Salon magazine has the article “Pagan statism”: The frightening corporate/Christian alliance that invented “In God We Trust” and “One Nation Under God”

In 1949, some of the country’s top advertising executives launched a national marketing campaign. They weren’t selling a physical product. They were selling religion. Before long, the Religion in American Life campaign was placing close to 10,000 newspaper ads per year, coordinating national radio marketing, and putting up thousands of billboards, all intended “to accent the importance of all religious institutions as the basis of American life.” Major corporations bankrolled the effort.

We tend to imagine public expressions of faith as rising spontaneously from the American people, for good or for ill. When a politician says “God bless America,” she’s trying to sound like a populist, not like a corporate pawn. But as Princeton historian Kevin Kruse details in a new book, “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,” our country’s religious slogans owe more to corporate campaigns than they do to grassroots work.

You probably already had a good guess as to the types of people who were and are the pushers. Did you know about the specifics described in the article, and presumably, the book?

As you may recognize, my headline is derived from something that Karl Marx wrote in an introduction to his paper A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.

You can read the full context, and try to figure out exactly what Marx was saying. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t what you always thought it was. It depends on your interpretation, and what you always thought about the statement.