Book summary “One nation under God”: summary

Introduction

You likely assume that the deep bond between American politics and Christianity stretches back to the Founding Fathers. You might think that national mottoes and presidential prayer breakfasts are ancient traditions rooted in the early republic. Kevin Michael Kruse demonstrates that this alliance is a recent invention forged in the middle of the twentieth century.

The political marriage of religion and conservatism in America was forged not by the Founding Fathers, but by corporate elites fighting the New Deal.

You will discover how business leaders weaponized faith to dismantle the welfare state and promote free-market capitalism. The book traces this transformation chronologically from corporate boardrooms in the 1930s to the Eisenhower administration and the culture wars of the 1960s.

You might wonder about several historical shifts as you read:

• How did corporate executives enlist conservative clergymen to fight labor unions?
• Why did the federal government suddenly insert religious language into national symbols during the Cold War?
• How did ordinary citizens react when the Supreme Court removed prayer from public schools?

1. Corporate Strategy and Christian Libertarianism

Corporate trade associations and wealthy executives funded conservative ministers to unite Christianity and capitalism against the welfare state.

Faced with public blame for the Great Depression and the popularity of the New Deal, corporate trade associations dramatically increased public relations spending. The National Association of Manufacturers shifted from spending $36,000 on public relations in 1934 to nearly $793,043 three years later. They utilized films, radio programs, advertisements, and ready-made editorials to rehabilitate the image of industrialists.

In December 1940, over 5,000 industrialists gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York for the annual meeting of the National Association of Manufacturers. Leaders proposed enlisting religion to fight collectivism. Major industrialists and business lobbies heavily funded conservative ministers to promote an ideology linking faith, freedom, and free enterprise as a bulwark against state power. You can trace the roots of Christian libertarianism directly to this organized business backlash.

Public Relations and the Anti-New Deal Backlash

Reverend James W. Fifield Jr. founded Spiritual Mobilization to unite conservative clergymen against the perceived totalitarian trends and collectivism of the federal government. Fifield argued that Christianity and capitalism were political soul mates. The organization recruited thousands of minister-representatives through subtle engagement, making them active participants in defending individual rights, private property, and free enterprise against the welfare state.

Fifield built his base at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, which featured elite corporate leaders on its advisory board and paid him an annual salary of $16,000. Wealthy industrialists heavily funded Spiritual Mobilization and its associated media campaigns. Industrialists such as J. Howard Pew Jr. of Sun Oil and executives from Republic Steel, General Motors, and Chrysler organized business advisory committees to raise large budgets. They poured funds into free-market literature distribution, magazine publishing, and national radio broadcasting.

J. Howard Pew solicited donations from officials at 158 corporations, placing Spiritual Mobilization at the top of the donation list. Spiritual Mobilization expanded its media reach by launching a syndicated radio program and a magazine designed to disguise ideological arguments as public service features. Advised by legal counsel to avoid direct partisan attacks, producers used foreign examples of socialism and domestic historical parables to illustrate the dangers of creeping government control.

By late 1951, the 15-minute radio program The Freedom Story was broadcast on a weekly network of over 800 stations.

The Rise of Spiritual Mobilization

Conservatives formed the Committee to Proclaim Liberty to orchestrate nationwide Fourth of July celebrations centered around the theme of freedom under God. Organizers coordinated church bell ringing, sermon contests, and a star-studded national radio broadcast. By focusing exclusively on a truncated preamble of the Declaration of Independence, they reframed the founding document as a pure manifesto against government power.

On July 4, 1951, 50,000 residents attended a massive rally at the Los Angeles Coliseum featuring circus acts, a jet plane demonstration, and an invocation by Reverend Fifield. You can adopt their methods to celebrate independence by applying specific practices:

• Mark the holiday with public readings of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.
• Organize the ringing of church bells across the nation precisely at noon for a full 10 minutes.
• Open doors, sound horns, blow whistles, and ring bells as individual salutes to freedom.

2. Cold War Evangelism and Billionaire Patronage

Billionaire industrialists bankrolled mass evangelists and prayer breakfast movements to sacralize political power and oppose labor unions.

