One Nation Under God
How Corporate America Invented Christian America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5708276 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Benjamin Brandenburg (Montreat College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 396-398 |
| Publication date | 2016-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Church and State (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-969X • E-ISSN: 2040-4867 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jcs/csw018 |
| OpenAlex | W2346926272 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
When Princeton University's Kevin Kruse, a pioneering scholar of the new suburban history, announced he was working on a history of the origins of the Religious Right, scholars of the Cold War, capitalism, and American religious history took notice. The result came with an ambitious subtitle: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. With lucid wit and archival precision, Kruse points to the Great Depression and the postwar period as the pivotal era when “Christian America” ideology became part and parcel of mainstream American life. Kruse's heavily researched work brings together the corporate, religious, creative, and political worlds to make an intriguing case for the midcentury origins of what he terms “Christian libertarianism.” Kruse's sincerity in his search to discover the origins of iconic American phrases such as “One Nation under God” and “In God We Trust” makes the book tick. For Kruse, the answers are found in the 1930s and in the religious and political campaigns against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. This is no modest argument. One Nation under God pushes against the prominent view among historians of American religion that pins the heightened American religious atmosphere of the 1950s to the Cold War binary of godless Communism versus God-fearing America. In the book's first section, “Creation,” Kruse provocatively argues that corporate elites were alarmed less by the foreign menace of Communism and more by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman's domestic threat of liberalism. Kruse captures the stories of oilman J. Howard Pew and hotelier Conrad Hilton, who along with other executives from a variety of companies, including Firestone Tires, Chrysler Motors, Kraft Foods, Marshall Field, United Airlines, General Motors, J.C. Penney, Walt Disney, and the US Chamber of Commerce, came to the aid of the ebullient Los Angeles Congregationalist minister James Fifield and his understudied Spiritual Mobilization campaign.
Communism · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Politics of the United States · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Catholicism and Religious Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,8 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2023 (3) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |