by Greg Mayer

In an op-ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times, the historian Kevin Kruse asks, Is the United States a Christian nation? It is a common claim among Christian theocrats (those whom Andrew Sullivan has aptly called ‘Christianists’) that America is a Christian nation—that somehow the basic structures of the American government are founded upon Christianity. But this claim is just plain false. (A majority of Americans were and are Christians, but that’s not what theocrats mean by a Christian nation). The daftness of their historical claims are sometimes comical in their absurdity. The Founding Fathers had diverse religious views (though tending toward deism and Unitarianism), but it was not their religious diversity that led them to erect a secular state: it was their too-intimate familiarity with the horror of centuries of bloody religious disputation in Europe, especially in the British Isles. America was not to have a religiously founded government; rather, the governments of the United States were, as John Adams wrote in the Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, “founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery”.

Kruse, the author of One Nation Under God, of course knows this, and quickly dispenses with the theocrats’ historical fantasy. Instead he situates the infusion of Christianity into the forms of American government to the middle of the 20th century:

But the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.

He attributes this infusion to conservative, anti-New Deal businessmen using Christianity as a cloak to cover their economic goals:

Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion. But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity….

Accordingly, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, corporate leaders marketed a new ideology that combined elements of Christianity with an anti-federal libertarianism. Powerful business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers led the way, promoting this ideology’s appeal in conferences and P.R. campaigns.

They succeeded, they thought, when they elected Dwight Eisenhower; but Eisenhower, once elected, abandoned their economic goals as well as their narrow sectarianism:

Although Eisenhower relied on Christian libertarian groups in the campaign, he parted ways with their agenda once elected. The movement’s corporate sponsors had seen religious rhetoric as a way to dismantle the New Deal state. But the newly elected president thought that a fool’s errand. “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs,” he noted privately, “you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” Unlike those who held public spirituality as a means to an end, Eisenhower embraced it as an end unto itself.

Uncoupling the language of “freedom under God” from its Christian libertarian roots, Eisenhower erected a bigger revival tent, welcoming Jews and Catholics alongside Protestants, and Democrats as well as Republicans. Rallying the country, he advanced a revolutionary array of new religious ceremonies and slogans.

He’s certainly right that “under God” and other such phrases were established—in pretty clear violation of the Constitution—during the 50’s, although he doesn’t, at least in this piece, sufficiently credit the fear of “godless Communism”. However, I don’t fully accept his main thesis: where I think he’s off is in ascribing to the public Christianity of the middle of the 20th century a Chamber-of-Commerce, pro-business, and Republican, character.

Speaking from of my own experience, it was not until considerably later, around 1980 and the rise of Ronald Reagan, that Christianity became a partisan political ideology. Reagan and his ilk redefined Christianity as a particular set of right-wing beliefs. Prior to this time, the word “Christian” had a rather different, non-sectarian, meaning: the “Christian” thing to do was the just, merciful, compassionate thing to do. Reagan made it mean essentially the opposite: judgmental, unforgiving, self righteous. Before Reagan, Christian values were more associated with liberal than with conservative causes.

This was a considerable change in the meaning of the word “Christianity”, and also marked the start of the now decades-long decline of the Republican party. The meaning of Christian became narrow not just politically, but also theologically. I was surprised to learn in the early 1990’s that Catholics were no longer “Christians” in common parlance (although there may be a regional dialectical difference at work here too). This narrowness of religious meaning of course reinforces the restriction of “Christian” to particular political doctrines.

Christianity is not a thing with an essence, but rather whatever it is that Christians do, and that has often been viciously reactionary. But its conversion to becoming the handmaiden of the right wing in America is a more recent event (ca. 1980) than Kruse allows, and is associated with a particular political movement, Reaganism, which though ideologically related to the efforts Kruse identifies, occupies its own distinct place and time in American history.