The Founding Myth

by Andrew L Seidel

  Though it is hard to credit, people regularly invoke these slogans to prove that America is a Christian nation, and even a nation founded on Christian principles.26 It’s argument by idiom. A little bit of research reveals that none of these phrases dates to the founding era. “In God we trust” was first added to American coinage in 1863, during the height of the Civil War, seventy-five years after the Constitutional Convention. It was added to paper currency in 1955 and became the national motto in 1956. “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. The first president to close a speech with “God bless America” was Richard Nixon, in a mendacious presidential message about Watergate.

  “In God we Trust,” “one nation under God,” “God bless America.” These tidbits are not historical so much as they are rhetorical. Their tardiness precludes arguments that they somehow prove the founding ideology, but it is worth analyzing how the verbiage entered the American vernacular because doing so reveals something interesting about Christian nationalism. Christian nationalists take advantage of times of fear and use them to impose their god on everyone. When doing so, they often destroy earlier unifying messages with their new, divisive message. Since the first years of our founding, citizens’ rights have been jeopardized and curtailed by war. Or rather, our rights are curtailed, perhaps even willingly given up, because of the fear of war. During the Quasi-War in 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act “in an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, and intrigue” that Thomas Jefferson dubbed the Reign of Witches.27 Understandably, no one today points to the ignominious Sedition Act to prove that our nation was founded on the government’s ability to punish speech critical of the government. Government censorship of speech is anathema to our founding principles, despite the Sedition Act’s passage and enforcement a mere seven years after the First Amendment was ratified. It is merely a sad, short-lived example of fear trumping our founding principles.

  But Christian nationalists ignore this logic and recite these religious idioms, each more delinquent relative to the founding than the next, to bolster their argument. In each instance, the truant language entered the American vernacular during times of fear and national crisis—during a war in one case, and in another case, at a time when witch hunters were looking for nonconformists and non-Christians while big business was peddling religion to repeal regulations. In the final instance, the intent was to cover the most notorious presidential crimes ever committed.28

  24

  “In God We Trust”: The Belligerent Motto

  “A man by the name of Pollock was once superintendent of the mint at Philadelphia. He was almost insane about having God in the Constitution. Failing in that, he got the inscription on our money, ‘In God we Trust.’ As our silver dollar is now, in fact, worth only eighty-five cents, it is claimed that the inscription means that we trust in God for the other fifteen cents.”

  — Robert Ingersoll, interview with Secular Review, 18841

  “We used to trust in God. I think it was in 1863 that some genius suggested that it be put upon the gold and silver coins which circulated among the rich. They didn’t put it on the nickels and coppers because they didn’t think the poor folks had any trust in God.”

  — Mark Twain, “Education and Citizenship,” May 14, 1908, speech2

  Three men are ultimately responsible for getting “God” on American currency: a preacher, a secretary, and a man seeking to amend the Constitution to promote his personal deity. It reads like a bad joke, but the truth is more sad than funny.3

  The men’s work spanned from late 1861 until 1864, but the final wording—“in God we trust”—was decided on in 1863, when the Civil War was at its height. That year began with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on January 1. Conscriptions followed soon after, as did the battles of Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and the two bloodiest of the war, Gettysburg and Chickamauga. Brothers were killing brothers; families and the country were being torn apart. The war would eventually kill some 750,000 Americans, more than 2 percent of the population—which would be equivalent to almost eight million Americans in 2019.4 Walt Whitman, who worked at a military hospital in Washington, DC, during the war, perhaps best captured the horror of the time:

  The dead in this war…the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—or South or North, ours all,…our young men once so handsome and so joyous, taken from us—the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend…the infinite dead—the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation…. . And everywhere among these countless graves…we see, and ages yet may see, on monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of thousands, the significant word UNKNOWN.5

  Not only did the war take the son from the mother, but it was also fought in America’s front yards, not some foreign, faraway battlefield. It affected every citizen. Eighteen sixty-three was a year of great and terrible fear.

  The United States may be the only country that needed civil war to end slavery; not coincidentally, it was also becoming an increasingly religious country at the time.6 To a larger extent than is usually discussed, the Civil War was a religious war. “I am for peace under any plan or able readjustment the people will make,” wrote former Illinois governor and US representative John Reynolds in a December 17, 1862, letter to an Ohio newspaper, “but, in the name of God, no more bloodshed to gratify a religious fanaticism.”7 Reynolds’s wish was unfulfilled. The war dragged on for another two and a half years. Reynolds attack on “religious fanaticism” was written against the war, but also against abolition; but his point about religious fanaticism fueling the war is accurate.