Billy Graham and Anticommunism

Evangelist Billy Graham catapulted to national prominence by framing the Cold War and the Soviet atomic bomb through biblical prophecy and apocalyptic urgency. You can see how Graham leveraged widespread nuclear anxiety during his 1949 Los Angeles revival to present communism as a demonic religion waging war against God. This transformation made him a prominent anti-communist crusader.

During a 1949 revival under a canvas tent in Los Angeles, Billy Graham preached to 350,000 attendees over eight weeks after news broke that the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb. That breakthrough event started with 5,000 residents who huddled under the canvas tent. At the time of his Los Angeles revival, Billy Graham was only 30 years old.

Religious leaders like Billy Graham actively opposed organized labor and government economic regulations by framing them as anti-Christian. Graham equated strikes and union membership with selfishness and subversion of divine order. He argued instead that true Christian employees should be entirely devoted to their employers and free enterprise.

At a 1952 rally, Billy Graham described the Garden of Eden as a paradise free of union dues and labor leaders. He repeatedly warned that strikes during the Korean War harmed American troops, while insisting that a Christian employee should put in 8 hours of work in a full workday.

Texas oil billionaire Sid Richardson served as a major financial and political patron for both Billy Graham and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Richardson funded Graham's media productions promoting free enterprise, arranged pivotal meetings, and bankrolled Eisenhower's presidential campaign to ensure the protection of the American capitalist way of life.

Sid Richardson financed Billy Graham's film Oiltown, U.S.A. for $100,000 and contributed an estimated $1 million directly to Dwight Eisenhower's 1952 presidential campaign. In 1954, Theodore White declared Sid Richardson the richest American. Ladies' Home Journal estimated the net worth of Sid Richardson at $700,000,000 in 1957. Known as a billionaire bachelor and Mr. Sid, Richardson also paid $200,000 for campaign expenses at the Commodore Hotel.

The Prayer Breakfast Movement

Methodist minister Abraham Vereide organized secretive prayer breakfast groups for corporate executives and politicians to align economic conservatism with biblical principles. Starting in Seattle amid intense labor strikes, Vereide established networks of elite businessmen who met regularly for prayer to combat what they viewed as the moral and spiritual decay of the New Deal era.

In 1905, Abraham Vereide immigrated to America. After meeting developer Walter Douglass in Seattle in 1935, Vereide recruited nineteen prominent corporate executives at the Washington Athletic Club to form the City Chapel prayer group. He also organized 49,000 housewives in Seattle for Goodwill Industries.

Abraham Vereide successfully integrated high-ranking government officials and Supreme Court justices into prayer breakfast networks to consecrate political power with religious rituals. Vereide organized special dedication ceremonies for newly appointed Chief Justices and Supreme Court justices. He blended religious liturgy with state power to foster a unified national faith often called God's Embassy in Washington.

In 1946, Vereide invited newly appointed Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Attorney General Tom Clark to join a Senate breakfast group to ceremonially dedicate Vinson's new Supreme Court position. That gathering involved 28 senators gathered for the Supreme Court dedication ceremony. By 1947, Vereide unveiled the International Council for Christian Leadership.

Persistent lobbying by religious conservatives led Congress to pass legislation forcing the president to proclaim an annual National Day of Prayer. The 1952 congressional resolution legally bound the president to set aside a specific day each year for national prayer.

President Harry S. Truman acquiesced to public pressure and signed the 1952 joint resolution establishing the National Day of Prayer. President Truman selected the 4th of July as the date for the first official National Day of Prayer under the theme Freedom Under God.

3. Eisenhower and the Rise of Civil Religion

President Dwight D. Eisenhower institutionalized a vague civil religion while preserving the New Deal and embedding corporate economic rights into a religious credo.

Civil Religion and the Lowest Common Denominator

Dwight Eisenhower championed a deliberately vague, nondenominational civil religion that united diverse Americans around spiritual ideals without getting bogged down in specific theological doctrines. Critics like liberal theologian William Lee Miller and sociologist Robert Bellah mocked Eisenhower for promoting a fervent belief in a very vague religion that lacked objective meaning. However, conservative sociologist Will Herberg and Eisenhower understood that reducing religion to its lowest common denominator was essential to unite a diverse nation.

