One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (46 page)

Those outside the administration's orbit disagreed. “Successful at doing what?” the editors of
Newsday
asked. “Bringing America together? Perhaps. But which America? Certainly not those who would not or could not go. Not those whose attempts to disrupt the affair with their obscenities and harassment and hurling of fireworks so aggrieved the participants that some returned to their homes muttering things like: ‘Now we know who the enemy is.'” Some critics believed the event had succeeded, at least in terms of its unacknowledged political agenda. “The ‘Honor America Day' rally brought them together, all right,” columnist Mary McGrory noted, “and sent them away farther apart than ever.” Reporters for the
Washington Post
agreed, concluding that the Fourth of July festivities had simply “illustrated, perhaps better than any study or commission could, the polarization of American society.”
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The critics were right, though they little realized of how deep the roots of Honor America Day ran. The event, and the larger efforts of the Nixon administration to use religious nationalism for its own ends, stemmed not just from the readily apparent polarization of the early 1970s but from the forgotten polarization of the 1930s as well. In their struggle against the New Deal, the business lobbies of the Depression era had allied themselves with conservative religious and cultural leaders and, in so doing, set in motion a new dynamic in American politics. The activism of Christian libertarians such as James Fifield and Abraham Vereide had sought to provide the right with its own brand of public religion that could challenge the Social Gospel of the left. But the rhetoric and rituals they created to topple the New Deal lived on long after their heyday, becoming a constant in American political life in the Eisenhower era and beyond.

By Honor America Day in 1970, the fundamental dynamics of this new public religion had significantly changed. At the dawn of the Cold War, the Eisenhower administration had united Americans under the broad rubric of “one nation under God,” largely by shedding the more confrontational libertarianism that Fifield, Vereide, and Graham had espoused in their fight against the New Deal state. Instead, Eisenhower had reframed that phrase in such a way that it welcomed in large swaths of
Americans, whatever their religion or politics. But as the country became more polarized over the course of the ensuing decades, the slogans of the Eisenhower era could no longer hold them together. More than that, the religious rhetoric itself often became a source of division, especially at the local level, as seen in the struggles over school prayer. The Nixon White House had hoped to repeat the earlier work of the Eisenhower years, in many cases tapping the same political and religious figures for leadership positions, the same conservative philanthropists and corporations for funding, the same patriotic and fraternal organizations for grassroots support, and even some of the same sympathetic entertainers as its public face. But the political climate had been thoroughly transformed. The rhetoric of “one nation under God” no longer brought Americans together; it only reminded them how divided they had become.

Epilogue

A
LMOST EXACTLY A DECADE AFTER
the Honor America Rally, Ronald Reagan accepted the presidential nomination of the Republican Party. Though the setting of the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit was far removed from the National Mall in both location and allure, the crowd arrayed before Reagan nevertheless looked a lot like the one at the earlier rally: largely white, middle-aged, middle-class, and conservatively dressed, with many waving signs that professed love of God and country. Billy Graham had once again given the invocation, but that night Reagan showed the crowd, and the millions more watching at home, that he was just as proficient in Graham's idiom. At the end of his speech, Reagan dramatically departed from the text that had been distributed to reporters. “I have thought of something that is not part of my speech and I'm worried over whether I should do it,” he began cautiously. He scanned the crowd and his eyes began to water, but he plunged ahead, asserting that “only a divine Providence” could have created the United States. He asked the Republican delegates gathered before him that “we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.” The cheers and clapping stopped as heads bowed in reverence across the arena. After fifteen seconds, the candidate, with a slight catch in his voice, broke the silence with a closing benediction: “God bless America.”
