In God We Trust

Remember the dollar coins that were issued earlier this year without "In God We Trust" stamped on the edges? A seller on eBay currently has a starting bid of $80 for one of these coins. Another has a "Buy It Now" price of $575. Of course, any coin or stamp with an error has a collectible value due to it's rarity, just witness the famous Inverted Jenny.

But this got me thinking about the value of money. For the first third of this country's history the value of currency fluctuated very little. All currency was either made of a substance with collectable value due to its relative rarity: gold, silver, nickel or copper. Or was backed by an equal quantity of that material held in storage somewhere. During that time inflation did not exist, and deflation was very slight. You could bury your spare wages in a box in the garden, dig them up in your old age and actually be a few cents ahead. Maybe this wasn't a great deal for the banks, but it worked fairly well for the working stiff. Type in 1790 and 1860 into this calculator, and you'll see that the purchase power of a dollar actually increased about 10% during those 70 years. Coincidentally, all this time the currency contained no reference to a deity of any kind.

During the US Civil War, many people began to believe that the country was suffering God's punishment for its sinful ways. As a result of the political pressure of this religious revival, and possibly to grant some divine authority to a government that was in real danger of collapse, the Congress agreed to allow the motto "In God We Trust" to appear on US Coinage beginning in 1865, but it was not required. Congress made it mandatory on all currency in 1957 at the height of the "Red Scare." Between those two dates the dollar lost almost half its value, and in the last 50 years it has lost another 86%. Keep in mind that during the Civil War there was significant uncertainty that the government would be able to make good on its debts, which meant that the dollar was already artificially low in 1865, but it rebounded over the next few years. Taking that into account we see that the dollar has lost over 96% of its value since 1860. That means that the "In God We Trust" dollar you carry is worth about 1/20th of it's secular predecessor's value. Think about it.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not calling this a cause-and effect relationship. I know that the responsibility for the devaluation of currency lies with government monetary policy in a quixotic attempt to control the economy. No superstition here. Altough if I were a Christian, I might question whether printing God's name on somthing that the love of which Paul called "the root of all evil" in his first letter to Timothy and then to remove any real backing it once had qualifies as taking the Lord's name in vain.

However, I do see a certain similarity in the attitudes that led to both occurances. For all the (many, many) ills of antebellum government, politicians and bureaucrats seemed to have a certain humility about their role in the Universe. They appeared reticent to either interfere in private business affairs (with the notable exception of enforcing fugitive slave laws and stealing land from the Indians) or religious affairs. If you look around the internet you'll find plenty of people arguing about whether the "Founding Fathers" intended the country to be a Christian nation or not. You can find plenty of quotes that contradict each other, sometimes by the same person. The only thing this establishes is that any group of human beings (even those we seem to have deified) will have disagreements. But the fact remains, that they instituted no official religious loyalty oaths, anthems or slogans on their money.

In contrast, by the mid-19th century social engineers and revivalists abounded. They had one goal in common, to fix the ills of the world, and govenrment looked like the perfect tool to do it. From Karl Marx to the Temperance Movement, they all agreed on the solution--well, mostly. Those who believed that society needed a religous awakening wanted government to set the example. Many called for changing the "godless United States Constitution"

"to acknowledge God, submit to the authority of his Son, embrace Christianity, and secure universal liberty."

In the end they made due with a few pieces of silver.

Over the following century, the government proceeded to fritter away all that silver and gold that had once backed it's currency. Eventually, with the collapse of the Breton Woods Agreement, the Federal Reserve gave up on that fiction altogether and finally admitted that thier notes had no real value at all. One cannot fail to notice the irony of the statement "In God We Trust" because we certainly can't trust the con artists who issued that worthless piece of paper.

As an aside, I'm sure that one of you may want to bring up the Liberty Dollar. This silver backed private currency has the words "Trust in God" engraved on its bills. One interesting point to note is that for $20 US they'll sell you a note backed by one ounce of silver, currently valued at about $13 - $14. You'd better "Trust in God" all right 'cause you just took a 30% hit to avoid mid-single digit annual inflation. Oddly enough, the bullion is stored in a vault a few blocks from my house, but there are fewer than a dozen businesses that take them within a 20 mile radius. I guess they follow the old adage: "Don't shit where you eat."

Monetary shenanigans aside, I end noting that the placement of a religious slogan on money never did have the effect that the proponents intended. Neither did the Congressional inclusion of "Under God" in the Pledge of Alleigience in 1954 nor the Fraternal Order of Eagles' installation of Ten Commandments Monuments around the country coinciding with the release of the famous Cecil B. DeMille epic starring the rather non-semetic looking Charlton Heston make the country any more godly. Instead, society has become increasingly accepting of all kinds of sins that ought to call for a good old-fashioned stoning.

Zealots: Zero, Heathens: Three.