| The pledge finds God |
| The Supreme Court has stated clearly that any statute entirely motivated by a purpose to advance religion must be invalidated as unconstitutional. Yet the legislators who added the words "under God" to the Pledge openly admitted that they did so to support the existence of God and institute official Government disapproval of atheism. The original Pledge, written in 1892 by a religious minister, took no stance on religion. But in the 1950s, when the nation's most obvious enemies were atheistic communists, Congress and President Eisenhower, under pressure from Christian organizations like the Knights of Columbus, altered the Pledge in a fit of McCarthy-style political correctness. Not only did they fail to recognize that atheism doesn't entail communism; in editing the Pledge, they also led the Government to endorse monotheism over polytheism. Such an act is a blatant violation of church-state separation and an affront to the cherished notion that religious opinion should be left to the individual conscience, uninfluenced by what the Government deems orthodox. Whatever the legal merits of the Ninth Circuit's ruling, it clearly has the moral high ground. Critics of the ruling want to express the debate in terms of the right to free religious expression. They charge that restoring the Pledge to its original wording by removing the words "under God" is a step toward erasing all religious expression from public life. This is an absurd exaggeration. No one's right to religious expression is endangered by returning the Pledge to its religiously neutral state, under which no American felt compelled not to swear allegiance to his country because of his religious beliefs. Nor can "under God" be compared to pithy references to a deity on our coinage or in our patriotic songs. Through inserting "under God" into the national Pledge of Allegiance, Congress crossed the line by predicating loyalty to our country and Government upon having the "correct" religious beliefs. This is why it won't do to tell polytheists and atheists that they can simply choose not to say the Pledge. To be unable to say the Pledge because of one's religious opinions is to be unable to swear allegiance to the United States. The message that the Pledge sends--the message that the Pledge's editors wanted to send--is that one cannot be a true American without being a monotheist. The message must be particularly poignant to the five-year-old child of Buddhists, Hindus or atheists who must stand daily in conspicuous silence as her peers pledge allegiance to their nation. The pledge finds God |