Chapter 142. One Nation Under God: American Civil Religion, the Masonic Founders and the Christian Right

The United States combines a constitution that names no God and forbids an established church with a public life full of prayer, oaths and the motto “In God We Trust”. This chapter traces that mix through four layers. The first is the deist and Masonic founding, read three ways by a Masonic historian, a banking-conspiracy author and an evangelical conspiracy writer. The second is the “civil religion” that the sociologist Robert Bellah named in 1967 and that the Cold War wrote into law. The third is the evangelical political movement from the Moral Majority to present-day Christian nationalism, with critics and defenders each given their say. The fourth is Christian Zionism, the theology that ties American domestic religion to policy on Israel. Mitchell Heisman’s ethno-historical reading of the republic closes the chapter.

Deists, Masons and the plan of Washington

Jim Willis describes a national myth: “Part of the American mythos involves the expressed belief that somehow it is a ‘Christian’ nation, or at least a religious one. The Founding Fathers, children are often taught, were God-fearing Christians”. He notes the paradox of a constitutional separation of church and state alongside a Congress that “retains a chaplain and opens each session with prayer”. He concludes: “The fact that none of this is accurate doesn’t alter the myth” [Willis, American Cults, #63203, “Lip-Service Religion”]. Karen Armstrong, cited in Chapter 140, records that the federal Constitution did not mention God at all [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064].

The Masonic question divides the library sharply. The British writer Ian Gittins lists Franklin and Washington as Masons and names seven signers of the Declaration as known Freemasons. He nonetheless calls the claim that the founders “concealed various Masonic signs and symbolism within the design of the nation’s capital” “one of the most perplexing and truly preposterous anti-Masonic myths of all”. In his account L’Enfant “does not appear to have been a Mason”, Washington “was the only Freemason involved in the creation of the capital city, and played no active part in its design”, and the pentagram “is a symbol with very little resonance in Masonry” [Gittins, Secrets of the Lost Symbol, #62988, ch. 3].

John Hamer’s Behind the Curtain, catalogued without an author but signed by Hamer on its title page, asserts the opposite. Washington “selected Freemason, Pierre Charles Enfant to design the new city”. “In 1795 the Freemasonic Founding Fathers laid out the streets of Washington D.C. to form Masonic symbols: a compass, square, rule, pentagram and octagon.” “On the 18th September 1793, Washington laid the foundation stone of the Capitol building in his full Masonic regalia”. In Hamer’s account the founders “rejected all organised religion in favour of Deism”, and the Great Seal was “the Illuminati emblem” [Hamer, Behind the Curtain, #72888, ch. 2].

Thomas Horn, writing from an evangelical-apocalyptic standpoint, uses the founders’ private letters as evidence of hostility to Christianity. He quotes John Adams to Jefferson (3 September 1816): “I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!” Horn takes this as “all the evidence we need… that Adams, too, was no Christian”. He describes Washington as “a Deist—and a Freemason of the highest rank as of August 4, 1753, at the Masonic Lodge No. 4 in Fredericksburg”. His book’s subtitle sets out its thesis of “Deep State Occultists… Manipulating American Society Through a Washington-Based Shadow Government” [Horn, Saboteurs, #72784, ch. 7 “The Secret Destiny of America?”]. The reading is reported here as Horn’s argument.

Civil religion and the Cold War consensus

According to the reference shelf, American civil religion is “a nonsectarian civil religion… with sacred symbols drawn from the national history”. Its present form comes from Robert Bellah’s 1967 article “Civil Religion in America”, which treats the Constitution, the Declaration and the Bill of Rights as a kind of sacred writ. Bellah later judged it “an empty and broken shell” in The Broken Covenant [Wikipedia: American civil religion]. The Cold War gave it legal form. On Flag Day, 14 June 1954, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and Eisenhower signed it [Wikipedia: Pledge of Allegiance]. A 1956 law signed by Eisenhower made “In God we trust” the first official national motto. The phrase had appeared on coins since 1864 [Wikipedia: United States national motto]. Webb notes that many Protestant churches came to describe the country as a “Redeemer Nation” with “a mission to evangelize the world and bring democracy and human rights” [Webb, Conspiracy Theories, #62861].

