![]() ![]() In the span of a few years, the administration either introduced or supported a National Day of Prayer a National Prayer Breakfast an explicit reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance and the replacement of “E Pluribus Unum” with “In God We Trust” as the nation’s official motto and its inclusion on stamps, coins, and paper currency. ![]() ![]() Kruse offers an important new reading of President Eisenhower that shows how religion was central both to him and to the goals and agenda of his administration, especially the effort to promote national unity. This campaign created the foundation for the flourishing of religious nationalism or what legal scholar Eugene Rostow dubbed “ceremonial deism” following World War II (p. In Kruse’s telling, during the 1930s a group of corporate leaders joined with conservative clergymen to use religious principles to discredit the New Deal and promote the more narrow cause of “Christian libertarianism” (p. Through a carefully researched and engaging account, Kevin Kruse shows that the notion of “Christian America” was very much a modern construction and the product of midcentury politics. Asking “why so many contemporary Americans came to believe that this country has been and always should be a Christian nation,” One Nation Under God, reperiodizes and refocuses one of the most vexing debates in and about American history (p. ![]()
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