One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (19 page)

It ultimately took a sermon from a Presbyterian to prompt action. Reverend George M. Docherty, a tall Scotsman with thinning brown hair, had been recruited in 1950 to take over New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Known as “the church of the presidents” because fourteen chief executives, including Lincoln, had worshiped there, it held a prominent position both within Presbyterian circles and in popular culture at large. (Reverend Peter Marshall, Docherty's predecessor in the pulpit, had been a world-renowned minister and author. The 1955 film based on his life,
A Man Called Peter,
was nominated for an Academy Award.) Docherty took over the pastorate of New York Avenue Presbyterian before he turned forty, and he was immediately marked as a rising star. Though he did not become an American citizen for another decade, he was an early convert to the campaign to merge religion and patriotism in the nation he now called home. When Billy Graham held services at the Capitol in February 1952, for instance, Docherty sat at a place of honor on the platform and offered his full-throated support to the endeavor. “I am certain,” he told a reporter from the
Post,
“that this young man is being used by God in the Nation's Capital to remind all of us of the sovereignty of God.”
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A few months later, Docherty had his own chance to be used by God, when he addressed the Washington Pilgrimage of American Churchmen. As its name suggested, the Pilgrimage involved hundreds of leading laymen and church figures, representing several faiths from across the country, converging on the capital. Believing that “faith is the foundation
of freedom,” they visited various shrines and monuments in order “to demonstrate to the world that belief in God has served as the basis of American government and the democratic way of life.” As he mulled his thoughts on that theme, Docherty was drawn to the Gettysburg Address, especially Lincoln's hope that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” When a chance conversation with his second-grader son turned to the Pledge of Allegiance, Docherty realized that the flag salute failed to follow Lincoln's example of acknowledging God. He decided to make the omission the central theme of his May 1952 address. “It was received by the Washington Pilgrims with acclamation,” he later remembered. “But after the congratulations and the ceremonies of presentation, the Washington Pilgrimage did nothing about it.” According to the
Post,
“several of Dr. Docherty's colleagues in this city declared it would violate the principle of separation of church and state” and therefore “dropped the idea” of pursuing it further. The minister remained undeterred and held on to the sermon.
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Docherty found an opportune chance to deliver it again when Dwight Eisenhower attended the annual “Lincoln Sunday” service at New York Avenue Presbyterian on February 7, 1954. That morning, the president and First Lady sat in the same pew where Lincoln had once prayed, with the remainder of the fourteen-hundred-seat sanctuary filled to capacity. “At this season of anniversary of the birth of Lincoln,” Docherty began, “it will not be inappropriate to speak about freedom, and what is called ‘the American way of life.'” That phrase was at once intimately familiar yet fairly vague, the Scotsman noted, so he illustrated its meaning with images that might have come from Madison Avenue: baseball games, popcorn, Coca-Cola, Sears, Roebuck, and so on. “And where did all this come from?” Docherty asked. “It was brought here by people who laid stress on fundamentals. They called themselves Puritans.” While it is easy to scoff at the idea that postwar America's obsession with consumer goods could be traced back to the staid Puritans, Docherty's argument resonated with an audience accustomed to such rhetoric. These “Fathers of a Mighty Nation,” he continued, had carried to the New World certain “fundamental concepts of life” taken from the teachings of Moses and Jesus Christ, and those religious concepts still represented the true heart of the nation. “This,” he concluded, “is the ‘American Way of Life.'”
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Even though religious principles were central to the nation's character, Docherty believed there was little evidence of them in public professions of patriotism. Turning to the Pledge of Allegiance, the Scotsman told the assembled that he had an advantage over American parents who listened to the “noble words” of their flag salute with rote familiarity. “You have learned them so long ago,” he said, “like the arithmetic table or the Shorter Catechism, something you can repeat without realizing what it all really means. But I could sit down and brood upon it.” Having done so, he had concluded “there was something missing in this Pledge, and that which was missing was the characteristic and definitive factor in the ‘American Way of Life.' Indeed, apart from the mention of the phrase, the United States of America, this could be the pledge of any Republic. In fact,” he added ominously, “I could hear little Muscovites repeat a similar pledge to their hammer and sickle flag in Moscow with equal solemnity.” To distinguish their national pledge from all others, Americans needed to stress the issue that distinguished their nation from all others—the fundamental role of religion. “It should be ‘one nation, indivisible, Under God,'” the minister insisted. “To omit the words ‘Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive character of the ‘American Way of Life.'”
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Docherty addressed the question of the separation of church and state directly. “What the Declaration
[sic]
says, in effect, is that no state church shall exist in this land,” he said. “This is separation of Church and State; it is not, and never was meant to be, a separation of religion and life.” He believed that his proposal was broad enough to encompass all Americans. “It must be ‘
UNDER GOD
' to include the great Jewish Community, and the people of the Moslem faith and the myriad of denominations of Christians in the land,” he said. “What then of the honest atheist? Philosophically speaking, an atheistic American is a contradiction in terms.” The Presbyterian praised atheists for being “fine in character” and “good neighbors” but suggested they were “spiritual parasites.” “I mean no term of abuse in this,” the minister added. “A parasite is an organism that lives upon the life force of another organism without contributing to the life of the other. These excellent ethical seculars are living upon the accumulated Spiritual Capital of a Judaio-Christian civilization, and at the same time, deny the God who revealed the divine principles upon which the ethics of
this Country grow.” And whether atheists admitted it or not, those divine principles were in evidence all around them, in the prayers offered before presidential inaugurations and sessions of Congress. Like the supporters of the Christian amendment testifying before the Senate that year, Docherty invoked an ever-expanding list of religious references in American public life as a rationale for creating yet another.
