Sixty-nine years ago today...
Small things over time become big things. Small changes can lead to large consequences, and a four-word phrase added to our money in 1957 has grown into a tool for telling Americans who belongs.
What was slipped in quietly should be able to come out the same way.
But today, Trump and sadly, his, HIS Republican Party would ridiculously sell its removal as a war on Christianity, proof that the left wants God erased from American life.
That reaction is itself the argument: a motto that cannot be questioned without being called an attack on faith has stopped being a motto and become a loyalty test.
Sixty-nine years later, the phrase is on every bill in your wallet. Hanging in our courts and government offices. This was not the America we created originally, or wanted, and for good reason.
It has also become something more than a slogan.
Christian nationalism has moved from the fringe into statehouses, school boards, and the White House.
Donald Trump learned that religion is a loyalty test he can sell, and he has used it to regain power and hold it.
A national motto that ties American identity to one idea of God is the perfect tool for that project.
So on this anniversary, a modest proposal:
retire "In God We Trust" and restore the motto that held this country together for its first 180 years.
E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. Our best and original national motto.
How God got on the money
The phrase is not a founding principle. It is a product of two wars, one hot and one cold.
- 1864. During the Civil War, after a minister petitioned Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase to recognize God on the coinage, "In God We Trust" first appeared on the two-cent piece.
- 1907. Theodore Roosevelt, a devout Christian, approved new gold coins without the phrase. He argued that putting God's name on money came close to sacrilege, cheapening something sacred by stamping it on what people spend. Congress overruled him in 1908 and put it back.
- 1955. At the height of the Red Scare, Congress required the phrase on all U.S. currency, paper included. One year earlier it had added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance.
- July 30, 1956. President Eisenhower signed the law making "In God We Trust" the official national motto, a deliberate contrast with "godless" Soviet communism.
- October 1, 1957. The first bills bearing the motto reached the public.
The Soviet Union has been gone for 35 years. The Cold War branding outlived the Cold War, and a new movement found it waiting.
The motto we already had
E Pluribus Unum turns 250 this year, alongside the country itself.
In August 1776, weeks after the Declaration, Congress asked Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design a seal for the new nation. Their committee proposed the phrase, and it went onto the Great Seal of the United States in 1782, where it remains.
It was never written into law as the national motto. It didn't need to be. It should have been. Our Founders also didn't imagine they would need many laws to protect us from someone like Donald Trump, or that we'd ever elect such a vapid, malignant narcissist career criminal as POTUS.
It just couldn't enter than patriotic mind back then, or even in 2016.
For 180 years it served as our nation's motto in practice, on the seal, on coins, and in the civic imagination. It described what the founders were actually attempting: thirteen quarrelling colonies, many faiths, many origins, one republic.
Notice what it does not say.
It does not say what you must believe.
It says what we are building together.
Why it matters so very much now
A motto is not harmless just because it is old. Courts have upheld "In God We Trust" by calling it "ceremonial deism," a phrase so worn by repetition that it supposedly means nothing.
Christian nationalists treat it as the opposite: proof that this is a Christian nation and a legal foothold for the next step.
It aids the putrid Christian accelerationism too many of them support and desire.
You can watch that step being taken.
Several states now require "In God We Trust" posters in public school classrooms. Louisiana and Texas have passed laws ordering the Ten Commandments posted there too. In Washington, the administration has opened a White House Faith Office, launched a task force on "anti-Christian bias," and created a Religious Liberty Commission, while the president who hawked $60 Bibles casts himself as Christianity's defender.
The pattern is old and well documented. Strongmen wrap themselves in faith because faith converts political opposition into heresy.
If the nation officially trusts in God, and the leader claims God's favor, then dissent becomes a sin.
The motto on the money is a small piece of that machinery, but it is the piece every American carries in their pocket.
Look at the illiberal, autocratic, corruptive direction this Donald Trump administration, his Republican (Maga) Party are taking us. These tools in their war chest seem harmless, certainly to their supporters. But are far less harmless than they seem, then they proclaim, than seems obvious to many, but painfully obvious once you see it and can no longer not see it.
The case for Out of Many, One
It includes everyone. Tens of millions of Americans are Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, pagan, agnostic, atheist, or simply unaffiliated. "In God We Trust" speaks for some citizens about all of them. E Pluribus Unum speaks for all of them about each other.
It matches the Constitution.
The First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion. A government that declares, in its official motto, whom the nation trusts has taken a side. E Pluribus Unum takes no side on belief. It takes the side of the Union.
It ends the insider test. "In God We Trust" has become a quiet way of sorting real Americans from suspect ones. A motto about unity leaves no room for that sorting. You cannot be outside of "one."
It is civic, not sectarian. Believers lose nothing. Their faith does not depend on the Treasury's endorsement, and many would argue it is better off without it, as Roosevelt did. What the country gains is a shared identity built on citizenship rather than creed.
It is the original. Restoring E Pluribus Unum is not a radical change. It is a return to the founders' choice, made in the year of independence, after a 70-year Cold War detour.
Before God, there was "Mind Your Business"
The first coin authorized by the United States government carried no reference to God at all. The 1787 Fugio cent, approved by the Confederation Congress, used a design traced to Benjamin Franklin's 1776 Continental Currency.
One side shows a blazing sun over a sundial, the Latin word FUGIO ("I fly," as in time flies), and the motto MIND YOUR BUSINESS. In Franklin's day that meant attend to your work and use your hours well, not "stay out of my affairs." The other side shows thirteen linked rings, one for each state, around the words WE ARE ONE.
Franklin was a Freemason (I am one myself) and a Grand Master of Pennsylvania's Masons, and the coin speaks a language any Mason will recognize: the sun as light and reason, the dial as time and discipline, the linked rings as a chain of union.
No record says the coin was designed as a Masonic piece, and it should not be sold as one. But its values are plainly Enlightenment values, the same ones that run through the Craft.
Read the whole coin as a sentence and you get the best civic creed this country ever minted: Time flies. Mind your business. We are one.
Sixty-nine years is long enough
The national motto lives in a single line of federal law, 36 U.S.C. § 302, and the currency requirement in two more. Congress put them there. Congress can take them out.
That will not happen this year or next. But mottos change when people stop treating them as untouchable, and that starts with saying plainly what this one has become:
a Cold War slogan now serving a movement that wants citizenship to depend on belief.
On this anniversary, tell your representatives you want the founders' motto back.
Share the Fugio cent with someone who has never seen it.
And the next time someone tells you this is a Christian nation, hand them a dollar and ask them to read the seal on the back.
It is still there, in the eagle's beak, where Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams put it 250 years ago.
E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a retired Senior Technical Writer/IT administrator, and an active award-winning author/ filmmaker, documentarian, and writer based in Bremerton, Washington.
He publishes commentary on the state of things here at Murdockinations.com and on his creative works over at Substack. He also posts on Slasher.com on the horror genre.
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