The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

The words “In God We Trust” cut into coins or engraved on a government building are not only relics from our fearful past, but also monuments to religious hypocrisy.

INJECTING A DEITY INTO THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE has proved central to the Christian nationalist narrative and identity. As with “In God We Trust,” the phrase’s history tells us more about Christian nationalism than about America’s founding, especially given the timing. As with “In God We Trust,” a unifying national maxim was made divisive. In this instance, rather than seeking to replace the unifying motto, the religious proponents drove a sectarian wedge into it. Prior to the change, the pledge glorified “one nation, indivisible,”44 an important theme for a nation that was still recovering from the Civil War when Francis Bellamy wrote the pledge in 1892.

Some six decades later, the Catholic fraternal order, the Knights of Columbus, disagreed. It conceived of a pious pledge and pushed Congress to include the nod to their god in the early 1950s. The Knights found a champion for their crusade in Michigan representative Louis C. Rabaut, himself a devout Catholic—three of his daughters were nuns and one of his sons was a Jesuit priest.47 More than sixty years later, “One nation, indivisible” became “one nation, under God, indivisible.” This change places religion, history’s most belligerent, contentious force, smack in the middle of the unifying sentiment. It literally divides the indivisible with religion.

Dividing the indivisible might be ironic if not for the method used: the politics of fear.48 Since Jesus became the original ad man for hell, Christianity has been comfortable using fear to intimidate and to force conformity.

Another reporter, John Hunter from the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, attempted an interesting social experiment to measure the fear. On July 4, 1951, Hunter asked passersby to sign a petition comprising the first six amendments to the Constitution; the Fifteenth Amendment, which guarantees the right to vote regardless of race; and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths…”). People were so scared and suspicious that of the 112 people Hunter asked, only one agreed to sign.52 Most declined because they thought the ideas contained in those excerpts were too communist, un-American, or subversive. Twenty actually accused Hunter of being a communist. Responses included: “That might be from the Russian Declaration of Independence, but you can’t tell me that it is ours,” and “You can’t get me to sign that—I’m trying to get a loyalty clearance for a government job.”53 Other newspapers around the country repeated the experiment, with similar results.54 Reactions like these, remarked Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1955, “cause[d] some thoughtful people to ask the question whether ratification of the Bill of Rights could be obtained today if we were faced squarely with the issue.”55

Religion preys on fear.

With the ground prepared by Madison Avenue advertising, it was easy for religious leaders to capitalize on the national fear of communism and nuclear death. If mutually assured destruction was truly assured, Christians would be happy in the afterlife with Jesus, while the godless communists would burn twice. As one author put it, “Americans, being Christians, believed in life after death and [were] self-confident that if even the world itself were destroyed in a righteous cause, they would go to their heavenly reward. Communists, by contrast, were atheists, held out no hope of life after death, and would be correspondingly less willing to escalate a confrontation all the way to nuclear exchange.”56 Senator McCarthy warned people “that this is the era of the Armageddon—that final all-out battle between light and darkness foretold in the Bible.”57 In the best of times, clergymen love to preach about the world ending. With nuclear Armageddon a real possibility and so many advertisements telling them to go to church, preachers were winning terrified converts. Soon, the words “American” and “Christian” became synonymous, realizing one of the goals of the Religion in American Life cam...

William Shirer’s prediction about witch-hunting proved prescient. Conformity was soon valued more highly than civil rights. During this era, Congress passed the Alien Registration or Smith Act of 1940, the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, and the Communist Control Act of 1954. All were designed to punish nonconformists. Any thinkers not strictly orthodox—i.e., American, capitalist, and Christian—were suspicious. According to polls, people suspected their neighbors of being communists because they “would not attend church,” “talked against God,” “didn’t believe in the Bible” or were “poisoning the minds of young people…with things that are contrary to the Bible.”63 President Truman, a failed businessman with no college degree (the last president elected sans degree and one of only a few since Reconstruction) and probably touchy about that shortcoming, attacked “ivory tower professors.”64 ...

“Politicians say it at the end of every speech as if it were some sort of verbal tick that they can’t get rid of…. They should admit that ‘God Bless America’ is really just some sort of an empty slogan, with no real meaning except for something vague like ‘good luck.’ ‘Good luck, America, you’re on your own,’ which is a little bit closer to the truth.” — George Carlin, It’s Bad for Ya, 20081 “God bless America. Let’s try to save some of it.” — Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast, 20062 Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president, tried to revive the popular piety of the 1950s when he became president in 1969. He was attempting, as one Catholic lay theologian put it, to resurrect the “corpse of civic religion.”3 The presidential tradition of troubling deaf heaven with bootless cries by closing presidential remarks with the phrase “God bless America” dates to Nixon and is rooted in one of the worst scandals to mar the presidency. Nixon used religion to distract Americans from Watergate.

On April 30, 1973, Nixon announced that three White House staffers—Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, and Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman—had resigned and that White House Counsel John Dean had been fired. It was Nixon’s first address to the nation about “the Watergate affair.” Nixon spoke to the nation from his “heart” and found occasion to mention “Christmas”—in April—and “God-given rights.”4 The address marks the first of many times a US President concluded an address with an appeal for supernatural support: “I ask for your prayers to help me in everything that I do throughout the days of my presidency. God bless America and God bless each and every one of you.”5 The four staffers were later convicted of, among other crimes, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Nixon had resigned within eighteen months. That wasn’t the only time Nixon used religion and this phrase in particular to distract from his wrongdoing. Eleven months later, Nixon’s popularity had plummeted, his desperation soared, and his impeachment loomed larger, so he set off on a tour to win over southern members of the House committee in charge of that impeachment. His first stop was the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, where he closed the evening by playing “God Bless America” on the piano.6 (Trump set off a national debate when he tweeted about bible classes in public schools just days after his close associate Roger Stone was arrested and the day bef...