From “Evangelical” to the Religious Right

Willis credits “Harold Ockenga, pastor of Park Street Church in Boston” with coining the term “Evangelical”. Once Christianity Today and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association adopted it, “the term ‘Evangelical’ stuck”. Then “it all began in 1979 with Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority”, which Falwell summed up in the line “We need to get these people saved, baptized, and registered to vote!” The movement deserted the evangelical Democrat Jimmy Carter for Reagan in 1980. Within ten years, “Conservative Evangelicals had, in effect, joined the Republican Party”, and in 2016 white evangelicals “were the primary group that voted… Donald J. Trump into office” [Willis, American Cults, #63203, “Offshoots”]. Willis goes further. He describes a “ménage à trois between the Evangelical church, politicians, and the NRA” that is “at least bordering on… cult-like status”, which he calls “the cult of the gun” [ibid.].

Webb gives David Bebbington’s definition of evangelicals: they take the Bible seriously, centre on the death and resurrection of Jesus, and promote conversion and social engagement. Webb dates the Christian right to the 1970s under Paul Weyrich, Falwell and Pat Robertson, around abortion, school prayer and gay rights. He calls Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network (1960), “a very important figure in the rise of the religious right”. Robertson’s The New World Order (1991) folded the Illuminati, Freemasons and international bankers into an apocalyptic scheme [Webb, Conspiracy Theories, #62861, ch. on evangelicals; Profiles, “Pat Robertson”]. The reference shelf confirms that Falwell and Weyrich founded the Moral Majority in 1979 [Wikipedia: Moral Majority].

Christian nationalism: indictment and defence

The Power Worshippers is catalogued under Kristin Kobes Du Mez. Its front matter lists The Good News Club “by the same author”, and its notes cite Katherine Stewart’s own New York Times articles, which identifies the author as Katherine Stewart. Stewart writes: “Christian nationalism is not a religious creed but, in my view, a political ideology. It promotes the myth that the American republic was founded as a Christian nation.” It holds that legitimate government rests “not on the consent of the governed but on adherence to the doctrines of a specific religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage” [Stewart, The Power Worshippers, #67800, Introduction]. She traces its roots to pro-slavery theology: “Christian nationalism came of age in the American slave republic”, when theologians such as Robert Lewis Dabney called the nation a “Redeemer Nation” [ibid., ch. 5]. Her chapters document a Bible club in her daughter’s public school, the “Project Blitz” model legislation, and Bill Dallas’s United in Purpose. United in Purpose built a database “to guide conservative Christian voter registration and voter turnout operations” for “roughly 75 faith-oriented non-profit organizations” [ibid., chs. 7–8].

The opposing case comes from Milo Yiannopoulos’s Diabolical, whose catalogue entry names no author. He argues that “Judeo-Christian societies are fairer, happier, healthier, and more tolerant than others”. He cites reports from Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion since 2004 that show “how much safer and more pleasant western Christian societies are”. On his account, “the loss of religion in public life is what opened up the space” for identity politics [Yiannopoulos, Diabolical, #71209, “Make Way for the Irreligious Right”]. Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman write from the secular-liberal side. They describe 2016 as “White rural voters’ final break with the Democratic Party” [Schaller & Waldman, White Rural Rage, #62476].

Christian Zionism: the theological hinge

David W. Lutz’s chapter in Neo-Conned! Again traces the doctrine to John Nelson Darby (1800–82), who “left the Anglican priesthood to join the Plymouth Brethren”. “In 1909, Cyrus I. Scofield… published an edition of the King James Bible with premillennial dispensationalist notations. (Scofield read some of Darby’s writings while doing time for forgery.)” Lutz quotes a Christian Zionist Israel Report of December 2001 to show the effect of 11 September: “Today, Israel has the opportunity to wage total war against its terrorist enemies” [Lutz, in O’Huallachain (ed.), Neo-Conned! Again, #63415, “Unjust-War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem”].

