One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (18 page)

The 1954 campaign for the Christian amendment failed, as had all the previous ones. Nevertheless, Patterson's observations about religious references in American political life remained an important point. Two years earlier, in a unanimous opinion for the Supreme Court case of
Zorach v. Clauson,
Justice William O. Douglas had taken note of some of these same examples of public religiosity—“prayers in our legislative halls; the appeals to the Almighty in the messages of the Chief Executive; the proclamations making Thanksgiving Day a holiday; ‘so help me God' in our courtroom oaths”—and asserted that they did not represent a violation of the First Amendment doctrine of separation of church and state. Notably, the liberal Douglas used these examples exactly as the conservative Patterson would in 1954: to draw a stark conclusion. “We are,” Douglas stated matter-of-factly, “a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” The Constitution, the Court seemed to say, might not officially acknowledge the authority and law of God, but neither would it object to any government official who did.
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A decade later, in a 1962 lecture at Brown University, the dean of Yale Law School, Eugene Rostow, referred to these extraconstitutional
religious practices in American political life as “ceremonial deism.” His choice of words captured the conventional wisdom on these issues well. The invocation of “deism” called to mind the specific religious practice of many of the founding fathers, of course, but it also reflected the ways in which public acknowledgments of a deity tended to be vague and divorced from any particular sect. “God” was regularly invoked; “Jesus Christ” rarely, if ever. While other crusades for public religiosity had stressed a Christian identity—often an implicitly Protestant Christian identity, as seen in the work of Spiritual Mobilization or the International Council for Christian Leadership—the God celebrated in acts of ceremonial deism was more easily embraced by other faiths. Indeed, during the 1950s, Catholics played pivotal roles in spreading such religious symbolism, especially with the twin mottos that represented the pinnacle of the phenomenon: “In God We Trust” and “one nation under God.” Catholic congressmen wrote much of the key legislation that enabled these changes, Catholic fraternal organizations lobbied for their passage, and leaders in the Catholic clergy lent their support. Jews, for the most part, were supportive as well, with prominent rabbis and leading Jewish congressmen sanctioning the changes. Much like the public statements of President Eisenhower, the “deism” of such invocations welcomed a wide range of religious worship.
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Rostow's framing of these religious references as “ceremonial” in nature was also telling. In the eyes of the law—even a stalwart liberal such as Justice Douglas—these invocations were ceremonial in the sense that they were merely ornamental. They had no meaningful substance, and as a result, courts routinely held that those who objected to their use had no standing to challenge them. Legal scholars likewise dismissed the importance of these issues, as Rostow did when he characterized them as “so conventional and uncontroversial as to be constitutional.” Surprisingly, this attitude was echoed by the era's most vigilant guardians of the wall separating church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, paid practically no attention to these issues when they were considered before Congress. As McCarthyism consumed the country, the ACLU focused its energies there. Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU), the most significant organization of its kind, worried largely about Catholic organizations seeking public money for parochial schools. Although they raised a few
pro forma objections, these civil liberties organizations largely acceded to the argument, made often by proponents of ceremonial deism, that the First Amendment mandated the separation of church and state, not the separation of religion and politics. Support for a specific sect, especially when it came to the use of taxpayer money or government policy, was beyond the pale. But general support for the sacred was perfectly fine. Like many others, these civil liberties organizations believed official invocations of a vague “God” had no substance or significance.
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And yet the “ceremonial” nature of public religious invocations did not diminish their importance. Quite the contrary—it vested them with incredible weight. In the eyes of many Americans, the official embrace of religion by the nation's leaders was, in effect, as politically significant and legally binding as any formal amendment to the Constitution possibly could have been. This religious revival in government, which had begun in earnest with Eisenhower's innovations, rapidly expanded as legislators got into the spirit. Though Congress dismissed the 1954 Christian amendment, during that very same session legislators enthusiastically and, indeed, effortlessly adopted the religious mottos “In God We Trust” and “one nation under God,” as well as a host of other changes that echoed and amplified this theme. These measures may not have had the legal impact of a constitutional amendment, but they were, for all intents and purposes, formal acknowledgments that the United States government recognized the law and authority of Almighty God. In the end, the “unwritten constitution” was written into American law and life after all.

T
HE ORIGINAL
P
LEDGE OF
A
LLEGIANCE
, much like the Constitution itself, did not acknowledge the existence of God. Its author, Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister from Rome, New York, was a decidedly religious man, but when he wrote the pledge in the 1890s he described himself as something that would seem an oxymoron in Eisenhower's America: a “Christian socialist.” A first cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 socialist utopian novel
Looking Backward,
Francis Bellamy helped found the Society of Christian Socialists a year later in order “to show that the aim of socialism is embraced in the aim of Christianity” and “to awaken members of Christian Churches to the fact that the teachings
of Jesus Christ lead directly to some specific form or forms of Socialism.” He became so busy spreading the gospel of Christian socialism that he left the ministry in 1891. Soon after, he went to work for
Youth's Companion
magazine, touring America to promote a commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival. In his public lectures, Bellamy promoted “a new Americanism.” The old interpretations of liberty, he said, “had meant liberty for great corporations to oppress the people” and “liberty for the atoms on the top of the sand heap to press down harder and harder on the atoms below.” But America had “had enough of that kind of liberty.” Instead, the nation needed liberty for all Americans, a true equality that would ensure that “every man shall have the equal right to work and earn bread for his family; that every child shall be taken and given as good a chance as the government can afford.”
