In One Nation Under
God, Kevin M. Kruse, a Princeton history professor, reconstructs the story
of the growth of the twin ideas that the United States is a Christian nation
and that a free-market, deregulated, de-unionized United States fulfills the
ideals of Christ.
Kruse starts his history with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who
Kruse says was the first to bring religious language into political speeches.
FDR associated religious—and specifically Christian—ideals with the New Deal.
Corporate interests fought back by spending enormous amounts of money to
associate Christian values with free market and anti-union principles. They
failed miserably, but that did not end the attempt to use religion for
political ends. Eisenhower consciously inserted religion into politics, but it
was a wishy-washy ecumenism that boiled down to “We are one nation, under god.”
A general consensus formed that included politicians of both the left and right
to support the idea that the United States was founded on broad religious
principles shared by all monotheists. Many added a stark contrast with godless
communism to their rhetoric. Some manifestations of the 1950’s religious
consensus were the placement of “under god” in the Pledge of Allegiance and
attempts to insert specific prayers into the public school curriculum.
In the early 1960’s, Kruse relates, a series of Supreme
Court decisions essentially ended prayer in public school. The justification
for both the state laws that injected school prayer into the curriculum and the
defense of school prayer in court was that the customs of the United States,
e.g., placing “In god we trust” on money and starting Congressional sessions
with a prayer, demonstrated that we are a religious nation. Opponents to prayer
in school included many prominent clergy of many religions, most of whom feared
that a specific prayer in classes would establish one religion as the state
belief, thereby suppressing all other faiths; for these purposes, every
Christian sect counted as another religion.
The court cases essentially split the loose religious
coalition of the 1950’s into left and right, the left proposing that we are a
religiously secular nation in which individuals are allowed to practice any
religion and all religions are allowed to thrive.
Enter Richard Milhous Nixon, who revived the idea of
connecting right-wing economic values to Christianity. With the help of Billy
Graham, Nixon used corporate money to organize those Christians who believed in
prayer in school and other governmental manifestations of Christianity to
support the basic economic principles of the extreme right-wing. That’s where Kruse’s story essentially ends.
As we all know, Nixon’s coalition has endured and grown into
a powerful force in American politics, representing about 20% of all voters,
although it is an aging constituency. This 20% of the voters now controls the
Republican Party. While virtually all politicians of all ilk invoke god, only
the Republicans want to follow fundamentalist Christian ideas in teaching science
and mandating social mores.
Kruse makes a convincing case, except for one thing: His
premise that corporate America invented the concept of America as a Christian
nation is not correct. The view that America is fundamentally Christian,
founded on Christian principles, has a long history.
For example, Another book I’ve been reading, Figures publiques, by French cultural
historian Antoine Lilthi analyzes the attempts of the very early and popular biography
of George Washington by Mason Weems to transform our first president, an avowed
nondenominational deist, into the incarnation of a Christian evangelist. Weems
made up a pack of lies about Washington’s private life and beliefs, essentially
setting in stone most of the myths we learned as children about the general,
e.g., the cherry tree incident. As his source for this distortion of history to
serve ideological ends, Lilthi cites Francois Furstenburg’s In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery,
and the Making of a Nation, which studies how the publishing
industry in early America helped to establish America’s civic culture. FYI, Lilthi’s
book, which unfortunately is only available in French at this time, is a
valuable guide to the creation of the contemporary concept of celebrity from
1750-1850 in France, England and North America.
Among other examples of the imposition of religious values on
the political scene in American history are the abolitionist movement, the movement
to stem the growth of unions, the opposition to giving women the right to vote
and prohibition. Plenty of rich folk with real estate and factory holdings
funded these movements. To marvel that corporations from 1940-1970 introduced
the concept of “American the Christian,” requires one to forget that on one
level corporations are merely organizations of convenience for the wealthy.
Weems book is still worth reading because his documentation
of religion in the public square during the years before and after World War II
is detailed and fascinating. More importantly, he reminds us that Richard Nixon
was instrumental in the creation of the ultra-right coalition that assumed
power with Reagan and has succeeded in transferring enormous amounts of wealth
from the poor and middle class to the wealthy, destroying our public education
system, turning us into a near police state, re-establishing a Jim Crow system in
mass incarceration and puttering away more than 30 years in the fight against
human-induced global warming. Although they all portray the United States as a
devoutly Christian nation, if Reagan is the devil and Bush II, Cheney and their
crew the devil’s spawn, then Nixon is the devil’s father.
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