The phrase is printed on every bill and stamped on every coin. “In God We Trust.” It is presented as an American tradition, a founding principle, proof that this nation was built on Christian foundations.
That. Is. A. Lie.
The phrase did not appear on currency until 1864, nearly a century after the founding.1 It did not become the official national motto until 1956.2 The Founders had been dead for generations. The men who wrote the Constitution and fought the Revolution never put God on the money. They put Liberty on the money. They put eagles on the money. They put “E Pluribus Unum” on the money. Out of Many, One. A secular statement of unity. A declaration that this new nation was defined by its people, not by its deity.
“In God We Trust” was added later, by religious activists who wanted to claim the republic for their faith. It was a retroactive baptism. And it worked. Millions of Americans now believe the lie. They point to the currency and say, “Look, it says In God We Trust. This has always been a Christian nation.”
The phrase on the money is not proof of the founding. It is proof of the capture.
The Founding Fathers were explicit. In 1797, the United States Senate unanimously ratified the Treaty of Tripoli, a peace agreement with the Muslim rulers of the Barbary Coast. Article 11 states: “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”3 Unanimously. Signed by President John Adams. No debate. No controversy. It was a statement of fact to assure a Muslim nation that they would not be treated as infidels. The Senate understood that the American government was secular. They voted to say so in writing.
If the Founders had intended a Christian nation, they would never have agreed to this. They would have insisted on language that proclaimed Jesus Christ as the foundation of the state. They did the opposite. They declared, in a legally binding treaty, that the government was not founded on Christianity.
The Constitution itself is silent on God. It mentions religion exactly once, in Article VI, which bans religious tests for office.4 No mention of Jesus. No mention of the Bible. No mention of a creator. The document that establishes the United States government derives its authority from “We the People,” not from divine ordination. This was a radical break from the European model, where kings ruled by the grace of God and the church was an arm of the state. The American experiment was built on the opposite premise: that the government’s legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed, not from the will of a deity.
The Founders were not Christians in the sense that modern evangelicals claim. They were Deists. They believed in a creator who set the universe in motion and then stepped back, a God who did not intervene in human affairs and did not write books. Thomas Jefferson took a razor to his Bible and cut out every miracle, every reference to the divinity of Jesus, every supernatural claim. He kept the moral teachings and discarded the religion. He called the result “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.”5 It was the ethics of Christianity without the theology. This was the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
George Washington rarely mentioned Jesus in his writings. He attended church irregularly and refused to take communion. When he spoke of religion, he spoke in generic terms about providence and the importance of morality. He did not preach Christian doctrine. He did not claim that the United States was a Christian nation.6
Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense” that inspired the Revolution, attacked organized religion in “The Age of Reason.” He called it “a human invention set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” He rejected Christianity entirely. The man whose words lit the fuse of American independence was a sworn enemy of the church.
The First Amendment was the deliberate culmination of this vision. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The first sixteen words of the Bill of Rights created a wall between church and state. The government would not establish a national church. It would not favor one faith over another. It would not enforce religious doctrine. It would protect the right of every citizen to worship or not worship as they chose. This was not an accident. It was the core of the American invention: a nation where religion was a matter of individual conscience, not state policy.
So where did “In God We Trust” come from?
In 1861, a Pennsylvania minister named M.R. Watkinson wrote to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. He complained that the absence of God on American currency was a “disgrace.” He argued that the coins should bear a statement of faith. Chase agreed. He instructed the Mint to design coins with the phrase. The first coins bearing “In God We Trust” appeared in 1864, during the Civil War.1 It was not a founding principle. It was the demand of a single minister who thought secular currency was an insult to his religion.
The phrase appeared and disappeared on various coins over the next century. It was not standardized. It was not universal. It was not the national motto. The national motto remained “E Pluribus Unum.”
Then came the Cold War. The Soviet Union was officially atheist. American politicians wanted to distinguish the United States from its communist enemy. In 1954, Congress added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.7 In 1956, Congress passed a law making “In God We Trust” the official national motto.2 In 1957, it began appearing on paper currency. The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, lobbied heavily for these changes.8 They were not recovering lost traditions. They were creating new ones. They were rewriting American history to claim the republic for Christianity.