In December 1952, Eisenhower addressed the Freedoms Foundation at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, famously asserting that the U.S. form of government makes no sense unless founded in a deeply felt religious faith. Church membership surged through these years, rising from 43 percent of Americans in 1910 to 49 percent in 1940, 57 percent in 1950, and 69 percent at the end of the 1950s. While a 1950 Gallup Poll showed that 80 percent of Americans believed the Bible was the revealed word of God, only 47 percent could name even a single author of the gospels.

The Freedoms Foundation, established by pro-business leaders and backed by Eisenhower, promoted Christian libertarianism by embedding corporate economic rights into a religious creed. Led by advertising executive Don Belding and supported by corporate titans from companies like General Foods, Maytag, and Republic Steel, the Freedoms Foundation tied free-market capitalism directly to religious faith. In March 1952, they published The Credo of the American Way of Life in Reader's Digest, placing political and economic rights like the right to make a profit and own private property on a pedestal rooted in a fundamental belief in God.

Ahead of the 1952 election, the Freedoms Foundation and the Boy Scouts distributed 1 million posters put up in store windows, 90,000 cards plastered on trains and buses, and over 30 million Liberty Bell-shaped door hangers featuring the credo to urge citizens to vote.

Cabinet Piety and the New Deal

Senator Frank Carlson and Abraham Vereide established the National Prayer Breakfast to institutionalize spiritual gatherings among high-ranking government officials in Washington. Senator Frank Carlson collaborated with hotel magnate Conrad Hilton to host the inaugural National Prayer Breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel in February 1953, featuring the theme Government Under God. Hilton prominently displayed his self-commissioned painting America on Its Knees above the dais, drawing 500 attendees and prompting Abraham Vereide to rapidly expand weekly prayer breakfast groups across the Pentagon and State Department.

Chief Justice Fred Vinson attended the first prayer breakfast and marveled that he had never seen anything like it in his three decades in Washington.

Eisenhower instituted the practice of opening all executive cabinet meetings with a silent prayer, aligning his administration's official actions with public piety. Prompted by Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson and presidential pastor Edward L. R. Elson, Eisenhower polled his department heads on whether to open cabinet meetings with prayer. You can follow this model by using these precise steps:

• Poll department heads on the preference for a spoken prayer, a silent prayer, or no ceremony.
• Institute a silent prayer as the opening act of every formal cabinet meeting.

While Eisenhower surrounded himself with corporate titans and millionaires in his cabinet, he ultimately preserved and expanded the New Deal welfare state rather than rolling it back. Critics dubbed Eisenhower's cabinet eight millionaires and a plumber, noting figures like General Motors executive Charles Wilson holding $5 billion worth of federal contracts, former Mark A. Hanna Company president George Humphrey, and top corporate lawyers. Although conservative backers and Texas oil millionaires expected these leaders to dismantle the New Deal, Eisenhower recognized that popular support for programs like Social Security was unassailable. He refused to repeal the welfare state, instead extending Social Security to cover 10 million additional Americans, securing $1 billion for education, and launching the massive interstate highway system with an original estimated cost of $101 billion.

The National Association of Evangelicals launched the March of Freedom campaign and the Statement of Seven Divine Freedoms to replace secular welfare state ideals with biblical principles. In July 1953, the National Association of Evangelicals representing 10 million Americans across 35 denominations orchestrated an Independence Day campaign featuring a manifesto derived from Psalm 23. You can review the divine principles that Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, and Supreme Court justices were solicited to sign:

• Affirm Freedom from Want based on Psalm 23:1.
• Affirm Freedom from Hunger based on Psalm 23:2.
• Affirm Freedom from Thirst based on Psalm 23:2.
• Affirm Freedom from Sin based on Psalm 23:3.
• Affirm Freedom from Fear based on Psalm 23:4.
• Affirm Freedom from Enemies based on Psalm 23:5.
• Affirm Freedom to Live Abundantly based on Psalm 23:5-6.

