The Pledge of AllegianceWhy we're not one nation "under God."Updated Friday, June 28, 2002, at 4:39 PM ET |
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Why we're not one nation "under God." - By David Greenberg - Slate Magazine |
Vine & Fig Tree analysis |
| Poor Alfred Goodwin! So torrential was the flood of condemnation that followed his opinion—which held that it's unconstitutional for public schools to require students to recite "under God" as part of the Pledge of Allegiance—that the beleaguered appellate-court judge suspended his own ruling until the whole 9th Circuit Court has a chance to review the case. | Goodwin's decision has been thrown out: Pledge of Allegiance's God reference now upheld by court - Los Angeles Times The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled back in 1943 that nobody had to say a single word of the Pledge of Allegiance if it conflicted with their religious views. Michael Newdow's lawsuit was completely superfluous. Further, the same 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled back in the 1970's that "God" in such phrases as "so help me God" and the National Motto ("In God We Trust") had no religious or theological significance: they were "secular" or patriotic slogans. See Greenberg below. |
| Not one major political figure summoned the courage to rebut the spurious claims that America's founders wished to make God a part of public life. | God was already a part of "public life" before the "Founders" were born. From the Mayflower through the Puritans and the American Revolution, America was a nation "under God." |
| It's an old shibboleth of those who want to inject religion into public life that they're honoring the spirit of the nation's founders. In fact, the founders opposed the institutionalization of religion. | The writer of this response opposes the "institutionalization" of Christianity. The Founders did not. The Founders opposed the politicization of "ecclesiastical bodies," to use the words of James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution." That is, a government which favors the Presbyterian Church over the Episcopalian Church, or any other denominational favoritism. They did nothing to de-institutionalize religion. |
| They kept the Constitution free of references to God. |
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| The document mentions religion only to guarantee that godly belief would never be used as a qualification for holding office—a departure from many existing state constitutions. | There was no departure from the State Constitutions. The State Constitutions say exactly the same thing as the Federal Constitution. Greenberg doesn't understand either one. |
| That the founders made erecting a church-state wall their first priority when they added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution reveals the importance they placed on maintaining what Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore have called a "godless Constitution." | Response to Krammick and Moore. More. Still more. |
| When Benjamin Franklin proposed during the Constitutional Convention that the founders begin each day of their labors with a prayer to God for guidance, his suggestion was defeated. | Nobody argued against Franklin's motion for prayer, but the convention had no money to pay a clergyman to pray -- an unfortunate effect of institutional religion. |
| Given this tradition, it's not surprising that the original Pledge of Allegiance—meant as an expression of patriotism, not religious faith—also made no mention of God. The pledge was written in 1892 by the socialist Francis Bellamy, a cousin of the famous radical writer Edward Bellamy. He devised it for the popular magazine Youth's Companion on the occasion of the nation's first celebration of Columbus Day. Its wording omitted reference not only to God but also, interestingly, to the United States: | Nobody (who supports "under God" in the Pledge) supports Bellamy's socialism or his original Pledge. To say that the Pledge is socialist because we changed it into an anti-communist Pledge is like saying that Christmas is a pagan holiday because we changed it into a Christian one. |
| "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." | |
| The key words for Bellamy were "indivisible," which recalled the Civil War and the triumph of federal union over states' rights, and "liberty and justice for all," which was supposed to strike a balance between equality and individual freedom. By the 1920s, reciting the pledge had become a ritual in many public schools. | Nobody supports "the triumph of federal union over states' rights." |
| Since the founding, critics of America's secularism have repeatedly sought to break down the church-state wall. After the Civil War, for example, some clergymen argued that the war's carnage was divine retribution for the founders' refusal to declare the United States a Christian nation, and tried to amend the Constitution to do so. | Name one "critic of America's secularism." There never was any "American secularism." Calvinists criticized unitarianism, and Protestants criticized Catholics, but there was never an "American secularism" to criticize... |
| The efforts to bring God into the state reached their peak during the so-called "religious revival" of the 1950s. It was a time when Norman Vincent Peale grafted religion onto the era's feel-good consumerism in his best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking; when Billy Graham rose to fame as a Red-baiter who warned that Americans would perish in a nuclear holocaust unless they embraced Jesus Christ; when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed that the United States should oppose communism not because the Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime but because its leaders were atheists. | ...until the 1950's.