  Religion commandeered both sides of the slavery issue. Lincoln made this point in his Second Inaugural: “Both [sides] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”8 The bloodshed might have been stemmed were it not for the unmovable certainty religion breeds in the faithful. We might say today that abolitionists motivated by religion were correct to be certain on such an obvious issue, but their brethren south of the Mason-Dixon Line were just as certain, and they had the stronger side of the biblical argument. As William Lloyd Garrison, a leading abolitionist, put it, “In this country, the Bible has been used to support slavery and capital punishment; while in the old countries, it has been quoted to sustain all manner of tyranny and persecution. All reforms are anti-Bible.”9 This is not to say that religion caused slavery, but it did justify slavery and allow others to justify it. The bible gave slavery a divine sanction (see chapter 17). Diametrically opposed certitude on an issue like slavery, held without evidence or reason but instead on religious faith, is a blueprint for conflict.

  David Goldfield makes a similar point in his book America Aflame. America’s “political system could not contain the passions stoked by the infusion of evangelical Christianity into the political process.”10 Evangelical Christianity invaded and polarized the political debate in the decades leading up to the Civil War, limiting the potential political solutions.11 It turned the democratic process, which relies on compromise, into a battle over sacrosanct issues of faith. Religion did exactly what the framers feared: it poisoned the political system. Incidentally, this fear was not confined to the founders; nor is it an issue the left and right need disagree on. The father of the modern conservative movement, Barry Goldwater, recognized and feared the inflexibility of religion in politics in 1994 when he famously insisted, “If and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise.”12

  Goldfield dates the launch of religion’s political invasion to the 1844 presidential race between Democrat James K. Polk and Whig Henry Clay, and James Birney of the Liberty Party: “From then on, political parties
paraded their religious bona fides and attacked opponents as infidels. The campaigns themselves came to resemble religious revivals as much as political exercises. Religion was not only an issue itself, it permeated other issues of the day, especially slavery.”13 The country’s first major religious political party, the Liberty Party, founded in 1839, gained prominence then and used spiritual blackmail to win votes by telling citizens to “vote the Liberty ticket as a religious duty.”14 The party hosted revival-like conventions and was, according to one of its leaders, “unlike any other [party] in history” because “it was founded on moral principles—on the Bible, originating a contest not only against slavery but against atheistic politics from which Divine law was excluded.”15 Religion had been largely absent from politics and government up to that point. The Liberty Party bemoaned “the common law of political life” that “religion has nothing to do with politics.”16 But that separation, so assiduously cultivated by the founders, was obliterated during the buildup of tensions that were released in the Civil War. According to Goldfield, “Churches became party gathering places; ministers stumped for the party’s candidates and even served as poll watchers.”17 Religion became a political weapon.

  More than a decade before the war, Daniel Webster, who served as secretary of state, US senator, and US representative, warned Congress about the passion religion creates when it mixes with politics. Examining the history of slavery, he also warned Congress about the historical justifications for slavery, including those found in Judeo-Christianity. “There was slavery among the Jews—the theocratic government of that people made no injunction against it,” Webster explained, adding later, “and I suppose there is to be found no injunction against that relation between man and man in the teachings by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or by any of his Apostles.”18 Webster then warned against mixing religion and politics: “When a question of this kind takes hold of the religious sentiments of mankind, and comes to be discussed in religious assemblies of the clergy and laity, there is always to be expected, or always to be feared, a great deal of excitement. It is in the nature of man, manifested by his whole history, that religious disputes are apt to become warm, and men’s strength of conviction is proportionate to their views of the magnitude of the questions.”19 Webster found it curious that believers failed to realize how unconvincing religious arguments are to everyone else: “They do not remember that the doctrines and miracles of Jesus Christ have, in eighteen hundred years, converted only a small portion of the human race; and among the nations that are converted to Christianity, they forget how many vices and crimes, public and private, still prevail, and that many of them—public crimes especially, which are offences against the Christian religion—pass without exciting particular regret or indignation.”20

  Of course, we are correct today to treat slavery as an intolerable violation of human rights, one on which no compromise is possible. The North was morally justified to fight a war to free the slaves if that was necessary. But had there not been a divine justification for slavery to begin with, the institution might have failed without a war. Religion on both sides solidified arguments, many untenable, as articles of faith. That was Webster’s point. And that was the point of Lincoln’s religious language in his second inaugural.

  Northerners used the bible to justify their position and some, in the throes of the misnamed Second Great Awakening, thought that reforming their society by abolishing slavery would even bring on “the Second Coming of Jesus Christ,” according to Goldfield.21 But the South, though morally wrong, had the stronger religious argument for its position and was therefore far less likely to do away with slavery because of religious pleading or moral reasoning. After all, God was on their side. The Confederate States of America motto said so: Deo vindice, “God will vindicate” or “With God our protector [or avenger].”22 The motto meant to call upon the “Christian God.”23

