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One
nation … under God?
By Tony van
Renterghem
Flagstaff Resident
“One nation under God.”
Sounds like a fine phrase to have in our Pledge of
Allegiance, especially to all of us God-fearing, patriotic
Americans. After all, that’s how our founding fathers wanted it,
didn’t they?
I’m terribly
sorry to have to disappoint you, but the Pledge of Allegiance was
not written until1892; 116 years after
our founding fathers and the American Revolution. The pledge was
written by Francis Bellamy, a former Baptist minister who had been
kicked out of his church because of his
socialist ideas.
His original
text was: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for
which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice
for all.” He made no mention of God.
What? Some
“godless pinko” wrote our Pledge? Yep, that’s the shocking
truth.
It was not
until 1954, during the height of McCarthyism, that a powerful Roman
Catholic pressure group succeeded in getting the words “under
God” added to the Pledge, probably to differentiate us from the
“godless” communists. This change would have bothered the hell
out of Francis Bellamy, not to mention our founding fathers, most of
whom had a low degree of tolerance for being “under” the
British-dominated Church of England. The founding fathers strongly
opposed any kind of mixing of state and church. Not too surprising,
since most of our founding
fathers were deeply influenced by the popular French and European
“enlightenment.” Enlightenment concepts of personal freedom and
free thought helped fuel the American Revolution — and later the
French Revolution.
Except for the
standard use of the expression, “The year of our Lord” to
specify dates, you will not find references to God in the Virginia
Bill of Rights, The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of
Confederation, or the Constitution of the United States or its
amendments. There is the statement about “being endowed with
certain inalienable rights by their Creator,” and one exception
which mentions citizen’s equal station “to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.” Otherwise there is
nary a word about “under God.”
Then there
remains a second question: is “under God” really politically
correct from a religious point of view? Some, who anxiously defend
the “under God” version of the Pledge, are already hemming and
hawing that this is not really a religious statement (which would be in conflict with our
Constitutional separation of church and state), but more of a
cultural or political expression. Interesting. Do they mean like a
religious version of what politicians use when they try to prove
their patriotism and good citizenship by wrapping themselves in the
stars and stripes, while promoting their latest pork barrel defense
spending bill?
It is too easy
to misuse religious attachments like “under God” to obtain
support on wrong grounds, subtly suggesting “How can we be
wrong?” or “How can our nation ever be wrong? After all, we
operate ‘under God.’”
Here’s
another aspect: Is it OK to thus use our deity’s name in vain, for
selfish, self- righteous and/or self-aggrandizing purposes? Such
questions do arise when we insist on the formal use of statements
such as: “under God,” “God be with us,”
“so help me
God,” or “In God we trust” (as if that will help keep our
money sounder than other currencies).
Which God are
we supposed to be under? The Christian God? And, if so, are we at
ease to include or exclude other god concepts, such as Allah, Hashem,
Jaweh, Brahma, or other interpretations dear to some fellow
Americans? Does it, for instance, include agnostics who believe that
the existence of God is not knowable and that — if such a universal God does exist — this God would, in no way, be
more interested in Americans than in other nations; that invoking
such a special relationship with God might amount to a kind of
blasphemy?
Even if we
insist on only being “under a proper Christian God,” then what
kind of Christian God are we talking about? The stern, jealous, Old
Testament figure popular with the God-fearing types? Or the ethereal Holy Ghost aspect which suddenly
“came upon” the teenage Mary and got her great with child,
favored by the God-loving devout?
Or is it the Zeus/Jupiter-like figure which I see illustrated here
before me in my copy of the Roman Catholic Douay Confraternity
version of the Holy Bible; a semi-nude, gray-haired,
lavishly-bearded, older white male, loosely wrapped in a windblown
sheet, pointing at sun and moon, while hovering high above a placid ocean? Is that the God our nation is supposed
to be under?
Problems,
problems. So what do we do? I somehow believe our founding fathers,
in their infinite wisdom, would have agreed to return to the
original godless version of the Pledge which left it up to each of
us to decide whether we wanted to see our nation under any kind of God. Or, rather, alongside any personal concept of the
deity each of us may have, thus keeping the clear-cut separation
between church and state as a protection of our rights, our freedom,
our thoughts, and our privacy.
Tony van
Renteghem received Israel’s Yad Vashem medal in 1954 for saving
Jews during the Holocaust. Representing Holland, he chaired the
first postwar Liberal International Congress at Cambridge
University. In the U.S., he became one of Hollywood’s top
historical researchers. Now retired, he still writes. He is the
author of When Santa was a Shaman, and has done extensive research
on the ancient shamanic origins of mythical Western figures such as
Santa Claus and Kokopelli.
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