Ben Carson,
the Sarah Palin of brain surgery.
Carson, a Seventh Day Adventist, told the gathering at the Free Chapel in Gainesville that, if elected president, he would place God at the center of American culture and politics.
“The pledge of allegiance to our flag says we are one nation under God,” he said. “Many courtrooms in the land on the wall it says ‘In God We Trust.’ Every coin in our pocket, every bill in our wallet says ‘In God We Trust.’” [...]
“So if it’s in our founding documents, it’s in our pledges, in our courts and it’s on our money, but we’re not supposed to talk about it, what in the world is that?” Carson said.
Here's some fun facts for you kids at home:
In God We Trust does not appear to be in any of our
founding documents, and in fact the bit about
under God was not even a part of the original pledge of allegiance, which was itself a 20th century invention. The phrase was tacked on (to the pledge, to the bills in our wallet, and as "national motto") in the rabid anti-communist fervor of the 1950s. The Godless Communists were, you see, Godless, and the anti-communism of the time therefore demanded true Americans do the opposite of whatever
they did at every opportunity including, whenever possible, purely symbolic gestures that had little actual impact on anything but which made hardliners and shallow people puff up with self-congratulation.
That's right, kids, the omnipresent godbothering of our national government and that pledge you say in school is the direct legacy of Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witchhunts and the Red Scare that rolled through Congress, blacklisting so-called subversives and ruining so very many American lives. (As an aside, whether the addition of under God in the pledge of allegiance was meant to cause closeted American maybe-communist gradeschoolers to burst into flames when spoken or whether it was intended to just make them feel bad is lost to history; whether adding the phrase to courthouses was meant to ward off communists in a similar fashion, also unknown. A great deal of what arch-conservatives believed about communists in those days appears to have been gleaned from books about vampires.)
So the vast majority of those things Dr. Ben Carson is referring to are not in our founding documents or were part of American life at all until the 1950s, or roughly the time when Dr. Ben Carson himself was founded.
But what of the coins? Ah, that's a slightly more obscure story. Head below the fold for all the details.
The motto IN GOD WE TRUST was placed on United States coins largely because of the increased religious sentiment existing during the Civil War. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase received many appeals from devout persons throughout the country, urging that the United States recognize the Deity on United States coins. From Treasury Department records, it appears that the first such appeal came in a letter dated November 13, 1861. It was written to Secretary Chase by Rev. M. R. Watkinson, Minister of the Gospel from Ridleyville, Pennsylvania, and read:
[...] You are probably a Christian. What if our Republic were not shattered beyond reconstruction? Would not the antiquaries of succeeding centuries rightly reason from our past that we were a heathen nation? [...]
The appeals worked, and the motto was added by the federal government as God-invoking bulwark against the Confederacy. Federally minted coins were adorned with the phrase as of 1864, allowing every northerner to carry proof that God was on the Union side right in their own purses and pockets.
Now where were we? Ah yes, Dr. Ben Carson, speaking of the pledge and our courts and money and things. I'm going to guess he is unawares that the government generally gets into the mandatory godbothering business only when Very Bad Things are going down, but then again if Dr. Ben Carson became president we can reckon that Very Bad Things would be going down on a daily basis.