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It’s hard to call oneself a Christian when so many who
flaunt that label behave in such unChrist-like ways. Too often Christian is synonymous today with racist and homophobe, which leaves many who actually attempt to live out the
principles attributed to Christ feeling as though they are victims of identity
theft. I wonder if God feels the same way.
The public context of God has been almost wholly subsumed in
the identity of radical right “Christian” hegemony. Political Christianism is a
rightwing gimmick. The God of “In God We Trust” is a “Christian” god for a “Christian”
nation—both fictions designed to fool unthinking masses with feel-righteous
rhetoric.
In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“How Business Made Us Christian,” March 15, 2015),
Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse traced the formulation of God as an
advertising ploy. Kruse attributes the mid-20th-century adoption of a decidedly
Christianist God as America’s national trademark to the influence of business
interests, particularly as stimulated and articulated by a young charismatic
evangelist, Billy Graham.
Kruse quotes Graham as saying in 1952, “If I would run for
president of the United States today on a platform of calling people back to
God, back to Christ, back to the Bible, I’d be elected.” Republican
conservatives have been banking on this ploy ever since.
Imagine a decade-earlier version of AMC’s Sixties
advertising agency in Mad Men and one
may better understand how corporate America began its drive toward oligarchy
with the collusion of rightwing politicians. God got big in the 1950s.
Government agencies initiated prayer services. In 1954 Congress added “under
God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance, and that was the year “In
God We Trust” got added to postage stamps. The next year the phrase was added
to U.S. currency. And in 1956 it became the official national motto.
In the current national debate about the character of the
United States—a debate that affects education, the arts, the sciences,
politics, global affairs, and all the rest—it is useful to remember that the
public “God,” like the notion of being a “Christian nation,” is a recent
invention—at root merely a crass advertising ploy and propaganda with no actual
foundation in faith.
This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).
