For a very, very long time, the official motto of the United States was E Pluribus Unum, a Latin phrase meaning “out of many, one.” In 1956, it was changed to In God We Trust, an English phrase meaning “there’s only one real religion in this country, dammit!”
This wasn’t the only religion-oriented change made in the 1950s. That was the same decade the Pledge of Allegiance gained “under God,” angering atheist kids and secular humanist parents the nation over. On the bright side, no one was required to do the Hitler (née Bellamy) salute any more (I’m serious, that’s what they did when they said the Pledge back before World War II; Wikipedia sez so). At any rate, why was Christianity so zealously promoted during these times? Easy: the Cold War. I’m certainly not the first to point out the connection, so don’t go telling people I made this all up. The common conception of the time was that Communists were evil. Soviet Russia was Communist and highly atheistic. Ergo, atheists were evil. To combat the evil, godlessness of the Communists, the United States promoted Christianity, ostensibly to show the world that America was the source of everything good, such as apple pie and Playboy, because we had God on our side.
History will record that Russia disintegrated and America won the Cold War. But did the Christianity promotion stop? No. The Pledge has resisted all efforts to revert it back to the original “under God”-less version and In God We Trust is still the motto of every American, much to the dismay of the ones who don’t actually believe in or trust God.
The motto is really a false one. While monotheistic religions (such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) dominate the United States, there are still millions of Americans who don’t believe in any god, much less the Judeo-Christian God, which is the obvious reference in the phrase. The use of this phrase denies that America is made up of a diverse bunch of religions, such as Buddhism or Wiccan. And what of the people who don’t ascribe to any religion, such as atheists, agnostics, or secular humanists? They do not trust in God.
The main issue behind this is the separation of church and state. By claiming God as being behind the United States, the government is giving preference to a handful of religions over all others. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The government should have no say in religion at all. I don’t care if the majority of Americans are God-fearing, church-going Christians. The minority has rights, too, especially the right to not be misrepresented.
The phrase E Pluribus Unum (still found on our currency, at least) implies a diverse spread of people banding together to form a single nation. That is what America is. America is Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, and secular. It’s every one of the religions (or lack thereof) that its citizens believe in. No one religion (or religion in general) should get preference simply for being the majority. If you want say that you personally trust in God, that’s great. But that shouldn’t be applied to everyone, especially when a good deal of them don’t trust in or even believe in God. This is a diverse nation, not a Christian nation.
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