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Poor Alfred Goodwin! So torrential was the flood of condemnation that followed his opinion-which held that it's unconstitutional for public schools to require students to recite "under God" as part of the Pledge of Allegiance-that the beleaguered appellate-court judge suspended his own ruling until the whole 9 th Circuit Court has a chance to review the case.

Not one major political figure summoned the courage to rebut the spurious claims that America's founders wished to make God a part of public life. It's an old shibboleth of those who want to inject religion into public life that they're honoring the spirit of the nation's founders. In fact, the founders opposed the institutionalization of religion. They kept the Constitution free of references to God. The document mentions religion only to guarantee that godly belief would never be used as a qualification for holding office-a departure from many existing state constitutions. That the founders made erecting a church-state wall their first priority when they added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution reveals the importance they placed on maintaining what Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore have called a "godless Constitution." When Benjamin Franklin proposed during the Constitutional Convention that the founders begin each day of their labors with a prayer to God for guidance, his suggestion was defeated.

Given this tradition, it's not surprising that the original Pledge of Allegiance-meant as an expression of patriotism, not religious faith-also made no mention of God. The pledge was written in 1892 by the socialist Francis Bellamy, a cousin of the famous radical writer Edward Bellamy. He devised it for the popular magazine Youth's Companion on the occasion of the nation's first celebration of Columbus Day. Its wording omitted reference not only to God but also, interestingly, to the United States:

"I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The key words for Bellamy were "indivisible," which recalled the Civil War and the triumph of federal union over states' rights, and "liberty and justice for all," which was supposed to strike a balance between equality and individual freedom. By the 1920s, reciting the pledge had become a ritual in many public schools.

Since the founding, critics of America's secularism have repeatedly sought to break down the church-state wall. After the Civil War, for example, some clergymen argued that the war's carnage was divine retribution for the founders' refusal to declare the United States a Christian nation, and tried to amend the Constitution to do so.

The efforts to bring God into the state reached their peak during the so-called "religious revival" of the 1950s. It was a time when Norman Vincent Peale grafted religion onto the era's feel-good consumerism in his best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking; when Billy Graham rose to fame as a Red-baiter who warned that Americans would perish in a nuclear holocaust unless they embraced Jesus Christ; when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed that the United States should oppose communism not because the Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime but because its leaders were atheists.

Hand in hand with the Red Scare, to which it was inextricably linked, the new religiosity overran Washington. Politicians outbid one another to prove their piety. President Eisenhower inaugurated that Washington staple: the prayer breakfast. Congress created a prayer room in the Capitol. In 1955, with Ike's support, Congress added the words "In God We Trust" on all paper money. In 1956 it made the same four words the nation's official motto, replacing " E Pluribus Unum." Legislators introduced Constitutional amendments to state that Americans obeyed "the authority and law of Jesus Christ."

The campaign to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was part of this movement. It's unclear precisely where the idea originated, but one driving force was the Catholic fraternal society the Knights of Columbus. In the early '50s the Knights themselves adopted the God-infused pledge for use in their own meetings, and members bombarded Congress with calls for the United States to do the same. Other fraternal, religious, and veterans clubs backed the idea. In April 1953, Rep. Louis Rabaut, D-Mich., formally proposed the alteration of the pledge in a bill he introduced to Congress.

The "under God" movement didn't take off, however, until the next year, when it was endorsed by the Rev. George M. Docherty, the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Washington that Eisenhower attended. In February 1954, Docherty gave a sermon-with the president in the pew before him-arguing that apart from "the United States of America," the pledge "could be the pledge of any country." He added, "I could hear little Moscovites [ sic] repeat a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag with equal solemnity." Perhaps forgetting that "liberty and justice for all" was not the norm in Moscow, Docherty urged the inclusion of "under God" in the pledge to denote what he felt was special about the United States.

The ensuing congressional speechifying-debate would be a misnomer, given the near-unanimity of opinion-offered more proof that the point of the bill was to promote religion. The legislative history of the 1954 act stated that the hope was to "acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon ... the Creator ... [and] deny the atheistic and materialistic concept of communism." In signing the bill on June 14, 1954, Flag Day, Eisenhower delighted in the fact that from then on, "millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town ... the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty." That the nation, constitutionally speaking, was in fact dedicated to the opposite proposition seemed to escape the president.

In recent times, controversies over the pledge have centered on the wisdom of enforcing patriotism more than on its corruption from a secular oath into a religious one. In the 1988 presidential race, as many readers will recall, George Bush bludgeoned Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for vetoing a mandatory-pledge bill when he was governor of Massachusetts, even though the state Supreme Court had ruled the bill unconstitutional. Surely one reason for the current cravenness of Democratic leaders is a fear of undergoing Dukakis' fate in 2002 or 2004 at the hands of another Bush.

The history of the pledge supports Goodwin's decision. The record of the 1954 act shows that, far from a " de minimis" reference or a mere "backdrop" devoid of meaning, the words "under God" were inserted in the pledge for the express purpose of endorsing religion-which the U.S. Supreme Court itself in 1971 was unconstitutional. Also according to the Supreme Court's own rulings, it doesn't matter that students are allowed to refrain from saying the pledge; a 2000 high court opinion held that voluntary, student-led prayers at school football games are unconstitutionally "coercive," because they force students into an unacceptable position of either proclaiming religious beliefs they don't share or publicly protesting.

The appeals court decision came almost 40 years to the day after the Supreme Court decision in . In that case, the court ruled it unconstitutional for public schools to allow prayer, even though the prayer was non-denominational and students were allowed abstain from the exercise. When asked about the unpopular decision, President John F. Kennedy replied coolly that he knew many people were angry, but that the decisions of the court had to be respected. He added that there was "a very easy remedy"-not a constitutional amendment but a renewed commitment by Americans to pray at home, in their churches, and with their families.

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Poor Alfred Goodwin! So torrential was the flood of condemnation that followed his opinion-which held that it's unconstitutional for public schools to require students to recite "under God" as part of the Pledge of Allegiance-that the beleaguered appellate-court judge suspended his own ruling until the whole 9 th Circuit Court has a chance to review the case.

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Every school that teaches American history must teach the Bible's central role. Easily said; but experience suggests that many of today's classes in English and U.S. history are stuck somewhere between useless and harmful. High school history and English curricula ought to be rebuilt from scratch right now, on an emergency basis. Those rebuilt curricula should (of course) teach students about the centrality of the Bible ...

Anglican settlers founded Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; Pilgrims arriving on the Mayflower founded Plymouth in 1620. Boston and Salem, 1630. The goal of the early Puritan settlers, writes the historian Sidney Ahlstrom, was "a Holy Commonwealth standing in a national covenant with its Lord." Ahlstrom mentions also that "an 'Anglicanism' deeply colored by Puritan convictions would shape the early religious life of Virginia"; so it seems fair to describe the first stages of the invention of America as a basically Puritan affair. The early settlers founded a series of colleges to provide them with pastors and theologians, starting with Harvard in 1636. By 1700, a quarter of a million ex-Europeans and their descendants lived in the future United States.

America's earliest settlers came in search of religious freedom, to escape religious persecution-vitally important facts that Americans tend increasingly to forget. A new arrival who joined the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1623 "blessed God for the opportunity of freedom and liberty to enjoy the ordinances of God in purity among His people." America was a haven for devoutly religious dissidents. It is a perfect reflection of the nation's origins that the very first freedom in the Bill of Rights-Article one, part one-should be religious freedom. "Separation of church and state" was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The idea that the Bill of Rights would one day be traduced into a broom to sweep religion out of the public square like so much dried mud off the boots of careless children would have left the Founders of this nation (my guess is) trembling in rage. We owe it to them in simple gratitude to see that the Bill of Rights is not-is never-used as a weapon against religion.

You cannot understand the literature and experience of 17th-century American Puritans unless you know the Bible. The Pilgrim father William Bradford reports in his famous journal, for example, that his people had no choice but to camp near their landing-place on the Massachusetts mainland. There was no reason to think they could do better elsewhere; after all they could not, "as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a more goodly country."

Bradford saw no need to explain that he was referring to Moses gazing at the Promised Land from atop Mount Pisgah before his death (Deuteronomy 34:1). To 17th-century readers, the reference would have been obvious-and so too the implied message: These Pilgrims are like biblical Israelites. They are a chosen people who made a dangerous crossing from the house of (British) bondage to a Promised Land of freedom. Other Puritan settlers expressed themselves in similar terms. There is a fascinating resemblance between these Puritan writings and the Hebrew literary form called "melitzah," in which the author makes his point by stringing together Biblical and rabbinic passages. The Puritans' world, like traditional Jewish society, was permeated and obsessed with the Bible.

Bradford's comparison between Puritans and ancient Israel is central to the American revolution and the emergence of the new nation. Americans saw themselves as Israelites throwing off a tyrant's yoke. Most historians look to the British and Continental philosophers of the Enlightenment, Locke especially, as the major intellectual influence on America's Founding Fathers and revolutionary generation. To rely on Locke is to rely (indirectly) on the Bible. Yet the Bible itself, straight up, was the most important revolutionary text of all. Consider the seal of the United States designed by a committee of the Continental Congress consisting of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. (They don't make congressional committees like they used to!) Their proposed seal shows Israel crossing the Red Sea, with the motto "Rebellion to kings is obedience to God." The pastor Abiel Abbot proclaimed in 1799, "It has been often remarked that the people of the United States come nearer to a parallel with Ancient Israel, than any other nation upon the globe. Hence Our American Israel is a term frequently used; and our common consent allows it apt and proper."

That Britain and America should both have been inclined to see themselves as chosen peoples made a subterranean connection between them that has sometimes-one suspects-been plainer to their enemies than their friends. Down to the war in Iraq, enemies of America and Britain have suspected an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy to rule the world. In part this is paranoia; but it might also have something to do with Britain's and America's Bible-centered cultural histories. The two nations speak of a "special relationship" with each other-besides which, each has a history of believing in its own "special relationship" with the Lord Himself.

The bible continued to shape american history. Some Americans saw the great push westward as fulfilling the Lord's plan for the United States, modeled on Israel's settlement of the holy land. Meanwhile, many have noticed that the history of modern Israel resembles earlier American experience. Harassed Europeans arrive in a sparsely settled land in search of freedom. They build the place up and make it bloom. They struggle with the indigenous inhabitants, some of whom are friendly and some not. At first they collaborate with the British colonial authorities; each group winds up in a push for independence and a deadly fight with Britain.

But long before Israel resembled America, America resembled Israel. It's true that Manifest Destiny-the idea that America was predestined to push westwards towards the Pacific-was less a Bible-based than a "natural rights" approach to America's place in God's plans. You didn't have to consult the Bible to learn about America's Manifest Destiny; it was just obvious. But America was called back to her biblical faith by no less a man than Abraham Lincoln himself.

