Our history with religion is really weird and not at all what we are taught in school. Our so-called "Protestant work ethic" comes from the Northeast, which was "settled" by small factions of Christians from England and Northern Europe like the Puritans. We're told they were looking for "Religious freedom". Well, they want the kind of "religious freedom" right-wingers today are looking for. The freedom to impress their religion on everyone else.
This was very different from the colonists in Virginia and the rest of the South. They were more of a weird mix between proto-capitalists and feudal lords. For them, religion was more of a social affair than anything. There was even a little of what could be considered socialism sprinkled throughout the North and South.
And then you have the French, who took a very "when in Rome" approach when dealing with the native populations they came across. They basically adopted and adjusted to whatever they came across so they could conduct trade. I'm not even going into the Spanish and various waves of immigrants that brought their own takes of faith. And, oh ya, the people who were already here when whitey showed up and Africans dragged here as slaves.
For most of American history, the majority vaguely identified as some sort of Christian but didn't really fall into a specific dogma. Publicly throwing around Christianity was usually just a cover to do something awful to "others". We really didn't call ourselves a "Christian nation". in fact, the Second Great Awakening, which gave birth to denominations like the Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, was centered around the idea that the Founders weren't religious enough and America needed to
become a Christian nation.
The modern roots of the evangelical movement we see taking over take shape in the 1930s, in Hollywood of all places. There was a minister named
James Fifield who worked with corporate backers to attack the New Deal and made capitalism vs communism central to his ministry.
And in the 1960s, Ike wanted to promote spiritualism to further differentiate the US from the Soviet Union. Granted, Ike wasn't pushing the toxic form of Christianity we are threatened by of today. He even worked to have more synagogues and mosques built. He simply believed that everyone should express some form of faith. It did lead to the intertwining of religion and government (well further so) and the rewriting of American history to be a lot more "Christian" than it really is.
Kevin Kruse's
One Nation Under God goes into this particular movement and how it led up to a lot of notable figures we see today.
