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PIE IN THE
SKY
Live
on hay.
Work
and pray.
There’ll
be pie
in
the sky
when
you die.
It’s
a lie.
Despite
proclamations upholding the U.S. Constitution, more than half of its citizens
are under the delusion that they live in an officially Christian nation. The
separation of church and state which Jefferson crafted in the 1770s has been
eroded by corporate sponsorship of religious fundamentalists since the 1930s.
Their merger with the Christian Right is documented in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invested Christian America,
(Basic Books), by Kevin M Kruse, a history Professor at Princeton.
Infuriated by the mild reforms of the
New Deal, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers
made use of the clergy after surveys had shown that the public gave more credit
to the pulpit than to any other platform.
Rev. James W. Fifield became known as
‘Saint Paul of the Prosperous’ from his consoling the consciences of millionaires
at First Congregational in Los Angeles where he compared reading the bible to
eating fish – you throw out the bones about the evils of wealth and savour the
fleshpots of its accumulation. In 1935, he set up Spiritual Mobilisation to
push for ‘freedom under god’. Within fifteen years, it had a weekly radio show
on 800 stations, offering cash prizes for ministers to preach the gospel of
wealth.
A
rival in the person of Rev Abraham Vereide had ministered to the corporate
bosses in Seattle and San Francisco for the distress caused by their striking
workers. He promoted prayer breakfasts to bring the executives and the
politicians together. By 1952, he had conducted weekly prayer meetings in both houses
of Congress, opened ‘God’s Embassy’ in the national capital, and held ‘dedication
ceremonies’ for freshly installed Justices of the Supreme Court. Government
Departments soon institutionalised prayer breakfasts, serving as an informal
‘loyalty test’. ‘Reds’ were known not to pray.
Billy Graham became the most
notorious propagandist for capitalism. The Garden of Eden, he preached, had ‘no
union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes and no disease.’ All government intervention was socialism, or
what Fifield had called ‘pagan statism’. In 1952, Graham took his Crusade to Washington
and got congressmen to serve as ushers at his rallies, starting with a formal
service on the steps of the Capitol. His success seemed unstoppable. He talked
the legislature into a National Day of Prayer, and supplied scriptural quotations
for Eisenhower’s election addresses.
Ike accepted Graham’s support but knew
better than to abolish the New Deal reforms in one throw. Instead he had
himself re-baptised a few days after his inauguration in 1953, broadcast from
the Oval Office to the American Legion’s ‘Back to God’ campaign, went to the
inaugural National Prayer Breakfast with Rev. Vereide and opened his first
cabinet meeting with a prayer.
In 1954, Congress added ‘under God’ to
the Pledge of Allegiance before placing ‘In God We Trust’ on the postage and
the currency. In 1956 the phrase became the nation’s motto.
Meanwhile, the corporates had been
too savvy to trust god to advance their propaganda efforts. By the early 1940s,
the ‘capitalism’ stank to high heaven after two world wars, fascism and the Great
Depression. In Taking the risk out of
democracy, Australian industrial psychologist Alex Carey documents how the
National Association of Manufacturers and their like paid millions of dollars
to marketing agencies to road test a new brand label. By 1945, they had come up
with ‘free enterprise’. Thereafter, employer federations spent at least $100
million a year until the threat from organised labour and New Dealism had been
beaten down by the mid-Fifties, aided by McCarthyite Red scares.
To
be effective these propaganda campaigns had to be out in the open while their
funding was fixed behind the altars. Historically illiterate hacks like RN’s
Frantic Kelly disparage Kruse and Carey as conspiracy theorists. The business
manoeuverings they reveal are conspiracy facts, footnoted to the last tax-deductible
dollar. Harvard hands out MBAs for mastering their operation and method.
Humphrey
McQueen
Authorised by the never-died collective
www.facebook.com/JoeHillorganiser
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