As the Civil War approached, both North and South saw their positions in biblical terms. Southern preachers sometimes accused abolitionists of being atheists in disguise. Lincoln rose above this kind of dispute. "In the present civil war it is quite possible," he wrote in 1862, "that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party."

Lincoln was America's most "biblical" president-"no president has ever had the detailed knowledge of the Bible that Lincoln had," writes the historian William Wolf. Lincoln turned to the Bible more and more frequently and fervently as the war progressed. His heterodox but profound Christianity showed him how to understand the war as a fight to redeem America's promise to mankind. Lincoln never joined a church, but said often that he would join one if "the Saviour's summary of the Gospel" were its only creed. He meant the passage in Mark and Luke where Jesus restates God's requirements in terms of two edicts from the Hebrew Bible: to love God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Lincoln's religion was deeply biblical-and characteristically American.

In modern times the Bible was no less important as a shaper and molder of American destiny. Woodrow Wilson, another intensely biblical president, spoke in biblical terms when he took America into the First World War-on behalf of freedom and democracy for all mankind. Harry Truman's Bible-centered Christianity was important to his decisions to lead America into the Cold War, and make America the first nation to recognize the newborn state of Israel -to the vast disgust of the perpetually benighted State Department. Reagan's presidency revolved around Winthrop's Gospel-inspired image of the sacred city on a hill. George W. Bush's worldwide war on tyranny is the quintessence of a biblical project-one that sees America as an almost chosen people (as Lincoln called us), with the heavy responsibilities that go with the job.

There is no agreement whether God created the world, but the Bible's awe-striking creative powers are undeniable. There is no agreement whether God "is not a man that He should lie" (Numbers 23:19), but the Hebrew Bible's uncanny honesty respecting Israel and its many sins is plain. The faithful ask, in the words of the 139th psalm, "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit?" or "whither shall I flee from Thy presence?" And answer, "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me." Secularists don't see it that way; but the Bible 's penetration into the farthest corners of the known world is simple fact. Most contemporary philosophers and culture critics are barely aware of these things, don't see the pattern behind them, can't tell us what the pattern means, and (for the most part) don't care.

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Every school that teaches American history must teach the Bible's central role. Easily said; but experience suggests that many of today's classes in English and U.S. history are stuck somewhere between useless and harmful. High school history and English curricula ought to be rebuilt from scratch right now, on an emergency basis.

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There is a phrase so often used today that too many Americans believe it to be true and worse yet, they believe it is in the U.S. Constitution. The phrase "separation of church and state" has been repeated so many times that many actually believe it is part of the first amendment. Those that use it want people to join them in removing God from everything in our lives today. They also want to remove our Godly heritage from our history. The truth is, the words separation, church and state are nowhere in the first amendment or the text of the U.S. Constitution.

The United States Constitution is one of the most brilliant documents ever written. But then why wouldn't it be, the very core of it comes straight from the Bible. The men that authored our Constitution were not perfect men, but they knew where to find perfection. Our Founding Fathers were men who knew and studied scripture. Their lives were wrapped in God's Word; it was the chief source of their education. They relied on the Bible and philosopher's whose own works and commentaries also relied on Holy Scripture. Scripture is what all laws are to be based upon. In Romans 13:3-4; "For rulers hold not terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good." Governments' duty is to be God's minister to the people. This is far different from what we think of our government leader's responsibility today. At the same time, the people are to pray for their leaders as said in I Timothy 2:2-4; "for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth."

To fully understand the influence Bible scripture had on the writing of the U.S. Constitution, you must read the Founders own words. Beginning with the Declaration of Independence, the writer's spelled out very clearly whom they owed their obedience to and whom their ultimate trust laid. They acknowledged a Creator and that our rights come from Him and that governments are instituted to protect all of those rights. They then listed their grievances and why they wanted to be free and independent. The U.S. Constitution was the remedy for all of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence. Remember these men pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor when they signed their names to the document.

The Constitution begins with the language "Blessings of Liberty" and "do ordain and establish" in the preamble and ends with the words "in the Year of our Lord September 17, 1787." Please take notice of the word, "our." The signers all agreed to this word and it implies that they were Christians. These are not just words; they have meaning and are an example of how much the Bible influenced the writers. They were men of faith, some more than others, but they were men that knew the power of prayer. During the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin requested a break and called for prayer at a time when it was much needed. Benjamin Franklin is often labeled a Deist by historians, yet his own words appear to contradict that claim. Who knows where we would be today without that prayer.

Our mass collection of historical documents proves overwhelmingly how scripture influenced our Founding Fathers. It appears Benjamin Franklin believed in divine providence when he said at the convention "...I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it possible that an empire can rise without His aid?" George Washington presided as president over the Constitutional Convention and was sworn in as our first president. He took the oath of office that is written in Article One, Section Two of the Constitution and added the words "so help me God." When he left office after two terms he said this in his farewell speech: "Of all dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports." These quotes surely suggest our founders' principles were based on scripture and a firm belief and faith in God.

James Madison, the main author of the Constitution and one of the three contributors to the Federalist Papers, wrote of the dilemma a free republic would face without virtuous, righteous men. He wrote in Federalist #51: "In framing a government which is to be administered by men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." Knowing that man did not possess virtue and knowing this kind of individual freedom was not possible without virtue, the only solution was Christianity! John Adams said it like this: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." During the War for Independence when John Adams was asked by Dr. Benjamin Rush if he thought the war could actually be won, John Adams answered this: "yes! If we fear God and repent of our sins." This is another of the many examples of our founding fathers' divine faith and our Godly heritage. Too many people today do not even know this.

After the war was over and America was no longer under British rule, as an act of Congress, the Holy Bible was the first English language Bible printed in America to be circulated for use in schools. This was on September 12, 1782 and would be one of many acts of Congress promoting the Bible and Bible Societies. An early school text book called the New England Primer contained Bible scripture and was ordered to be reprinted by three of our founding fathers. Samuel Adams in Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin in Pennsylvania and Noah Webster in Connecticut all considered this book essential for children to have in school. This text book was used until the 1930's. John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court is quoted as saying this: "Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers; and it is the duty- as well as the privilege and interest- of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers." Leaders in all branches of government believed we were a Christian nation and that in order to survive, our leaders needed to be Christian men with Christian values.

So how and why do so many people today believe in those four words, "separation of church and state"? One reason being, there are those that want it to be so. The other reason is that too many people just do not know any better. When something is repeated over and over, many simply begin believing it. There has been a huge effort to remove God and all references to God and religion out of our life today. At the same time, too many Christians remain silent and do not rebuke this lie. The actual words "separation of church and state" are taken from a letter President Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. President Jefferson was answering the concerns of the Danbury Baptist Association in the state of Connecticut in regards to the establishment of a State religion or denomination. Our third president assured them that their first amendment rights would not be infringed. This is Thomas Jefferson's actual quote from the letter. "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; thus building a wall of eternal separation between Church and State." He was reassuring his commitment to upholding the first amendment. Years later, Supreme Court judges took those words out of context and reversed the original meaning of those words to support a decision of theirs. This was not the first or last time judges have twisted the words or changed the meanings of the Founders' words to support a court decision.

The first amendment is this: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It guarantees the people that Congress will not establish a State religion. It guarantees Congress will not prohibit the free exercise of religion. It protects the freedom of speech and the freedom to print, as well as the right of the people to assemble and the right of the people to petition their government with their grievances. It does not prohibit churches from being actively involved in matters of government policy. It does not prohibit public offices from displaying religious symbols. Our Founding Fathers would find it absurd for religious leaders not to have input on the very laws the legislator's would write. They intended all citizens to be engaged in the legislative process and be knowledgeable of their very own constitutional rights. They thought it was the duty of the people and churches to keep a watchful eye on those serving in their representative republic. The standard to be used when debating new laws at that time was to primarily use the Ten Commandments. They would have thought laws that conflicted with God's Law would be rendered unconstitutional, null and void.

We must remember too that such words as religion and state had different meanings than we think of today. When reading and studying the words of the Constitution we must understand the Founders' original intent as the only manner in which to interpret. The Congressional record, required by the Constitution in Article One- Section Five, contains all the official words and acts that occur in congressional chambers. These are all available for us see and read. The Founders fully intended the States to be free and independent and that the federal government would be very small and the federal power would be very limited. The ninth and tenth amendments are evidence of this fact.

Our historical documents are full of biblical principles being applied to our Constitution. Our country was founded on Christian values and the very own words of our Founding Fathers leads us to no other view of our American heritage. If many today believe the lie of "separation of church and state," what else will they also believe? Our Godly, Christian heritage is documented with beautiful quotes from so many of our leaders. Numerous signers of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution as well as famous statesmen like Patrick Henry affirmed this same view of America. We are and always have been a Christian nation founded on Judeo-Christian values. Let's repeat this over and over until it becomes the truth that it already is!

References:

Michael A. Peroutka of IOTC (Institute on the Constitution)

David Barton of Wallbuilders

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There is a phrase so often used today that too many Americans believe it to be true and worse yet, they believe it is in the U.S. Constitution. The phrase "separation of church and state" has been repeated so many times that many actually believe it is part of the first amendment.

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Abstract: Did America have a Christian Founding? This disputed question, far from being only of historical interest, has important implications for how we conceive of the role of religion in the American republic. Mark David Hall begins by considering two popular answers to the query-"Of course not!" and "Absolutely!"-both of which distort the Founders' views. After showing that Christian ideas were one of the important intellectual influences on the Founders, he discusses three major areas of agreement with respect to religious liberty and church-state relations at the time of the Founding: Religious liberty is a right and must be protected; the national government should not create an established church, and states should have them only if they encourage and assist Christianity; and religion belongs in the public square. In short, while America did not have a Christian Founding in the sense of creating a theocracy, its Founding was deeply shaped by Christian moral truths. More important, it created a regime that was hospitable to Christians, but also to practitioners of other religions.

The role of religion in the American republic has been a source of controversy since the nation's inception. Debates are particularly fierce when they concern religious liberty and the proper relationship between church and state. Arguments on these questions are often framed in the light of the Founders' intentions, but unfortunately, their views are often distorted.

Did America have a Christian Founding? Two popular answers to this query-"Of course not!" and "Absolutely!"-both distort the Founders' views. There is in fact a great deal of evidence that America's Founders were influenced by Christian ideas, and there are many ways in which the Founders' views might inform contemporary political and legal controversies.
Two Common but Mistaken Answers
According to those who answer "Of course not!" America's Founders were guided by secular ideas and self, class, or state interests. These scholars do not deny that the Founders were religious, but they contend that they were mostly deists-i.e., persons who reject many Christian doctrines and who think God does not interfere in the affairs of men and nations.

