The Books of My Life: One Nation Under God

Religion, as American voting data from the 19th century to today shows, has long played an important and significant role in American politics and in American history. Many American academics and intellectuals, particularly since World War II, thanks to the notion that religion was declining in importance in the modern and postmodern world, however, have sometimes seem to have forgotten this fact. Occasionally, as in the elections of Carter, Reagan, Trump and the increasing prominence and importance of the White Christian right since the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the role it played in the elections of Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump, they recognise, if only perhaps fleetingly, the important role religion has played and continues to play in modern and postmodern American politics. Recently, even labour historians like Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf, have realised the important role culture, in the form of religion, has played in American cultural history, for instance.

Keven Kruse's One Nation Under God (New York: Basic, 2015) is one of the many books published by social scientists and historians recently that have recognised the important and significant role culture and religion have played in American politics during the 20th and 21st century. Kruse argues in his book that contrary to the argument that American right wing Christian nationalism--he primarily calls it Christian libertarianism--arose in the economic, political, and cultural ferment of the Cold War between the US and USSR, Kruse instead argues that Christian libertarianism was actually born out of the right wing and conservative reaction to the New Deal of American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt with its more activist state.

In One Nation Under God Kruse introduces us to a host of fascinating and sometimes colourful cast of characters including Congregationalist James Fifield, Methodist Abraham Vereide, evangelist Billy Graham, Presbyterian oilman J. Howard Pew, oilman Sid Richardson, Australian medical doctor Fred Schwarz, entertainers Cecil B. DeMille, John Wayne, English born Bob Hope, and Pat Boone, and politicians like Dwight David Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, and institutions and organisations like Spiritual Mobilization, the National Council of Christian Leadership, the International Council of Christian Leadership, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Freedom Foundation, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the National Association of Manufacturers, to create an important and influential right wing and conservative spiritual-economic elite, political, military, and industrial ideological complex that tied American freedom and liberty to free market capitalism and right wing Christian religiosity and had a significant impact on American political institutions at federal, state, and local levels. This complex, Kruse shows, helped establish the National Day of Prayer, the National Prayer Breakfast, change the American Pledge of Allegiance, add slogans to American paper monies, and tried to pass amendments to the American Constitution establishing state directed prayer and Bible readings in American public schools.

Kruse's book is a wonderful well researched and well documented history of the rise of a spiritual-economic-political-military-and industrial complex that has grown up and become immensely influential in American politics in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, World War II, and the Cold War. However, I think there are a number of problems with the book that, while they don't, in most instance, undermine the argument of the book do problematise certain aspects of the book. First, there is the Terminological problem. Kruse refers to the right wing anti-New Deal largely Christian movement as Christian libertarianism. While such a descriptive phrase may accurately describe the Christian right's economic ideology it certainly doesn't describe the Christian rights tendency, on the economic, political, and cultural level, for theocracy. For right wing Christians there is only one valid economics, politics, and culture. Their own. Those who don't buy into their economic, political, and cultural ideologies are simply heretics. Finally, Kruse tends to conflate conservative and right wing, though, historically speaking, these are different cultural forms and these social movements have different historical genealogies. Laissez faire liberals are not, historically speaking, conservative.

Second, there is the historical problem. Kruse argues that right wing nationalist and theocratic Christianity is the product of an anti-New Deal impulse. However, Christian theocratism goes back at least to nineteenth century America when WASP Protestantism, with its culture of American exceptionalism, became the official unofficial religion of the United States. The right-wing Protestantism, which emerged out of the conflicts over Darwinism and scientific Biblical criticism, was certainly impacted by the anti-communism of the middle and late 19th century and anti-communism, by the New Deal, but it was not the product alone of the New Deal. Additionally, what is peculiarly missing from Kruse's analysis is an analysis of the role Southern White right-wing Protestantism played in the anti-New Deal and anti-Soviet Christian right. Kruse fails to note and explore the role race played in the culture of right-wing American Christianity. Finally, Kruse doesn't explore the role Puritanism, with its stern moralism, its theocracy, and its notion of American exceptionalism played and plays in right-wing Christianity.

Third, there is the theoretical problem. Kruse tends to use civil religion and public religion interchangeably though social scientists often use these terms, and the phrase civic religion, in somewhat different ways. Additionally, Kruse seems to only have a very limited conception of the fact that there are multiple forms of civil religion, multiple forms of priestly and prophetic civil religion, varying hegemonic forms of priestly civil religion that fight culture wars with each other, and that civil religion is dynamic and that this dynamic civil religion has impacted American right wing Christianity over time and changed it somewhat across time. Finally, Kruse doesn't engage the issue of whether religion is one meaning system among many, an institutional phenomenon, or both though he seems to imply the last.

Regardless of my concerns about Kruse's approach One Nation Under God is an important and seminal book on the intersection between religion, economics, politics, culture, geography, and demography. Everyone interested in American culture, American politics, American economics, American cultural imperialism, and American religion should read it. Anyone who wants to know how America got to now needs to read this superb book. Highly recommended.