“Christian America” was born. Not in 1776, but in the mid-20th
century. Kruse and I talked about how that happened, why it matters, and
what it means for the story we tell ourselves about our country.
They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but if you were
to hear that wealthy businesspeople have taken up with conservative
Christians, you probably wouldn’t be too surprised — just think of Hobby
Lobby. Has it always been thus? Not according to Kevin Kruse, Princeton
historian and author of
One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. Per Kruse, the cozy relationship is more recent than many of us might think.
After
all, it wasn’t until 1954 — over 175 years after our nation’s founding —
that “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Two years
later, “In God We Trust” became the official American motto. This move
toward national religiosity wasn’t, as some have
assumed, borne entirely out of a response to the godless Communists.
Kruse’s book argues that the notion of a Christian America — a country
not just comprising Christians but fundamentally Christian in its
structure, nature, and history — was cobbled together in the 1930s and
'40s by a group of businessmen and ministers who needed each other to
unite against a common enemy: FDR and the New Deal.
The
Great Depression saw the revival of public interest in the Social
Gospel — the idea that Christianity ought to be more concerned with the
common good than individual salvation. Businessmen like J. Howard Pew
(of Sun Oil) and Harvey Firestone didn’t like the emphasis on what they
saw as “collectivism,” so they decided they needed to partner with a
group of likeminded individuals who would help them advance their
capitalistic agenda. Who to turn to?
Reverend James
Fifield was especially beloved by his flock — First Congregational
Church in Los Angeles — and was the free enterprise-loving clergy that
Pew, Firestone, and their cohort needed. Through leaning on an
organization called Spiritual Mobilization, Fifield and these wealthy
corporate leaders helped ministers to see how the domestic support of
FDR’s New Deal, which Fifield and others saw as creeping progressivism,
was more than just a political nuisance — it was a spiritual threat.
Their fear was the emphasis on collectivism, which religious leaders
argued diminished the importance of the individual as presented in the
gospel of Jesus Christ, which they saw as elevating personal salvation
above communal identity.
Thus “Christian America” was
born. Not in 1776, but in the mid-20th century. Kruse and I talked about
how that happened, why it matters, and what it means for the story we
tell ourselves about our country.
One
thing I always wonder about is how do you, as an historian, get to a
place where you can put a stake in the ground on this issue? What
preponderance of evidence do you have to reach before you think, “Okay, I
can confidently draw not just a connection but sort of a conclusion?”
In
some ways it’s always a leap of faith. You reach a certain tipping
point where you feel that you’ve got several sources all saying the same
thing and no one pushing back the other way, you can kind of assume
that that’s the case. So I go down into the private letters of the
organizations that were pushing this, the private letters of the
corporate figures who were funding it, beyond the public statements — if
you look behind the scenes, they’re very clear about why they’re doing
this.
Are there moments that stand out to you that do this in the book?
Spiritual
Mobilization had this radio program, “The Freedom Story.” They started
off only talking about Truman, because that’s what [Fifield and Pew]
cared about. Soon enough, though, their lawyer says, “You are a public
service radio show, and if you weigh too heavily on domestic politics,
we’re going to lose that public service designation. So let’s instead
talk about the foreign manifestations of communism, and then you can
draw some connections to it at home.” Behind the scenes you can see
their motive in this; they’re talking about communism abroad in order to
attack the creeping socialism at home — to make the New Deal seem like
it’s part of this global communist menace.
I
read somewhere else about how you didn’t set out to write this book —
you set out to write something different about conservative
Christianity. What did you find in your research that was big enough to
make you change course?
I did a lot of research for
what I thought would be my second book, and dove into the papers of Hugo
Black at the Library of Congress — he wrote the decision in Engle v. Vitale, which is the school prayer decision of 1962.
He got at least ten boxes full of angry letters about the decision.
What struck me is that in these letters that were written to him, there
was a recurring theme: Over and over again, in hundreds if not thousands
of these letters, I saw ordinary Americans tell this Supreme Court
justice he’d misread the First Amendment, because our national motto is
“In God We Trust.” But that had only been made the national motto six
years earlier.
Are Christians aware of this history, or is it something new to them? Are we like Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada when Meryl Streep schools her about the color of her sweater, unaware of the past?
Christians
and everyone, really, even historians, get this wrong. You can look
back to plenty of religious invocations the Founders make, but on the
issue of whether America is a Christian nation, [the Founders] are very
explicit. The Declaration of Independence attributes rights to the
Creator, but the Constitution is very clear; there’s no religion other
than a date made in the year of our Lord. It keeps religion at arm’s
length.
With The Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, you might as
well have the Founders of the United States come back and talk to you
directly: “The government of the United States is in no sense founded on
the Christian religion.” That’s not a statement I think you could make
in the '50s or even today, but it was begun by Washington, signed by
John Adams — the most religious of the founders — and passed unanimously
by a voice vote in the Senate. It was largely uncontroversial at the
time. It would not be today.
If you asked Americans
today if we are a Christian nation, they invoke these phrases and this
recent history as evidence that yes, we always have been a Christian
nation. And that, I think, is a mistake that not just Christians but I
think all Americans make.
Have
you seen anything good come out of the relationship between corporate
America and Christian America? Or has it been all bad?
Ultimately,
there have been some positive effects of this language on America. It
was not what the corporations intended: Dwight Eisenhower decoupled
religious language from Christian libertarianism and it became more
inclusive.
You see this in the civil rights movement. I
don’t talk about this in the book, but Martin Luther King, Jr. and
others like him are incredibly effective at using this fusion of
religion and Americanism and making it clear that segregation can’t fit
as part of this. They mobilize this language against segregation.
This
is such a white movement in so many ways — the connection between large
corporations and Christian America. The people in power are white men.
So it’s interesting that some of the civil rights movement was
influenced by this rhetoric.
This is a story full of
unintended consequences and I think that’s one. Without the groundwork
of that fusion of piety and patriotism, you wouldn’t have ministers like
King at the forefront of the movement with the language of a
religiously-infused Americanism. King calls attention to the founding
documents and says, all we’re asking you to do is stay true to what you
put down on paper.
In my
experience, some of contemporary evangelical Christianity is really this
sort of nostalgia for the 1950s, when a woman was a woman and a man was
a man. That notion runs throughout the book, too, in terms of people
looking backwards toward the era of the Founding Fathers. How has
nostalgia been deployed as a political and religious tool?
I
don’t talk about it in the book, but one of the later “Freedom Stories”
on the radio, they would have Thomas Jefferson travel through time to
the ‘50s, furious about the idea of a welfare state. He’s livid and
wants to go fight people and rouse an army. So there is a constant
looking to the Founders to make these arguments, and all sides do that
now.
But your point about the ‘50s is fascinating,
because as we look back to the Founders, I think people who do so very
selectively pick out what they like about that era. So if you went back
and there were traditional gender roles, where the husband works and the
wife stays home and takes care of the family — why is that possible?
This is an era in which union levels are at an all-time high. This is an
era in which the economy is greatly expanded under Eisenhower, the New
Deal state, and the top tax bracket is 92-94 percent. There is a lot on
the policy side that makes that familial relationship possible that we
just don’t think about.
There are obvious downsides to the ‘50s,
too — I mean, we talked about segregation, that’s clearly one of them;
gender roles, the rights of gays and lesbians. There’s a lot we would
not want to go back to. In some ways, we’re all kind of cafeteria in our
approach to nostalgia. You pick and choose parts at will, but you can’t
have one part without the other.