For instance, historian Frank Lambert writes that "[the] significance of the Enlightenment and Deism for the birth of the American republic, and especially the relationship between church and state within it, can hardly be overstated." Similarly, University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone avers that "deistic beliefs played a central role in the framing of the American republic" and that the "Founding generation viewed religion, and particularly religion's relation to government, through an Enlightenment lens that was deeply skeptical of orthodox Christianity." Virtually identical claims are made by Edwin Gaustad, Steven Waldman, Richard Hughes, Steven Keillor, David Holmes, Brooke Allen, and many others.[1]

In addition to asserting that the Founders were deists, these authors regularly contend that they abandoned their ancestors' intolerant approach to church-state relations and embraced religious liberty. They often concede that some Founders thought civic authorities should support religion but argue that this is irrelevant as Jefferson's and Madison's conviction that there should be a high wall of separation between church and state was written into the Constitution and reinforced by the First Amendment. As we shall see, there are significant problems with this story.

The second answer to this question is offered by popular Christian writers such as Peter Marshall, David Manuel, John Eidsmoe, Tim LaHaye, William J. Federer, David Barton, and Gary DeMar. They contend that not only did America have a Christian Founding, but virtually all of the Founders were devout, orthodox Christians who consciously drew from their religious convictions to answer most political questions.

To support their case, these writers are fond of finding religious quotations from the Founders. The rule seems to be that if a Founder utters anything religious, at any time in his life, he counts as an orthodox or even evangelical Christian Founder. Using this methodology, Tim LaHaye concludes, for instance, that John Adams was "deeply committed to Jesus Christ and the use of Biblical principles in governing the nation," and George Washington, if he was alive today, "would freely associate with the Bible-believing branch of evangelical Christianity that is having such a positive influence upon our nation."[2] This approach leads to similarly bad history.
What Exactly Would a Christian Founding Look Like?
In order to answer the question "Did America have a Christian Founding?" properly, we must first understand it. Let us begin by considering what, exactly, would constitute a Christian Founding?

One possibility is simply that the Founders identified themselves as Christians. Clearly, they did. In 1776, every European American, with the exception of about 2,500 Jews, identified himself or herself as a Christian. Moreover, approximately 98 percent of the colonists were Protestants, with the remaining 1.9 percent being Roman Catholics.[3]

But this reality is not particularly interesting. These men and women might have been bad Christians, they may have been Christians significantly influenced by non-Christian ideas, or they may even have been Christians self-consciously attempting to create a secular political order.

Second, we might mean that the Founders were all sincere Christians. Yet sincerity is very difficult for the scholars, or anyone else, to judge. In most cases, the historical record gives us little with which to work. And even if we can determine, say, that a particular Founder was a member, regular attendee, and even officer in a church, it does not necessarily mean he was a sincere Christian. Perhaps he did these things simply because society expected it of him.

Third, we might mean that the Founders were orthodox Christians. In some cases-for example, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Roger Sherman, and John Witherspoon-there is abundant evidence that these Founders embraced and articulated orthodox Christian ideas. But the lack of records often makes it difficult to speak with confidence on this issue.

Nevertheless, in light of the many and powerful claims that the Founders were deists, it should be noted that there is virtually no evidence that more than a handful of civic leaders in the Founding era-notably Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and (if we count him as an American) Tom Paine-embraced anything approximating this view. Moreover, a good argument can be made that even these Founders were influenced by Christianity in significant ways-and it certainly does not follow that they desired the strict separation of church and state.[4]

A fourth possibility is that the Founders acted as Christians in their private and/or public lives. Some historians have argued that the Founding cannot be called Christian because some Founders did not join churches, take communion, or remain faithful to their spouses. Moreover, in their public capacity, they did not act in a Christian manner because they did things such as fight an unjust war against England and did not immediately abolish slavery.[5]

In some cases, these critiques do not take into account historical context, such as the difficulty of joining Calvinist churches in 18th century America. In others, they neglect the traditional Christian teaching that even saints sin. If the standard of being a Christian is moral perfection, no one has ever been a Christian. Most egregious, it is profoundly unhistorical to judge the Founders by specific policy outcomes that seem perfectly clear to 21st century Christians.

This is not to say that biblical principles are relativistic, but their applications to specific issues in particular times and places may vary or be unclear. To take a contemporary example, one should be very careful in saying, for instance, that someone is a good Christian politician only if she votes for (or against) tax cuts or national health care.

A final possibility is that the Founders were influenced by Christian ideas. Scholars have spent a great amount of time attempting to discern influence. Book after book has been written about whether the Founders were most influenced by Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism, the Scottish Enlightenment, etc.

I believe that this is the most reasonable way to approach the question "Did America have a Christian Founding?" In doing so, it is important to note that nominal Christians might be influenced by Christian ideas, just as it is possible for an orthodox Christian to be influenced by non-Christian ideas. I believe that an excellent case can be made that Christianity had a profound influence on the Founders.[6]

Before proceeding, I should emphasize that I am not arguing that Christianity was the only significant influence on America's Founders or that it influenced each Founder in the exact same manner. Clearly there were a variety of different, but often overlapping, intellectual influences in the era.[7] The Founders were also informed by the Anglo-American political-legal tradition and their own political experience, and like all humans, they were motivated to varying degrees by self, class, or state interests. My contention is merely that orthodox Christianity had a very significant influence on America's Founders and that this influence is often overlooked by students of the American Founding.
What Constitutes America's Founding?
I have assumed here that America was founded in the late 18th century, but some authors have argued, in the words of Gary DeMar, that our "nation begins not in 1776, but more than one hundred fifty years earlier."[8] Let us consider three major possibilities that might count as the country's founding: (1) the establishment of colonial governments in the 17th century, (2) America's break with Great Britain in the 1770s, and (3) the creation of a new constitutional order in the 1780s and 1790s.
1. America's Colonial Origins
Few doubt that Puritans were serious Christians attempting to create, in the words of Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop,"a shining city upon a hill" (a reference to Matthew 5:14). Puritans separated church and state, but they clearly thought the two institutions should work in tandem to support, protect, and promote true Christianity.

Other colonies, however, are often described as being significantly different from those in New England. Historian John Fea, for instance, contends that "the real appeal of Jamestown was economic opportunity and the very real possibility of striking it rich."[9] It is certainly the case that colonists were attracted to the New World by economic opportunity (in New England as well as in the South), and yet even in the southern colonies the protection and promotion of Christianity was more important than many authors assume. For instance, Virginia's 1610 legal code begins:

Whereas his Majesty, like himself a most zealous prince, has in his own realms a principal care of true religion and reverence to God and has always strictly commanded his generals and governors, with all his forces wheresoever, to let their ways be, like his ends, for the glory of God....

The first three articles of this text go on to state that the colonists have embarked on a "sacred cause," to mandate regular church attendance, and to proclaim that anyone who speaks impiously against the Trinity or who blasphemes God's name will be put to death.[10]

Early colonial laws and constitutions such as the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and Massachusetts Body of Libertiesare filled with such language-and in some cases, they incorporate biblical texts wholesale. Perhaps more surprisingly, tolerant, Quaker Pennsylvania was more similar to Puritan New England than many realize. The Charter of Liberties and Frame of Government of the Province of Pennsylvania (1681) begins by making it clear that God has ordained government, and it even quotes Romans 13 to this effect. Article 38 of the document lists "offenses against God" that may be punished by the magistrate, including:

swearing, cursing, lying, profane talking, drunkenness, drinking of healths, obscene words, incest, sodomy...stage-plays, cards, dice, May-games, gamesters, masques, revels, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, bear-baiting, and the like, which excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and irreligion....[11]

An extensive survey of early colonial constitutions and laws reveals many similar provisions. As well, at least nine of the 13 colonies had established churches, and all required officeholders to be Christians-or, in some cases, Protestants. Quaker Pennsylvania, for instance, expected officeholders to be "such as possess faith in Jesus Christ."[12]

If one is to understand the story of the United States of America, it is important to have a proper appreciation for its Christian colonial roots. By almost any measure, colonists of European descent who settled in the New World were serious Christians whose constitutions, laws, and practices reflected the influence of Christianity. Although some authors refer to this "planting" as a "founding," such a designation is rare among scholars. Instead, most scholars consider America to have been founded in the late 18th century around one of, or some combination of, two major events: the War for Independence and the creation of America's constitutional order.
2. The War for Independence
On the surface, the War for American Independence appears to be an inherently un-Christian event. The Apostle Paul, in Romans 13, seems to leave little room for revolution: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained by God. Whosoever therefore resists the power, resists the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

Historically, Christian thinkers have taken this and similar biblical passages to prohibit rebellion against civic authorities. However, in the 12th century, some Christian scholars began to allow for the possibility that inferior magistrates might overthrow evil kings. These ideas were developed and significantly expanded by the Protestant Reformers. John Calvin, the most politically conservative of these men, contended that, in some cases, inferior magistrates might resist an ungodly ruler. However, Reformed leaders such as John Knox, George Buchanan, and Samuel Rutherford of Scotland, Stephanus Junius Brutus and Theodore Beza of France, and Christopher Goodman and John Ponet of England argued that inferior magistrates must resist unjust rulers and even permitted or required citizens to do so.

It is worth noting that all of these men wrote before Locke published his Two Treatises of Government and that this tradition was profoundly influential in America. Indeed, between 55 percent and 75 percent of white citizens in this era associated themselves with Calvinist churches, and members of the tradition were significantly overrepresented among American intellectual elites.[13]

The influence of the Reformed political tradition in the Founding era is manifested in a variety of ways, but particularly noteworthy is the almost unanimous support Calvinist clergy offered to American patriots. This was noticed by the other side, as suggested by the Loyalist Peter Oliver, who railed against the "black Regiment, the dissenting Clergy, who took so active a part in the Rebellion." King George himself reportedly referred to the War for Independence as "a Presbyterian Rebellion." From the English perspective, British Major Harry Rooke was largely correct when he confiscated a presumably Calvinist book from an American prisoner and remarked that "[i]t is your G-d Damned Religion of this Country that ruins the Country; Damn your religion."[14]

The Declaration of Independence, the most famous document produced by the Continental Congress during the War for Independence, proclaims: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." As well, this text references "the laws of nature and of nature's God" and closes by "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world" and noting the signers' "reliance on the protection of divine Providence." The Founders' use of Christian rhetoric and arguments becomes even more evident if one looks at other statements of colonial rights and concerns such as the Suffolk Resolves, the Declaration of Rights, and the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms-to say nothing of the dozen explicitly Christian calls for prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving issued by the Continental and Confederation Congresses.[15]

Some scholars have argued that the use of "distant" words for God or "vague and generic God-language" like "Nature's God," Creator," and "Providence" in the Declaration and other texts is evidence that the Founders were deists.[16] However, indisputably orthodox Christians regularly used such appellations.