The men who added God to the pledge and the currency were not the Founding Fathers. They were Cold War politicians and religious lobbyists who wanted to baptize the country after the fact. The Founders had been dead for over 140 years. Their secular vision was overwritten by a generation that wanted to fight godless communism with state-sponsored religion.
The courts have upheld the phrase by claiming it is “ceremonial deism.” They argue that the words have been repeated so often and are so generic that they have lost all religious meaning. This is legal nonsense. If the words have no meaning, why fight to keep them? If they do have meaning, then the government is endorsing a religious claim. The courts cannot have it both ways. They have created a doctrine that says the government can endorse religion as long as it does so vaguely enough that no one is supposed to take it seriously.
But people do take it seriously. Christian Nationalists point to the currency and the pledge as evidence that this is their country. They argue that the founding was Christian, that the laws should reflect biblical principles, that non-Christians are guests in a Christian nation. The phrase on the money is the thin end of the wedge. It is used to justify Ten Commandments monuments in courthouses. It is used to defend prayer in public schools. It is used to argue that secularism is an attack on American heritage rather than the fulfillment of it.
The current Supreme Court has embraced this logic. In Kennedy v. Bremerton, the Court allowed a public high school football coach to pray at the 50-yard line after games.9 In Town of Greece v. Galloway, the Court allowed explicitly Christian prayers at government meetings.10 In Carson v. Makin, the Court required Maine to fund religious education with taxpayer money.11 The wall between church and state is being dismantled, brick by brick, by justices who claim to be originalists but who ignore the original founding vision.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was grounded in religious doctrine, not constitutional principle. The majority opinion cited medieval legal traditions and a moral framework that comes from Catholic teaching, not from the text of the Constitution. The attack on LGBTQ+ rights is similarly grounded in biblical interpretation. The legislators who pass laws banning abortion and restricting transgender healthcare do not cite legal precedent. They cite scripture. They are imposing their religious beliefs on citizens who do not share them, using the power of the state to enforce theological doctrine.
This is exactly what the Founders feared. They knew the history of religious war in Europe. They knew what happened when the state enforced orthodoxy. They built a government that derived its authority from the consent of the governed, not from the will of God, specifically to prevent this. They created a secular republic where people of all faiths and no faith could live together as equals under the law. The Christian Nationalists who claim to be restoring American values are destroying them. They are not patriots returning to the founding vision. They are heretics against the founding vision, betraying the secular experiment for a theocratic fantasy.
“In God We Trust” tells atheists, agnostics, and non-monotheists that they are not part of the “we.” It tells them this is not their country. Every transaction forces citizens to carry and exchange a religious statement. The most visible representation of the state asserts a claim that millions of citizens do not believe. It is an establishment of religion, printed in ink and stamped in metal, enforced by the government that is supposed to be neutral.
The original motto was better. “E Pluribus Unum.” Out of Many, One. It described a nation where people of different backgrounds, different faiths, different origins could come together as equal citizens. It made no theological claims. It excluded no one. It was a statement of political unity, not religious conformity.
The Founders chose those words. They chose a secular government. They chose a wall between church and state. They chose a nation where the state would not enforce religion and religion would not control the state. They did not put God on the money because they did not believe the government should be in the business of theological declarations.
The people who added “In God We Trust” to the currency and “under God” to the pledge were not honoring the Founders. They were undoing them. They were replacing the secular vision with a religious claim. They were taking a nation designed to protect religious freedom and turning it into a nation that enforces religious conformity.
The phrase on the money is not a tradition to be preserved. It is a lie to be exposed. It is evidence of a theft. The theocrats stole the republic from its secular founders. It is time to take it back.
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Great article. I don’t agree with the conclusions but so appreciate discussions about religion in America.
Thank you for reading and taking the time to comment.
Jason, I agree. It is a great article. With that said, what are the conclusions that you don’t agree with?
For the record, I was born and raised an Episcopalian … a Protestant Christian denomination.
Thank you, as well.
I too am curious.