One Nation Under God

The thesis of Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God is that “the postwar revolution in America’s religious identity had its roots not in the foreign policy panic of the 1950s but rather in the domestic politics of the 1930s and early 1940s. Decades before Eisenhower’s inaugural prayers, corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase ‘freedom under God.’” 

Citing “private correspondence and public claims,” he argues that “this new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most – not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington. With ample funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized as ‘Christian libertarianism’” (xiv).

It is true, then, that “there once was a time during which virtually all Americans agreed that their country was a Christian nation.” During this moment, American religion “succeeded in writing itself – literally, in some cases – into the very identity of the nation. It transformed the national motto and the Pledge of Allegiance. It became a central part of important ceremonies of civic life and created wholly new traditions of its own. . . . Above all, it invented a new idea about America’s fundamental nature, an idea that remains ascendant to this day” (xvi).

This period was not, however, the 18th or 19th century, but the early- to mid-twentieth. 

Kruse is on to something, for sure. The unbreakable alliance union of conservative religion and conservative politics and capitalist economics is comparatively new. It would have surprised the populist Christians of the 19th century, who were at once Bible-thumping and big-business-bashing.

But the argument is partly the result of an optical illusion. He wants to sidestep the question of whether America was founded as a Christian nation to ask how so many came to believe it to be one. A good question; but it is rooted in Kruse’s premise (which he shares, he claims, with “most scholars”) that the “wall of separation between church and state” was the founding vision of American politics. 

It doesn’t take a lot of investigation to cast doubt on this premise. In his recent religious history of the Mexican-American war (Missionaries of Republicanism), John Pinheiro asks “What was the United States of America?” and answers: “An increasingly common answer by the 1840s was that the United States was all of those things that Mexico was not: free, Protestant, republican, and prosperous. . . . Whether politicians stressed political, religious, or anti-Mexican themes, what tied their rhetoric together was its rootedness in American’s sense of identity as a republican race uniquely blessed by Divine Providence” (3-4). 

This is the 1840s, not the 1940s, and apparently Americans are already thinking of the country as a Christian one.

So Kruse’s thesis would have more prima facie plausibility if it was more modest: If he claimed that corporations promoted an alliance of capitalism and religion.