One Nation Under God by Kevin Kruse

We’re often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the idea of “Christian America” is an invention—and a relatively recent one at that. As Kruse argues, the belief that America is fundamentally and formally a Christian nation originated in the 1930s when businessmen enlisted religious activists in their fight against FDR’s New Deal. Corporations from General Motors to Hilton Hotels bankrolled conservative clergymen, encouraging them to attack the New Deal as a program of “pagan statism” that perverted the central principle of Christianity: the sanctity and salvation of the individual. Their campaign for “freedom under God” culminated in the election of their close ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. But this apparent triumph had an ironic twist. In Eisenhower’s hands, a religious movement born in opposition to the government was transformed into one that fused faith and the federal government as never before. During the 1950s, Eisenhower revolutionized the role of religion in American political culture, inventing new traditions from inaugural prayers to the National Prayer Breakfast. Meanwhile, Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the country’s first official motto. With private groups joining in, church membership soared to an all-time high of 69%. For the first time, Americans began to think of their country as an officially Christian nation. During this moment, virtually all Americans—across the religious and political spectrum—believed that their country was “one nation under God.” But as Americans moved from broad generalities to the details of issues such as school prayer, cracks began to appear. Religious leaders rejected this “lowest common denomination” public religion, leaving conservative political activists to champion it alone. In Richard Nixon’s hands, a politics that conflated piety and patriotism became sole property of the right. Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how the unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.

Intriguing But Incomplete. The central premise of this book is that “Under God” and “In God We Trust” were created by a cabal of corporate and religious interests opposed to the New Deal in the 1930s, and indeed the roughly 30 year period from the mid 1930s through the mid 1960s is where the bulk of the text concentrates. For example, the 30 year period from 1980 - 2010 is encompassed only in the epilogue, the 2nd shortest of the chapters of this book, and the period before the mid 1930s is barely mentioned at all. And therein lies where the book is incomplete. It should have built the case that pre-New Deal, religious references were scant in American politics. I believe that case can be made, based on my own knowledge of the history, but I'd like to see the efforts of a more trained historian on the matter. Instead, Kruse zeroes in on the New Deal opponents. But within the framework that he creates, he actually does do a solid job of showing how their efforts led to the increased religiosity of the Eisenhower Administration and from there directly to the Culture Wars as we know them now - though Kruse never uses the term “Culture Wars”. Even with my own better than average knowledge of the relevant events, I learned quite a bit here and had at least a few attitudes shifted. Highly recommended reading for anyone actually interested in the subject from any side of the issue.

Summary: The subtitle "How Corporate America Invented Christian America" does not work, but the history is still fascinating.

One Nation Under God is the third book of Kevin Kruse's that I have read. I am a follower of his on Twitter, and I appreciate his work. However, at this point, I wonder if Kruse's niche is the history of the development of libertarianism in the US. The first book I read by Kevin Kruise, White Flight, was about Atlanta's racial history and white flight and how white flight helped to encourage libertarian thought. The second book I read by Kruse was Fault Lines, a history of the US since 1974. Fault Lines was co-authored with Julian Zelizer, and while it is a comprehensive political history, its attention to the rise of political media was where it shined. It was not primarily about libertarianism, but you cannot tell the story of modern political history without the story of libertarian thought becoming mainstream within the GOP.

One Nation Under God is about how modern politics has become rhetorically religious in a different way from previous history. The primary history of the book is about how “One Nation Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” was added to our currency just a couple of years before the Supreme Court eliminated compulsatory prayer and bible reading from schools. That story is commonly presented as a Cold War story. The US culturally understood itself as Christian in opposition to the USSR as an atheist country. So it needed to demonstrate its religious nature publicly and self-identify as a country founded on religious principles. Kruse seeks to complicate that story by moving back to the 1920s and 1930s and showing how a conscious and planned work of corporate institutions and wealthy individuals used religious motivations and institutions to make a theological case for Christianity as an individualistic, pro-capitalist, and anti-government religion. Christian Libertarians were a category in the 1920-30s, not just in the Tea Party movement. The epilogue of the book makes the case that these are connected movements.

The book's weakness is that beyond the 1920-30s history of corporate intervention and propaganda in the first section of the book, the case for corporate influence on Christianity was weak. It was not corporate America as a whole, but a particular stream of conservative wealthy businessmen, often connected to oil and resistant to government regulation. I have not read the book, but I have listened to Darren Dochuk about his book Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. So I think the case that Kruse was seeking to make can be made more clearly. In One Nation Under God, the real focus is on the history of how politicians and religious corporate leaders sought to encourage a type of cultural-religious meaning for their benefit. And how that shifted politics to an overtly religious rhetorical posture. Politicians have always used biblical references to communicate ideas. But before Reagan, the phrase ‘and God bless America' at the end of speeches was almost absent. After Reagan, politicians of both parties regularly used it even as a more rigid line was being drawn preventing government institutions like schools from advocating religious speech.

I listened to this during a single day on a very long car trip. It kept me engaged, and as I would expect, a lot of history was new to me. At the same time, because I am not unfamiliar with the rise of the religious right, Billy Graham and his political influence and the role of corporate wealth in missions and evangelism funding during the mid-20th century, and the role of civil religion in the mid 20th century, I was not wholly convinced of the argument of the subtitle. There was an influence, but that influence was not definitive in the way the subtitle suggests. As long as you have limited expectations, I think this book is well worth reading.