Pledging allegiance to God, is it indoctrination?

In 1954, at the height of the cold war, Congress amended the phrase "one Nation indivisible" in the 62 year-old Pledge of Allegiance to read "one Nation, under God, indivisible." Last week, over a blistering 160-page dissent, the Ninth Circuit held that the state-directed, teacher-led, daily recitation of the amended Pledge by children in public schools did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The original version of the Pledge (without any reference to God or religion) was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892, although many mistakenly assume the founders wrote it. (Sarah Palin once wrote that if the Pledge "was good enough for the founding fathers, its [sic] good enough for me.") In 1942, the Pledge (again without any reference to God or religion) was officially codified by Congress.

But in 1954, one day after Rev. George M. Docherty, a highly regarded Presbyterian minister, delivered a sermon attended by members of Congress, urging that the Pledge be amended to add "Under God," several resolutions were introduced in the House and Senate to do just that.

Soon, members of Congress were piously declaring that "without these [new] words ... the pledge ignores a definitive factor in the American way of life and that factor is belief in God," that there "should be embodied in the pledge our allegiance and faith in the Almighty God," that "we are officially recognizing once again this Nation's adherence to our belief in a divine spirit, and that henceforth millions of our citizens will be acknowledging this belief every time they pledge allegiance to our flag," and that Congress was engaged in "a sacred mission" to achieve a "victory for God."

On June 14, 1954, as he proudly signed the joint resolution amending the Pledge to add the phrase "under God," President Dwight D. Eisenhower solemnly declared that "[f]rom this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural school house, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty. To anyone who truly loves America, nothing could be more inspiring than to contemplate this rededication of our youth, on each school morning, to our country's true meaning."

To celebrate, according to the Congressional Record, the victorious legislators recited the newly minted Pledge of Allegiance to "our Nation [and] to the Almighty," while a bugle played "Onward, Christian Soldiers."

In the face of such overwhelming evidence (and much more recounted in detail in the dissent filed by Judge Stephen Reinhardt) establishing the predominantly religious purpose behind the amendment, Judges Carlos T. Bea and Dorothy W. Nelson in Newdow v. Rio Linda Union School District, held that, instead, the predominate purpose was "to inspire patriotism" and convey the secular principle that our nation is founded on "the concept of a limited government."

Mincing no words, Reinhardt wrote that "[t]o put it bluntly, no judge familiar with the history of the Pledge could in good conscience believe, as today's majority purports to do, that the words 'under God' were inserted into the Pledge for any purpose other than an explicitly and predominately one: 'to recognize the power and the universality of God in our pledge of allegiance'; to 'acknowledge the dependence of our people, and our Government upon the moral direction and the restraints of religion,' 100 Cong. Rec. 7590-91 (1954); and to indoctrinate schoolchildren in the belief that God exists, id. at 5915, 6919."

Reinhardt goes on to bemoan the fact that "[w]e should indeed have had more faith in our country, our citizens, and Constitution than we exhibited at the peak of the McCarthy era when we enacted the religious amendment to our Pledge of Allegiance, in part to inculcate in our children a belief in God. In doing so, we abandoned our historic principle that secular matters were for the state and matters of faith were for the church. The majority does so once again today, sadly, by twisting, distorting, and misrepresenting the law, as well as the issues that are before us."

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