For instance, the Westminster Standards (a classic Reformed confession of faith), both in the original 1647 version and in the 1788 American revision, refer to the deity as "the Supreme Judge," "the great Creator of all things," "the first cause," "righteous judge," "God the Creator," and "the supreme Law and King of all the world." The Standards also regularly reference God's providence and even proclaim that "[t]he light of nature showeth that there is a God...." Similarly, Isaac Watts, the "father of English Hymnody," referred to the deity as "nature's God" in a poem about Psalm 148: 10. Jeffry H. Morrison has argued persuasively that the Declaration's references to "'divine Providence' and 'the Supreme Judge of the World' would have been quite acceptable to Reformed Americans in 1776, and conjured up images of the 'distinctly biblical God' when they heard or read the Declaration."[17]

It may be objected that Jefferson, the man who drafted the Declaration, was hardly an orthodox Christian, and that is certainly the case. But this is beside the point. As Jefferson himself pointed out in an 1825 letter, the object of the document was not to "find out new principles, or new arguments.... [I]t was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day...."[18] Even though Jefferson believed in a vague, distant deity, when his fellow delegates revised and approved the Declaration, virtually all of them understood "Nature's God," "Creator," and "Providence" to refer to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: a God who is active in the affairs of men and nations.
3. The Creation of America's Constitutional Order
In light of the above discussion, it is perhaps surprising that the Constitution says little about God or religion. Of course, there are hints that America is a Christian nation (e.g., a pocket veto occurs 10 days after a bill is passed by Congress, Sundays excepted), but these seem to be more than balanced by Article VI's prohibition of religious tests for federal offices. The only specific mention of God is found in the date the Constitution was written: "in the Year of our Lord 1787."

What is going on? Some have argued that America began as a Christian country but that the authors of the Constitution recognized that this was not a good thing, and so they created, in the words of Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, a "Godless Constitution." To reinforce this point, the Founders added the First Amendment to the Constitution, which begins "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."[19]

On the surface, this is a plausible hypothesis, and a few Founding-era documents such as James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance" (1785) and Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802) seem to offer some support for this view. As we shall see, this interpretation of the Founding is inaccurate even with respect to Jefferson and Madison, and if one looks beyond them to the hundreds of men who attended the Federal Convention of 1787, participated in the state ratification conventions, and were elected to the first federal Congress, it becomes completely implausible. These individuals, without exception, called themselves Christians, and a good case can be made that many were influenced by orthodox Christian ideas in important ways.

This argument is made well in broad strokes by Barry Alan Shain in The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought. It also receives interesting empirical support from Donald Lutz, who examined 15,000 pamphlets, articles, and books on political subjects published in the late 18th century. His study found that the Bible was cited far more often than any other book, article, or pamphlet. In fact, the Founders referenced the Bible more than all Enlightenment authors combined.[20]

If Shain and Lutz make the argument for Christian influence in broad strokes, others have made it in finer strokes through studies of individual Founders. For instance, I have co-edited four books that collectively shine light on 26 different Founders and several major traditions. These books, along with a number of other articles and books on less famous Founders, demonstrate that there is little evidence that the Founders as a group were deists who desired the separation of church and state.[21]

Before discussing the positive influence of Christian ideas on the American Founders, let me briefly suggest the central reason why the Constitution appears to be "Godless." Simply put, the Founders were creating a national government for a very few limited purposes-notably those enumerated in Article I, Section 8. There was almost universal agreement that if there was to be legislation on religious or moral matters, it should be done by state and local governments.[22]

In fact, states remained active in this business well into the 20th century. It is true that the last state church was disestablished in 1832, but many states retained religious tests for public office, had laws aimed at restricting vice, required prayer in schools, and so forth. Because the federal government was not to be concerned with these issues, they were not addressed in the Constitution. The First Amendment merely reinforced this understanding with respect to the faith-i.e., Congress has no power to establish a national church or restrict the free exercise of religion.[23]

Even though Christianity is not mentioned in the Constitution or Bill or Rights, the Founders of the American republic were influenced by Christian ideas in significant ways. For example:

1. Their faith taught them that humans were sinful. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external or internal controls on government would be necessary." This conviction led them to avoid utopian experiments such as those later pursued during the French Revolution and to adopt a constitutional system characterized by separated powers, checks and balances, and federalism. Many Enlightenment thinkers in this era, by way of contrast, tended to favor a strong, centralized government run by experts.[24]

2. They firmly believed that God ordained moral standards, that legislation should be made in accordance with these standards, and that moral laws took precedence over human laws. This conviction manifests itself in their abstract reflections (e.g., James Wilson's law lectures, parts of which read like St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica) and practical decisions (e.g., all but one Supreme Court Justice prior to John Marshall argued publicly that the Court could strike down an act of Congress if it violated natural law).[25]

3. Similarly, Christianity informed the Founders' understanding of substantive concepts such as "liberty." Barry Shain has identified eight different ways in which the word was used in the 18th century. Only one of these is related to the excessively individualistic way the term is often used today. Instead, the Founders were far more likely to see liberty as the freedom to do what is morally correct, as illustrated by United States Supreme Court Justice James Wilson's marvelous dictum: "Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness."[26]

4. America's Founders believed that humans were created in the imago dei-the image of God. Part of what this means is that humans are reasonable beings. This led them to conclude that we the people (as opposed to the elite) can order our public lives together through politics rather than force. It also helped inform early (and later) American opposition to slavery.[27]

5. Faith led many Founders to conclude that religious liberty should be extensively protected. Yet many also thought that civic authorities should encourage Christianity and that it is appropriate to use religious language in the public square. By the late 18th century, some Founders were beginning to question the wisdom of religious establishments, primarily because they thought that such establishments hurt true religion. The Founders' views on these questions have the most immediate and obvious policy and legal implications, so I will address them in some detail.

The Founders on Church and State
In the 1947 Supreme Court decision of Everson v. Board of Education, Justice Wiley Rutledge proclaimed that "no provision of the Constitution is more closely tied to or given content by its generating history than the religious clause of the First Amendment. It is at once the refined product and the terse summation of that history." Like many jurists and academics since, he proceeded to argue that the Founders intended the First Amendment to create a strict separation of church and state. As evidence, he relied almost solely on statements by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, most taken out of context and made before or well after the Religion Clauses were drafted.[28]

Yet consideration of a wide range of Founders and their public actions shows that few if any embraced anything approximating modern conceptions of the separation of church and state. Of course, they differed among themselves, but it is possible to identify three major areas of agreement with respect to religious liberty and church-state relations.
Consensus #1: Religious Liberty Is a Right and Must be Protected.
To a person, the Founders were committed to protecting religious liberty. This conviction was usually based upon the theological principle that humans have a duty to worship God as their consciences dictate. A good illustration of this is George Mason's 1776 draft of Article XVI of Virginia's Declaration of Rights. It reads:

That as Religion, or the Duty which we owe to our divine and omnipotent Creator, and the Manner of discharging it, can be governed only by Reason and Conviction, not by Force or Violence; and therefore that all Men shou'd enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the Magistrate....

James Madison, in his first significant public act, objected to the use of "toleration" in the article, believing that it implied that religious liberty was a grant from the state that could be revoked at will. The Virginia Convention agreed, and Article XVI was amended to make it clear that "the free exercise of religion" is a right, not a privilege granted by the state.[29]

Mason's draft of Article XVI was reprinted throughout the states and had an important impact on subsequent state constitutions and the national Bill of Rights. By the end of the Revolutionary era, every state offered significant protection of religious liberty. The federal Constitution of 1787 did not, but only because its supporters believed the national government did not have the delegated power to pass laws interfering with religious belief or practice. In the face of popular outcry, the first Congress proposed and the states ratified a constitutional amendment prohibiting Congress from restricting the free exercise of religion.

Scholars and jurists debate the exact scope of religious liberty protected by the First Amendment. For instance, it is unclear whether the amendment requires religious minorities to be exempted from neutral laws. (For example, does the Free Exercise Clause require Congress to exempt religious pacifists from conscription into the military?) But at a minimum, it prohibits Congress from, in the words of James Madison, compelling "men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience."[30]
Consensus #2: States Should Have Established Churches Only If They Encourage and Assist Christianity.
In 1775, at least nine of the 13 colonies had established churches. Although establishments took a variety of forms, they generally entailed the state providing favorable treatment for one denomination-treatment which often included financial support. Members of religious denominations other than the official established church were usually tolerated, but they were occasionally taxed to support the state church, and some were not permitted to hold civic office.

After independence, most states either disestablished their churches (particularly states where the Church of England was previously established) or moved to a system of "plural" or "multiple" establishments. Under the latter model, citizens were taxed to support their own churches. Although a few Founders challenged establishments of any sort in the name of religious liberty, most arguments were framed in terms of which arrangement would be best for Christianity.

A good illustration of the last point may be found in two petitions from Westmoreland County that arrived at the Virginia General Assembly on the same day regarding Patrick Henry's 1784 proposal to provide state funds to a variety of churches. The first supported Henry's bill, arguing, much like public-sector unions today, that state subsidies are necessary to keep salaries high enough to attract the best candidates into the ministry.

Opponents of Henry's plan disagreed, responding that assessments were against "the spirit of the Gospel," that "the Holy Author of our Religion" did not require state support, and that Christianity was far purer before "Constantine first established Christianity by human Laws." Rejecting their fellow petitioners' arguments that government support was necessary to attract good candidates to the ministry, they argued that clergy should manifest:

that they are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost to take upon them that Office, that they seek the good of Mankind and not worldly Interest. Let their doctrines be scriptural and their Lives upright. Then shall Religion (if departed) speedily return, and Deism be put to open shame, and its dreaded Consequences removed.[31]

This petition was significantly more popular than James Madison's now-famous "Memorial and Remonstrance," another petition written to oppose Henry's plan. Madison's memorial has often been referenced to shine light on the First Amendment, and it is regularly treated as a rationalist, secular argument for religious liberty. But, as in the Virginia Declaration, Madison argues that the right to religious liberty is unalienable "because what is here a right towards men, is a duty towards the Creator." As well, he noted that "ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation" and that "the bill is adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity."[32]

America's Founders were committed to the idea that religion (by which virtually all of them meant Christianity) was necessary for public happiness and political prosperity. This view was so widespread that James Hutson has called it "the Founders' syllogism."[33] The key question with respect to particular establishments at the state level was whether they helped or hurt the faith.

Consensus #3: Religion Belongs in the Public Square.

