The White House boasts an enormous Christmas tree, sponsors an Easter egg-rolling contest, hosts an annual prayer breakfast, and engages in weekly Bible study. In ways both large and small, its occupants—then, as now—routinely invoke the presence of the divine. So, too, do the nation's politicians, both Democrat and Republican, who are given, rousingly, to concluding their speeches to the American public with the phrase “May God bless America.” Surely all this bespeaks a proud and public assertion of faith.
Curiously enough, the National Museum of American History, a part of the Smithsonian—that complex of museums in D.C. known fondly as the “nation's attic”—has paid little attention to America's religious landscape. While this stellar repository of Americana has trained its sights on nearly every aspect of the country's past, from locomotion to Julia Child's kitchen, religion has been conspicuously absent from its galleries. Until now.
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