In God We Trust became the official motto of the United States in 1956, adopted as an alternative to the countrys earlier unofficial motto, E pluribus unum, which dates to the design of the Great Seal in 1782. The phrase now appears on currency, in songs, and in ordinary public life, and has been the subject of recurring constitutional challenges over whether an officially religious motto belongs on a secular states currency at all, challenges that have consistently failed in court.
The debate over the mottos constitutionality tends to crowd out a simpler question worth asking on its own terms: what does trusting God actually involve, beyond the phrase printed on a coin? Scripture is fairly specific about it. Trusting God begins with placing faith in Jesus for salvation rather than in ones own effort, a point Paul makes plainly in Ephesians: by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one can boast (Ephesians 2:8-9).
From there, trust extends outward rather than staying private. Philippians 2:4 asks believers to look not only to their own interests but also to the interests of others, trust in God expressed as attention paid to other people rather than as an inward spiritual feeling. Philippians 4:6 makes a related, harder demand: be anxious for nothing, but bring everything to God in prayer with thanksgiving, a standard that asks for something closer to a daily discipline than a slogan.
The motto and the theology behind it are not really in tension, but they are not the same thing either. A phrase on currency can affirm a national self-understanding without much requiring anything of the people who spend that currency. The trust the New Testament describes is a different, more demanding thing: not a claim stamped on a coin, but a posture that has to be renewed daily, in prayer, in how a person treats others, and in what they do and do not worry about.
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