One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse

Abstract

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented America. By Kevin M. Kruse. (New York: Basic Books, 2015. Pp. xvi, 352. Paper, $17.50, ISBN 978-0-465-04949-3; cloth, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-465-04949-3.) Why do so many contemporary Americans believe that the United States of America has been and always should be nation? This question drives Kevin M. Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented America. The book ignores the question of whether the Founders intended the nation to be Christian. The author writes that most scholars agree that the Founders preferred a wall of separation between church and state (p. xiii). Instead, the book focuses on why and how religion has so prominently entered political discourse since World War II. Kruse agrees with those who have found that religious revival was fueled in part by Cold War conflict with the 'godless communists' of the Soviet Union, but he argues that the revival's roots extend back to the 1930s when corporate leaders allied with conservative clergymen to promote Christian libertarianism as an antidote to the perceived social, spiritual, political, and economic cancers spawned by the New Deal (p. xiv). Kruse argues that Dwight D. Eisenhower used the revival to unite constituencies as nation under God, while Richard M. Nixon used religion for political gain in ways that divided constituencies. The effects of those efforts linger into the present. Kruse presents his argument in three parts: Creation, Consecration, and Conflict. Creation explores the sources of what he calls libertarian alliance from the 1930s to the eve of the Eisenhower administration. In twist on Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms campaign, clergymen, business leaders, and politicians pursued freedom under campaign that was aimed at getting big government out of people's lives and off businesses' backs (chap. 1). Consecration provides detailed analysis of how conservative politicians, mostly Republicans, embraced religion in political discourse (sacralizing the state, as Kruse puts it) during the Eisenhower administration, paying special attention to the addition of one nation under God to the Pledge of Allegiance and of the motto In God We Trust to currency (p. 87). Conflict chronicles the resistance to this new religious political discourse. U.S. Supreme Court cases like Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963) play important roles in this section, as does Nixon's divisive use of religion. …