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“America has a long way to go until it becomes the country it thinks it already is.”

This comment by a retired Canadian defense attorney I mentioned in my last Blog would be rejected out of hand by most political and religious conservatives, arguing as they always do that America is the greatest nation on earth. That is why, they insist, so many people want to come here to live.

It’s called “American exceptionalism,” the conviction that America is qualitatively different from other nations. Translated it is the belief that our country is better than any other, not because we as a people are better, but because America was founded as a light unto the nations, a beacon on a hill, a nation with a divine destiny to lead the world.

This is the stuff of cultural mythology, which is precisely what it is, a myth conservative Americans keep telling themselves as if it was passed down from our country’s founders.

The truth, however, is a different story, as Princeton historian Kevin Kruse documents in his very important book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.

As he explains, in the aftermath of the economic devastation wrought by the Great Depression, corporate America fell from its vaulted status as the perfect engine that kept America running. In response top corporate leaders formed the National Manufacturing Association (NMA) to wage a public relations campaign to rehabilitate their public image.

Essentially the story they told was that capitalism, i.e., their businesses, was the reason for American exceptionalism, but to their dismay the effort was failing. Many politicians and commentators criticized the NMA for a message that was self-serving because in fact it was. The more they tried the less what they did worked.

Then they discovered an unexpected ally, some might even have thought a gift from God. The Reverend James Fifield, Senior Minister at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, was a theological liberal, but also a Herbert Hoover Republican.

Fifield shared the NMA’s disdain for Roosevelt’s policies as an threat to capitalism. He even used the familiar phrase “creeping socialism” to describe the New Deal. In a speech before the NMA he extolled the virtues of Faith, Freedom, and Free Enterprise. By the time he finished corporate America knew it had found its man.

With major corporate funding Fifield founded an organization he called Spiritual Mobilization that promoted the free enterprise system as the key to American prosperity because it protected individual freedom that was core to the religious heritage of a righteous nation.

Faith, Freedom, and Free Enterprise. Together these once made America great, Fifield preached, and it could do it again, if ordinary citizens understood that the three were inextricably linked. A threat to one was a threat to all three.

Spiritual Mobilization was amazingly successful in framing American history as the story of the birth of a Christian nation destined to political and economic greatness so long as it honored God in its public and private life. In short, it succeeded in baptizing American exceptionalism.

There were voices of dissent among scholars and clergy to be sure, but they were no match for Fifield and a young, charismatic evangelist who was barnstorming the country with the same message Spiritual Mobilization preached. His name was Billy Graham.

Unlike Fifield, Graham was anything but a theological liberal. He was in fact a Christian fundamentalist who believed the only hope for a nation that had drifted from its spiritual foundations was genuine Christian conversion.

But Graham was more than a preacher. He was radically anti-Communist and like Fifield believed New Deal programs such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, market regulations, and public jobs programs were a threat to American freedom and liberty and could lead the country into becoming a welfare state.

By the 1950’s Graham’s linking of the spiritual renewal of the nation with conservative politics made him a friend to more than a few Republicans. He became a frequent visitor to the White House during the Eisenhower presidency, and served as the president’s de facto spiritual advisor. Later he would play a similar role for Richard Nixon when he became president.

More of that next time as we continue this fascinating story of how what Kruse calls “political religion,” or what sociologists call “American civil religion,” was invented rather than being core to the Constitution.