In light of the Supreme Court case about the Pledge of Allegiance, which will be heard today, I have a question. Yes, it’s a smart-alecky question.
As most of you know, our parents and grandparents didn’t recite the same Pledge as we do today. It used to be entirely secular, and somehow patriotism and religiosity managed to survive in this country.
The Rev. Francis Bellamy wrote the original Pledge in 1892 as part of a flag salute ceremony. (Modern-day conservatives may find it inconvenient, but Bellamy was a Baptist minister and a socialist. He was vice president of the Society of Christian Socialists and frequently lectured on “Jesus the Socialist.” But I digress…)
At the time, the Pledge read:
“I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Ten years later, Congress and President Benjamin Harrison endorsed Bellamy’s Pledge for use in public schools. The phrase “my flag” was changed to “the flag of the United States of America” in 1923.
In 1954, at the height of “red scare,” Congress added “under God” to stick it to the godless commies. Introducing the resolution in the Senate, Sen. Homer Ferguson (R-Minn.) said, “I believe this modification of the Pledge is important because it highlights one of the real fundamental differences between the free world and the communist world, namely belief in God.”
Which is a very roundabout way of leading me to my question.
If we added “under God” at the height of the Cold War because our enemies were godless communists, should we take the phrase out now because our enemies are religious fanatics?
When the Pledge was added, the nation’s primary scourge were people who were professed atheists. (There’s plenty of debate about just how “godless” the Russians really were at the time, but that’s another story for another day.) The Knights of Columbus, which led the campaign to change the Pledge in 1954, saw this is a symbolic gesture to remind communists that Americans, in general, are a religious bunch.
That was then. The new enemies America faced aren’t atheists; just the opposite. They’re deeply religious people who believe their efforts are guided by God. Indeed, they attack and slaughter because of their faith.
If the Pledge is a rhetorical tool to send symbolic messages to our international foes, as the government said it was in the ’50s, then perhaps we should revisit the wording to send a new message.
After all, if the 1954 precedent is right, we should be going out of our way to distance ourselves from the ways of the enemy and “highlight the fundamental differences” between us and them. With that in mind, if fundamentalist terrorists desperately want religion and government to be merged in a theocracy, the U.S., in turn, should be doing everything possible to embrace church-state separation and make patriotic oaths like the Pledge of Allegiance completely secular.
Just a thought.