# One Nation Under God Princeton historian Kevin Kruse's documented origin story of "Christian America" — not the founding era, but the **1930s–1950s, invented by corporate titans to fight the [[New Deal]]**. Facing public fury after the Crash, business leaders (NAM, Sun Oil's J. Howard Pew, GM, Hilton) bankrolled clergy like James Fifield's Spiritual Mobilization to preach "freedom under God": a fusion of Christianity and capitalism in which the welfare state was not just bad policy but pagan statism. ## The Argument The campaign's payoff arrived in the Eisenhower era: "under God" added to the Pledge (1954), "In God We Trust" on currency and as national motto (1955–56), the National Prayer Breakfast — with [[Billy Graham]] and [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] sacralizing a civic religion whose original sponsors wanted an anti-union, anti-regulation gospel. Kruse's point is precise: the ceremonial "Christian nation" Americans now treat as timeless is younger than many of its defenders, and it was purchased, not inherited. ## RWKB Relevance The corporate-history half of the Christian-nationalism counter-canon — *who paid for the myth* — alongside Seidel's [[The Founding Myth]] (*why the myth is false*). Direct ancestor of the vault's corporate-power-meets-religious-right threads.