Kevin Kruse, _One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America_

 I AM OLD enough to have been in school when the Supreme Court decided prayer in public school was unconstitutional. In first grade, we had a prayer at the start of the day, right alongside the Pledge of Allegiance, and the occasional Bible story along with our mid-morning milk and graham crackers. In second grade...no prayer, no Bible stories. I didn't miss either, and my parents did not seem at all bothered by the change, but the outcry in other households was loud enough to get a movement for a constitutional amendment started.

Kevin Kruse explains that the loudness of the outcry had a lot to do with the wall of separation between church and state having been shaved down to wafer thinness during the Eisenhower years, the years when "In God We Trust" officially became the U.S. motto and the phrase "under God" was added to the pledge of allegiance. Attending "the church of your choice," as the slogan of the time put it, became almost a civic duty. The Supreme Court decision on school prayer was the first check the 1960s delivered to this steady incursion of religiosity into public life...but not the last. 

Behind this incursion, Kruse argues (and his subtitle indicates), was "corporate America," or more precisely what he calls "Christian libertarianism," i.e., the idea that capitalism and Christianity were perfectly congruent with each other, even uniquely well-suited for each other. This idea, he explains, arose in the 1930s as a way to muster public opinion against the New Deal, but only really took off in the Cold War. Since communism was atheistic, capitalism must be Christian. Americans and their allies must be the new Chosen People; God must be in favor of free markets and opposed to unions and minimum wage laws.

Kruse does not look closely into what these arguments looked like, but one has to wonder. Both the Old and the New Testaments urge relieving the poor and scorn the accumulation of riches as a vanity. How do you get an ally of capitalism out of that? Ayn Rand's ruthless atheistic materialism seems a better match, really. It must have required fancy footwork.

In an interesting irony, as Kruse makes clear, the crucial opposition that arrested the progress of the school prayer amendment was not the ACLU or secularists, but the churches themselves--not just the non-Christian faiths, but the National Council of Churches, the  Roman Catholic church, and even the Southern Baptist Convention. Why? Because they saw, as Tocqueville saw back in 1830s, that the separation of church and state was the best ally American religion ever had.

School prayer has never come back, but Kruse traces the many ways the idea that the USA ought to be officially Christian continued to influence our politics fro the 1970s forward--the prayer breakfasts, the photographs with Billy Graham, the inescapable "God bless America" at the end of presidential speeches.