John Foster Dulles was a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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| Hand in hand with the Red Scare, to which it was inextricably linked, the new religiosity overran Washington. Politicians outbid one another to prove their piety. President Eisenhower inaugurated that Washington staple: the prayer breakfast. Congress created a prayer room in the Capitol. In 1955, with Ike's support, Congress added the words "In God We Trust" on all paper money. In 1956 it made the same four words the nation's official motto, replacing "E Pluribus Unum." Legislators introduced Constitutional amendments to state that Americans obeyed "the authority and law of Jesus Christ." | Was communism just a "scare" in Cambodia? After the fall of communism, Soviet records were made public, and no intelligent person can deny that communists had infiltrated Washington D.C.
Trust in God goes back centuries in America. |
| The campaign to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was part of this movement. It's unclear precisely where the idea originated, but one driving force was the Catholic fraternal society the Knights of Columbus. In the early '50s the Knights themselves adopted the God-infused pledge for use in their own meetings, and members bombarded Congress with calls for the United States to do the same. Other fraternal, religious, and veterans clubs backed the idea. In April 1953, Rep. Louis Rabaut, D-Mich., formally proposed the alteration of the pledge in a bill he introduced to Congress. | |
| The "under God" movement didn't take off, however, until the next year, when it was endorsed by the Rev. George M. Docherty, the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Washington that Eisenhower attended. In February 1954, Docherty gave a sermon—with the president in the pew before him—arguing that apart from "the United States of America," the pledge "could be the pledge of any country." He added, "I could hear little Moscovites [sic] repeat a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag with equal solemnity." Perhaps forgetting that "liberty and justice for all" was not the norm in Moscow, Docherty urged the inclusion of "under God" in the pledge to denote what he felt was special about the United States. |
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| The ensuing congressional speechifying—debate would be a misnomer, given the near-unanimity of opinion—offered more proof that the point of the bill was to promote religion. The legislative history of the 1954 act stated that the hope was to "acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon … the Creator … [and] deny the atheistic and materialistic concept of communism." In signing the bill on June 14, 1954, Flag Day, Eisenhower delighted in the fact that from then on, "millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town … the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty." That the nation, constitutionally speaking, was in fact dedicated to the opposite proposition seemed to escape the president. | Promoting Christianity has been a purpose of government for centuries, until the mid-20th century.
"dedicated to the proposition," as the states-rights buster put it," that all men are created equal." Referring back to the Declaration of Independence, a Theocratic charter. |
| In recent times, controversies over the pledge have centered on the wisdom of enforcing patriotism more than on its corruption from a secular oath into a religious one. In the 1988 presidential race, as many readers will recall, George Bush bludgeoned Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for vetoing a mandatory-pledge bill when he was governor of Massachusetts, even though the state Supreme Court had ruled the bill unconstitutional. Surely one reason for the current cravenness of Democratic leaders is a fear of undergoing Dukakis' fate in 2002 or 2004 at the hands of another Bush. | An oath is inherently religious. The Pledge is inherently statist. |
| The history of the pledge supports Goodwin's decision. The record of the 1954 act shows that, far from a "de minimis" reference or a mere "backdrop" devoid of meaning, the words "under God" were inserted in the pledge for the express purpose of endorsing religion—which the U.S. Supreme Court itself ruled in 1971 was unconstitutional. Also according to the Supreme Court's own rulings, it doesn't matter that students are allowed to refrain from saying the pledge; a 2000 high court opinion held that voluntary, student-led prayers at school football games are unconstitutionally "coercive," because they force students into an unacceptable position of either proclaiming religious beliefs they don't share or publicly protesting. | Endorsing religion goes back for centuries in America, and ends only in the mid-20th.
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| The appeals court decision came almost 40 years to the day after the Supreme Court decision in Engel v. Vitale. In that case, the court ruled it unconstitutional for public schools to allow prayer, even though the prayer was non-denominational and students were allowed abstain from the exercise. When asked about the unpopular decision, President John F. Kennedy replied coolly that he knew many people were angry, but that the decisions of the court had to be respected. He added that there was "a very easy remedy"—not a constitutional amendment but a renewed commitment by Americans to pray at home, in their churches, and with their families. | How tolerant of the State to take children away from home, church and families for the better part of the entire day, five days a week. |