{"id":20565,"date":"2015-04-27T21:21:44","date_gmt":"2015-04-28T01:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=20565"},"modified":"2015-04-27T21:21:44","modified_gmt":"2015-04-28T01:21:44","slug":"religion-is-the-opium-of-the-people-and-salon-knows-who-the-pushers-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2015\/04\/27\/religion-is-the-opium-of-the-people-and-salon-knows-who-the-pushers-are\/","title":{"rendered":"“Religion is the opium of the people” and Salon Knows Who the Pushers Are"},"content":{"rendered":"

Salon<\/em> magazine has the article \u201cPagan statism\u201d: The frightening corporate\/Christian alliance that invented \u201cIn God We Trust\u201d and \u201cOne Nation Under God\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

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In 1949, some of the country\u2019s top advertising executives launched a national marketing campaign. They weren\u2019t 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 \u201cto accent the importance of all religious institutions as the basis of American life.\u201d Major corporations bankrolled the effort.<\/p>\n

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We tend to imagine public expressions of faith as rising spontaneously from the American people, for good or for ill. When a politician says \u201cGod bless America,\u201d she\u2019s trying to sound like a populist, not like a corporate pawn. But as Princeton historian Kevin Kruse details in a new book, \u201cOne Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America,\u201d<\/a> our country\u2019s religious slogans owe more to corporate campaigns than they do to grassroots work.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Philosophy of Right<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nReligious 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.<\/p>\n

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Salon magazine has the article \u201cPagan statism\u201d: The frightening corporate\/Christian alliance that invented \u201cIn God We Trust\u201d and \u201cOne Nation Under God\u201d In 1949, some of the country\u2019s top advertising executives launched a national marketing campaign. They weren\u2019t selling a physical product. They were selling religion. Before long, the Religion in American Life campaign was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-20565","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20565"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20565\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20566,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20565\/revisions\/20566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}