Kevin Kruse is a professor of 20th Century American History at Princeton University. His new book, “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America” is an examination of the myth of a Christian America, and how many of the tropes invoked to “prove” that America is a Christian country were invented just in the last 80 years.
Even more revealingly, the invention of a Christian America came from a coalition of businessmen and popular preachers who wanted to fight the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal. From the very beginning, the myth of a Christian America was tied to the myth of free enterprise — and so the rise of the Religious Right and of neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s are deeply intertwined.