The Pledge of Allegiance

I still perform daily that little morning ritual most middle-aged professionals haven’t even considered since clearing out their high school locker for the last time. Every working morning I stand before my students with my right hand over my heart and recite the Pledge.

I do not force my students to recite the Pledge. I ask them to stand, but I don’t force them to stand. What value is there in extracting a forced display of allegiance? I try to persuade my students to stand out of respect for the people around them or for the soldiers waking up on the battle field this morning. I explain to them that if I were sitting among Parisians getting ready to watch a soccer match, I’d stand for the French national anthem. I have no allegiance to France, but I would stand out of respect for the people around me. Sometimes I am able to persuade them. Sometimes I’m not.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m doing it. My allegiance is not to the flag, certainly. My allegiance is not to this country, its soil, its history, or its leaders. My allegiance is to the ideas that make this country the only place on Earth I would ever wish to live. Those ideas do not include mindless subservience to my leaders or any sense of duty to support some imagined greater good. Compulsory pledges of obedience are anathema to liberty. I’m not duty-bound to the ideas that make America great. I am morally bound to them. Mine is a volitional reverence.

What my students don’t know is that I recite the original Pledge, the Francis Bellamy Pledge, the 1892 version. Francis Bellamy's original Pledge read, "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. America"

I’ve accepted some of the earlier modifications of Bellamy’s Pledge; actually, I say: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

It’s the last official re-writing of the Pledge that I object to most. The change the Knights of Columbus lobbied Washington for years to affix. The change Rev. George MacPherson Docherty sold one Sunday morning to an American president, arguing it was representative of the views of all Americans. I object to the change President Eisenhower signed into law, June14, 1954, after voicing the following rationale:

These words [“under God”] will remind Americans that despite our great physical strength we must remain humble. They will help us to keep constantly in our minds and hearts the spiritual and moral principles which alone give dignity to man, and upon which our way of life is founded. [Wikipedia]

First. It is not humility that places a check on American might. The reason we reframe from using our military superiority to build a world empire subject to decrees from Washington is that Americans categorically reject authoritarian government and the initiation of the use of force in all human relationships. We [should] exercise power rightly, not righteously. We check the use of force with reason and out of a profound respect for the rights of individuals, not some ancient, superstitious, God-fearing.

Second. It is not our spiritual and moral principles [i.e. faith] that give dignity to man. Man’s inherent dignity was first recognized by secular institutions, “more perfectly” by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights than anywhere else on the globe. The dignity of man was utterly ignored throughout the thousands of years of recorded human history when church-states governed humanity. The dignity of man was achieved finally by the rejection of the marriage of church and state by the United States. We have no official way of thinking: Not even the belief in God is official. There is no reference to God in the Constitution. Our First Amendment rights to think for ourselves and speak our minds acknowledged the dignity of man for the first time in history.

Third. Our way of life was not founded upon Christian principles [or any religious doctrine, for that matter]. Our way of life was founded upon an Enlightenment revolution that turned the old world order on its head. In our revolution, reason trumps faith; choice trumps duty; the rights of each individual trump the will of the collective. If 99% of Americans were Christian, this would not be a Christian nation. Individualism is not a Christian idea. Capitalism is not a Christian idea. Free thinking is not a product of any religious doctrine.

All of these things having been said, my objections to my government’s violation of the Establishment Clause delineated, my bottom line remains simple: I really don’t care to argue with people who think placing “under God” in our Pledge, or “In God we trust” on our currency, makes a bit of difference to their imagined deity. Mindless, daily regurgitations of “under God” by school children [many of whom are forced to stand and speak] does not move the people in this country any closer to God. Furthermore, why religionists, who believe money to be the root of all evil, fight to keep the name of their deity on Cesar’s evil instrument is also beyond me?

So, when Michael Newdow made a federal case of the issue in 2002, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rightly decided that “under God” in the Pledge is unconstitutional, I was pleased. When the chicken-shit Supreme Court of the United States refused to decide the case on its merits and sent Newdow home on a technicality, I was not pleased. I was also not surprised.