I was driving and the show on the radio interested me. An author was being interviewed about his book. I missed part of it. The interview had started before I got in my car. I picked up on a show in-progress but I heard enough that I was definitely interested.
Has the United States always been a Christian nation? I believe the answer is “No”. Why do many others think the answer is “Yes”?
In “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America”, Kevin M. Kruse delves into the question of why so many believe that the United States always been a Christian nation.
I think the evidence is quite clear on the ”always been a Christian nation” question. I’ve done a good bit of reading on the founding of the United States and it seems to me that the founders, although many had Christian beliefs, established this county so that in Jefferson words there would be a wall of separation between the government and religion.
But let’s leave that question for now as “One Nation Under God” does not really go into that question.
In “One Nation Under God”, Dr. Kruse does not join into the endless arguments on the intent of the founders – did they intend to form a Christian nation- but rather just accepts the scholarly consensus that this was not their indent then sets out to answer a more interesting question.
If the founders did not establish a Christian nation, why do so many Americans believe they did? If we are not a religious nation why are we “one nation under God”?
The common explanation is that during the cold war we wanted to distinguish our country from godless communism and so added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. This is what I always believed but I was probably wrong. Also in the book I learned that “In God We Trust” became the United States’ motto during the same period and was added to our paper money.
Dr. Kruse traces this religious (and mostly Christian) involvement in government and politics to corporate opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s. Corporations were not held in high esteem by many because of the Depression. So to get their message out they bankrolled conservative ministers who believed in what Dr. Kruse calls “Christian libertarianism”.
The book discusses the role of religion in politics and government and gets into contentious issues such as school prayer. I particularly liked this section as I was a grade schooler at the time of the Supreme Court decision that eliminated classroom Bible readings and teacher-led prayer from public school. I had only very incomplete knowledge of those lawsuits had been unaware of many of the other related cases of that period.
The issues of religion in politics and government continue to be controversial and I highly recommend this book to those who wish to understand the controversy better.