“One Nation, Under God”

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

September 13, 2002

 

Introduction

If I asked you do you recognize the name Francis Bellamy, I doubt that it would get wide recognition. Yet he is responsible for something I learned in the earliest years of public school and with which I started the morning, every morning, through the twelfth grade. We did it Wednesday morning at the Unity Day observance, which I attended at the Coliseum, and at Beth Ahabah in the evening. I was taught that you did it with your right hand over your heart. One hundred and ten years ago this past August, Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance. His version was a little different.

'I pledge allegiance to my Flag and (to) the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'

You can immediately hear three differences:

• 'my' instead of 'the';
• 'the Republic' instead of 'of the United States of America'
• and of current dispute, he did notwrite the words 'under God'.

The first and second changes were effected in 1923 and 1924 at the National Flag Conference under the leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution. The third, inserting the words 'under God' was done by Congress in 1954 after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus. The pledge became an oath and a prayer. By the time I was old enough to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, these changes were in place and I took it for granted that this was the way it was composed. Now I know better. This summer the 9 th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco decided that the inclusion of the words 'under God' is an official endorsement of Deism, the belief in a single God, and thus unconstitutional. The judge also issued a stay of the ruling, preventing it from being enforced, until the Court decides what it wants to do next. This is a case that could eventually come to the Supreme Court.

This evening, I would like to talk about two things:

• What was Bellamy's intention in composing the pledge? And,
• What does it mean when we say 'under God'?

 

I.

Francis Bellamy was a Baptist minister and a Christian Socialist. In his many publications, along with his brother Edward, an author of American Socialist utopian novels, he described in detail how the middle class could create a planned economy with political, social and economic equality for all. Because of his strong socialist sermons, Bellamy had been forced to leave his Baptist church in Boston and was hired by Daniel Ford, owner and editor of the leading family magazine of its time The Youth's Companion. Ford had been a parishioner of Bellamy and had enjoyed his sermons. On September 8 th, he published the original version of the pledge.

It is clear from his writings that Bellamy was stressing the concept of one nation, despite the divergences and in the face of the great waves of immigration that brought hundreds of thousands of Europeans to the United States. He looked back to the founding documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and to the Civil War, which had only been fought thirty years earlier. He settled on just including the words liberty and justice. His socialist character wanted to add the word equality, but he knew that the state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans. He hoped that if the republic could stand on the principals of liberty and justice, and see itself as one nation, then equality would ultimately follow. He realized that it was a long way off. He was right. That struggle is not over, not racially nor economically. Essentially the Pledge of Allegiance was a type of manifesto, pledging loyalty to a country that where every citizen was part of the whole, based on a social vision of liberty and justice, with equality implied but not articulated. The original version captured the essence of the American experiment in its brevity.

II.

What he did not do was make a religious declaration or prayer. Perhaps Bellamy specifically left out the words'under God' because he was aware that every nation had monopolized God for themselves. Europe was plagued by wars in God's name. Every king knew what God wanted for his country and would execute it. Each country believed that God has blessed them. European nations could not separate religious identity from its national character. The intertwining brought great persecution to divergent groups of Christians, not only to us. This restricting of God to be a particular country's guardian, but being done by all countries meant that each combatant believed that they were both blessed and protected by the same God. I wonder how they thought that He, or She, kept score. Both we and the murderers of September 11 th make the same claim. We say "God Bless America" and they said "Allah Akhbar." This was exactly what Francis Bellamy wanted to exclude from the pledge.

III.

I presume that under the pressures of the Cold War, in the mid 1950's, this thought, that the United States had a special place under God's grace and protection, rose to the fore. We had survived two World Wars and the Korean Conflict, besides our own Civil War and some smaller conflicts. We spread from coast to coast, Hawaii and Alaska not yet states. Without evening trying to define the God in which they believed, they did believe that the United States merited God's unique love, blessing and protection. Kate Smith sang it out in Philadelphia as an unofficial second anthem, "God Bless America." For us, particularly in our junction in history, having lived through the events of September 11th itself and now the remembrance one year later, we believe that our nation survived that day, did not fall apart, that government held, that the people endured, because beyond all human acts, there was some magical and mysterious divine aid and assistance. Though I would leave in the words 'under God' which Bellamy so assiduously left out, I would recite it without hubris. No prophet, at least any that I would believe in, has come to tell us what God thinks about this country. Whose name do we use for the God that we think blesses us? And are there any strings attached to the blessings we so desperately want? Perhaps we have seen the truth of Bellamy's pledge in these days, that our survival most clearly depended on our loyalty to the nation and our faithfulness to each other. With these qualities, if none other, this very special country will long endure.

Conclusion

Particularly in our religious calendar, this is a season of invoking God. The liturgy of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur ask God for many blessings. We ask. We don't demand. We also articulate in our prayers that the God we believe and pray and to is the universal God, the one creator of all existence. We have to be careful not to think that we own Him, or Her. I do believe that America is the most unique and promising human experiment for the betterment of society. The original pledge was wonderful and didn't need to be changed. I do hope and pray that God will metaphorically smile upon us, at least with the blessing of peace.