The book promises to explain the post-war boom in church membership and civic religion by connecting it not to anti-Communism but to capitalism, particularly to corporate interests opposed to FDR's New Deal. What is actually is, in fact, is a history of the aforesaid religious boom, particularly in regard to adding "In God We Trust" to US bills and "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. Without the subtitle, I wouldn't have experienced such cognitive dissonance as I tried to detect the nearly-nonexistent fingerprints of "corporate America" in the narrative; granted, I also would have been much less interested in reading the book, so score one for capitalism, I guess.
Kruse's narrative continually undercuts his assertion that the concept of the United States as a Christian nation originated among anti-New-Deal businessmen in the 1930s. He openly admits that right-wing interests copied the playbook of progressives who had been promoting their own political ends under the aegis of the Social Gospel since the 1890s. The proposal to amend the Constitution to declare America officially a Christian nation, by his own admission, had been kicking around Congress since the Civil War in the 1860s.
I kept waiting for the nefarious corporate interests to emerge and start manipulating religious organizations, but the best Kruse could offer was the National Association of Manufacturers being approached by an activist minister and lobbied for support for an anti-FDR movement which he had already launched and continued to run, which seems to me more like a religious organization co-opting the deep pockets of corporate interests. How this is morally distinct from any other charity or political cause seeking underwriting from large business and wealthy donors, a process which takes place literally all the time, Kruse never makes clear.
Ultimately, this is a much less interesting story than advertised. The 1950s did coincide with a huge upwelling of church attendance and membership, a conflation of patriotism with Judeo-Christian theism, and massive popular support for religious observance, but Kruse's attempt to explain it all by reference to Depression-era businessmen falls flat. The thesis, rejected by the author, that it was a reaction to "godless Communism" is far more convincing, particularly given that one of the rallying calls to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was the assertion that the pledge didn't sound that different from one spouted by "little Muscovites."
A tidbit that stood out to me: Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, part of the court which struck down school prayer, was a deacon and Sunday School teacher for decades at a Baptist church while being an open agnostic. If such was common in church culture at the time, it makes Sparky Schulz teaching a Sunday School class for years without either joining the church or, indeed, attending worship services more understandable (if still nuts).
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