President Dwight Eisenhower
December 22, 1952

In comments at the Waldorf Astoria hotel on December 22, 1952, Eisenhower described an encounter with Georgy Zhukov, a top Soviet official. It became a famous explication of the modern approach to combining piety with pluralism.

I must say that in just a matter of immediate dialectic contest, let’s say, I didn’t know exactly what to say to him, because my only definition was what I believed to be the basic one, the basic reason for its existence. I know it would do no good to appeal to him with it, because it is founded in religion. And since at the age of 14 he had been taken over by the Bolshevik religion and had believed in it since that time, I was quite certain it was hopeless on my part to talk to him about the fact that our form of government is founded in religion.

Our ancestors who formed this government said in order to explain it, you remember, that a decent respect for the opinion of mankind impels them to declare the reasons which led to the separation [between the American colonies and Britain]. And this is how they explained those: ‘we hold that all men are endowed by their Creator …’ not by the accident of birth, not by the color of their skins or by anything else, but ‘all men are endowed by their Creator.’ In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal. So what was the use of me talking to  Zhukov about that? Religion, he had been taught, was the opiate of the people.”

 

Source(s):

Patrick Henry, “‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49, no. 1 (March 1981): 35–49.