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in which he famously suggested that the First Amendment created a "wall of separation between Church & State." This metaphor lay dormant with respect to the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence until 1947, when Justice Hugo Black seized upon it as the definitive statement of the Founders' views on church-state relations.[34]

As appealing as the wall metaphor is to contemporary advocates of the strict separation of church and state, it obscures far more than it illuminates. Leaving aside the fact that Jefferson was in Europe when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, that the letter was a profoundly political document, and that Jefferson used the metaphor only once in his life, it is not even clear that it sheds useful light upon Jefferson's views, much less those of his far more traditional colleagues.

Jefferson issued calls for prayer and fasting as governor of Virginia, and in his revision of Virginia's statutes, he drafted bills stipulating when the governor could appoint "days of public fasting and humiliation, or thanksgiving" and to punish "Disturbers of Religious Worship and Sabbath Breakers." As a member of the Continental Congress, he proposed that the nation adopt a seal containing the image of Moses "extending his hand over the sea, caus[ing] it to overwhelm Pharaoh," and the motto "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." He closed his second inaugural address by encouraging all Americans to join him in seeking "the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers, as Israel of old...." And two days after completing his letter to the Danbury Baptists, he attended church services in the U.S. Capitol, where he heard John Leland, the great Baptist minister and opponent of religious establishments, preach.[35]

The point is not that Jefferson was a pious man who wanted a union between church and state. His private letters make it clear that he was not an orthodox Christian, and his public arguments and actions demonstrate that he favored a stricter separation between church and state than virtually any other Founder. Yet even Jefferson, at least in his actions, did not attempt to completely remove religion from the public square, and what Jefferson did not completely exclude, most Founders embraced.

This point may be illustrated in a variety of ways, but a particularly useful exercise is to look at the first Congress, the body that crafted the First Amendment. One of Congress's first acts was to agree to appoint and pay congressional chaplains. Shortly after doing so, it reauthorized the Northwest Ordinance, which held that "Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."[36]

More significantly for understanding the First Amendment, on the day after the House approved the final wording of the Bill of Rights, Elias Boudinot, later president of the American Bible Society, proposed that the President recommend a day of public thanksgiving and prayer. In response to objections that such a practice mimicked European customs or should be done by the states, Roger Sherman, according to a contemporary newspaper account:

justified the practice of thanksgiving, on any signal event, not only as a laudable one in itself, but as warranted by a number of precedents in holy writ: for instance, the solemn thanksgivings and rejoicings which took place in the time of Solomon, after the building of the temple, was a case in point. This example, he thought, worthy of Christian imitation on the present occasion; and he would agree with the gentleman who moved the resolution.[37]

The House agreed, as did the Senate, as did the President. The result was George Washington's famous 1789 Thanksgiving Day Proclamation. The text of his proclamation is worth quoting at some length:

Whereas 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...

I do recommend...the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be....

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our national government a blessing to all the People....[38]

Similar proclamations were routinely issued by Presidents Washington, Adams, and Madison. Jefferson, it is true, refused to formally issue such proclamations, yet as Daniel L. Dreisbach has pointed out, he "employed rhetoric in official utterances that, in terms of religious content, was virtually indistinguishable from the traditional thanksgiving day proclamations."[39]

America's Founders did not want Congress to establish a national church, and many opposed establishments at the state level as well. Yet they believed, as George Washington declared in his Farewell Address, that of "all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports."[40] Moreover, almost without exception, they agreed that civic authorities could promote and encourage Christianity and that it was appropriate for elected officials to make religious arguments in the public square. There was virtually no support for contemporary visions of a separation of church and state that would have political leaders avoid religious language and require public spaces to be stripped of religious symbols.
Conclusions
So did America have a Christian Founding? History is complicated, and we should always be suspicious of simple answers to difficult questions. As we have seen, there is precious little evidence that the Founders were deists, wanted religion excluded from the public square, or desired the strict separation of church and state. On the other hand, they identified themselves as Christians, were influenced in important ways by Christian ideas, and generally thought it appropriate for civic authorities to encourage Christianity.

What do these facts mean for Americans who embrace non-Christian faiths or no faith at all? Although the Founders were profoundly influenced by Christianity, they did not design a constitutional order only for fellow believers. They explicitly prohibited religious tests for federal offices, and they were committed to the proposition that all men and women should be free to worship God (or not) as their consciences dictate.

As evidenced by George Washington's 1790 letter to a "Hebrew Congregation" in Newport, Rhode Island, the new nation was to be open to a wide array of individuals who were willing to assume the responsibilities of citizenship:

All [citizens] possess alike liberty and conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

...May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.[41]

Yet it does not follow from this openness that Americans should simply forget about their country's Christian roots. Anyone interested in an accurate account of the nation's past cannot afford to ignore the important influence of faith on many Americans, from the Puritans to the present day.

Christian ideas underlie some key tenets of America's constitutional order. For instance, the Founders believed that humans are created in the image of God, which led them to design institutions and laws meant to protect and promote human dignity. Because they were convinced that humans are sinful, they attempted to avoid the concentration of power by framing a national government with carefully enumerated powers. As well, the Founders were committed to liberty, but they never imagined that provisions of the Bill of Rights would be used to protect licentiousness. And they clearly thought moral considerations should inform legislation.

America has drifted from these first principles. We would do well to reconsider the wisdom of these changes.

The Founders believed it permissible for the national and state governments to encourage Christianity, but this may no longer be prudential in our increasingly pluralistic country. Yet the Constitution does not mandate a secular polity, and we should be wary of jurists, politicians, and academics who would strip religion from the public square. We should certainly reject arguments that America's Founders intended the First Amendment to prohibit neutral programs that support faith-based social service agencies, religious schools, and the like.[42]

Finally, we ignore at our peril the Founders' insight that democracy requires a moral people and that faith is an important, if not indispensable, support for morality. Such faith may well flourish best without government support, but it should not have to flourish in the face of government hostility.

-Mark David Hall, Ph.D., is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics at George Fox University. He is the author or co-editor of eight books, including The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 2009) and The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). Among his numerous essays is First Principles Essay No. 26, "Justice, Law, and the Creation of the American Republic: The Forgotten Legacy of James Wilson" (The Heritage Foundation, June 1, 2009).
View the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics microsite.

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Abstract: Did America have a Christian Founding? This disputed question, far from being only of historical interest, has important implications for how we conceive of the role of religion in the American republic. Mark David Hall begins by considering two popular answers to the query-"Of course not!"

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Christian History | Learn the History of Christianity & the Church

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Christianity on the Early American Frontier: Christian History Interview - Revivals That Changed a Nation

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Frontier faith captured the heart of the common person-and molded America's character.

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Americans United for Separation of Church and State

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Is the United States a "Christian nation"? Some Americans think so. Religious Right activists and right-wing television preachers often claim that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Even some politicians agree. If the people who make this assertion are merely saying that most Americans are Christians, they might have a point. But those who argue that America is a Christian nation usually mean something more, insisting that the country should be officially Christian. The very character of our country is at stake in the outcome of this debate.

Religious Right groups and their allies insist that the United States was designed to be officially Christian and that our laws should enforce the doctrines of (their version of) Christianity. Is this viewpoint accurate? Is there anything in the Constitution that gives special treatment or preference to Christianity? Did the founders of our government believe this or intend to create a government that gave special recognition to Christianity?

The answer to all of these questions is no. The U.S. Constitution is a wholly secular document. It contains no mention of Christianity or Jesus Christ. In fact, the Constitution refers to religion only twice in the First Amendment, which bars laws "respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," and in Article VI, which prohibits "religious tests" for public office. Both of these provisions are evidence that the country was not founded as officially Christian.

The Founding Fathers did not create a secular government because they disliked religion. Many were believers themselves. Yet they were well aware of the dangers of church-state union. They had studied and even seen first-hand the difficulties that church-state partnerships spawned in Europe. During the American colonial period, alliances between religion and government produced oppression and tyranny on our own shores.

Many colonies, for example, had provisions limiting public office to "Trinitarian Protestants" and other types of laws designed to prop up the religious sentiments of the politically powerful. Some colonies had officially established churches and taxed all citizens to support them, whether they were members or not. Dissenters faced imprisonment, torture and even death.

These arrangements led to bitterness and sectarian division. Many people began agitating for an end to "religious tests" for public office, tax subsidies for churches and other forms of state endorsement of religion. Those who led this charge were not anti-religion. Indeed, many were members of the clergy and people of deep piety. They argued that true faith did not need or want the support of government.

Respect for religious pluralism gradually became the norm. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, for example, he spoke of "unalienable rights endowed by our Creator." He used generic religious language that all religious groups of the day would respond to, not narrowly Christian language traditionally employed by nations with state churches.

While some of the country's founders believed that the government should espouse Christianity, that viewpoint soon became a losing proposition. In Virginia, Patrick Henry argued in favor of tax support for Christian churches. But Henry and his cohorts were in the minority and lost that battle. Jefferson, James Madison and their allies among the state's religious groups ended Virginia's established church and helped pass the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, a 1786 law guaranteeing religious freedom to all.

Jefferson and Madison's viewpoint also carried the day when the Constitution, and later, the Bill of Rights, were written. Had an officially Christian nation been the goal of the founders, that concept would appear in the Constitution. It does not. Instead, our nation's governing document ensures religious freedom for everyone.

Maryland representative Luther Martin said that a handful of delegates to the Constitutional Convention argued for formal recognition of Christianity in the Constitution, insisting that such language was necessary in order to "hold out some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity or paganism." But that view was not adopted, and the Constitution gave government no authority over religion. Article VI, which allows persons of all religious viewpoints to hold public office, was adopted by a unanimous vote. Through ratification of the First Amendment, observed Jefferson, the American people built a "wall of separation between church and state."

Some pastors who favored church-state union were outraged and delivered sermons asserting that the United States would not be a successful nation because its Constitution did not give special treatment to Christianity. But many others welcomed the new dawn of freedom and praised the Constitution and the First Amendment as true protectors of liberty.

Early national leaders understood that separation of church and state would be good for all faiths including Christianity. Jefferson rejoiced that Virginia had passed his religious freedom law, noting that it would ensure religious freedom for "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, the infidel of every denomination."

Other early U.S. leaders echoed that view. President George Washington, in a famous 1790 letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, R.I., celebrated the fact that Jews had full freedom of worship in America. Noted Washington, "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship."

Washington's administration even negotiated a treaty with the Muslim rulers of north Africa that stated explicitly that the United States was not founded on Christianity. The pact, known as the Treaty with Tripoli, was approved unanimously by the Senate in 1797, under the administration of John Adams. Article 11 of the treaty states, "[T]he government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion...."