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Speechwriters had been carefully crafting his acceptance address for six weeks, but for Reagan it had been a lifetime in the making. Raised in a Democratic family that credited the New Deal with helping them survive the Depression, he had long considered Franklin D. Roosevelt his political hero; even as he accepted the Republican nomination, he praised the Democratic president not once but twice. But in 1952, Reagan became
captivated by the candidacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and cast his first-ever ballot for a Republican. When he ran for the office himself, he kept the lessons of his predecessor close to his heart. Like Eisenhower, Reagan routinely called his presidential campaign a “crusade” and encouraged supporters to believe his election would lead to a “spiritual renewal” across the nation. Most notably, Reagan often invoked the religious rhetoric that had been crafted in the Eisenhower era. “There are people who want to take ‘In God We Trust' off our money,” he warned in one speech. “I don't know of a time when we needed it more.” The defining issue in the coming election, he claimed, was “whether this nation can continue, this nation under God.”
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At the Republican National Convention, Reagan's stress on “old-fashioned values” found a receptive audience. His running mate, George H. W. Bush, likened the nominee to Eisenhower, while the delegates embraced a deeply conservative party platform that called for a constitutional amendment to restore prayer in public schools. “The political commandments endorsed by the Republican Party here this week may not be chiseled in stone,” the
Washington Post
noted, “but, as one preppy-looking California Christian put it, ‘they ought to be. It's right down the line an evangelical platform.'” The rest of the convention had similar overtones, delighting those inside the arena but alienating some outside it. Media critic Tom Shales remarked that it all reminded him of “the new breed of evangelical talk shows carried on TV stations throughout the country, where the vacant grins of ceaselessly smiling hosts and guests are usually dead giveaways that up above the eyebrows, nobody's home.”
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Rather than simply reaffirm the old faith of the Eisenhower era, Reagan created new political rites and rituals suited to his own time. The silent prayer at the end of his speech was one innovation; the sign-off of “God bless America” was another. While the phrase had a long history in American culture, it had actually been used only once before in a major address by a president or presidential candidate. (And according to the thorough study by communications scholars David Domke and Kevin Coe, that occasion was an inauspicious one: a speech Nixon made when he was seeking a way out of the Watergate scandal in 1973.) Earlier presidents and presidential candidates had used other forms of divine invocation, of course, but only sparingly. By Domke and Coe's count, the
eight presidents from FDR through Carter called for God's blessing in less than half of their speeches; indeed, most of them did so in only a quarter. But from Reagan on, presidents have asked for God's blessing in roughly nine out of every ten speeches they made. Reagan's campaign represented a turning point, a moment when this “God strategy” became the new norm.
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As Reagan's strategists understood in 1980, the electorate was primed for such shows of public piety. In the previous presidential election, self-described “born-again Christian” Jimmy Carter had drawn the media's attention to previously overlooked religious voters, prompting
Newsweek
to anoint 1976 as “The Year of the Evangelical.” But few appreciated the importance of this development until those same supporters started to turn on Carter late in his term. In the lead-up to the 1980 election, a Gallup poll revealed an electorate in the midst of a religious revival. More than 80 percent of Americans accepted the divinity of Jesus Christ, almost half professed confidence in the inerrancy of the Holy Bible, and, most surprising, nearly a third identified themselves as having had a “born-again” experience of their own. Underscoring the strength of religious conservatism, breathless reporters described for the uninitiated the expansive reach of an “electric church,” a network of influential religious broadcasters who spread their message across thirteen hundred radio and television stations—one out of every seven stations in the country—and claimed an audience of nearly 130 million and profits in the neighborhood of $1 billion. “We have enough votes to run the country,” boasted religious broadcaster Pat Robertson. “And when the people say, ‘We've had enough,' we're going to take over the country.”