4. Inscribing Faith into National Symbols

Bipartisan congressional efforts successfully added under God to the Pledge of Allegiance and mandated In God We Trust on currency and postage.

The Pledge of Allegiance

Francis Bellamy originally wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1890s as a godless oath. By the Cold War era, you could see religious leaders demand a change to separate American values from Soviet atheism.

Reverend George Docherty delivered a sermon at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church on February 7, 1954. He argued that omitting under God made the American pledge indistinguishable from a communist one, which prompted President Eisenhower and Congress to act.

A Gallup poll from May 1953 reported that 69 percent of Americans favored adding under God to the pledge. President Eisenhower signed the bill adding under God into law on Flag Day, June 14, 1954.

National Motto and Currency Legislation

Religious nationalism soon expanded from the pledge into postal mail and paper currency. You saw the Eisenhower administration transform ordinary government transactions into public displays of faith.

Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield and President Eisenhower unveiled the 8-cent Statue of Liberty stamp in April 1954, generating nearly nine million sales on its first day. Senators had introduced bills in March 1953 calling for the motto to be added to all future stamps as a postal ambassador that would travel abroad on two hundred million letters a year.

Representative Charles E. Bennett introduced the bill calling for the motto's addition to all paper currency, leading to unanimous congressional approval and enactment by President Eisenhower in 1955. The legislative push followed resolutions passed in August 1954 by the American Numismatic Association and the American Legion. The House passed the currency motto bill with almost no debate on June 7, 1955, and the Senate passed the measure in a unanimous voice vote on June 29, 1955.

Representative Bennett secured the backing of House Judiciary Chairman Emanuel Celler to supersede E Pluribus Unum, which had been chosen for the seal in 1782. President Eisenhower signed the measure making In God We Trust the official national motto on July 30, 1956.

5. Popular Culture and Anticommunist Crusades

The advertising industry utilized public relations campaigns to defend corporate capitalism by branding religious observance as the bedrock of American democracy.

Following New Deal regulations and the economic shocks of the Great Depression, ad executives gathered in Hot Springs to organize a defense of free enterprise. In 1949, the Advertising Council launched the Religion in American Life campaign to encourage church and synagogue attendance, framing faith as both personal salvation and a bulwark against state-owned collectivism.

Bread-wrapping businesses in Columbus, Ohio, and Menasha, Wisconsin, placed RIAL campaign labels on thirty million loaves of bread to spread the religious message. The campaign generated 2,200 newspaper ads in 1949 and grew to 9,700 newspaper ads in 1956, by which time 100 million persons in the U.S. affiliated with a church or synagogue.

Corporate Advertising and Faith

The J. Walter Thompson agency realized that a top-down corporate message would face resistance, so it manufactured local grassroots support by creating detailed manuals. These toolkits told local leaders exactly which community groups to recruit, how to write mayoral proclamations, and which prefabricated editorials to hand to local newspapers.

In Culver City, California, the local RIAL program was backed by business, veterans, fraternal, women's, and youth organizations recruited through ad agency blueprints. In Longmont, Colorado, workers distributed 8,200 pieces of RIAL material, while workers in Albany, Oregon, placed 2,000 prayer cards on restaurant tables.

You can trace how these toolkits guided local campaigns through specific operational directives:

• Recruit recommended organizations for the campaign.
• Organize the central committee and assign specific citizens to leadership roles.
• Compose subcommittees and assign their duties.
• Issue the mayoral proclamation provided in the kit.
• Hand-deliver news releases to local editors.
• Run prefabricated editorials provided in the kit.

Hollywood and Religious Nationalism

Cecil B. DeMille utilized epic biblical cinema as political propaganda to fight the New Deal, labor unions, and godless communism through the framework of freedom under God.

Deeply conservative and opposed to the growth of the federal government, filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille partnered with James Fifield's network and funded anti-union foundations. He marketed his blockbuster film The Ten Commandments not just as entertainment, but as a historical lesson proving that mankind's rights come from God and cannot be infringed upon by the state.