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Docherty's sermon elicited a tremendous reaction. As the minister later reflected, “One of the advantages—and dangers—of being a preacher in the nation's capital is the ease with which a given sermon, such as one preached when the president is in church, can be given front-page headlines in the press.” Eisenhower lit the fuse, endorsing the minister's proposal as he left the church. The next morning, the offices of senators and representatives phoned the pastor to request copies of his sermon; it was soon reprinted in the
Congressional Record
and distributed widely. A Paramount Pictures recording of the event played in newsreel segments in theaters across the country for weeks afterward. The Hearst newspaper chain launched a major editorial campaign in favor of the change, while several radio commentators pressed the issue as well. Resolutions supporting the proposal were issued by organizations ranging in size and significance from a Brooklyn club for retired policemen to the Massachusetts state legislature. Veterans' groups, fraternal clubs, labor unions, and trade associations joined the cause as well. “Congress is being flooded with mail,” the
New York Times
soon reported. “The letter writers by the thousands daily are demanding that Congress amend the pledge of allegiance so that the pledge is made to read ‘one nation under God.'”
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Passage of a bill based on Rabaut's proposal now seemed inevitable. As an editorial in the
Christian Century
noted, “This is the sort of proposal against which no member of Congress would think of voting, any more than against a resolution approving of motherhood.” Opposition was light. The ACLU, for instance, decided not to intervene. “If some outstanding religious leaders would speak out on the basis of the church-state separation point, it might hold up action,” an official noted. But he immediately added, “I doubt whether any such leaders would make this statement.” Objections from clergymen were indeed few, with the most notable coming from the Unitarian Ministers Association, which passed a resolution opposing the proposal at its annual convention in May 1954.
A speaker warned that the measure was a sign that religion was becoming little more than a fad. “If you don't bring God into every Cabinet meeting, political convention or other assembly,” she noted sarcastically, “it is bad public relations.”
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If anything, the proposal to add “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance was perhaps
too
popular, with legislators scrambling to claim credit for the idea. The House of Representatives found itself in a state of chaos as multiple bills calling for the change competed for attention. The idled proposal that Representative Rabaut had introduced the previous April was still pending, but it was soon joined by another sixteen bills: seven from Democrats, eight from Republicans, and one from an independent.
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Notably, the congressmen behind these bills had agreed on little else that year. As the ADA's voting scorecards made clear, the Democrats and the lone independent had been reliably liberal, while the Republicans had been just as consistently conservative. Only the broad concept of “one nation under God” proved elastic enough to bring them together.
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But liberals and conservatives had wildly different interpretations of the phrase's meaning. For Republicans, “one nation under God” simply extended old Christian libertarian arguments. When Michigan representative Charles Oakman introduced his proposal, for instance, he spoke at length about how the nation's founders “recognized the inherent truth that any government of and by the people must look to God for divine leadership in order to protect itself from tyranny and despotism.” For Democrats, in contrast, “one nation under God” signaled not opposition to government power but an alliance with it. “This country was founded on theistic beliefs, on belief in the worthwhileness of the individual human being which in turn depends solely and completely on the identity of man as the creature and son of God,” noted Representative Rabaut. While groups such as Spiritual Mobilization stopped there, using the concept of “freedom under God” to wage war against the welfare state, the liberal Democrat stressed the common good, in an echo of the Social Gospel. “Children and Americans of all ages,” he insisted, “must know that this is one Nation [in] which ‘under God' means ‘liberty and justice for all.'”
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Democrats and Republicans were able to set aside partisanship in this instance, largely due to Eisenhower's successful rebranding of the federal government as a “government under God.” Now that the political system
was so suffused with prayer, the state no longer seemed “pagan,” as Christian libertarians had once argued, and liberals could present themselves as acting in accord with God's will too. And much as Eisenhower helped bring right and left together, Docherty also encouraged their cooperation by pointing to a common enemy in the Soviet Union. Though only a brief passage in his sermon, his line about the “little Muscovites” had been singled out in news reports and reprinted over and over again, a development that did a great deal to further the cause of “one nation under God.” For two decades, those advocating the ideology of “freedom under God” had wanted to discredit and dismantle the New Deal state, only referencing the Soviet Union occasionally. But as the entire American political spectrum rallied around the phrase “one nation under God,” the New Deal state was no longer the counterpoint to godly politics. The Soviet Union now took its place.

So as Democratic and Republican congressmen argued for their various proposals to change the pledge, they loaded their speeches with approving references to Docherty's “little Muscovites” line. Oakman, for instance, read long passages from the sermon into the
Congressional Record,
purposely ending on that very passage. “I think Mr. Docherty hit the nail squarely on the head,” he said. “One of the most fundamental differences between us and the Communists is our belief in God.” Rabaut, opposed to his Michigan colleague on most every issue, also quoted Docherty's sermon, though he focused even more narrowly on the “little Muscovites” part. “Dr. Docherty and I are not of the same Christian denomination, but I may say that in this matter he has hit the nail right on the head,” Rabaut said. “You may argue from dawn to dusk about differing political, economic, and social systems, but the fundamental issue which is the unbridgeable gap between America and Communist Russia is a belief in Almighty God.” These comments gave the public at the time—and scholars ever since—the mistaken idea that the pledge change was largely, or even solely, a result of Cold War anticommunism. But in reality it was the result of nearly two decades of partisan fighting over domestic issues. The Cold War contrasts were largely a last-minute development, one that helped paper over partisan differences.
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