One Nation, Under God

Kevin M. Kruse. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. 
Basic Books, 2015.

Most Americans are aware that "In God We Trust" was adopted as the National Motto in the 1950's; many are also aware that the phrase "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the same period. Most accounts have assumed that these changes--and the increased religiosity in political and public life in general--were primarily a product of the Cold War, as American political and social leaders sought to amplify the contrast with the official atheist Communist bloc. But in Kruse's telling, the fusion of faith and conservative politics predated the Cold War. Instead, he traces the origins of the myth of a "Christian America" all the way back before World War II. The rise of what would later become the religious Right was birthed in corporate America, in deep-seated opposition to the liberalism of the Roosevelt years.

Kruse's account locates the center of the rise of the religious Right neither in specific denominations nor even among a particular cadre of politicians (not at first, anyway), but rather in the private sector. First these anti-New Deal corporate interests found common cause with a select group of charismatic and influential ministers like Billy Graham, the push to bring overt religiosity into the Federal government; then they found a willing and able agent in the person of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who shared many of the same values but who failed to utilize the creation of civic religiosity towards the specifically libertarian ends many of his sponsors had hoped to see. On the other hand, his tendency towards vagueness and ideologically-neutral religiosity created a sort of "civic deism" which would give the use of religious language and iconography a permanent home in Washington.

It was up to Billy Graham and Richard Nixon to finish the job of making Republican control of the White House an explicitly religious (and Christian) endeavor. By that point, the nascent religious Right was focused more on the rise of the counterculture and the tumult of the 1960's rather than the economics of the post-New Deal state. Communism was an oft-quoted foe, but it was the fear of domestic fellow-travelers and presumed creeping socialism from within which was the real bogeyman. The language of the Cold War served to validate and institutionalize a process that had begun decades earlier.