The corporate Christian conspiracy? A historian tries to blame "Christian libertarians" for the idea that America is a Christian nation.

• Author: Doberty, Brian
• Position: Book review

One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, by Kevin M. Kruse, Basic Books, 352 pages, $29.99

One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History, by Peter Manseau, Little, Brown and Co., 469 pages, $28

IN HIS MUCH-LAUDED new book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse promises to tell us the real reason so many people think America is a "Christian nation." As telegraphed by his bolder-than-the-evidence subtitle, Kruse believes that modern American Christian religiosity was not grown organically from native soil but planted in our minds with malice aforethought by corporations in the 1950s. Their secret purpose: to crush the New Deal.

Many historians--particularly Jonathan Herzog, in his 2011 book The Spiritual-Industrial Complex--have made a thorough case that the religious fervor of the '50 s was rooted in Cold War anxieties. These fears were certainly shaped and guided by state, corporate, and other interests, as Herzog stresses, but such efforts could not have been effective had they not resonated with the broader population, making '50s religiosity more a diffuse public reaction than a deliberately conceived plot. Kruse acknowledges that theory, but insists that it pays insufficient attention to some religious-ideological interest groups funded by the pre-Cold War rich who were motivated more to oppose the New Deal than to contain the Soviet threat.

America's intelligentsia are perpetually attracted to theories in which beliefs they disapprove of and/or are perplexed by do not arise from independent agency but are imposed on an easily duped populace. (See, for example, the conspiracies pinning the Tea Party movement on a plutocratic propaganda machine that hypnotized dumb Americans into acting against their own interests.) Kruse tosses in another popular, if more obscure, trend in ideological historiography by inaccurately conflating libertarianism with the more well-known conservative movement. Indeed, one of the main villains in Kruse's version of 20th century America is that curious breed he calls the "Christian libertarian."

Here's Kruse's brief: After World War II, the Christian libertarians rebranded their free market, anti-New Deal ideas as a form of religiously rooted Americanism. The players included Spiritual Mobilization (a genuinely libertarian advocacy group that aimed its efforts mostly at Protestant clergy), the Rev. Billy Graham, and the National Council for Christian Leadership, a prayer group movement...