One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin Kruse appears to be a fascinating book on how religion/Christianity was promoted in the US by the corporations in the second half of the twentieth century. Ronald Reagan was, thus, not the first President supported whole-heartedly by the newly invigorated religious right. Eisenhower and Nixon were both successful, partly due to the support from the pulpit, a support financed by the American business.
Recently, we have seen a strong alliance developing between religious-right and business communities around the world. In many countries, this alliance has delivered amazing results. We have seen it in Turkey, where Anatolia tigers (conservative businessmen from Anatolian heartland) allied with the AKP and ended the almost ninety years rule of secular establishment. We have more recently seen it in India, where corporate India supported religious-right party BJP, under Narendra Modi, to comprehensively win in 2014 elections to form the first single-party government in India in more than two decades.
The US seems to be an outlier in terms of church-state relationship. As discussed in a previous post (see American Secularism: A historical view of separation of the Church and the State in the US), the US is the only country of the world that keeps religion and state strictly separate. The practicing of minority or majority religions is neither restricted nor regulated. However, it was not always so. In the 18th and 19th centuries, while church-state was separate at the federal level, at the state and local level, there were laws that discriminated against minority religions, including Christian sects such Catholicism. It was only in the 1940s that Supreme Court imposed the strict separation of church-state.
Kruse informs the readers that it was about the same time that corporate America and religious-right came close. Both of them realized that they are under threat from the federal government; the religious right was threatened by the judicial branch while corporate America was being threatened by the executive branch (Roosevelt's New Deal). General Eisenhower's victory in Presidential elections in 1952 was the first national success for this alliance. A new national motto (In God we trust), the addition of 'under God' in the pledge of allegiance and appearance of national motto on all banknotes soon followed.
Here is a review of the book (See The World Ike Wrought) and an interview with the author (See How 'One Nation' Didn't Become 'Under God' Until The '50s Religious Revival) to savor before you buy the book.