Watergate, like the Civil War and Red Scare, was a moment of national turmoil. This time however, piety was being used to distract the masses and, as is so often the case, to cloak a criminal in the mantle of religion. The next two presidents, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, abjured the phrase “God Bless America,” perhaps seeing it for what it was or associating it with Nixon. But Ronald Reagan saw a powerful political weapon and used it to curry favor with the voters and, presumably, his deity. Reagan revived Nixon’s Watergate distractor and did so early, when he accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1980: I’ll confess that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest—I’m more afraid not to—that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent pra...

Reagan “ended 90 percent of his major addresses by requesting divine guidance. George H. W. Bush also did so in 90 percent of his speeches, and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush followed suit 89 percent and 84 percent of the time, respectively.”9 Religion became the weapon in a rhetorical arms race, with each president needing to match the piety of his predecessors. The ratchet had tightened on presidential rhetoric.

Religion is a cheap shorthand for tribal allegiance, but it also has the power to distract from important issues that actually affect governance. Nixon asked people to pray for him and ended with “God bless America” to remind the nation that he was religious and therefore moral, and either innocent or deserving of forgiveness. It was an emotional ploy, but his final note would ring in American history.

Like Eisenhower’s, Trump’s personal religion seemed to appear alongside his political ambitions. During the campaign, it became clear that he was not familiar with the bible, as the “two Corinthians” gaffe and his inability to name a favorite bible passage show.11 Whenever he spoke of religion he seemed uncomfortable and, above all, insincere. Trump was simply exploiting religion, casting it about like a net to snare voters, and, as we saw in the discussion of religion’s role in leading to the Civil War, to immunize his policies from criticism. In Trump’s case, we actually have Trump admitting to “using” religious leaders, especially black religious leaders. In a tape released by his former attorney Michael Cohen, Trump asks Cohen, “Can we use him any more?…Are we using him?”12 Trump was referring to two African American pastors who helped legitimize Trump’s campaign and whom he and Cohen seemed to have difficulty distinguishing from one another. Trump’s exploitation and say-anything tactics are what Madison meant when he warned that injecting religion into politics is an “unhallowed perversion of the means of salvation.”13

Nixon, Reagan, and Trump’s abuse of religion for political gain signals to every other politician that lying about religion is perfectly acceptable. Lawrence O’Donnell wrote some dialogue in The West Wing that captures this point perfectly: “And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there: if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to…. And it will be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes.”14 Voters are not just asking to be lied to—they are demanding it. This is a voter-imposed religious test, an auto-da-fé for public office. Religious voters are willingly handing over the tools of their own manipulation, and they may come to regret it. Typically, the majority religion is content to let itself be corrupted by politics, so long as it is in the majority. But as soon as it becomes a minority it seeks to buttress the wall of separation. Christianity is declining in this country, so it will be interesting to see whether American Christians come to realize the value of state-church separation as they lose their majority. THE MARRING OF AMERICAN CURRENCY, the religious revision of the pledge, and the diversionary religious blessing of America are not evidence that we are a Christian nation or founded on Christian principles. They are catchphrases. They are slogans Christian nationalists can remember even when they can’t name a single gospel or right protected by the First Amendment.15 Sma...

Christian nationalism also contends that the United States of America is exceptional because the nation was chosen by a god, not because the founders’ enlightened experiment was successful. Christian nationalists sometimes misconstrue a 1983 Newsweek quote: “Historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.”3 Ken Woodward and David Gates’s full quote is more interesting, and, as one would imagine, more reflective of reality: “Now historians are discovering that the Bible, perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document: the source of a powerful myth of the United States as a special, sacred nation, a people called by God to establish a model society, a beacon to the world.”4 Biblical America is indeed a myth, a powerful one. The sad irony of the myths of the Christian nation, biblical America, and Judeo-Christian principles is that they are born out of a misplaced zeal to revive or extend American exceptionalism. Trump and his Christian nationalist brethren want a return to a Christian nation; they want to “make America great again.” But religion did not make the United States, let alone make it great. “We the People” make America exceptional. Religion is the millstone around the neck of American exceptionalism because religious faith denies experience and observation to preserve a belief.5 It is for this reason that it is unlikely to contribute to progress,6 though it will take credit for what s...

Ben Franklin cautioned, “When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”9 By seeking to graft his religion on to the structure of the American government, the Christian nationalist is simply showing his religion to be “a bad one.” Not only bad, but also, according to Thomas Jefferson, erroneous, for “it is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”10 Christian nationalism, by its very existence, admits the weakness of Christianity’s truth claims, the frailty of a morality based on supernatural authority, and the shortcomings of an antiquated book. As with the Catholic wedding, Christian nationalists’ attempt to co-opt the power and prestige of the American Enlightenment for their own ends says far more about their insecurity and the genuine blindness of their faith than it does about America’s founding.