DeMille personally funded the DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, receiving large donations from corporations like General Motors and Chrysler to fight for right-to-work legislation. The film carried a $15 million budget, utilized 25,000 cast members, and drew 1.3 million patrons at a single New York theater in its first year while selling 22 million tickets across America.

6. School Prayer Battles and Supreme Court Rulings

Supreme Court decisions striking down state-sponsored school prayer sparked intense backlash from conservative laymen against liberal clergy.

Engel v. Vitale and Abington v. Schempp

The Supreme Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale that state-composed prayers in public schools violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Writing for the majority in 1962, Justice Hugo Black argued that drafting official prayers for state-instituted compulsory programs unconstitutionally merged church and state. However, Black protected preexisting public religious expressions by carving out exceptions for historical documents and national mottos.

Parents in New York, supported by the ACLU and represented by attorney William Butler, successfully challenged the state's prayer requirement all the way to the Supreme Court in a 7 to 1 majority ruling on June 25, 1962.

The Supreme Court extended its ban on state-sponsored religious exercises to include mandatory daily Bible readings in public schools. In Abington School District v. Schempp, the Court ruled that mandatory devotional Bible readings and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer violated the Establishment Clause. Justice Tom Clark emphasized that the government must maintain a wholesome neutrality toward religion, leaving spiritual instruction to homes and churches on June 17, 1963.

Ellory Schempp, a Unitarian high school student in Pennsylvania, protested mandatory Bible reading by reading a copy of the Koran, prompting a lawsuit filed by his parents with the Philadelphia ACLU.

Legislative Defeats of Prayer Amendments

Representative Frank Becker united various legislative proposals into a single resolution and attempted to bypass committee opposition using a discharge petition. Becker introduced House Joint Resolution 693, known as the Becker Amendment, which protected voluntary prayer and religious references in public institutions and government documents. To circumvent Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler, Becker attempted to gather 218 signatures on a discharge petition, ultimately achieving 167 signatures for Discharge Petition No. 3.

Frank Becker waged an aggressive campaign, reading atheist goals into the record and threatening to campaign against uncooperative congressmen in their home districts.

House Judiciary Chairman Emanuel Celler used extensive hearings to stall and ultimately defeat the Becker Amendment by allowing opponents time to mobilize. Celler held six weeks of hearings involving nearly two hundred witnesses, producing a massive three-volume report. This deliberate pacing gave religious and civil liberties organizations time to organize opposition and sway committee members.

The House Judiciary Committee hearings stretched from April 22 to June 3, 1964, filling 2,774 pages across three volumes.

Senator Everett Dirksen introduced a revised prayer amendment in 1966, but it ultimately failed to achieve the required two-thirds Senate majority. Dirksen proposed a concise sixty-five-word constitutional amendment allowing voluntary public school prayer. Despite strong public mail and Senate co-sponsors, opponents used arguments from religious leaders to defeat the measure.

The Dirksen Amendment failed in late September 1966 with a final Senate tally of 49 to 37, falling nine votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority after gaining 47 Senate co-sponsors by midsummer 1966.

10 Key Ideas

1. Corporate trade associations and wealthy executives funded conservative ministers to unite Christianity and capitalism against the welfare state.
2. Billionaire industrialists bankrolled mass evangelists and prayer breakfast movements to sacralize political power and oppose labor unions.
3. President Dwight D. Eisenhower institutionalized a vague civil religion while preserving the New Deal and embedding corporate economic rights into a religious credo.
4. Bipartisan congressional efforts successfully added under God to the Pledge of Allegiance and mandated In God We Trust on currency and postage.
5. The advertising industry utilized public relations campaigns to defend corporate capitalism by branding religious observance as the bedrock of American democracy.
6. Cecil B. DeMille utilized epic biblical cinema as political propaganda to fight the New Deal, labor unions, and godless communism through the framework of freedom under God.
7. Supreme Court decisions striking down state-sponsored school prayer sparked intense backlash from conservative laymen against liberal clergy.