The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

On December 9, 1863, Secretary Chase approved the final language: “In God We Trust.”66 Congress made the change official a few months later when it passed a new coinage bill, though it did not actually vote on the new language—it simply gave the Mint director, Pollock, the power to fix the shape, motto, and devices of the coins, with the approval of the Treasury secretary.67 So, at the advice of a proselytizing preacher, two government officials—one with a religious agenda so all-consuming he was trying to amend the Constitution to honor his god—deliberately used the time of “national peril and danger,” when people were too busy dying for the Constitution to protect it from a rear-guard assault, to promote their personal religion. Even if this addition were not decades after the founding, it’s hard to see how three men betraying a founding principle—keeping state and church separate—is itself a founding principle. Watkinson, Pollock, and Chase took advantage of a fearful, distracted nation and abused their government offices to impose their personal religious beliefs on all citizens.