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One Nation Under God

How Corporate America Invented Christian America
Feb 01, 2018
In the late 1940s and 1950s, American businessmen, and they were mostly men, felt under attack by Roosevelt and the New Deal. They responded by creating a past that never existed -- a nation founded on religion. Not a religion that serves the poor, but an individualistic, public religion largely funded by DuPont, Chrysler, Sun Oil, J.W. Marriot and other corporate benefactors. These "Christian libertarians" helped elect Eisenhower, lobbied for Nixon's divisive politics and made the Rev. Billy Graham a star. They added "In God We Trust" to our paper currency and "one nation under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. Their efforts echo down to today, through Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Pence. As the author notes, the parentage of these phrases "stems not from the founding fathers, but from an era much closer to our own,...[W]e do violence to our past if we treat certain phrases...as sacred texts handed down to us from the nation's founding. Instead, we are better served if we understand these utterances for what they are: political slogans that speak not to the origins of our nation but to a specific point in its not-so-distant past. If they are to mean anything to us now, we should understand what they meant then."