- Despite the protection of free religious practice by the First Amendment (commonly known as the separation of church and state), many in the United States tend to think of their country as being Christian. Indeed a 2007 survey reports that 55 percent of respondents believe the U.S. is in fact a Christian nation — which would be a surprise to the Founders. A revealing article by Kevin M. Kruse (The New York Times, 14-Mar-2015) shows why this is so.
After the Great Crash and the ensuing Great Depression of the 1930s, American business was assaulted by the public, labor unions, and F.D.R.’s New Deal. Business leaders pushed back with a campaign to regain their prestige.
But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity,
writes Kruse.Accordingly, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, corporate leaders marketed a new ideology that combined elements of Christianity with an anti‑federal libertarianism.
To see how they did it read A Christian Nation? Since When?
A Christian Nation?
The most exciting scientific find of the period was Charles Willson Peale’s exhumation in 1801 near Newburgh, New York, of the bones of the mastodon, or mammoth. Peale displayed his mammoth in his celebrated museum and in 1806 painted a marvelous picture of what was perhaps the first organized exhumation in American history. Peale’s discovery electrified the country and put the word mammoth
on everybody’s lips. A Philadelphia baker advertised the sale of mammoth bread.
In Washington a mammoth eater
ate forty-two eggs in ten minutes. And under the leadership of the Baptist preacher John Leland, the ladies of Cheshire, Massachusetts, late in 1801 sent to President Jefferson a mammoth cheese,
six feet in diameter and nearly two feet thick and weighing 1,230 pounds.
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (2009)