One nation under God
"We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the idea of 'Christian America' is an invention--and a relatively recent one at that. As Kruse argues, the belief that America is fundamentally and formally a Christian nation originated in the 1930s when businessmen enlisted religious activists in their fight against FDR's New Deal. Corporations from General Motors to Hilton Hotels bankrolled conservative clergymen, encouraging them to attack the New Deal as a program of 'pagan statism' that perverted the central principle of Christianity: the sanctity and salvation of the individual. Their campaign for 'freedom under God' culminated in the election of their close ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. But this apparent triumph had an ironic twist. In Eisenhower's hands, a religious movement born in opposition to the government was transformed into one that fused faith and the federal government as never before. During the 1950s, Eisenhower revolutionized the role of religion in American political culture, inventing new traditions from inaugural prayers to the National Prayer Breakfast. Meanwhile, Congress added the phrase 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance and made 'In God We Trust' the country's first official motto. With private groups joining in, church membership soared to an all-time high of 69%.
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What Hacker News says
- There was a good book[0] about where that came from. Big business and religious leaders joined forced to fight the New Deal.
[0] One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America Kevin M. Kruse https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22928900-one-nation-unde...
- > True the minimum wage hasn’t kept up. That’s mainly due to exporting manufacturing offshore.
That’s partially true but this trend has been widespread well outside of manufacturing, too. There’s no shortage of companies engaged in wage theft, converting full time positions to contract, changing benefits plans to shift more cost to the workers, etc. in every sector. Programmers are in high demand but even in tech, consider how many companies contract out core competencies or, especially, have things like helpdesk jobs which pay considerably less than they used to and no longer have a promotion path.
There’s been a well-funded push to roll back the New Deal since around the end of WWII. This has included funding libertarian think tanks, religious denominations which encourage self-reliance and distrust of the government, etc. One big factor feeding into demand for cheaper goods is that people are acting rationally in a world where their income lags behind their parents or grandparents at the same age.
Kevin Kruse wrote a book about this a while back which is good for understanding some trends in the 20th century:
- This is certainly intentional, and is well documented in the book and documentary What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa...
Additionally, Kevin Kruse of Princeton has written a great book called One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. An intro article on this book can be found here:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-am...
- Whenever something seems off like that I usually try to follow the money to see who profits from it. In this case, I’m partial to the explanation that it stems back to business opposition to the New Deal pushing a lot of money into promoting libertarian Christianity, with one of the bedrock principles being that the world is just and therefore someone rich must have deserved it in some way.
Kevin Kruse wrote a book about that a few years ago and anyone familiar with American politics or religion will recognize a lot of the people involved:
- It’s important to remember that those libertarian views didn’t just happen by accident: a LOT of money had been spent developing media, organizations, even religious denominations starting with backlash to the New Deal. The historian Kevin Kruse wrote a book which will have a lot of familiar names:
- The book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America has it the other way around.
https://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-God-Corporate/dp/046...
