Did you see that Mark Twain quote in the paper the other
day? Great line - "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being
run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who
really mean it."(1) I thought it particularly apropos in light of
last week's judicial decision. As the Associated Press put it,
"Stunning politicians on both the left and right, a federal
appeals court declared for the first time Wednesday that reciting
the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional."
And this, the week before our first 4th of July since September
11th.
Within minutes a political firestorm was set off to rival
anything that Colorado or Arizona has been experiencing. Members
of the House of Representatives assembled on the steps of the
Capitol to recite the Pledge in defiance - big time photo op.
The US Senate voted unanimously to condemn the decision.
President Bush called it "ridiculous." Across the nation there
appeared editorials, letters to the editor, and even the
occasional sermon decrying the action. The man who initiated the
lawsuit, a 49-year-old lawyer and emergency-room doctor named
Michael Newdow, was being cursed and vilified, threatened with
bodily harm and worse, by sweet church people who on Sunday sing,
"They'll know we are Christians by our love." Right! Over and
over there were complaints that these hallowed words, handed down
from generation to generation, were now being snatched from our
babies' mouths by mean-spirited unbelievers who would deny our
heritage as a "Christian nation."
For what it is worth, there are several errors reflected in
those complaints. First those "hallowed words" have not been
around all that long. The Pledge is only a little more than a
hundred years old, written in 1892 for the celebration of the
400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America.
For that matter, the phrase that has caused all the
controversy - "under God" - was not part of the original pledge
anyway. It is 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 reworded pledge for use in their own meetings, and members
bombarded Congress with calls for the United States to do the
same. Other civic and fraternal organizations joined in. After
all, the Cold War was raging and Joe McCarthy was finding godless
communists under every rock - we were NOT godless, so in 1953,
the change was formally proposed to Congress.
The "under God" movement did not finally succeed, however,
until the next year, when it was endorsed by the Rev. George
Docherty, the pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church
in Washington where President Eisenhower attended. In February
1954, Docherty gave a sermon - with the president in the pew
before him - arguing that as it currently stood, 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 in
those days, Docherty (who was a Scotsman, by the way) urged the
inclusion of "under God" in the pledge to denote what he felt was
special about the United States.(2) And it was done. We who were
in school at the time, had to relearn what we would repeat every
morning. Remember?
As to this being a "Christian nation," we should set the
record straight. Most of the founding fathers were deists or
rationalists, not Christians. They or their ancestors had fled
Europe to escape hundreds of bloody years of Christian oppression
caused by both Catholics and Protestants. In fact, during the
1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a motion to open
meetings with prayer was voted down - Benjamin Franklin noted
that there were only two or three besides himself who favored the
idea. In a diplomatic message to Malta, no less a personage than
George Washington stated that, "The government of the United
States is in no sense founded upon the Christian religion. The
United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a
Jewish or Mohammedan nation."(3) There are hundreds of other
quotes by the founders that can be documented in official,
personal or public writings that make clear their intent was to
have this nation a haven of religious liberty, and not identified
with one religion or another. Case closed.
Now, back to the California case, which is FAR from closed.
In a 32-page decision (which is on-line, if you are interested in
wading through it(4)), the court held that it is an
unconstitutional establishment of religion to require teachers to
open every school day by leading students in a recitation of the
Pledge which includes the questionable phrase. Students do not
have to repeat the words anyway - that was held to be a violation
of the First Amendment of the Constitution in 1943, eleven years
prior to the act of Congress that inserted the reference to God!
That Supreme Court said, "If there is any fixed star in our
constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or
petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox or force citizens to
confess by word or deed or act their faith therein." As a
Presbyterian minister whose Confession of Faith insists that "God
alone is Lord of the Conscience," I say Amen!
Keeping the sacred and secular separate has great precedent.
Remember our lesson. The Pharisees and the Herodians, a strange
partnership with only one thing in common - a big-time worry
about the popularity of this new rabbi - come to Jesus and ask
about the legitimacy of paying imperial taxes. It was a trap, as
we all know, and as Jesus knew as well: force Jesus into a choice
between alienating the crowds (who despised the heavy hand of
Roman rule) or publicly proclaiming a treasonous point of view.
Jesus said, "Show me the coin used for paying the tax."
They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait
is this? And whose inscription?"
"Caesar's," they replied.
Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and
to God what is God's."
Or to move that to July, 2002. "Give to the Flag what is
the Flag's, and to God what is God's."
As Lance Morrow opined in this week's TIME magazine, "Don't
try to nationalize the deity; it's a little cheap. The Almighty
likes to work on a case-by-case basis anyway. I'm all for
patriotism and all for religion. But they need to be watched.
Sometimes patriotism becomes the next-to-last refuge of a
scoundrel. And sometimes - as Osama bin Laden and certain
pederast priests should have proved to us by now - religion
becomes the last refuge."(5)
One of those editorials written in the wake of the Court
decision came from Muskogee, Oklahoma, a quintessential "Bible
belt" community. The editor commented that it surprised him that
the congress had jumped so quickly to vote the court wrong. He
thought it was too bad they could not have the same energy to get
medical care for children, health care for the working poor, etc.
Then he wondered how a country that provided so little for the
care of its people equally could really call itself "under God."(6)
Good point.
Do you really want to pledge your allegiance UNDER GOD?
Then do it.
- Pledge allegiance to this nation UNDER GOD as you
support a political vision that reflects a concern for
liberty and justice for all, not just a favored few.
- Pledge allegiance to this community UNDER GOD as you
generously share what you have with neighbors in need.
- Pledge allegiance to your children UNDER GOD as you
love them and care for them and enable them to be all
they can be.
- Pledge allegiance to your family UNDER GOD as you give
them the priority in your life that they deserve.
- Pledge allegiance to your church UNDER GOD as you
commit yourself to faithful worship, a life-long
program of learning, and an appropriate commitment of
time, talent and treasure.
- Finally, pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ as you come
to him in faith with your promise of obedience and
humble discipleship.
"One nation, under God..." Good words. Perhaps
unconstitutional words if we force someone to say them whose
conscience is bothered by them. OK. The freedom-loving nation
to whom I pledge my allegiance would not do that. And neither
would my God.
Happy 226th birthday, America, and many, many more.
Amen!
1. Warren Times Observer, 7/4/02, p. S-19
2. David Greenberg, "The Pledge of Allegiance: Why we're not one nation 'under God.'",
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2067499, June 28, 2002
3. From an Overland, KS editorial quoted by Bruce Green via Ecunet, "SERMONSHOP
2002 07 07," Note #18, 4/4/02
4. http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/
FE05EEE79C2A97B688256BE3007FEE32/$file/0016423.pdf?openelement
5. Lance Morrow, "God Knows What the Court Was Thinking," TIME, 7/8/02, p. 96
6. Posted by Ann Brizendine to Ecunet, "SERMONSHOP 2002 06 30," Note #68, 6/29/02
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