There is no attack on American culture more destructive and more historically dishonest than the secular Left’s relentless effort to drive God out of America’s public square. The 2002 decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that the phrase “under God” is unconstitutional represents a fundamental assault on our American identity. A court that would unilaterally modify the Pledge of Allegiance as adopted by the Congress in 1954, signed by President Eisenhower and supported by 91 percent of the American people, is a court that is clearly out of step with an America that understands that our unalienable rights come from God.
In the Pledge of Allegiance case, while the Supreme Court overruled the Ninth Circuit on procedural grounds, it did not affirm that saying “under God” was constitutional. Only three of the justices took that position. Five of the justices hid behind procedural excuses, ruling that the plaintiff did not have legal standing to file the suit. The ninth justice, Antonin Scalia, had recused himself because he had made a public speech supporting the Pledge.
But if the plaintiff had had legal standing, the Supreme Court might have had – amazingly - a five to four majority in 2004 for declaring “under God” unconstitutional. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor only defended the phrase “under God” in the Pledge by arguing that it was meaningless:
Even if taken literally, the phrase is merely descriptive; it purports only to identify the United States as a Nation subject to divine authority. That cannot be seen as a serious invocation of God or as an expression of individual submission to divine authority.... Any religious freight the words may have been meant to carry has long since been lost.” The Pledge, she deemed, merely invoked “civic deism.
The Pledge, she deemed, merely invoked “civic deism.” Yet, if pledging allegiance to one nation under God does not mean we believe America is a nation under God (and by extension ourselves as citizens), what could it possibly mean?
When a handful of judges can ignore history and decide they can overrule the culture of 91 percent of America, how can the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, maintain its moral authority? It can’t. The Court itself begins each day with the proclamation, “God save the United States and this honorable Court.” This phrase has been used for almost two hundred years. It was not adopted as a ceremonial phrase of no meaning; it was adopted because justices in the 1820s actually wanted to call on God to save the United States and the Court.
Similarly, the Pledge of Allegiance does not contain a “ceremonial” reference to God. The term under God was inserted deliberately by Congress to draw the distinction between atheistic tyranny (the Soviet Union) and a free society whose freedoms were based on the God-given rights of each person. As the report from the House of Representatives accompanying the law asserted: “From the time of our earliest history, our peoples and our institutions have reflected the traditional concept that our Nation was founded on a fundamental belief in God.”
“Fundamental belief” is not “civic deism.”
One Nation Under God
For most Americans, the blessings of God have been the basis of our liberty, prosperity, and survival as a unique country.
For most Americans, prayer is real and we subordinate ourselves to a God on whom we call for wisdom, guidance, and salvation.
For most Americans, the prospect of a ruthlessly secular society that would forbid public reference to God and systematically remove all religious symbols from the public square is horrifying.
Yet, the voice of the overwhelming majority of Americans is rejected by a media-academic-legal elite that finds religious expression frightening and threatening, or old-fashioned and unsophisticated. The results of their opposition are everywhere.
Our schools have been steadily driving the mention of God out of American history (look at your children’s textbooks or at the curriculum guide for your local school).
Our courts have been literally outlawing references to God, religious symbols, and stated public appeals to God (prayer).
For two generations we have passively accepted the judiciary’s assault on the values of the overwhelming majority of Americans. It is time to insist on judges who understand that throughout our history—and continuing to this day—Americans have believed that their fundamental rights come from God and are therefore unalienable.
The secular Left has been inventing law and grotesquely distorting the Constitution to achieve a goal that the Founding Fathers would have found to be a fundamental threat to liberty.
A steadfast commitment to religious freedom is the very cornerstone of American liberty. People came to America’s shores to be free to practice their religious beliefs. It brought the Puritans with their desire to create a “city on a hill” that would be a beacon of religious belief and piety. The Pilgrims were another group that poured into the new colonies. Quakers in Pennsylvania were another, Catholics in Maryland yet a fourth.
A religious revival, the Great Awakening in the 1730s, inspired many Americans to fight the Revolutionary War to secure their God-given freedoms. Another great religious revival in the nineteenth century inspired the abolitionists’ campaign to end slavery.
It was no accident that the marching song of the Union Army during the Civil War included the line “as Christ died to make men holy let us die to make men free.” That phrase was later changed to “let us live to make men free.” But for the men in uniform -- who were literally placing their lives on the line to end slavery -- they knew that the original line was the right one.
It is a testament to the genius of the Founding Fathers that they were able to design a practical form of government that allows religious groups the freedom to express their strong religious beliefs in the public square. And to do so in a constitutional framework that avoids inter-religious conflict and discrimination, which had characterized part of the colonial period.
First Principles
For the colonists the argument with the British government was an argument about first principles. Where did power come from? What defined loyalty? Who defined rights between king and subject?
It was in this historic context that America proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the proposition upon which America was based, and when Thomas Jefferson wrote these lines, he turned on its head the idea that power only came from God through the monarch and then to the people.
Jefferson’s immortal words about the inalienable rights from our Creator echoed the thinking of so many of the Founding Fathers.
The Founding Fathers believed that God granted rights directly to everyone. Moreover, these rights were “unalienable” -- government simply had no power to take them away. Throughout the dramatic years of America’s Founding, religious expression was commonplace among the Founding Fathers and considered wholly compatible with the principles of the American Revolution. In 1774, the very first Continental Congress invited the Reverend Jacob Duché to begin each session with a prayer. When the war against Britain began, the Continental Congress provided for chaplains to serve with the military and be paid at the same rate as majors in the Army.
During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin (often considered one of the least religious of the Founding Fathers) proposed that the Convention begin each day with a prayer. As the oldest delegate, at age eighty-one, Franklin insisted that “the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the Affairs of Men.”
