How God Got on the Money

It's Saturday, July eleventh. Pull out your wallet and look at any bill you have. Every single one says "In God We Trust" across the back. It's on every coin too. Most people assume it's been there since the beginning, that the founding fathers put it there as a statement of the nation's Christian values. I assumed the same thing until I looked into it this week. The phrase didn't appear on paper money until 1957. It didn't become the official national motto until 1956. The founding fathers had been dead for over a century by the time it showed up. The original motto, the one the founders actually chose, was "E Pluribus Unum," which is Latin for "Out of Many, One," a secular statement about national unity that says nothing about God. And the very first coin the US government ever minted, the Fugio cent of 1787, didn't mention God either. Its motto was "Mind Your Business." I'm not kidding. The founders put "Mind Your Business" on the money. The popular image of the founding fathers as devout Christians who built the country on biblical principles doesn't hold up very well when you look at what they actually wrote and believed.

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, literally took a razor blade to the Bible. He cut out every passage involving miracles, the resurrection, and the divinity of Jesus, and reassembled what was left into what's now called the Jefferson Bible, a version of the New Testament that treats Jesus as a moral philosopher rather than the son of God. Jefferson wrote in a letter to John Adams that "the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." He was a deist, someone who believed in a creator God but rejected organized religion, divine intervention, and miracles.

Benjamin Franklin held similar views. He believed in God but wrote that he had "some doubts as to his divinity" when referring to Jesus. John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, which stated explicitly: "The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." That was an official treaty ratified by the Senate.

James Madison, who wrote the First Amendment, was the most aggressive of the founders on separating church and state. He argued against government-paid chaplains and objected to presidential proclamations of prayer and thanksgiving as violations of the principle of religious neutrality. The amendment he wrote is clear: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The men who built the framework of American government were deliberate about keeping religion out of government institutions. They put "E Pluribus Unum" on the Great Seal. They put "Mind Your Business" on the first coin. They did not put God on the money. The phrase "In God We Trust" first appeared on a coin in 1864, during the Civil War, 88 years after the Declaration of Independence. A minister from Pennsylvania named Reverend M.R. Watkinson wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury arguing that some acknowledgment of God should appear on US currency, partly as a morale booster for Union soldiers. The Secretary agreed and directed the US Mint to add it to the two-cent piece. Over the next few decades, the phrase appeared on some coins but not others, with no particular consistency.

In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt actually removed the phrase from the newly designed $20 gold coin because he considered it irreverent to put God's name on something people used to buy things. "It seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins," he wrote. Congress overrode him in 1908 and mandated the phrase on all gold and silver coins. The last holdout was the nickel, which didn't get the motto until 1938.

But paper money remained untouched until the Cold War changed everything. The Soviet Union was officially atheist. Soviet leaders suppressed religious expression and promoted state-sponsored secularism as part of communist ideology. American politicians in the 1950s decided that the way to distinguish the United States from the Soviets was to lean into religion as a national identity marker. In 1954, Congress added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, which had existed without those words since 1892. In 1956, Congress passed a joint resolution, unanimously and without debate, declaring "In God We Trust" the official national motto of the United States, replacing "E Pluribus Unum." In 1957, the phrase appeared on the $1 silver certificate for the first time. By 1966, it was on every denomination of paper currency: the $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100.

The phrase that most Americans assume was put there by the founding fathers was actually put there by Cold War politicians who wanted to differentiate the US from the Soviet Union. It wasn't a founding principle. It was a marketing campaign against communism. The legal challenges have been exactly what you'd expect. Multiple lawsuits have argued that printing "In God We Trust" on government-issued currency violates the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, which prohibits Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion. The argument is straightforward: a monotheistic phrase on money excludes atheists, agnostics, polytheists, Buddhists, and anyone who doesn't subscribe to the idea of a singular God, and it forces every American to carry a religious statement every time they make a transaction.

The courts have consistently ruled that it's constitutional, and the legal reasoning is fascinating in a slightly absurd way. The concept is called "ceremonial deism," and it essentially means that the phrase has been repeated so many times, for so many decades, on so many surfaces, that it has lost its religious significance and become a patriotic tradition rather than a genuine endorsement of religion. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in 1970 that the phrase is "of patriotic or ceremonial character and bears no true resemblance to a governmental sponsorship of a religious exercise."

The courts are saying, in effect, that "In God We Trust" is constitutional because it doesn't really mean anything anymore. The phrase survives legal scrutiny not because the government is allowed to endorse religion, but because the courts have decided that the endorsement has been repeated so often that it no longer counts as an endorsement. Whether you find that reassuring or deeply weird probably depends on how seriously you take the words printed on your money.

Meanwhile, "E Pluribus Unum" still appears on the Great Seal and on most coins, but it's no longer the official motto. A secular phrase about unity was replaced by a religious phrase about faith, and the justification for keeping it is that the religious phrase has become so routine that it's essentially secular again. The founders who deliberately kept God off the money would probably have something to say about that. Then again, they also put "Mind Your Business" on the first coin, so maybe they had a sense of humor about the whole thing. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. "In God We Trust" wasn't put on money by the founding fathers. It first appeared on a coin in 1864, during the Civil War, and didn't appear on paper money until 1957. The official national motto until 1956 was "E Pluribus Unum," Latin for "Out of Many, One." The switch happened during the Cold War as a way to differentiate the US from the atheist Soviet Union. Congress passed the resolution unanimously and without debate. The founders were mostly deists who deliberately separated church and state: Jefferson cut the miracles out of the Bible, Adams signed a treaty stating the US was "not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion," and the first coin ever minted said "Mind Your Business." Courts have upheld the motto as constitutional under the concept of "ceremonial deism," which means the phrase has been repeated so often it no longer carries religious weight. The motto survives because the courts decided it doesn't mean what it says. Whether that's comforting or strange is up to you.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.