Admittedly, the U.S. government has not always lived up to its constitutional principles. In the late 19th century especially, officials often promoted a de facto form of Protestantism. Even the U.S. Supreme Court fell victim to this mentality in 1892, with Justice David Brewer declaring in Holy Trinity v. United States that America is "a Christian nation."
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion....
-U.S. Treaty with Tripoli, 1797

It should be noted, however, that the Holy Trinity decision is a legal anomaly. It has rarely been cited by other courts, and the "Christian nation" declaration appeared in dicta a legal term meaning writing that reflects a judge's personal opinion, not a mandate of the law. Also, it is unclear exactly what Brewer meant. In a book he wrote in 1905, Brewer pointed out that the United States is Christian in a cultural sense, not a legal one.

A more accurate judicial view of the relationship between religion and government is described by Justice John Paul Stevens in his 1985 Wallace v. Jaffree ruling. Commenting on the constitutional right of all Americans to choose their own religious belief, Stevens wrote, "At one time it was thought that this right merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Mohammedism or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all."

A determined faction of Christians has fought against this wise and time-tested policy throughout our history. In the mid 19th century, several efforts were made to add specific references to Christianity to the Constitution. One group, the National Reform Association (NRA), pushed a "Christian nation" amendment in Congress in 1864. NRA members believed that the Civil War was divine punishment for failing to mention God in the Constitution and saw the amendment as a way to atone for that omission.

The NRA amendment called for "humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, [and] His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government." Ten years later, the House Judiciary Committee voted against its adoption. The committee noted "the dangers which the union between church and state had imposed upon so many nations of the Old World" and said in light of that it was felt "inexpedient to put anything into the Constitution which might be construed to be a reference to any religious creed or doctrine."

Similar theocratic proposals resurfaced in Congress sporadically over the years. As late as 1950, a proposal was introduced in the Senate that would have added language to the Constitution that "devoutly recognizes the Authority and Law of Jesus Christ, Saviour and Ruler of nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of liberty." This amendment was never voted out of committee. Efforts to revive it in the early 1960s were unsuccessful.

Today, America's religious demographics are changing, and diversity has greatly expanded since our nation's founding. The number of Jews has increased, and more Muslims are living in America than ever before. Other religions now represented in America include Hinduism, Buddhism and a myriad others. In addition, many Americans say they have no religious faith or identify themselves as atheists, agnostics or Humanists. According to some scholars, over 2,000 distinct religious groups and denominations exist in the United States.

Also, even though most Americans identify as Christian, this does not mean they would back official government recognition of the Christian faith. Christian denominations disagree on points of doctrine, church structure and stands on social issues. Many Christians take a moderate or liberal perspective on church-state relations and oppose efforts to impose religion by government action.

Americans should be proud that we live in a democracy that welcomes persons of many faiths and none. Around the globe, millions of people still dwell under oppressive regimes where religion and government are harshly commingled. (Iran and the former Taliban regime of Afghanistan are just two examples.) Many residents of those countries look to the United States as beacon of hope and a model for what their own nations might someday become.
When the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.
-Justice John Paul Stevens

Only the principle of church-state separation can protect America's incredible degree of religious freedom. The individual rights and diversity we enjoy cannot be maintained if the government promotes Christianity or if our government takes on the trappings of a "faith-based" state.

The United States, in short, was not founded to be an officially Christian nation or to espouse any official religion. Our government is neutral on religious matters, leaving such decisions to individuals. This democratic and pluralistic system has allowed a broad array of religious groups to grow and flourish and guarantees every individual American the right to determine his or her own spiritual path or to reject religion entirely. As a result of this policy, Americans enjoy more religious freedom than any people in world history. We should be proud of this accomplishment and work to preserve the constitutional principle that made it possible separation of church and state.

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Is the United States a "Christian nation"? Some Americans think so. Religious Right activists and right-wing television preachers often claim that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. Even some politicians agree. If the people who make this assertion are merely saying that most Americans are Christians, they might have a point.

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Was America founded as a Christian nation? | CNN

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That question has served a variety of political causes since July 4, 1776, from legalizing persecution and aiding runaway slaves to fighting Nazis.

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Americans United for Separation of Church and State

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Depending on your perspective, today is either Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples' Day. I don't intend to get into that debate, but I do want to share some information about this holiday's overlooked connection to a familiar patriotic ritual, the Pledge of Allegiance, and explain how it got religious overtones - yes, Columbus is involved.

In the year 1892, the country marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage to the New World. To mark the occasion, educators wanted to come up with some kind of special observance schoolchildren could take part in.

Enter Francis Bellamy. A Baptist minister, Bellamy had a year earlier been fired from his Boston pulpit for being too radical. Bellamy was a socialist, prone to launch broadsides against capitalism. In one of his most famous sermons, Bellamy made the case that Jesus was a socialist.

Casting about for a new gig, Bellamy ended up on the editorial staff of The Youth's Companion, a hugely popular magazine at the time. There, to mark the Columbus quatercentenary, he penned what we know as the Pledge of Allegiance and devised a flag-salute ritual. (It may have been part of a plot by the magazine to sell U.S. flags to schools, but we won't get into that now.)

Congress and President Benjamin Harrison endorsed the Pledge, and it took off. Soon it was being recited in schools nationwide. Children would begin the day by facing the flag, thrusting their right arms at it stiffly and saying the Pledge in unison. (For obvious reasons, the so-called "Bellamy salute" became problematic during the lead-up to World War II and was replaced with the hand-over-heart gesture we know today.)

Bellamy's original salute read, "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Two changes were later made: In 1923, "my flag" became "the flag of the United States of America" after a campaign led by the American Legion.

For advocates of church-state separation, the more significant change occurred in 1954. The words "under God" were slipped into the Pledge between "one nation" and "indivisible." This came about after a pressure campaign spearheaded primarily by the Knights of Columbus. (The same group, incidentally, lobbied to make Columbus Day a national holiday in 1934.)

During the 1950s, the United States was locked in an ideological struggle with "godless communism," and adding a reference to God to the Pledge was seen by many as a good tactical move. When the Senate deliberated the matter, U.S. Sen. Homer Ferguson (R-Minn.) opined, "I believe this modification of the Pledge is important because it highlights one of the real, fundamental differences between the free world and the communist world, namely belief in God."

The Pledge's place in public schools was thus secured - but not everyone was on board. Jehovah's Witnesses, who don't believe in pledging to anything other than God, refused to take part and went to court seeking an opt-out for their children. They lost the first case in 1940, but the Supreme Court soon realized its mistake and ruled in 1943 that public school students can't be compelled to recite the Pledge.

Today, Jehovah's Witnesses still sit out the Pledge, as do some non-believers and others who want to engage in social protest. While youngsters have the right to refrain from reciting the Pledge, some school officials still try to force it. Every school year, Americans United has to remind a few schools that students have the right not to take part.

Many of those who choose to recite it are probably not aware that the Pledge's famous words, penned by a socialist, were originally wholly secular.

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How Columbus Put 'Under God' In The Pledge Of Allegiance (Sort Of)

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Depending on your perspective, today is either Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples' Day. I don't intend to get into that debate, but I do want to share some information about this holiday's overlooked connection to a familiar patriotic ritual, the Pledge of Allegiance, and explain how it got religious overtones - yes, Columbus is involved.

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Atheist contests 'under God' in US allegiance pledge

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America's highest court will be urged today to order the removal of the words "under God" from the pledge of allegiance.

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Contact:

Merrill Miller, 202-238-9088 ext. 105, merrillmiller@americanhumanist.org

(Washington, D.C., Sept. 2, 2014)-A new study by The Seidewitz Group, commissioned by the American Humanist Association with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, reports that 34 percent of Americans support removing the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance.

The study, conducted in May of 2014, responded to a 2013 poll by Lifeway Research, which stated that only 8 percent of American adults felt that "under God" should be removed from the Pledge. Unlike the Lifeway Research poll, the survey done by The Seidewitz Group included a brief description of the history of the Pledge of Allegiance, including the information that "under God" was only added as recently as 1954 in response to the Cold War and that some Americans feel that the Pledge should focus on unity rather than religion.

"The current wording of the Pledge marginalizes atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nontheists because it presents them as less patriotic, simply because they do not believe in God," said Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association. "We are encouraged by these findings, which suggest with even a small amount of education, more Americans are in favor of restoring the Pledge to its original wording."

One thousand American adults were surveyed. Among Christians, 21 percent supported the removal of "under God" from the Pledge. Forty-three percent of individuals of other faiths and 62 percent of individuals who identified with no particular faith also supported removing the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Over 90 percent of individuals who identify as atheists are in favor of the removal of the phrase "under God."

In response to these survey results, the American Humanist Association will be announcing the launch of a new campaign on Sept. 8, 2014.

The full study can be viewed here.

###
Founded in 1941 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., the American Humanist Association (AHA) works to protect the rights of humanists, atheists, and other non-religious Americans. The AHA advances the ethical and life-affirming philosophy of humanism, which-without beliefs in any gods or other supernatural forces-encourages individuals to live informed and meaningful lives that aspire to the greater good of humanity.

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Over One-Third of Americans Support Removing Under God from the Pledge of Allegiance - American Humanist Association

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Contact: Merrill Miller, 202-238-9088 ext. 105, merrillmiller@americanhumanist.org (Washington, D.C., Sept. 2, 2014)-A new study by The Seidewitz Group, commissioned by the American Humanist Association with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, reports that 34 percent of Americans support removing the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance.

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A forwarded email claims an NBC poll asking respondents if they believe in God yielded this result: 86% in favor of keeping the words 'In God we trust' on currency and 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, 14% against.
Email text contributed by Diana Y., Aug. 6, 2006:

Subject: Fw: NBC POLL

Do you believe in God?

NBC this morning had a poll on this question. They had the highest Number of responses that they have ever had for one of their polls, and the Percentage was the same as this:

86% to keep the words, IN God We Trust and God in the Pledge of Allegiance

14% against.

That is a pretty 'commanding' public response.

I was asked to send this on if I agreed or delete if I didn't.

Now it is your turn .... It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, I have a very hard time understanding why there is such A mess about having "In God We Trust" on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Why is the world catering to this 14%?

AMEN!

If you agree, pass this on, if not, simply delete.

In God We Trust

Some versions of this 2004-vintage email claim NBC pollsters were "shocked" or "surprised" to learn that such a large percentage of respondents (86%) voted in favor of keeping the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" as the national motto. The point we're supposed to take away, evidently, is that the mainstream press is rife with Godless cretins who neither share nor understand the religious convictions of average Americans.

There's no evidence to suggest that anyone at NBC actually reacted that way to such a poll, however, and in point of fact, it wouldn't have made sense if they had, given that the same questions constantly turn up in public opinion polls, and the results are always roughly the same.

It's unclear whether NBC actually conducted a "Do you believe in God?" poll around the time these messages first surfaced (2004). If they did, we couldn't find evidence of it, though we gather from secondhand sources that NBC subsidiary CNBC did conduct a survey more or less along those line in March 2004, asking participants if the words "under God" should be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. The results broke down similarly to those stated in the email: 85% answered no (meaning they favored keeping the phrase "under God," and 15% answered yes.

