One Nation "Under God"

Recently, at a meeting attended by a number of public school teachers and administrators, I thoroughly embarrassed myself by muffing the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. While everybody around me was still on "under God," I was already racing ahead to extol the virtues of liberty and justice for all. One of my table partners took great delight in wondering out loud just what kind of a minister I was, anyway.

In truth, messing up the God reference is the way it usually goes for me. Maybe I would get it right if I said the Pledge often enough. But it still would not be easy. For just when they were putting in the "under God" phrase for the first time, I was finishing up my twelfth year of public school saying the Pledge the old way, without mentioning Him at all. My relative indifference to the addition probably has a lot to do with my having gotten along pretty well without it for so long.

The Cold War context for this particular alteration of the Pledge ought to arouse at least a modest suspicion that many of our leaders back then were seriously confused about the scope of God's presence in human history. In specific, they were saying in 1954, whether it is to freedom's shores or to the Pearly Gates, no communists need apply. This kind of Amateur Night theology was still drawing crowds thirty years later, when another ever so faithful President self-righteously condemned the whole of a foreign government as an "Evil Empire." Never mind that more than a few of its citizens were risking everything to worship surreptitiously in supposedly banned Orthodox churches.

It is hard to find fault with a general notion that every nation should aspire to conduct itself as if before the judgment seat of God. The trouble begins when we try to get specific about what the notion implies for a country's legal system, its foreign policy, and its vision for humankind's future. A lot of people in our own country take in the strictest literal sense the Pledge's reference to one nation under God: our nation, and ours alone. But a lot of people in other countries put a quite different spin on the affirmation: their congeries of nations, under their God.

Now that the Supreme Court has taken up the question of whether the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance is permissible under our Constitution, it is likely that we will be hearing a good bit about a peculiar anomaly in our system of government that we do not think about as often as we should. It is that citizens who want to worship their nations' God rather than our nation's God have the "unalienable" right to do so --- by virtue of our belief that the right is God given! Are you keeping up with me on this?

It is difficult to imagine that the constitutional question before us can even be addressed, much less answered, without probing as deeply as we can both the mind of the Founding Fathers and the mindlessness of anti-Communist demagogues, in order to understand better whom they had in mind when they spoke of God. The former seem to have been praising the Maker of the Heavens and the Earth. The latter seem to have been bowing down before a tribal deity who got a bad case of heartburn from reading Hegel, Engels, and Marx. I think I can learn to recite "under God" without further stumbling if I can be sure that it is the first kind of God we are talking about. If the Pledge is about the second kind of God, I will invoke my constitutional right to remain silent while others recite it aloud, and trust that they will not think me any less loyal to our country for doing so.

After all this particular wrangling about religion in American life is over, we may very well be left with the old form of the Pledge of Allegiance, rather than the post-1954 one. Would we be the worse off for it? I doubt it. Frankly, though, I think I would have a hard time grasping how the reference to God in our present Pledge violates the spirit of a constitutional system whose liberties it ensures are so unambiguously attributed to the will of the Deity. Just as hard a time as my atheist fellow citizen --- the man who got all this started --- should have grasping how it is indeed God who is the source both of his right and his capacity to disbelieve.