Because of their belief that power had come from God to the individual, the Framers began the Constitution with the words “we the people.” Note that the Founding Fathers did not write “we the states.” Nor did they write “we the government.” Nor did they write “we the lawyers and judges” or “we the media and academic classes.”
These historic facts pose an enormous problem for the secular Left. How can they explain America without addressing its religious character and heritage? If they dislike and in many cases fear this heritage, then how can they communicate the core nature of the American people and their experience?
The answer is that the secular Left cannot accurately teach American history without addressing America’s religious character and its religious heritage, so it simply ignores the topic. If you don’t teach about the Founding Fathers, you do not have to teach about our Creator. If you don’t teach about Abraham Lincoln, you don’t have to deal with fourteen references to God and two Bible verses in his 703-word second inaugural address. That speech is actually carved into the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in a permanent affront to every radical secularist who visits this public building. You have to wonder how soon there will be a lawsuit to scrape the references to God and the Bible off the monument so as not to offend those who hate or despise religious expression.
This is no idle threat. Dr. Michael Newdow, the radical secularist who continues to fight in court to outlaw the words “under God,” told the New York Times that he intended to “ferret out all insidious uses of religion in daily life.” While the Supreme Court did not find the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional in the case brought by Newdow in 2004, Newdow has since instigated a similar lawsuit that has been successful at the federal district court level and is now on appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
Unlike Dr. Newdow, the Founding Fathers, from the very birth of the United States, publicly acknowledged God as central to defining America and to securing the blessings of liberty for the new nation.
Our first president, George Washington, at his first inauguration on April 30, 1789, “put his right hand on the Bible...[after taking the oath] adding ‘So help me God.’ He then bent forward and kissed the Bible before him.” In his inaugural address, Washington remarked that:
...it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a Government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes, and may enable every instrument employed in its administration to execute with success the functions allotted to his charge.... No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.... You will join with me, I trust, in thinking that there are none under the influence of which the proceedings of a new and free government can more auspiciously commence.
Then in the Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 3, 1789, Washington declared, “It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” Note that Washington was not only asserting that individuals have obligations before God, but that nations do as well. At this point, the United States government was not yet a year old.
That most astute observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed in Democracy in America (1835), “I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can read the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.”
The secular Left and the media-academic-legal elite would argue that even if de Tocqueville were right, he is irrelevant because he is writing about an earlier America. They argue that America has changed profoundly and is now a very different country. Justice O’Connor herself wrote that the phrase “under God” was adopted in 1954 when “our national religious diversity was neither as robust nor as well recognized as it is now.”
Yet this is a profound misinterpretation of modern America. As Michael Novak has noted, recognizing one nation “under God” is much more important in a country as religiously diverse as America because the phrase transcends any one faith or denomination and is inclusive. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has pointed out that “Americans tend to have a certain catholicity toward religion: All deserve respect.”
More importantly, the wisdom of the Founding Fathers concerning religious liberty is just as relevant today as it was in 1787 because it reflects a fundamental insight about human nature and how men and women might best live out the political experiment in ordered liberty that they ordained in Philadelphia.
The Founders had a very straightforward belief that liberty was the purpose of a just government, but that the maintenance of this liberty among a free people would require virtue.
And if virtue was to survive, it would require “true religion”, which was any religion that cultivates the virtues necessary to the protection of liberty.
Implicit within this vision of the Founding Fathers is a pluralistic sensibility. Any true religion would be therefore deserving of the respect of the government, which would include the freedom to express in public the moral principles of such a true religion.
This view that religion was an indispensable support of republican government was all-encompassing among the [founding generation].
For the Founders, it was abundantly clear. Religious liberty and freedom of religious expression would be indispensable supports for our democratic traditions of government and our pluralistic society.
And so they have, for over two hundred years.
It is important to recognize that the benefits of these supports accrue to people of not just one particular faith, but those of all faiths, and for all people of goodwill, whether religious, agnostic, atheist, or radical secularist. Likewise, the Founders clearly believed that the weakening of these religious supports – such as by the hostile treatment of religion in American public life -- threatens to undermine the very republican institutions under which the religious and the non-religious alike find their liberties.
It is with this understanding in mind of the beliefs of America’s founding generation that it becomes very clear why our national leaders have consistently invoked the protection of Divince Providence in times of great national strife. It didn’t happen for the first time in 1954 when the Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge. On July 2, 1776, as the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia to declare independence, George Washington was gathering his troops on Long Island to meet the British in battle. Washington wrote in the general orders to his men that day:
“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves.... The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.”
The very same week we were declaring our independence from Great Britain, Washington was asserting that American independence ultimately depended on God.
Likewise, Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, remarked that:
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Like Washington before him, Lincoln understood that America’s new birth of freedom would require that the nation seek the source of its liberties in the same place it had prior to the Civil War – under God.
History is vividly clear about the importance of God in the founding of our nation. To prove that our Creator is so central to understanding America, there is a walking tour of Washington, D.C. in Rediscovering God in America that shows how often the Founding Fathers and other great Americans, and the institutions they created, refer to God and call upon Him. Indeed, to study American history is to encounter God again and again. A tour like this should be part of every school class’s visit to Washington, D.C.
In the ongoing effort to reject the founding generation’s vision for religious liberty by removing any form of religious expression from American public life, the courts and the classroom are the two principal places at the center of this fight. These are the two arenas in which the secular Left has imposed change against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Americans. Yet if we insist on courts that follow the facts of American history in interpreting the Constitution, we will reestablish the right of every American to publicly acknowledge our Creator as the source of our rights, our well being, and our wisdom. And if we insist on patriotic education both for our children and for new immigrants, we will preserve the “mystic chords of memory” that have made America the most exceptional nation in history.