debt, as they read through an early draft of the manuscript, providing terrific suggestions at a crucial stage, and then helped me think through countless new issues as I revised the manuscript over the next few years. Several other scholars deserve my sincere thanks for taking the time to read the entire manuscript in later stages of its evolution, offering insight and much-needed encouragement to press on: Paul Harvey, Andrew Preston, Larry Moore, Matt Sutton, Bob Wuthnow, and Neil J. Young. Gill Frank and Kim Phillips-Fein, meanwhile, offered invaluable feedback on individual chapters. For additional conversations and insights that shaped the book in important ways, I must also thank Tony Badger, Tim Borstelmann, Jon Butler, Nathan Connolly, Jeff Cowie, Mary Dudziak, Sally Gordon, Mary Beth Norton, Matt Lassiter, Dick Polenberg, Nick Salvatore, Andrew Sandoval Strausz, Bryant Simon, and Tom Sugrue. And I owe special thanks to three complete strangers who generously offered to help me track down key materials for this project: Rich Kimball and Kara Hansen, who helped me secure photocopies from the Cecil B. DeMille archives, and Sam Brenner, who graciously loaned me FBI files on the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade that he had unearthed in his own research.

Many institutions and individuals made the research for this book possible. Financial support from the Princeton University Committee on Research and the Department of History subsidized several research trips to various archives, while the excellent staff at our Firestone Library worked tirelessly to dig up countless copies of obscure books, magazines, and periodicals on short notice. Most important, this book owes a great deal to the resourcefulness and helpfulness of a good number of archivists, librarians, and staff members around the nation. As any historian can attest, the insight and assistance of archivists can make or break a project, and there are several who deserve special mention for their kind help: Jim Armistead at the Truman Presidential Library, Brian Keough at the University of Albany, Dan Linke at the Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton, Ron McDowell of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, Simone Munson at the Wisconsin Historical Society, John Nemmers at the University of Florida, Bruce Tabb at the University of Oregon, Howard Trace at the American Legion, Randy Vance at Texas Tech University, and Stacey Wright at Valdosta State University. Three archives, in particular, were vitally important for this project, and luckily for me, they were all run by exceptional archivists: Bob Shuster at the Billy Graham Center Archives, Bill Sumners at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, and the late Herb Pankratz at the Eisenhower Presidential Museum and Library. Without the generous assistance (and general kindness) that they and their outstanding staffs provided, this book would not have been possible. To anyone whose name should be here but is not, I ask that you please forgive me for the oversight.