[Magdalen] Since When?

Jim Guthrie jguthrie at pipeline.com
Thu Apr 9 16:30:15 UTC 2015


>From the NY TImes March 14 -- a look at the real religious history of the United 
States. Given our recent discussion of Billy Graham, it is important to know the 
history, I think. My guess is that some here are too young to remember the 
circumstances of his rise to prominence, and why one might not be so accepting 
of him beyond his attention to President Nixon.

Well, worth the read, I think -- especially if one has friends who think of the 
US as a "Christian Nation."

A Christian Nation? Since When?
By KEVIN M. KRUSE MARCH 14, 2015

AMERICA may be a nation of believers, but when it comes to this country’s 
identity as a “Christian nation,” our beliefs are all over the map.

Just a few weeks ago, Public Policy Polling reported that 57 percent of 
Republicans favored officially making the United States a Christian nation. But 
in 2007, a survey by the First Amendment Center showed that 55 percent of 
Americans believed it already was one.

The confusion is understandable. For all our talk about separation of church and 
state, religious language has been written into our political culture in 
countless ways. It is inscribed in our pledge of patriotism, marked on our 
money, carved into the walls of our courts and our Capitol. Perhaps because it 
is everywhere, we assume it has been from the beginning.

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.

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.

The two had been described as soul mates before, but in this campaign they were 
wedded in pointed opposition to the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal. The 
federal government had never really factored into Americans’ thinking about the 
relationship between faith and free enterprise, mostly because it had never 
loomed that large over business interests. But now it cast a long and ominous 
shadow.

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. Generous funding came 
from prominent businessmen, from household names like Harvey Firestone, Conrad 
Hilton, E. F. Hutton, Fred Maytag and Henry R. Luce to lesser-known leaders at 
U.S. Steel, General Motors and DuPont.

In a shrewd decision, these executives made clergymen their spokesmen. As Sun 
Oil’s J. Howard Pew noted, polls proved that ministers could mold public opinion 
more than any other profession. And so these businessmen worked to recruit 
clergy through private meetings and public appeals. Many answered the call, but 
three deserve special attention.

The Rev. James W. Fifield — known as “the 13th Apostle of Big Business” and 
“Saint Paul of the Prosperous” — emerged as an early evangelist for the cause. 
Preaching to pews of millionaires at the elite First Congregational Church in 
Los Angeles, Mr. Fifield said reading the Bible was “like eating fish — we take 
the bones out to enjoy the meat. All parts are not of equal value.” He dismissed 
New Testament warnings about the corrupting nature of wealth. Instead, he paired 
Christianity and capitalism against the New Deal’s “pagan statism.”

Through his national organization, Spiritual Mobilization, founded in 1935, Mr. 
Fifield promoted “freedom under God.” By the late 1940s, his group was spreading 
the gospel of faith and free enterprise in a mass-circulated monthly magazine 
and a weekly radio program that eventually aired on more than 800 stations 
nationwide. It even encouraged ministers to preach sermons on its themes in 
competitions for cash prizes. Liberals howled at the group’s conflation of God 
and greed; in 1948, the radical journalist Carey McWilliams denounced it in a 
withering exposé. But Mr. Fifield exploited such criticism to raise more funds 
and redouble his efforts.

Meanwhile, the Rev. Abraham Vereide advanced the Christian libertarian cause 
with a national network of prayer groups. After ministering to industrialists 
facing huge labor strikes in Seattle and San Francisco in the mid-1930s, Mr. 
Vereide began building prayer breakfast groups in cities across America to bring 
business and political elites together in common cause. “The big men and the 
real leaders in New York and Chicago,” he wrote his wife, “look up to me in an 
embarrassing way.” In Manhattan alone, James Cash Penney, I.B.M.’s Thomas 
Watson, Norman Vincent Peale and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia all sought 
audiences with him.

In 1942, Mr. Vereide’s influence spread to Washington. He persuaded the House 
and Senate to start weekly prayer meetings “in order that we might be a 
God-directed and God-controlled nation.” Mr. Vereide opened headquarters in 
Washington — “God’s Embassy,” he called it — and became a powerful force in its 
previously secular institutions. Among other activities, he held “dedication 
ceremonies” for several justices of the Supreme Court. “No country or 
civilization can last,” Justice Tom C. Clark announced at his 1949 consecration, 
“unless it is founded on Christian values.”

The most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism, though, was the Rev. 
Billy Graham. In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Mr. Graham supported 
corporate interests so zealously that a London paper called him “the Big 
Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival attendees, was a 
paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.” In the 
same spirit, he denounced all “government restrictions” in economic affairs, 
which he invariably attacked as “socialism.”

In 1952, Mr. Graham went to Washington and made Congress his congregation. He 
recruited representatives to serve as ushers at packed revival meetings and 
staged the first formal religious service held on the Capitol steps. That year, 
at his urging, Congress established an annual National Day of Prayer. “If I 
would run for president of the United States today on a platform of calling 
people back to God, back to Christ, back to the Bible,” he predicted, “I’d be 
elected.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower fulfilled that prediction. With Mr. Graham offering 
Scripture for Ike’s speeches, the Republican nominee campaigned in what he 
called a “great crusade for freedom.” His military record made the general a 
formidable candidate, but on the trail he emphasized spiritual issues over 
worldly concerns. As the journalist John Temple Graves observed: “America isn’t 
just a land of the free in Eisenhower’s conception. It is a land of freedom 
under God.” Elected in a landslide, Eisenhower told Mr. Graham that he had a 
mandate for a “spiritual renewal.”

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.

The first week of February 1953 set the dizzying pace: On Sunday morning, he was 
baptized; that night, he broadcast an Oval Office address for the American 
Legion’s “Back to God” campaign; on Thursday, he appeared with Mr. Vereide at 
the inaugural National Prayer Breakfast; on Friday, he instituted the first 
opening prayers at a cabinet meeting.

The rest of Washington consecrated itself, too. The Pentagon, State Department 
and other executive agencies quickly instituted prayer services of their own. In 
1954, Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. 
It placed a similar slogan, “In God We Trust,” on postage that year and voted 
the following year to add it to paper money; in 1956, it became the nation’s 
official motto.

During these years, Americans were told, time and time again, not just that the 
country should be a Christian nation, but that it always had been one. They soon 
came to think of the United States as “one nation under God.” They’ve believed 
it ever since.

Kevin M. Kruse is a professor of history at Princeton and the author, most 
recently, of “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian 
America.”

Cheers,
Jim

"The enemy isn’t liberalism;
the enemy isn’t conservatism.
The enemy, is baloney." - Lars Erik Nelson 



More information about the Magdalen mailing list