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Some you can’t see coming, some sneak up and escape notice. Others make a grand entrance and many still can’t see them clearly.

What happened on July 30, 1956 and why it was done are clear enough. Fear of “Godless Communists” prompted Congress to pass and President Dwight Eisenhower to sign a bill into law making “In God We Trust” our official national motto, supplanting “E Pluribus Unum”—Latin for “out of many, one”—that had defined the American experiment for 180 years.

How fractured we’d be only a few generations later, how far from the ideal of E Pluribus Unum we would find ourselves, no amount of trust in a higher power could have enabled Americans in 1956 to see it coming.

What happened on November 19, 1863 is literally etched in stone. Arguably the greatest speech ever, a mere 10 sentences, fewer than 275 words, Abraham Lincoln defining democracy in a way that has echoed through the ages—government of the people, by the people, for the people. Still, with this inheritance in our p…