Mearsheimer and Walt date the political turn: “The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 gave new life to the dispensationalist movement, but the Six-Day War in 1967… was even more important for its emergence as a political force.” Dispensationalists read the capture of the West Bank, “which, like Israel’s Likud party, they refer to as Judea and Samaria”, as prophecy fulfilled [Mearsheimer & Walt, The Israel Lobby, #75004, “Christian Zionists”]. William Bernstein argues that “uncritical American support for Israel’s expansion of West Bank settlement… can be traced directly to the advocacy of evangelicals, so-called Christian Zionists”. Two dispensationalist ministers gave the benedictions at the May 2018 opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem. One was Robert Jeffress, who “once claimed that Hitler had helped plan the Jew’s return to Israel”. The other was John Hagee, who “had deemed Hurricane Katrina God’s punishment for New Orleans’s sinfulness” [Bernstein, The Delusions of Crowds, #73904]. Synarchy reports that Hagee’s Christians United for Israel “claims a membership of seven million, larger than any Jewish organization” [Synarchy, #67074, “Zionists”].

Heisman: Normans, Saxons and a “half-Jewish” republic

Heisman offers an ethno-historical reading. The first presidencies, he notes, balanced Virginia and Massachusetts: Washington with Adams, then Adams with Jefferson. This “confirmed the primacy of the need to balance the representative scales of justice between Massachusetts and Virginia”. He traces this to a “core constitutional contradiction… the Jeffersonian proposition of the implicit constitutional equality of Normans and Saxons” [Heisman, suicide note, #38252, “American Presidency and Constitutional Contradiction”]. He calls Jefferson’s America “the rationalized side of this same Anglo-Saxon fantasy” that drove the Puritan revolution, and democracy “the final solution to the Norman problem” [ibid., part 713]. Quoting the critic Walter Kerr, he argues that the American mind “‘was ready to’ think Jewishly because of the profound Biblical influence that has defined the very invention that is America”. In his view, “culturally, Americans are like half-Jews” [ibid., part 593]. These are Heisman’s theses.

Willis adds a legal limit to religious freedom. The courts have held that “religions were not to be banned, but they needed to adhere to specific laws”. He cites the polygamy rulings and the Jehovah’s Witnesses cases, and he takes Jonestown (1978) as the point where that line “refuses to go away” [Willis, American Cults, #63203]. Cults themselves are treated in other Parts of this study.

Key points

• Willis calls the “Christian nation” belief an American myth [#63203]. The federal Constitution does not mention God [#53064].
• Gittins rejects the Masonic DC street plan as “preposterous” [#62988]. Hamer affirms it, along with Washington’s Masonic cornerstone of 18 September 1793 [#72888]. Horn reads Adams’s “engine of grief” as evidence of anti-Christian founders [#72784].
• Bellah defined civil religion in 1967. “Under God” entered the Pledge in 1954 and “In God we trust” became the national motto in 1956 [Wikipedia].
• Willis credits Ockenga with the term “Evangelical” and dates the political turn to Falwell’s Moral Majority (1979), after which evangelicals “joined the Republican Party” [#63203]. Webb gives Bebbington’s definition and Robertson’s role [#62861].
• Stewart calls Christian nationalism “a political ideology” born “in the American slave republic” [#67800]. Yiannopoulos argues that Judeo-Christian societies are “fairer, happier, healthier” [#71209].
• Christian Zionism runs from Darby and the Scofield Bible (1909) [#63415] to political force after 1967 [#75004] and to the 2018 embassy benedictions [#73904]. Christians United for Israel claims seven million members [#67074].
• Heisman reads the republic as a Norman–Saxon settlement shaped by Biblical, “Jewish” thinking [#38252].