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In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash

By Ralph C. Reynolds

Before the days of credit and debit cards, one used to see signs similar to the one above in diners, service stations, food stores, and many other establishments, obviously playing on the use of the motto "In God We Trust" that is on our coins and paper currency. It may come as a surprise to many younger and even not so young persons that this was not always so, that the regular use of "In God We Trust" on US coins did not begin until 1908, "In God We Trust" was not made an official motto of the United States until 1956, and the motto did not appear on paper money until 1957. The history of the choice of "In God We Trust" as an official motto of the United States and the practice of placing "In God We Trust" on coins and bills is a tale of historical revisionism, perfidy by our elected representatives and appointed officials, and ecclesiastical opportunism whose results have tended to eat away at the foundations of our liberties and threaten the very idea of the separation of church and state.

In contrast to the Declaration of Independence, and quite deliberately, the Constitution of the United States contains not a single reference to a deity or to divine inspiration. This was, of course, due to the genius of the founding fathers who saw in Europe and elsewhere the strife that had been engendered by the adoption of official religions in nearly all Old World countries. Yet we frequently see in letters to the editor and elsewhere the claim that the US was created and remains a Christian nation. I have had several e-mail notes from evangelicals and fundamentalists who have maintained the same thing. When pressed as to where this idea comes from, they point to the words "In God We Trust" on all our money and the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. Well, how did this come about? How did the clearly unconstitutional words "In God We Trust" and "under God" come to appear on our money and in our Pledge of Allegiance?

In the early years of our country, around 1800, when church affiliation was perhaps 10% (some authorities say up to 17-20%) of the population, the motto on our coins, then the major medium of exchange, was often just "LIBERTY." In 1776, Congress appointed John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to design a Great Seal for the fledgling country. The motto they adopted for the Great Seal was E Pluribus Unum, meaning, "from many, one" or "one unity composed of many parts." Although the design was rejected, the motto was adopted by the designers of the Great Seal approved by Congress in 1782. The motto was first used on coins of the United States mint in 1795, and both legends, that is, LIBERTY and E Pluribus Unum, were used somewhat regularly on coins throughout the nineteenth century.

By 1860 the proportion of church-related persons in the United States had slowly doubled or tripled to about 40% of the population, and during and following the Civil War, there was a burgeoning of religious fanaticism in America that built on a general feeling fed by the clergy that the Civil War was God's punishment for omitting His name from the Constitution. In 1863, eleven Protestant denominations banded together to petition the Congress to correct the oversight by the founders and "reform" the Constitution to indicate that the United States was created as and remained a Christian nation. Thus, the so-called National Reform Association submitted the following additions to the preamble:

We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the ruler among nations, his revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the inalienable rights and the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to ourselves, our posterity, and all the people, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. [Proposed additions italicized.]

The Christian amendment never gained the approval of the Congress or of any of the states. When introduced again in 1874 it never got out of committee. In its heyday, however, in the early 1860s, the NRA (not the gun people) had as members many prominent men including a Supreme Court Justice, William Strong, and two ex-governors of Pennsylvania, J.W. Geary and James Pollock. The stated and well-known goal of the NRA was the creation of a Christian theocracy in the United States. Although they were singularly unsuccessful in their primary goal of amending the preamble, the organization lasted through the first half of the twentieth century and apparently still had registered lobbyists in the late 1950s.

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ARMPIT