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Reagan resolved to win the votes of this newly discovered “religious right” at all costs. On paper, a divorced former Hollywood actor who rarely attended church seemed unlikely to attract the deeply devout, but his past experience with the politics of piety and patriotism—in stints promoting the Committee to Proclaim Liberty and speaking at Christian Anti-Communism Crusade events, for instance—had prepared him well. Reagan quickly made common cause with leaders of the religious right such as Jerry Falwell, head of the new Moral Majority organization, and worked to convert rank-and-file religious conservatives to his campaign. The climax came in August 1980, when he accepted an invitation
to address the National Affairs Briefing of the Religious Roundtable in Dallas. Some fifteen thousand evangelical and fundamentalist ministers, including Falwell, Robertson, and the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, were on hand, hoping they might finally find a champion in Reagan. He did not disappoint. In his speech, he complained that “over the last two or three decades the Federal Government seems to have forgotten both ‘that old-time religion' and that old time Constitution.” In a line that had been scripted by his hosts, Reagan declared his loyalty to the audience. “I know you can't endorse me,” he told them. “But I want you to know I endorse you and what you are doing.” Duly impressed, religious conservatives rallied around him, and when Reagan swept to victory that November, they were happy to claim the credit. As Falwell put it, the conservative landslide was “my finest hour.”
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Once in office, Reagan helped deepen the sacralization of the state. “I am told that tens of thousands of prayer meetings are being held on this day; for that I am deeply grateful,” he said in his first inaugural address. “We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each inaugural day in the future years it should be declared a day of prayer.” Though Reagan rarely went to church—he averaged just three trips annually in his first three years in office, according to press estimates—he faithfully attended rituals of public religiosity such as the National Prayer Breakfast. Most of his predecessors had studiously avoided politicizing that event and similar ones, but when Reagan attended he pressed hard for partisan issues that were important to the religious right, such as school prayer, Bible reading, and abortion restrictions. “God, the source of our knowledge, has been expelled from the classroom,” he said at the 1982 prayer breakfast. “He gives us his greatest blessing, life, and yet many would condone the taking of an innocent life.”
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The school prayer amendment in particular was a recurring theme for Reagan, as he repeatedly called on Congress to pass the measure in his first term. Its prospects in the Senate looked stronger than they had since the Dirksen era, as a new class of conservative evangelicals swelled the ranks of the religious right there. The Senate's prayer breakfast meetings, which had dwindled to a handful of participants in the prior decade, now saw a full fourth of the chamber participate each and every week. The
senators' spouses, meanwhile, met for a weekly Bible study meeting, while eight hundred staffers took part in monthly prayer breakfasts of their own. Those who attended the official Senate prayer breakfast meetings insisted politics played no role in the proceedings, but their staffers' sessions were another matter. At a December 1981 gathering, an aide to Republican senator Roger Jepsen of Iowa played a video produced by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network about court rulings on the separation of church and state. “At each decision, the Supreme Court building grows slightly more red,” a
Washington Post
reporter noted, “until by 1980 it glows with a vicious crimson. The viewers bend forward on their chairs, and there are frequent sighs of ‘Ohhh!' or ‘Can you
believe
it?'” Ultimately, though, moderates in both parties prevented Reagan's prayer amendment from passing the Senate. The House, under Democratic control, was seen as a lost cause.
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B
UT FAILURE HAD ITS OWN
rewards. As Reagan planned his reelection campaign, he knew that emphasizing social issues might keep the religious right on board, since it had hopes of finishing the crusade it began four years before. Notably, the seventy-three-year-old Reagan announced his plan to run for a second term late on a Sunday night in January 1984, just minutes before giving a televised address to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters (NARB). The president invoked God two dozen times in the speech and proclaimed to cheers that he wore the ACLU's criticism of his proclamation making 1983 the “Year of the Bible” as “a badge of honor.” The purpose of it all, a GOP strategist explained at the time, was to “energize our base with the religious right.” By all accounts, it worked. According to Lou Cannon, a veteran reporter who had covered Reagan for over a decade, the NARB speech resulted in “one of the most enthusiastic receptions of his presidency.” For Cal Thomas, spokesman for the Moral Majority, it proved that Reagan was committed to their cause, regardless of his lapse in church-going. Carter had faithfully attended worship services, he pointed out, but he “appointed people who were pro-abortion.”
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