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In that spirit, Bellamy organized a national program of public school celebrations for Columbus Day in 1892. His plans centered on a then-novel proposal for every schoolhouse in the nation to display the American flag and lead students through a brief ceremony celebrating it and the country it represented. The idea quickly caught on. After a White House meeting with President Benjamin Harrison, Bellamy secured a congressional resolution making Columbus Day a national holiday. The next step was arranging for the program, which in Bellamy's mind would involve “an original Carol, an original Address, [and] an original Ode, prepared by the best American writers.” With his attention fixed on these matters, Bellamy paid little attention to the comparatively minor details of the flag salute. A colleague who had been assigned that duty was unable to come up with anything suitable, however, and Bellamy had to tackle it himself. He spent only two hours drafting the pledge, but he was satisfied with the result: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands—one Nation indivisible—with Liberty and Justice for all.”
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Though widely used in the 1892 Columbus Day ceremonies, Bellamy's pledge did not officially become
the
pledge until after the Second World War. Indeed, at the turn of the century, a number of different pledges competed for the loyalty of American schoolchildren. In New York State, schools that held flag ceremonies had a choice of five pledges, none of which made any reference to a deity. In San Francisco, the sixty different public schools followed their own preferences, resulting in a considerable
range of pledges. Only after the First World War was there any real effort to select a single pledge for the entire nation, a movement that peaked with a pair of National Flag Conferences in 1923 and 1924. Concerns over labor radicalism and new immigration from southern and eastern Europe were widespread at the time, and Bellamy, by this point in his late sixties and much more conservative, offered his pledge as the solution. He argued that it would dispel the influence of a wide variety of domestic radicals, “including direct action communists and revolutionary socialists who are boring into the labor unions and are inciting revolt among all classes of working people.” To ensure the loyalty of new immigrants, his pledge was altered in 1923 to change the somewhat vague “my flag” to “the flag of the United States.” (In case the country in question remained unclear, “of America” was added the following year.) “This pledge,”
Time
later noted, “rapidly became a fixture of U.S. school life, as standard as Palmer penmanship and chewed erasers.” In December 1945, an act of Congress finally made it the official Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag.
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Through all these various revisions, the pledge remained godless. But as the Christian libertarian movement of “under-God consciousness” swept the nation in the early 1950s, a campaign to add that phrase to the pledge began in earnest. The idea originated with the Knights of Columbus, a leading Catholic fraternal organization. In April 1951, its Supreme Board of Directors adopted a resolution requiring its Fourth Degree Assemblies—divisions devoted to the promotion of patriotism, of which there were 750 in all—to insert “under God” after the words “one nation” when reciting the pledge at their meetings. As the phrase gained greater prominence during the “Freedom Under God” festivities held on the Fourth of July that year and the next, the Knights decided all Americans would benefit from their revision. In 1952, the national board of the organization called on Congress to add “under God” to the pledge, with copies of the resolution sent to President Harry Truman, Vice President Alben Barkley, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. Moreover, the Knights of Columbus urged its nearly six hundred thousand members to write their representatives in Congress about it as well.
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In April 1953, Representative Louis C. Rabaut, a Democrat from suburban Detroit, received one such letter. While “outwardly brusque,” a newspaper profile noted, the elderly congressman consistently displayed a
“soft spot” for children's issues, perhaps because he had nine children and twenty-nine grandchildren of his own. A devout Catholic—one son was a Jesuit priest and three of his daughters were nuns—Rabaut was immediately taken with the arguments for adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. He soon introduced a bill to do just that, saying that the words would serve as “public proclamation of our religious traditions and our dependence on divine providence.” The congressman noted in passing that an acknowledgment of God in the pledge would serve as a “bulwark against communism,” but his argument focused on the relationship between religion and individual freedom. “It is my hope that the recitation of the pledge, with this addition, ‘under God,' by our schoolchildren will bring to them a deeper understanding of the real meaning of patriotism,” Rabaut said. “Love of country is a devotion to an institution that finds its origin and development in the moral law and commands our respect and allegiance so long as it provides that liberty and justice for all in which freemen can work out their own immortal destinies. Our country was born under God,” the congressman insisted, “and only under God will it live as a citadel of freedom.”
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Rabaut's emergence as chief congressional champion of the pledge proposal demonstrated how quickly the campaign for “under-God consciousness” had spread beyond the original intentions of its creators. In its early years, Protestant leaders—ministers such as Fifield, Vereide, and Graham and laymen such as Eisenhower and Pew—had championed a slate of events and ideas that, while nominally ecumenical, were in practical terms overwhelmingly Protestant in composition and character. Soon enough, however, Catholics such as the Knights of Columbus and Rabaut had joined the cause. Over the previous decade, Catholic politicians and lay organizations had been on the defensive, as Protestants complained about their ambition to secure public funding for parochial schools. But Rabaut was evidence that Catholics could blend religion and politics in ways that Protestants not only accepted but applauded. And if his religion was notable, his politics were too. In 1953, the Michigan congressman received a perfect rating from Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the progressive organization founded by prominent liberals including Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt. The involvement of liberal Democrats such as Rabaut demonstrated that
the “under-God” campaign had moved well beyond the original intent of Christian libertarians who hoped it would undermine the New Deal.
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The popular reaction to Rabaut's proposal showed how support for the campaign of “under-God consciousness” now spread across the spectrum of both religion and politics. In May 1953, a Gallup poll reported that 69 percent of Americans favored adding “under God” to the pledge, with only 21 percent opposed and 10 percent undecided. Catholics and Protestants overwhelmingly favored the idea, with a majority of Jews supporting it as well. At the grass roots, Democrats and Republicans alike rallied around the idea. Yet the House initially made no effort to act on Rabaut's bill. The Knights of Columbus renewed their campaign, while other fraternal organizations, including the American Legion, announced their support as well. Yet Congress still failed to act.
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