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14 America the Ecumenical In 1954, following a national campaign by the powerful Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus, a congressional resolution decreed that the phrase “one nation indivisible” in the Pledge of Allegiance be amended to incorporate the phrase “under God.” A parallel dictate of 1957 authorized American paper money to bear the motto “In God We Trust”—as had the coinage for nearly a hundred years. Both were considered militant ripostes to the threat of godless communism. The U.S. president, Dwight Eisenhower—for most of his life not conventionally religious, having joined a church and begun attending services regularly when he decided to seek the presidency—endorsed these measures soundly. Eisenhower, when quizzed on his own theology, demonstrated by reaching in his pocket and pulling out a dime and reading aloud the motto, “In God We Trust.” As to constitutionality, both provisions went without notable challenge in the courts. From the perspective of the religious wars of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first, the endless clash of fundamentalisms at home and abroad, one word comes to mind about the possibility of the enactment of any such present scenario so tranquilly and uneventfully yoking politics and belief in American life and culture—be that possibility contemplated by the most committed secularist or militant evangelical. The word is unimaginable. From advocates of the classic disestablishmentarian tradition such measures would draw immediate condemnation as a brazen attempt to mingle the discourses of religion and politics; from 222 / Chapter 14 the standpoint of the religious right they would be considered a hopeless overreach in an era when the courts have repeatedly ruled against prayer in schools, the teaching of religious alternatives to scientific evolution, and the Bible as history and literature. Fifty years ago the whole business was done basically without a peep. Accordingly, the intervening decades measure one of the truly epochal passages the nation has made from the years just after World War II—in this particular case from certain attitudes of consensus, comity, and community prevailing on matters of religion in the years just after the war and, to the current atmospherics of religious controversy, themselves nearly unimaginable five decades earlier, now infusing national life in every dimension of culture. In the first modern nation-state arising essentially de novo out of the twinned impulses of Renaissance humanism and Reformation Protestantism , with its basic documents of government instituted by linguistic fiat, one of the most notable features of the secular religion of democracy in America has remained its collision at nodes of cyclical conflict with risings and fallings of Christian idealism and popular sectarian enthusiasm . Great Awakenings seem to be written into the American genome . G. K. Chesterton, a popular English novelist and religious writer of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, has been famously quoted as describing America as “a nation . . . with the soul of a church.” What is less known is the degree to which Chesterton, a Catholic intellectual , was actually describing the susceptibility of a certain kind of generic American Protestantism to forms of cultural theodicy, with a politics frequently seeming but a few short steps from merging a happy reign of religious consensus into a civic totalitarianism of fundamentalist mind control.There is not a great distance, Chesterton seemed to suggest , between a nation of churches and a nation with the fascist soul of a true church. In context the observation seems particularly apt. For a person growing up in America after 1945, one of the great measures of the particular distance the nation has traveled in memory and history will now always be a religious one, measured essentially, if still somewhat unbelievably , by the sense of menace conveyed in Chesterton’s strange, prophetic admonition. This is to say that in retrospect, for many of us, surely one of the foremost features of American domestic culture at midcentury seemed to be the happy, comfortable, positive accommodations of politics and religion America the Ecumenical / 223 with each other as positive cultural energies. Actually, one could claim more than that. In a postwar nation where, in 1955, 60 percent of citizens claimed church membership and 50 percent claimed weekly participation in some kind of religious activity, to borrow from the current language of corporate enterprise, faith and citizenship were believed by most to be enriching synergies. Further, it seemed a natural victory dividend, a social evolution directly in keeping with the principles of liberty put to the test in the...

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