In God We Trust

In God We Trust is a phrase Offred remembers from the paper currency of the pre-Gilead period, a relic of a vanished economic and spiritual order. She recalls that her mother kept some of this obsolete money pasted into a scrapbook alongside early photos, describing the bills as "thickish, greasy to the touch, green-colored, with pictures on each side, some old man in a wig and on the other side a pyramid with an eye above it." The motto itself, she notes, was once the subject of a joke: people placed signs beside their cash registers reading "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash" — a blasphemy, she reflects, under the current regime. The memory surfaces as Offred contemplates how the shift from portable money to the Compubank system enabled the regime's swift seizure of women's assets, since freezing accounts required only "push a few buttons." The phrase thus becomes a marker of the distance between a world where faith was a casual cultural reference and one where it is a totalizing political instrument.

The Motto as a Relic of Lost Economic Freedom

Offred's recollection of In God We Trust is embedded in a longer meditation on the material culture of the pre-Gilead economy. She remembers paper money as "pieces of paper, thickish, greasy to the touch, green-colored," and notes that by the time she was nine or ten, most people used plastic cards. The motto's appearance on currency links it to a system of personal financial autonomy that was systematically dismantled: women could no longer hold property, their Compucounts were frozen, and their numbers were transferred to husbands or male next of kin. The phrase, once printed on every bill, now reads as a cruel irony — the trust it invoked was in God, but the regime's God was a "National Resource" deployed to justify the confiscation of women's livelihoods.

The Regime's Appropriation of Religious Language

The motto's resonance extends beyond economics into the regime's broader co-optation of religious discourse. Offred observes that the phrase "In God We Trust" would now be considered blasphemy if used in its old joking context, because the regime has monopolized the meaning of faith. This parallels the way the Bible is kept locked up and read aloud only by Commanders, and the way prayers are mass-produced by machines at Soul Scrolls. The motto, like the Bible verses recited at the Red Center, is stripped of its personal or communal significance and repurposed as a tool of control. Offred's memory of the phrase thus becomes an act of resistance: by recalling its former, more casual use, she preserves a sense of a world where faith was not yet a weapon.

The Motto and the Regime's Symbolic Economy

The pyramid and eye on the reverse of the bill — a symbol of divine providence on the Great Seal — finds a dark echo in the regime's ubiquitous Winged Eye, which appears on the black vans, the Soul Scrolls machines, and the screen in the doctor's office. Where the pre-Gilead eye was an abstract emblem of enlightenment or divine oversight, the regime's eye is a literal surveillance apparatus. Offred's memory of the motto thus traces a line from a symbolic economy of trust — God as a distant guarantor of value — to a political economy of fear, where the Eye watches and punishes. The phrase In God We Trust, once printed on every piece of currency, becomes a ghostly reminder of a trust that has been broken, replaced by a regime that demands not trust but obedience.