One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (24 page)

Tom Smith gets up, turns on the radio, hears an announcer say: “Worship together every week.” On the bus he looks up and sees a car card urging him to “Build a stronger, richer life.” He opens his newspaper and reads an ad about “Faith and the Atomic Age.” In his office he opens his company magazine to an ad giving him “Food for Thought.” Going home he pauses in the bus station before a seven-foot poster picturing a family emerging from a house of worship. Along the highway he sees the same scene on a billboard. Home, he turns to his Reader's Digest and reads a RIAL page about “The Look On Their Faces.” He turns on the TV . . . to a one-minute film on religion.

And that was only the national campaign:

If Tom Smith lives in a community observing Religion in American Life Month, he might also go to a restaurant and use a RIAL table prayer card for his grace. At his service club he might hear a talk about spiritual strength. In his mail he might find a card on “Faith and Football.” He might find someone has placed on his car a bumper sticker urging him to attend worship. In the bank a miniature billboard urges him, once again, “Build.” It does happen.

Indeed, local communities found imaginative ways to elaborate on the message of the national campaign. Sometimes these efforts took place on a relatively small scale. In Longmont, Colorado, for instance, eighty-two hundred pieces of RIAL material were distributed, mostly left on
doorsteps with milk deliveries or tucked into grocery bags. Likewise, in Albany, Oregon, supporters placed two thousand prayer cards on restaurant tables. At times, though, local ingenuity took on impressive proportions, as when bread-wrapping businesses in Columbus, Ohio, and Menasha, Wisconsin, multiplied the RIAL message considerably by placing labels for the campaign on thirty million loaves.
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“Religion in American Life” had broad reach at the local level because of the strong support from social clubs and community organizations. In some places, the list of local groups sponsoring the RIAL program reached almost absurd lengths. The local campaign in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City, for instance, was backed by business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Realty Board, and the Business and Professional Women's Club; service groups like the Exchange Club, Rotary International, the Kiwanis Clubs, and the YMCA; veterans' groups including the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, and Jewish War Veterans; fraternal clubs such as the Lions, Elks, Moose, and Optimists; women's leagues like Soroptimist, Opti-Mrs., and the Palms Women's Club; children's activities such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, and Brownies; religious organizations ranging from the mainline Council of Churches to the evangelical Sky Pilots of America; and community-wide organizations including Parent-Teacher Associations, the Civic Improvement League, and the Coordinating Council.
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While this grassroots support for the campaign seemed impressive, it was, to a great degree, another creation of the advertisers. A few years earlier, the J. Walter Thompson agency had put its powers of persuasion to work promoting the “Freedom Under God” celebrations organized by the Committee to Proclaim Liberty; now it applied those same techniques to this new cause. The agency distributed a blueprint detailing the “Seven Steps to a Successful Local Religion in American Life Program.” The kit instructed local leaders about which organizations should be recruited for the campaign, how the central committee should be organized, what specific sorts of citizens were best suited to each leadership position, how the various subcommittees should be composed, and what duties each should handle. No detail was ignored. The kit set forth a role for everyone, ensuring that ordinary Americans would be not simply recipients of the
“Religion in American Life” message but participants in its propagation. Their involvement guaranteed a wider dissemination of the RIAL theme, of course, but also a broader acceptance of the message than would have resulted from a simple top-down approach. In an echo of the “minister-representative” model of Spiritual Mobilization, the admen understood that ordinary Americans would be much more likely to buy an idea that they were themselves selling.
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The ad agency not only taught local participants how to organize themselves; it told them precisely what to do and say. The “Seven Steps” kit, for instance, included a proclamation to be issued by the mayor. Spaces were left blank so that the mayor could add his name and his town's, but the rest was spelled out for him. “The freedoms we enjoy today are the gift of God, no matter in what terms or creed we worship Him,” the mayor was instructed to say. “Faith in Divine power was stamped on this nation's first [sic] money with the words, ‘In God We Trust.' Our religious beliefs have steadfastly endured as the foundation of our way of life.” The kit also provided a news release that called attention to the proclamation. (“Be sure to make [this form] your copy,” the packet instructed,
“filling in names and facts.
Deliver your release by hand to local editors.”) Meanwhile, newspapermen who received that press release had already been issued a prefabricated editorial that they, in turn, were supposed to run as their own. Beginning with a quotation on religion in politics from George Washington, the editorial argued the “ringing declaration of faith by the first President of the United States marks religion as the cornerstone of American democracy. Similar avowals have been made by our presidents right down through history. In fact,” the editors were instructed to say, “democracy is a system of government derived from religious principles.”
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The Advertising Council reported that its efforts had been wildly successful. There was a marked increase in religious observances each year as the annual campaigns reached their peak. “According to the Gallup Poll report of Dec. 31, 1956,” the council bragged, “attendance at worship services was highest in America during November, RIAL Month, than at any other time during the year.” More important, religious observance had significantly increased from year to year over the life of the campaign. Naturally, the council implied there had been a direct correlation between the two, noting in its 1957 report that “51% of Americans attend worship
regularly, compared with 39% in 1949, the year of the first RIAL campaign.” Executives at J. Walter Thompson used a different metric, relying on softer claims about religious “affiliation” rather than the harder data on regular attendance, almost surely because it led to more impressive numbers. “Today, for the first time in history, more than 100 million persons in the U.S. are affiliated with some church or synagogue,” a JWT newsletter claimed in 1956. “This is 60.9% of the total U.S. population.”
