Review of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse. New York: Basic Books, 2015.
In One Nation Under God, Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse offers yet another deconstruction of the claim, made quite vehemently in some conservative Christian circles, that America is (or at least was) a “Christian nation.” But unlike those who largely insist on the heterodoxy, rationalism, skepticism or separationism of some leading members of the founding generation, countering one kind of “originalism” with another, Kruse offers a different sort of genealogy, taking its point of departure in the 1930s, when a few religious and business leaders developed what he calls a kind of “Christian libertarianism” to counter the statism of FDR’s New Deal.
Drawing a thread from Rev. James W. Fifield Jr.’s creation of the anti-New Deal Spiritual Mobilization organization in the 1930s through Abraham Vereide’s National Council of Christian Leadership and Billy Graham’s crusades in the forties and fifties to Richard Nixon’s White House worship services, Kruse tells a richly detailed story. While it is somewhat of an oversimplification and (as I shall suggest shortly) outruns the evidence he provides, the book’s subtitle— “How Corporate America Invented Christian America”—indicates the thrust of Kruse’s argument. Much of the Godtalk, or rather, much of the conservative God-talk, in the first half of the last century was deployed on behalf of those who resisted the growth of national government. That growth was to be resisted, the “Christian libertarians” asserted, on behalf of our God-given freedoms.
These efforts bore a certain kind of fruit in the Eisenhower Administration, during which “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” inscribed on our currency. But, as Kruse rightly notes, these were in a sense Pyrrhic victories, as their effect was less to roll back the state than to consecrate it. Christian libertarianism seemed to have given birth to Christian nationalism, which has ever since, in Kruse’s view, been a favorite trope on the political Right.
We might thus read Kruse’s story as a cautionary tale warning us that those who use words and ideas in the public arena cannot always control how they are received and then redeployed by others. Ideas have (often unintended) consequences. In this case, even if we were to credit the simplicity and sincerity of men like Fifield, Vereide, Graham and their allies (as Kruse by and large does not), we might still tax them with playing with fire, permitting the powerful moral language of faith to be sullied by its all too intimate connection with merely temporal ends.
But while he certainly permits us to draw those conclusions (indeed citing many liberal religious commentators to that effect), Kruse has what he regards as bigger fish to fry. As aforementioned, his point is that, while the pretense and purport of our “Christian nation” talk is historical, that understanding is of relatively recent provenance.
Well, yes and no. “Like most scholars,” Kruse says, he believes that “the historical record is fairly clear about the founding generation’s preference for what Thomas Jefferson memorably described as a wall of separation between church and state.”
If we accept this misleading and oversimplified premise, if there indeed were long-standing and widely—not to say almost universally—accepted scruples about mixing religion and politics, then the novelty of the Christian nation talk and the worldly agenda behind it would indeed be striking. But one does not have to believe American historians like David Barton to argue that the picture of the first 150 years of American history is more complicated. Setting aside the fact that prominent and influential founders comprised both sides of the separationism issue and that the argument that the Establishment Clause was more about limiting the federal government than about separating church and state, we can also consider the assumption, taken for granted in the Northwest Ordinance, that schools were meant to teach religion and one of the principal battlegrounds for the argument over slavery—the issue of our first century— was Scripture. If religious arguments were out of bounds, someone forgot to tell most Americans.
Indeed, Kruse himself observes the close connection between the Social Gospel movement and progressivism and the quite heavy use of religious language in FDR’s speeches. While America may not have been a Christian nation in the same sense people mean today, neither did it have the kind of secular public square apparently preferred by unreconstructed Rawlsians. Our common moral language owed—and still owes—much to the Old and New Testaments. And even the more secular philosophies favored by some of our elites presumed (for rhetorical purposes at least) a basically Christian audience. As George Washington said in his farewell address, “[L]et us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
It might be safer to say that, throughout American history, political leaders have found that God-talk rolls trippingly off our tongues and that, inevitably, they have adopted the cadences that we the people understand and love. Given our fallen natures, it is not at all surprising that some (and not just the central figures of Kruse’s history) have either cynically cloaked their selfish designs in religious costumes or honestly mistaken what they want for themselves and their fellows for what God wants for his people. Treating all religious language cynically or eschewing it (or demanding that we eschew it) altogether would be to deprive our country of the richest source of inspiration and moral energy available to it. Not only would our political and moral vocabulary be impoverished, but our hearts would be as well.
To be sure, I don’t think Kruse wants us to go that far. He certainly doesn’t seem to be troubled by religious language when it is deployed in the name of what is fashionably called “social justice.” But when it is offered on behalf of conservative views, he describes it as problematically divisive.
Nonetheless, regardless of the conclusions Kruse would have us draw (and that I will not), he has done us a service. By deconstructing the symbols and slogans we adopted in the 1950s, he points us in the direction of something deeper— the longing and popular understanding that gave them their force to begin with. America may never have been a Christian nation. Indeed, no nation should be or could be. But it was a nation of Christians who could not help but respond to what they believed and felt most powerfully.
Joseph M. Knippenberg is professor of politics at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta.