  The South believed in the righteousness, in the religious sense, of its cause. “To evangelical Christians,” explains Goldfield, the secession and formation of the Confederate States of America “represented a rebirth, just as they had been reborn in Christ.”24 After secession, the South rushed to inject religion into politics wherever possible, such as in its motto. The confederacy essentially copied the 1787 US Constitution’s preamble but added the one thing the confederacy thought most important, a clause “invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God.”25 Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, thought that slavery “was established by decree of Almighty God…. It is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation…. It has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts.”26 He might have added that Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, owned slaves. At the “behest” of his barren wife, Sarah, Abraham impregnated her slave Hagar, and married her as well.27

  Jefferson Davis and Daniel Webster were right: the bible supported the southern slaveholders, not the northern abolitionists.28 The point was even made in the House of Representatives during the first US Congress. Two months before his death, Benjamin Franklin petitioned Congress to abolish slavery. Franklin was in an abolition society that included Thomas Paine, other founders, and Quakers. Representative James Jackson of Georgia attacked the petition, at least partly because the bible allows slavery: “If they [the petitioners] were to consult that book, which claims our regard, they will find that slavery is not only allowed, but commended. Their Saviour, who possessed more benevolence and commiseration than they pretend to, has allowed of it.”29 Representative William Smith of South Carolina also favored slavery on religious grounds, as “the professors of its [Christianity’s] mild doctrines never preached against it.”30

  Slavery is sanctified and permitted in the bible. Jesus even discusses the proper force with which to beat one’s slaves in Luke 12:45–49, a passage the Southern states often used to justify slavery.31

  Another major argument for slavery was not just biblical sanction, but that Christianity civilized “the Negro race” by bringing them to Jesus. Slavery created Christians. Reverend Frederick A. Ross, author of Slavery Ordained of God (1857), wrote that “harmony among Christians…[which] can be preserved only by the view…that slavery is of God, and to continue for the good of the slave, the good of the master, the good of the whole American family, until another and better destiny may be unfolded.”32 William C. Daniel of Georgia, “a gentleman having the talent, education and comprehensive view to do justice to so grave a subject,” spoke extensively to a southern agricultural congress on the civilizing benefit to the slave in 1854.33 Daniel thought “the operation of slavery generally throughout Christendom” had been to civilize the slaves.34 He preached that southern agriculture’s goals should include “cultivat[ing] the aptitudes of the negro race for civilization, and consequently Christianity.”35 Freedom would come eventually, but not “by imposing upon them the duties and penalties of civilization before they have cast off the features of their African barbarism.”36 This civilization gospel rationalized slavery and imposed a duty on slave owners to use the “subjection” to prepare the “African race” for “civilization, and consequently Christianity.”37

  Slaveholders believed themselves to be executing the Christian duty to “love our neighbors” by civilizing their slaves, by bringing them out of “the barbarisms and idolatries of paganism,” as Daniel put it.38 By exposing “the African race” to “the humanizing influence of Christianity” through their bonds, the slavers believed they were doing the slaves a favor—they were saving Africans by enslaving them.39 The slave owners justified enslaving an entire race using the perceived superiority of Christianity.

  If slavery was a divine trust, abolition was also atheistic. The month before South Carolina seceded, Reverend Benjamin Palmer of the First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans delivered a Thanksgiving sermon on the division seizing the country: “Last of all, in this great s
truggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic…. Among a people so generally religious as the American, a disguise must be worn; but it is the same old threadbare disguise of the advocacy of human rights…. This spirit of atheism, which knows no God who tolerates evil, no Bible which sanctions law, and no conscience that can be bound by oaths and covenants, has selected us for its victims, and slavery for its issue.”40 To be pro-slavery was to be pro-bible; abolitionists were atheists and anti-biblical.

  Today, many might doubt these religious rationales for slavery, believing the church to have been the major force for abolition, or above reproach. Religion played an important role in the abolition movement, but it played a bigger role on the other side of the argument. While speaking to an audience in London in 1846, Frederick Douglass encountered a vocal doubter as to the culpability of churches. The report of that encounter, noting the crowd reaction in parentheses, survives:41

  Mr. DOUGLASS.—Why, as I said in another place, to a smaller audience the other day, in answer to the question, “Mr. Douglass, are there not Methodist churches, Baptist churches, Congregational churches, Episcopal churches, Roman Catholic churches, Presbyterian churches in the United States, and in the southern states of America, and do they not have revivals of religion, accessions to their ranks from day to day, and will you tell me that these men are not followers of the meek and lowly Saviour?” Most unhesitatingly I do. Revivals in religion, and revivals in the slave trade, go hand in hand together. (Cheers.) The church and the slave prison stand next to each other; the groans and cries of the heartbroken slave are often drowned in the pious devotions of his religious master. (Hear, hear.) The church-going bell and the auctioneer’s bell chime in with each other; the pulpit and the auctioneer’s block stand in the same neighbourhood; while the blood-stained gold goes to support the pulpit, the pulpit covers the infernal business with the garb of Christianity. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support missionaries, and babies sold to buy Bibles and communion services for the churches. (Loud cheers.)