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As the admen boasted about their own effectiveness, outside observers agreed. In 1957, Eisenhower's secretary of the interior, Fred Seaton, said, “I have only praise for this movement which takes the message of religion and morality out of the cloistered area of church and synagogue and carries it right into the heart of the everyday world, puts it up on streetcars and busses and carries it into millions of homes over radio and television.” He admitted that it was impossible to say with certainty if any one factor had been the key to the surge in religious observance. But he thought RIAL deserved credit, pointing to a man-on-the-street interview in the
Toledo Blade
that summed up his own view. “Churches are beginning to advertise their product,” an Ohio man said, “and the result is that they are selling it.”
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The “Religion in American Life” campaign permeated every space in the United States—public and private, national and local, sacred and secular. Its twin messages, about the role of religion as a founding principle in American society and the need for all Americans to employ faith to help themselves and their nation, proved inescapable. But while the admen of Madison Avenue were highly effective in spreading that message, they were not alone. Thousands of miles away in Hollywood, conservative figures in the entertainment industry were working just as hard to install the messages of “under-God consciousness” in popular culture as well.
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I
N MANY WAYS
,
THE TELEVISION
, radio, and print advertisements put out by the “Religion in American Life” campaign were barely distinguishable from the content surrounding them. Newspapers at the time related biblical stories not simply in religion columns but on the comics page and elsewhere. A writer for
Reader's Digest
rewrote the Bible in the magazine's informal style, syndicating it as a series carried by hundreds
of newspapers. Weekly magazines joined the cause as well. In 1953, for instance, an observer of the
Saturday Evening Post
was struck by the “emphatically moral and even religious” themes in the magazine. “If the
Post
was once an emporium of entertainment,” he noted, “we must now judge from these stories that it now sees itself as a citadel of faith, and even—such is its intensity of tone—faith's last outpost.” In the same vein,
Good Housekeeping
published a small paperback titled
Dwight D. Eisenhower's Favorite Poetry, Prose and Prayers.
(The uncanny resemblance between Ike's little red-and-white-striped book and Mao's “little red book” was, one imagines, entirely coincidental.)
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The era's most popular books also focused on religion, representing a shift in consumer interests that was as significant as it was sudden. Reverend Halford Luccock of Yale Divinity marveled that it was “one of the most striking changes in feeling, mood and taste which have occurred in centuries, [taking place] not as changes in literary trends have usually occurred, over a generation or a half century, but telescoped into a very few years.” By 1953, one out of every ten texts sold in America was religious in nature. Sales of the Holy Bible neared ten million copies that year, with the new Revised Standard Version outselling all other books.
Publishers Weekly
reported that “the theme of religion dominates the non-fiction best sellers,” with spiritual titles including
Angel Unaware, Life Is Worth Living, A Man Called Peter, This I Believe,
and
The Greatest Faith Ever Known
all in the top eight. Reverend Norman Vincent Peale's
The Power of Positive Thinking
ranked second on the nonfiction list, right behind the Bible, for three straight years. Meanwhile, the two most popular works of fiction from 1953,
The Robe
and
The Silver Chalice,
likewise had religious themes. Clergymen were ecstatic. “We believe this has never happened before in American publishing,” exclaimed Edward Elson, the president's pastor. “When religion takes over in the field of best-sellers, something is happening in the American mind!”
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Television and film followed the religious trend throughout the 1950s. Billy Graham's
Hour of Decision
program was televised by three different networks, on some 850 stations, to an estimated audience of twenty million viewers. Roman Catholic bishop Fulton Sheen, whom actress Loretta Young hailed as “the finest ham in the business,” proved almost as strong an attraction, with a weekly audience of ten million. “He is easily the
strongest letter-puller on TV,” noted one observer; “better than 8,000 letters come in from his audience each week.” Recognizing the rising interest in religious programming, Hollywood rushed to produce mainstream films on spiritual or biblical themes. The 1955 film version of
A Man Called Peter,
for example, was intended to show that “religion can be fun.” Its protagonist was Peter Marshall, Reverend George Docherty's predecessor at New York Avenue Presbyterian. Ads for the film assured audiences: “He was everybody's kind of guy. . . . He was God's kind of guy.” Even as Hollywood brought religion down to earth in this movie and others, it also used biblical stories as the basis for its biggest blockbusters, including
Samson and Delilah
(1949),
David and Bathsheba
(1951),
Solomon and Sheba
(1959), and
The Story of Ruth
(1960). At the same time, filmmakers used the Bible as inspiration for fictional epics, from
Quo Vadis?
(1951) to
Ben-Hur
(1959). By far, however, the most important of the biblical blockbusters was Cecil B. DeMille's
The Ten Commandments
(1956).
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A deeply devout and outspoken conservative, the legendary director followed a familiar path to religious nationalism in the postwar era. As with other Christian libertarians, DeMille despised the New Deal. “At the beginning,” his son remembered, “he was sucked in by Roosevelt's false promises, but then [the president] proceeded to a very systematic socialist program and DeMille turned against him.” The government's growth during the Second World War and DeMille's own conflicts with Hollywood labor organizations only hastened his turn to the right. “When a Union can literally shackle a citizen by forbidding and actually preventing him from working at his trade,” DeMille complained to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1945, “a situation is created which is un-American and unendurable, and the people of the United States are in the grip of tyranny as all-out as Fascism or Nazism or Communism.” After the war, DeMille became even more outspoken in his conservatism. “Increasingly,” his granddaughter recalled, “he made a distinction between a good American and a liberal. He hated communism with such a passion, thought it was godless tyranny; he thought anyone who was a fellow traveler was a traitor.” In private, he expressed even angrier views. “The happiest man in the world to see a continuance of the Truman regime,” he wrote, “would be Joseph Stalin.”
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