One Nation Under God

I just finished Keven Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.  It's a bit of a slow read at first, as he outlines with copious research how various anti-New Deal libertarian business interests bankrolled efforts to align Christianity with libertarian, anti-welfare state politics.  He then moves into the Eisenhower years as Ike worked to increase what became known as ceremonial deism, a sort of non-sectarian religious presence in American life.  It really picks up steam as it narrates the degree to which court cases like Engel v Vitale and Abingdon v Schempp accelerated the culture wars.

What struck by the end was how what started as an appeal by libertarian business leaders to oppose the regulatory and welfare state efforts of the New Deal morphed into what we see from Evangelicals today: outright embrace of authoritarianism.

Evangelicism certainly is fertile ground for authoritarianism, as it represents a religious belief in defering to God, the Bible and the pastor (later Fox News).  The evangelical God is the Lord, the King of Kings and He deserves deference.  It's the God of Leviticus, not the God of Matthew.  It is aggressively populist, too, which he chronicles well in the debate over an amendment to allow prayer in public schools.  The prime opponent to the amendment was the National Council of Churches, made up of educated, more liberal clergy.  To these clergy, with their book-learning, theology and historical knowledge, the idea that the state would create prayers for school children was an assault on the separation of church and state.  To them, that separation allowed for a healthy religious pluralism and prevented the abuses that inevitably follow when the church and state coalesce into an authoritarian whole.  It's no coincidence that Putin has worked to resurrect the Russian Orthodox Church.

The lay people of the church supported the school prayer amendment, because the ban on school prayer was seen as anti-religious.  Even a cursory reading of the Court opinions would reveal this to be false, but your average church goer was not parsing Supreme Court decisions.  To them, there was a very simple (and wrong) equation: no school prayer=attack on religion.

Over time, it was Nixon and his Silent Majority who really aligned the Evangelical community and the Republican Party. I've said it before, but it wasn't Ronald Reagan who created modern conservatism, it was Nixon who created the politics.  Reagan may have introduced new policies, but no one cares about policies.  Nixon told the story, Pat Buchanan helped write the words.

The hypocrisy of Nixon's embrace of religion as he violated America's laws goes unstated in the book, Kruse just skips over Watergate entirely, except to note that evangelicals moved to Carter, and then away from him.  Back then, they were swing votes.  Not anymore.

Evangelicals are currently so commited to their deference to authority that they have supported Trump in everything.  There is a poll out today that has Republicans (which can increasingly be conflated with Evangelical Whites) approving of Kim Jong Un more than Nancy Pelosi.  It's just a few percentage points, but...Jesus wept.  Republicans basically equate a liberal Californian with a despot who executes his enemies with anti-aircraft cannon.  Trump is great because Trump is great.  MAGAMAGAMAGA.

That mindset of "us against them," country against city, "Real America" vs "Coastal Elites" has its roots in the argument over Christianity's place as the national faith.  It has its roots in the slavish devotion of evangelicals to their leaders, no matter how poorly those leaders (Swaggert, Bakker and now Trump) actually follow the tenets of their faith.

I don't know what it will take to disenthrall these alleged Christians from their embrace of a would-be Mussolini.  Maybe putting children into cages.  Maybe putting children into cages is actually "on-brand," given that those children are brown.  Who knows?  Maybe God.  She's not talking.