Eisenhower signs the words already stamped on coins into the law itself
By the summer of 1956, "In God We Trust" had already been circulating on American coins for two years, a phrase familiar to anyone who'd handled pocket change. On July 30, the 84th Congress sent H.J. Res. 396 to the White House, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into Public Law 85-851. The single sentence did one specific thing: it made "In God We Trust" the official national motto of the United States, on the statute books rather than just the mint's.
The motto joined "E Pluribus Unum" as a second national phrase, but this one carried an explicit religious claim written into federal law during the Cold War, when Congress was drawing sharp lines against officially atheist communism. It remains the motto today, printed on every bill and coin, and it still surfaces in First Amendment disputes over religion's place in government.
QWhy did the phrase appear on coins nearly a century before it became law?
Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase pushed to add "In God We Trust" to U.S. coins during the Civil War, when the outcome of the war, and the nation itself, was genuinely uncertain. The phrase reflected a wartime instinct to invoke divine backing at a moment of national peril, and it stuck on coinage for generations before anyone made it official by statute. By the time Eisenhower signed H.J. Res. 396 in 1956, the phrase had already outlasted the war that inspired it by nearly a century.
QWhat happened to paper currency just one year before the motto became official?
In 1955, a year before Eisenhower signed the motto into law, Congress ordered "In God We Trust" added to all U.S. paper currency for the first time. Until then the phrase had lived mainly on coins. That change meant that by the time the 1956 law made the phrase the official national motto, it was already printed on every denomination of American paper money in circulation, not just loose change.
QHow did courts later treat legal challenges to the motto?
Federal courts have repeatedly heard challenges arguing the motto violates the separation of church and state, and have just as repeatedly rejected them, classifying the phrase as a form of ceremonial deism rather than a religious endorsement. Congress did not let the matter rest with the 1956 law either: it passed a fresh resolution in 2011 reaffirming "In God We Trust" as the national motto, more than half a century after Eisenhower's signature.
