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A review by stephenmeansme
One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse
3.0
This was a thought-provoking book, and I mean that in an intense but neutral way. From the title alone I should have been an easy mark (see my "nf-religion" tag), yet at pretty much every point I found myself puzzled by the narrative.
Kruse sets out to explain "How corporate America invented Christian America" - that is, how the way the American religious right-wing sees itself, the political activities and ideologies they endorse, and so on, originate in whole or in part with corporate interests. At least on the "Corporate America" end he paints a fairly convincing picture. Heads of the big industrial conglomerates of the early 20th c. felt threatened by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, and so when they found allies among conservative-leaning preachers and pastors, they added that religious element to their marketing campaigns. Post-WW2, with the election of Eisenhower, public religiosity took off, and the era of "ceremonial deism" was born.
But the question remains: what drove conservative-leaning preachers and pastors so close to corporate interests, and set them against New Deal politics? Kruse focuses on the corporate-political-religious nexus through the 1950s and 1960s (basically Eisenhower through Nixon, with a rapid-fire epilogue to Obama) yet barely touches on the theological sea-changes that polarized American Christianity in the 20th c. When we learn that, in the prayer-in-school debates of the 1960s, the laity of many denominations raised up insurgent firebrands against the more cool-headed elite theologians, it comes as a mild surprise. What happened to cause such a rift, or at least make it exploitable? Barely any attention is paid to the creation/evolution issue, either, whereas in (e.g.) Ronald L. Numbers' THE CREATIONISTS it's argued that textual criticism of the Bible, evolutionary biology, and anti-German xenophobia from WW1 contributed to theological polarization in the early 20th c.
On the corporate side, Kruse's rhetoric at least suggests that much of this was imposed by Madison Avenue types. Yet Billy Graham was pulling in "crusade" audiences in the millions, so how much of a push did the Mad Men need to make? A more fascinating question would be how cultural and religious conservatives seemed to be winning so much, to the point where even Secret Kenyan Marxist (/s) Barack Obama said "God bless you and God bless the United States of America" in so many speeches; and yet they managed to self-radicalize and self-marginalize?
The policy sections were perhaps the most interesting, because it showed how blatantly, bullshittingly ahistorical the arguments were. "Judeo-Christian" values were so self-evidently part of America that they had to be (in the 1950s, for the first time!) codified and demonstrated publicly. Then further public laws and displays of religion were demanded, using the previous ones as historical justification! Accommodationists should feel very uncomfortable...!
Overall, 2.5 stars rounded up. The information that was there was useful, but I always felt like there was something important missing.
Kruse sets out to explain "How corporate America invented Christian America" - that is, how the way the American religious right-wing sees itself, the political activities and ideologies they endorse, and so on, originate in whole or in part with corporate interests. At least on the "Corporate America" end he paints a fairly convincing picture. Heads of the big industrial conglomerates of the early 20th c. felt threatened by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, and so when they found allies among conservative-leaning preachers and pastors, they added that religious element to their marketing campaigns. Post-WW2, with the election of Eisenhower, public religiosity took off, and the era of "ceremonial deism" was born.
But the question remains: what drove conservative-leaning preachers and pastors so close to corporate interests, and set them against New Deal politics? Kruse focuses on the corporate-political-religious nexus through the 1950s and 1960s (basically Eisenhower through Nixon, with a rapid-fire epilogue to Obama) yet barely touches on the theological sea-changes that polarized American Christianity in the 20th c. When we learn that, in the prayer-in-school debates of the 1960s, the laity of many denominations raised up insurgent firebrands against the more cool-headed elite theologians, it comes as a mild surprise. What happened to cause such a rift, or at least make it exploitable? Barely any attention is paid to the creation/evolution issue, either, whereas in (e.g.) Ronald L. Numbers' THE CREATIONISTS it's argued that textual criticism of the Bible, evolutionary biology, and anti-German xenophobia from WW1 contributed to theological polarization in the early 20th c.
On the corporate side, Kruse's rhetoric at least suggests that much of this was imposed by Madison Avenue types. Yet Billy Graham was pulling in "crusade" audiences in the millions, so how much of a push did the Mad Men need to make? A more fascinating question would be how cultural and religious conservatives seemed to be winning so much, to the point where even Secret Kenyan Marxist (/s) Barack Obama said "God bless you and God bless the United States of America" in so many speeches; and yet they managed to self-radicalize and self-marginalize?
The policy sections were perhaps the most interesting, because it showed how blatantly, bullshittingly ahistorical the arguments were. "Judeo-Christian" values were so self-evidently part of America that they had to be (in the 1950s, for the first time!) codified and demonstrated publicly. Then further public laws and displays of religion were demanded, using the previous ones as historical justification! Accommodationists should feel very uncomfortable...!
Overall, 2.5 stars rounded up. The information that was there was useful, but I always felt like there was something important missing.