Describe your latest book.
My book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, seeks to explain why so many Americans have come to believe that this country is an officially "Christian nation." As I show in the book, the religious symbols and ceremonies that are often invoked as proof that it is come not from the Founding Fathers but rather from our own grandfathers.
The book begins by showing how, during their fight against the New Deal, corporate leaders worked with conservative clergymen to advance a language of "freedom under God" that they could use to challenge the "slavery of the state." Over the 1930s and 1940s, they spent a great deal of time and money popularizing this new Christian libertarianism, and with the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, they succeeded in placing an ally in power.
With the new president pointing the way, America officially embraced a wide variety of developments that previously would have been unthinkable — the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953, the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and the adoption of "In God We Trust" on paper money in 1955 and as the national motto in 1956. During these years, Americans were told their country was a Christian nation; they've believed it ever since.
Eisenhower succeeded in enshrining all these new religious changes largely because he had uncoupled the religion from its partisan political origins. But in the 1960s, politics crept back in, first in the backlash over the Supreme Court's decisions against school prayer, then in a bitter congressional fight over a prayer amendment, and finally when the Nixon administration sought to use the language of piety and patriotism as cover for...