On the current Illegal Mexican-catholic injection, there is historical resonance in another example of protection-racket fearmongering opportunism. Whereas xians opportunized the Civil War in this Jeffersonian pathology, catholics took their place at the start of the Cold War:
’Injecting a deity into the Pledge of Allegiance has proved central to the Christian nationalist narrative and identity. As with “In God We Trust,” the phrase’s history tells us more about christian nationalism than about America’s founding, especially given the timing. As with “In God We Trust,” a unifying national maxim was made divisive. In this instance, rather than seeking to replace the unifying motto, the religious proponents drove a sectarian wedge into it.
Prior to the change, the pledge glorified “one nation indivisible,” an important theme for a nation that was still recovering from the Civil War when Francis Bellamy wrote the pledge in 1892. In a fitting precursor to American companies actively selling religion to undermine governmental regulation, Bellamy was hired to write the pledge buy a children’s magazine, the Youth’s Companion, for their campaign to sell flags to schools to help boost subscriptions.
Bellamy would go on to become a New York ad man, even penning a book called Effective Magazine Advertizing. But when he wrote the pledge, Bellamy was a Baptist minister and thought the pledge complete without references to his personal god. Some six decades later, the Catholic fraternal order, Knights of Columbus, disagreed. It conceived of a pious pledge and pushed Congress to include the nod to their god in the early 1950s. The Knights found a champion for their crusade in Michigan representative Louis C. Rabaut, himself a devout Catholic — three of his dauighters were nuns and one of his sons was a Jesuit priest. More than sixty years later, “One nation, indivisible” became “one nation, under God, indivisible.” This change places religion, history’s most belligerent, contentious force, smack in the middle of the unifying sentiment. It literally divides the indivisible with religion. Dividing the indivisible might be ironic if not for the method used: the politics of fear.’
(Seidel, op cit)