Freedom under God: Corporations, Christianity, and the Revolt against the New Deal

This paper will seek to show that the public rise of religious nationalism in mid-twentieth century America had its roots not in the international tensions of the Cold War, but rather the domestic politics of the New Deal era.  The paper will focus on the popularization of the phrase "under God" in the 1940s and early 1950s.  During these years, conservative businessmen and sympathetic clergymen worked together to delegitimize the welfare state and improve the public prestige of unfettered free enterprise.  They did so by popularizing a form of "Christian libertarianism" which would stand as a stark alternative to what they characterized as the "pagan statism" of the welfare state.  A prominent circle of business leaders, led by Sun Oil President J. Howard Pew but involving leaders of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the heads of several major corporations, worked diligently to fund and promote the work of sympathetic clergymen like James Fifield and Norman Vincent Peale, who were more than happy to put a religious spin on conservative complaints about the size and scope of the federal government that had heretofore been cast solely in secular terms.  Through a massive public relations campaign in print media, radio programs, sermon contests and national events such as a massive Fourth of July campaign, these forces widely popularized a new concept of "freedom under God," a simple slogan that offered a sharp contrast to what they saw as oppression by the federal government.  In doing so, they did considerable work in setting the stage for the religious nationalism of the 1950s, and the later rise of the religious right.