A faith-based view of history

In “One Nation Under God,” James P. Moore Jr. treats the expression of prayer as a defining force in the national identity. The narrative opens with the American Indians and follows varied manifestations of the reverence for the divine from the European discovery of America to the landing of the Pilgrims, the colonial era, independence from Britain, the Civil War and on through keystone events of the last two centuries.

With a tone of patient optimism, the author orchestrates anecdotes of major (and occasionally lesser) historical figures and how they expressed themselves to God at pivotal moments in their lives. This take on the great-man theory of history, propounded by Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century, has its limitations; however, the cameos are sparkling cul-de-sacs off the center lane of the narrative.

We see Yankee slugger Babe Ruth as he lay dying of throat cancer, surrounded by Catholic medals and relics, and murmuring over and over: “My Jesus, mercy.” Country singer Johnny Cash, who dressed in black with a preacher’s coat whenever he performed, “believed that two-way communication with God was what saved his life from self-destruction.” LBJ said prayers in public as the Vietnam War became his quagmire.

Several years later, when a sobbing Richard Nixon realized he had to resign the presidency because of the Watergate scandal, he told Secretary of State Kissinger: “Henry, you are not a very orthodox Jew, and I am not an orthodox Quaker, but we need to pray.” At his president’s command, Kissinger knelt beside him as Nixon prayed for “help, rest, peace, and love” -- and then pounded his fist on the rug, wailing, “What have I done?”

The author is chief executive of ATI (formerly Ameritrade International), teaches at the Georgetown University Business School and was assistant secretary of Commerce in the Reagan administration. These are unexpected credentials. What does a financial expert have to say about prayer and politics? Quite a lot, in fact. Moore does so in lucid prose, keeping tight focus on how spiritual beliefs have coursed through the growth and development of the country. He shows a sensitive ear for the language of worship in approaching the struggles, wars, cultural high points and times of crisis, letting the rhetoric advance a theme that is as true today as when De Tocqueville made his famous journey to the United States in the early 19th century: that Americans, in the main, are a prayerful people, grounded in religious beliefs.

Moore’s account of Native American worship includes a poignant description of the ghost dance, “a prayer ritual that spread rapidly across American tribes in the late nineteenth century to implore the Creator to help them confront the realities of living alongside the white man.” In an oral history from 1931, the Sioux chief Black Elk related his prayer to the Great Spirit: “Hear me, not for myself, but for my people: I am old. Hear me that they once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding tree!”

Columbus prayed three times a day in leading three ships on the discovery of America. Writes Moore: “All the crews shared the same daily routine, often hearing one another’s prayers across the lapping of the waves.” For the Puritans and other early settlers, God was seen as the main protagonist of all life. Singing in churches was a release from rough yeoman burdens. The power of individual preachers held great sway over an emergent New England sensibility. In the 1692 Salem witch trials, the author sees a community torn apart by an obsessed young minister, Cotton Mather. Moore offers scant analysis on what went wrong within the community; however he notes that Samuel Sewall, the chief justice of Massachusetts who presided over the trials, in his later years confessed to “the Blame and shame of it” and begged God to “pardon that sin and all other sins.”

Chapter titles reflect thematic groupings, such as “The Healers,” “The Pathfinders” and “The Soldiers.” In “The Dreamers,” Moore chronicles the aspirations of Southern slaves, from the ring shouts of African memory to the spirituals as songs for freedom. He quotes H.L. Mencken on the unknown composer of “Deep River,” who is called “one of the greatest poets we have produced.” The lines are haunting:

Deep river, my home is over Jordan

Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground ...

Oh, chillun

Oh, don’t you want to go to that gospel feast

That promised land, where all is peace?

In his approach to writers, Moore’s powers of synthesis falter. “Most of the greater writers of the first half of the twentieth century led torturous lives,” he reports, as if writers in any age have not been complicated people, prone to occupational hazards such as alcohol or drugs. Moore’s condescending tone toward Hemingway, Fitzgerald and others who strayed from religious moorings is too sweeping in its assumptions.

In five paragraphs given to William Faulkner, Moore asserts: “By using prayer as a vehicle, he depicted personalities and devised plots that showed depth, shallowness and duplicity.” This awkward sentence, without a single plot or character summary as example, leads to: “It was an effect that would profoundly influence such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus” -- an even more enigmatic statement, as those French writers were confirmed atheists.

Moore writes of Sinclair Lewis’ “Elmer Gantry,” the novel about a stem-winding preacher with a secret life of promiscuity, as “the musings of Lewis, trying to imagine what his own fate might have been had he entered the ministry.” That is a poor misreading of a book that captured a genuine American archetype: the religious charlatan. Gantry foreshadowed televangelists like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, who projected their secret sins into bombastic sermons that seem all the more ludicrous in the replays.

Moore argues for restoration of prayer in public places as a form of continuity with rooted traditions: “It is reckless to view prayer solely as an appendage of religion, to see it as a divisive, polarizing force,” he insists. “Throughout history, prayer has infused Americans with a sense of their spirituality in a world too often rocked by a lack of moral grounding.”

At the same time, religious hypocrisy is a mighty current in our history. It is a shame that Moore gives this topic short shrift, for his thesis is undeniably true: American values rest on a religious bedrock. Yet the author avoids hard questions, such as: How should we distinguish reverence from opportunism? The influence of Christian triumphalism on national politics -- as seen in evangelicals such as Franklin Graham calling for a

crusade to convert Muslims -- has divided America as deeply, if not so bitterly, as in the Vietnam years. This makes it all the more disappointing that Moore avoids a probing analysis of how prayer, when marshaled for purely political ends, begets a hubris subverting piety to power. *