Public opinion polls have produced strikingly similar results over the years:

A Newsweek poll in 2002 found that 87% of respondents favored keeping "under God" in the Pledge, and 9% were against.

In 2003, a Gallup poll found that 90% of Americans surveyed were in favor of the inscription "In God We Trust" on U.S. coins. In addition to the 8% who said they opposed it, 2% said they didn't know.

A 2004 Newsweek poll yielded 87% in favor of keeping "under God," 12% against, and 1% "not sure."

An online poll launched by MSNBC in 2005 posed the question, "Should the motto 'In God We Trust' be removed from U.S. currency?" When last I checked the results, 89% had voted no and 11% had voted yes.

Poll: Keep 'Under God' in Pledge of Allegiance. Associated Press, 24 March 2004

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Claim That NBC Poll Says 86% Favor 'In God We Trust'

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A forwarded email claims an NBC poll asking respondents if they believe in God yielded this result: 86% in favor of keeping the words 'In God we trust' on currency and 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance, 14% against. Email text contributed by Diana Y., Aug.

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American children first began reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in school more than 100 years ago in October 1892, after the words appeared in a family magazine called Youth's Companion. Although the recitation was published anonymously, its authorship is usually attributed to Francis Bellamy, who wrote it to commemorate the 400 th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World. The pledge quickly became one of the most common expressions of American patriotism, especially in America's schools.

Data from the August 2004 Gallup Youth Survey* reflect the ongoing popularity of the pledge in schools -- a majority of U.S. teenagers say that they recite it in school either daily (50%) or weekly (9%). Eighteen percent of teens rarely recite the pledge at school, while fewer than one in four (23%) say they never recite it. Younger teens are slightly more likely than older teens to recite the pledge daily or weekly, suggesting that recitation of the pledge becomes less prevalent in high school than in middle school.
The Case Against the Pledge
At many schools, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is such a standard part of the morning routine that students may give little thought to it. But the pledge made headlines on June 26, 2002, when the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case of Newdow v. Elk Grove Unified School District, ruled that requiring students to recite the phrase "under God" as part of the Pledge of Allegiance is a violation of the First Amendment. (The "under God" phrase was added to the pledge in 1954.)

The case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision was reversed on June 14, 2004. Ironically, the Supreme Court decision occurred on Flag Day, exactly 50 years after the 1954 decision to add "under God" to the pledge.

So the pledge, including the "under God" phrase, is intact for now, and most schools are still permitted to require that their students recite it. Currently, 34 U.S. states have laws requiring schools to include recitation of the pledge during the school day or week, while several other states encourage schools to include it. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 1943 that government schools could not force children to recite the pledge, do most teens feel that they are required to say the pledge when it is recited at school? According to the Gallup Youth Survey, a majority of teens -- 59% -- say that they feel free not to say the pledge if they don't want to. But that leaves a sizable minority of teens who say they do feel required to recite it.
Teen Views on "Under God"
Gallup polling of American adults has consistently shown that Americans support keeping the pledge in its current format, rather than removing the words "under God." Most recently, a March 2004 poll showed that 89% of U.S. adults support keeping the pledge as is, while just 9% would like to remove "under God." When asked the same question, American teenagers express a similarly high level of support for leaving the pledge unchanged: 92% of teens want to keep the current pledge, and 8% would like to see the words "under God" removed.

Among teens, support for keeping the pledge as it is transcends racial, religious, political, and geographic lines. More than 85% of teens in every demographic group support keeping "under God" in the pledge.
*The Gallup Youth Survey is conducted via an Internet methodology provided by Knowledge Networks, using an online research panel that is designed to be representative of the entire U.S. population. The current questionnaire was completed by 439 respondents, aged 13 to 17, Aug. 8-19, 2004. For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±5 percentage points.

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Do Teens Feel Pressured to Recite Pledge?

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American children first began reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in school more than 100 years ago in October 1892, after the words appeared in a family magazine called Youth's Companion. Although the recitation was published anonymously, its authorship is usually attributed to Francis Bellamy, who wrote it to commemorate the 400 th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World.

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F or its first 60 years, the Pledge of Allegiance was a nonsectarian American vow, conceived to foster love of country in youths and among immigrants, and to heal the nation's wounds in the wake of a vicious civil war. But in 1953, another conflict-the Cold War between democracy and communism-was on, and Congress decided the deity had a place in the pledge.

Following the War Between the States, the Union flag emerged as a popular American symbol. Admirers undertook to establish an official Flag Day. Many school systems embraced the concept, but decades would pass before the event achieved national holiday status. Nonetheless, by the 1880s affection for the Stars and Stripes had grown so enthusiastic as to interest The Youth's Companion. The Boston-based weekly, in business since 1827, had 475,000 readers; subscribers paid $1.75 a year and anyone who signed up received a premium. To honor the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America, publisher and editor Daniel Ford decided to hand out tricolors with subscriptions. That campaign had been under way for two years in 1890 when Ford heard minister Francis Bellamy preach at Bethany Baptist Church in Boston. The temperance advocate impressed Ford with his elucidation of Christian Socialist theology, which looked warily on capitalism and expressed sympathy for the workingman. Bellamy's views drew on the philosophy of his novelist cousin, Edward, famous for the utopian ideas in his futuristic 1888 best seller, Looking Backward.

In 1891, Francis Bellamy quit Bethany Baptist over money. Ford hired him for The Youth's Companion Columbus quadricentennial project. As part of the increasingly prominent promotion, James Upham, Ford's nephew, was struggling to compose a pledge to the flag.

That July, President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation to honor Columbus Day with ceremonies in schools and other places of assembly. "The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools be made by the people the center of the day's demonstration," Harrison said. "Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country, and the exercises of such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship." In February 1892, the National Education Association, which then as now represented teachers, endorsed the flag project and named Bellamy chairman of an NEA committee on the Columbus celebration.

At the time, the best-known-and perhaps only-verbal salute to the flag had been composed by Colonel George Balch, principal of a free kindergarten in New York City for poor and immigrant children. "We give our heads and our hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one flag," Balch had written.

Upham asked Bellamy if he could do better.

In August 1892, the minister finished writing: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Upham approved and suggested an accompanying gesture: coming to attention, snapping together the heels upon beginning the recitation, and, while speaking, extending the right arm, hand palm up. Ford and the NEA approved the pledge and the salute, featured in the September 8, 1892, Youth's Companion. Bellamy had wanted a writing credit; Ford said no, citing the magazine's policy of anonymity for contributors. More than half of the country's 120,000 public schools participated in the October 1892 National Public School Celebration.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson issued an official proclamation establishing June 14 as Flag Day but not making the holiday official. In 1923, to standardize flag etiquette and help immigrants assimilate, the American armed forces and nearly 70 other entities convened a National Flag Conference. Among other guidance, the Flag Code stipulated that flags too worn or damaged to be suitable for display were to be disposed of in a dignified way, preferably by burning. To encourage immigrants to understand the difference between their homelands and their adoptive country, organizers revised the pledge from "I pledge allegiance to my flag..." to "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States." The words "of America" were added in 1924.

The government revisited the pledge on June 22, 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed a joint congressional resolution incorporating the pledge into the 1923 code. And because the Nazi " Sieg heil!" salute bore a creepily close resemblance to the Youth's Companion gesture, that December FDR signed another resolution: Instead of raising their right arms, civilians reciting the pledge were to hold their right hands over their hearts; active duty military personnel would salute.

On August 3, 1949, President Harry Truman made Flag Day a national holiday. Less than a year later GIs were fighting in Korea. The Soviet Union and China had emerged as foes. Senator Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, was warning of a Red-riddled government. The times encouraged talk of inserting the language of faith into the Pledge of Allegiance. In April 1951, members of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men's organization, began to include "under God" after "one nation" when reciting the pledge. The Knights urged Congress to institute that change nationally. Sentiment for the new wording grew after the 1952 election saw World War II hero Dwight D. Eisenhower win the White House by a landslide and the House and Senate go Republican.

Affirmation of a national relationship with a higher being seemed to be in order. The spirit was bipartisan; in early 1953, Democratic Representative Louis C. Rabaut of Michigan sponsored a resolution to incorporate the words "under God" into the pledge.

Debate was fraught over the phrase's meaning. Congressional leaders, especially Republicans, were feeling pressure from conservative sects to invoke Jesus Christ and Christianity by name. Senator William Langer, a North Dakota Republican, decided to have the judiciary subcommittee he chaired hold hearings on a constitutional amendment recognizing the authority and law of Jesus. Others on Capitol Hill offered reassurances that rewording the pledge was not an attempt at establishing a state religion. One was Rep. Charles G. Oakman, a Republican from Michigan and sponsor of one of the 17 "under God" bills introduced.

"The phrase 'under God' is all-inclusive for all religions and has no reference whatever to the establishment of a state church," Oakman said. "One can pledge allegiance to a flag symbolizing a state founded upon a belief in God and, at the same time, accept the doctrine of a separate church and state. A distinction exists between the church as an institution and a belief in the sovereignty of God." As for atheists, Oakman said, "there is a vast difference in making a positive affirmation on the existence of God in whom one does not believe, and on the other hand making a pledge of allegiance and loyalty to the flag of a country which in its underlying philosophy recognizes the existence of God."

No serious opposition materialized, but concerns about separation of church and state crossed party lines and crept into the official record. After President Eisenhower signed the pledge changes into law, Republican Representative William E. Miller of New York noted clerical fears. On June 22, 1954, Miller quoted the Rev. George N. Marshall, a Unitarian minister who saw the change in the Pledge of Allegiance, along with an amendment seeking to put Jesus in the Constitution and a California proposal requiring loyalty oaths for churches, as signs of a dangerous erosion of the separation of between church and state.

Signing House Joint Resolution 243 on Flag Day 1954, Eisenhower invoked his country's need for reassurance in parlous times. "Over the globe, mankind has been cruelly torn by violence and brutality and, by the millions, deadened in mind and soul by a materialistic philosophy of life. Man everywhere is appalled by the prospect of atomic war," the president said. "In this somber setting, this law and its effects today have profound meaning. In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America's heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country's most powerful resource, in peace or in war." ✯
This story was originally published in the September/October 2016 issue of American History magazine. Subscribe here.
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Under God: The Evolution of the Pledge of Allegiance | HistoryNet

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F or its first 60 years, the Pledge of Allegiance was a nonsectarian American vow, conceived to foster love of country in youths and among immigrants, and to heal the nation's wounds in the wake of a vicious civil war.

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By Bob Smietana
NASHVILLE, Tenn.-In 1954, the United States Congress added the words "under God" to the country's Pledge of Allegiance. Sixty years later, most Americans would like to keep it that way, despite ongoing legal challenges to the pledge.

A lawsuit filed against a New Jersey school district on March 28 contends that reciting the phrase "under God" in the pledge sends a message that nonbelievers are bad citizens and creates a hostile environment for atheist students.

But a telephone survey of 1,001 Americans from Nashville-based LifeWay Research found that 85 percent want to keep "under God" in the pledge.

Researchers did find 1 in 4 Americans (25 percent) believe forcing students to say "under God" violates their rights. But less than 1 in 10 (8 percent) Americans want to remove "under God" from the pledge.

The survey results show little support for changing the pledge, says Scott McConnell, director of LifeWay Research.

"Most Americans have recited the pledge hundreds of times and are not inclined to memorize a different pledge," he says. "Changing it may just feel wrong. Most Americans say they believe in God or a higher being and feel comfortable having 'under God' in the pledge."

Lawyers for the parents in the New Jersey lawsuit disagree. They issued a statement on Monday (April 21) announcing the suit.

"Public schools should not engage in an exercise that tells students that patriotism is tied to a belief in God," said David Niose, attorney for the American Humanist Association's Appignani Humanist Legal Center, which represents the parents. "Such a daily exercise portrays atheist and humanist children as second-class citizens, and certainly contributes to anti-atheist prejudices."

A similar legal challenge to the pledge is pending before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. That case, brought by atheist parents of a public school child, claims the "under God" phrase violates the state's equal rights laws.

The study by LifeWay Research also found younger Americans are more likely to support removal of "under God" from the pledge. Fourteen percent of those ages 18-29 want to remove the phrase, compared to 5 percent of those over 64.

Women (88 percent) are more likely to want to keep "under God" than men (83 percent). Americans with a college degree are more likely (13 percent) to want it removed. And, self-identified born again, evangelical, or fundamentalist Christians are most likely (94 percent) to say "under God" should remain.
Methodology: Interviews were conducted in either English or Spanish. The telephone survey of adult Americans was conducted Sept. 6-10, 2013. Both listed and unlisted numbers were called, and approximately 20 percent of the sample was reached by cell phone. Responses were weighted by age, gender, education, race/Hispanic ethnicity, region and CBSA market size to more accurately reflect the population. The completed sample is 1,001 phone surveys. The sample provides 95 percent confidence the sampling error does not exceed +3.1 percentage points. Margins of error are higher in sub-groups. LifeWay Research is a Nashville-based, evangelical research firm that specializes in surveys about faith in culture and matters that affect the church. Download the research

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Keep "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Say Most Americans

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By Bob Smietana NASHVILLE, Tenn.-In 1954, the United States Congress added the words "under God" to the country's Pledge of Allegiance. Sixty years later, most Americans would like to keep it that way, despite ongoing legal challenges to the pledge.

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Poor Alfred Goodwin! So torrential was the flood of condemnation that followed his opinion-which held that it's unconstitutional for public schools to require students to recite "under God" as part of the Pledge of Allegiance-that the beleaguered appellate-court judge suspended his own ruling until the whole 9 th Circuit Court has a chance to review the case.

Not one major political figure summoned the courage to rebut the spurious claims that America's founders wished to make God a part of public life. It's an old shibboleth of those who want to inject religion into public life that they're honoring the spirit of the nation's founders. In fact, the founders opposed the institutionalization of religion. They kept the Constitution free of references to God. The document mentions religion only to guarantee that godly belief would never be used as a qualification for holding office-a departure from many existing state constitutions. That the founders made erecting a church-state wall their first priority when they added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution reveals the importance they placed on maintaining what Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore have called a "godless Constitution." When Benjamin Franklin proposed during the Constitutional Convention that the founders begin each day of their labors with a prayer to God for guidance, his suggestion was defeated.

Given this tradition, it's not surprising that the original Pledge of Allegiance-meant as an expression of patriotism, not religious faith-also made no mention of God. The pledge was written in 1892 by the socialist Francis Bellamy, a cousin of the famous radical writer Edward Bellamy. He devised it for the popular magazine Youth's Companion on the occasion of the nation's first celebration of Columbus Day. Its wording omitted reference not only to God but also, interestingly, to the United States:

"I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The key words for Bellamy were "indivisible," which recalled the Civil War and the triumph of federal union over states' rights, and "liberty and justice for all," which was supposed to strike a balance between equality and individual freedom. By the 1920s, reciting the pledge had become a ritual in many public schools.

Since the founding, critics of America's secularism have repeatedly sought to break down the church-state wall. After the Civil War, for example, some clergymen argued that the war's carnage was divine retribution for the founders' refusal to declare the United States a Christian nation, and tried to amend the Constitution to do so.

The efforts to bring God into the state reached their peak during the so-called "religious revival" of the 1950s. It was a time when Norman Vincent Peale grafted religion onto the era's feel-good consumerism in his best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking; when Billy Graham rose to fame as a Red-baiter who warned that Americans would perish in a nuclear holocaust unless they embraced Jesus Christ; when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed that the United States should oppose communism not because the Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime but because its leaders were atheists.

Hand in hand with the Red Scare, to which it was inextricably linked, the new religiosity overran Washington. Politicians outbid one another to prove their piety. President Eisenhower inaugurated that Washington staple: the prayer breakfast. Congress created a prayer room in the Capitol. In 1955, with Ike's support, Congress added the words "In God We Trust" on all paper money. In 1956 it made the same four words the nation's official motto, replacing " E Pluribus Unum." Legislators introduced Constitutional amendments to state that Americans obeyed "the authority and law of Jesus Christ."

The campaign to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance was part of this movement. It's unclear precisely where the idea originated, but one driving force was the Catholic fraternal society the Knights of Columbus. In the early '50s the Knights themselves adopted the God-infused pledge for use in their own meetings, and members bombarded Congress with calls for the United States to do the same. Other fraternal, religious, and veterans clubs backed the idea. In April 1953, Rep. Louis Rabaut, D-Mich., formally proposed the alteration of the pledge in a bill he introduced to Congress.

The "under God" movement didn't take off, however, until the next year, when it was endorsed by the Rev. George M. Docherty, the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Washington that Eisenhower attended. In February 1954, Docherty gave a sermon-with the president in the pew before him-arguing that apart from "the United States of America," the pledge "could be the pledge of any country." He added, "I could hear little Moscovites [ sic] repeat a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag with equal solemnity." Perhaps forgetting that "liberty and justice for all" was not the norm in Moscow, Docherty urged the inclusion of "under God" in the pledge to denote what he felt was special about the United States.

The ensuing congressional speechifying-debate would be a misnomer, given the near-unanimity of opinion-offered more proof that the point of the bill was to promote religion. The legislative history of the 1954 act stated that the hope was to "acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon ... the Creator ... [and] deny the atheistic and materialistic concept of communism." In signing the bill on June 14, 1954, Flag Day, Eisenhower delighted in the fact that from then on, "millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town ... the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty." That the nation, constitutionally speaking, was in fact dedicated to the opposite proposition seemed to escape the president.

In recent times, controversies over the pledge have centered on the wisdom of enforcing patriotism more than on its corruption from a secular oath into a religious one. In the 1988 presidential race, as many readers will recall, George Bush bludgeoned Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for vetoing a mandatory-pledge bill when he was governor of Massachusetts, even though the state Supreme Court had ruled the bill unconstitutional. Surely one reason for the current cravenness of Democratic leaders is a fear of undergoing Dukakis' fate in 2002 or 2004 at the hands of another Bush.

The history of the pledge supports Goodwin's decision. The record of the 1954 act shows that, far from a " de minimis" reference or a mere "backdrop" devoid of meaning, the words "under God" were inserted in the pledge for the express purpose of endorsing religion-which the U.S. Supreme Court itself in 1971 was unconstitutional. Also according to the Supreme Court's own rulings, it doesn't matter that students are allowed to refrain from saying the pledge; a 2000 high court opinion held that voluntary, student-led prayers at school football games are unconstitutionally "coercive," because they force students into an unacceptable position of either proclaiming religious beliefs they don't share or publicly protesting.

The appeals court decision came almost 40 years to the day after the Supreme Court decision in . In that case, the court ruled it unconstitutional for public schools to allow prayer, even though the prayer was non-denominational and students were allowed abstain from the exercise. When asked about the unpopular decision, President John F. Kennedy replied coolly that he knew many people were angry, but that the decisions of the court had to be respected. He added that there was "a very easy remedy"-not a constitutional amendment but a renewed commitment by Americans to pray at home, in their churches, and with their families.

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Poor Alfred Goodwin! So torrential was the flood of condemnation that followed his opinion-which held that it's unconstitutional for public schools to require students to recite "under God" as part of the Pledge of Allegiance-that the beleaguered appellate-court judge suspended his own ruling until the whole 9 th Circuit Court has a chance to review the case.

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Many public school districts in America require daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. At this point, school authorities know that they have to permit an exception for any child who conscientiously objects to participating. Moreover, by now commands not just grudging acceptance, but widespread approval. Most Americans think it very bad to force children to make statements that offend their conscience.

What, however, about the timid child, or the child who has reasonable worries about stigma and peer pressure? The history of the pledge and of the related school prayer issue makes it obvious that nonparticipation often comes at a cost. If Ellory Schempp was greeted with outright persecution for reading from the Quran, we can expect that children who refuse to say the pledge-whether they stand in silence, sit, or leave the classroom-will be courting the hostility of teachers, administrators, and, perhaps most clearly, their fellow students. The whole point of the pledge, in the mind of its original supporters, was to put all Americans on record as supporting patriotism, and to inculcate the value of patriotism by a daily required exercise in the schools. From the point of view of these concerns, the non-participating child is bound to look at the very least weird and not fully American, at the worst subversive and threatening.

Lee v.Weisman recognized the coercive role of peer pressure, and this problem, studied in famous experiments by Solomon Asch, has been prominently recognized in recent studies of the Holocaust and of the social importance of dissent. It is clear that even adults are highly vulnerable to peer pressure, to the extent of being willing to say things that they know to be false, and to do things that are terrible.

At the time of Barnette, the children involved objected to the pledge because it asked them to swear loyalty to an entity other than God, which their faith did not permit them to do. Although Jehovah's Witnesses were not the only Americans who had such conscientious objections, the other concerned groups were relatively small. It seemed at the time that arranging exemptions for a small number of children was feasible without undue stigmatization and upheaval. When the words "under God" were added to the pledge in 1954, the whole issue suddenly became much more complex. At this point, many new groups of Americans acquired conscientious grounds for objection to the daily recitation: atheists, agnostics, believers in a detached God who does not take a direct interest in human affairs, believers in a God who looks for right conduct and thus does not take a particular interest in Americans over Russians just because Americans (many of them) believe in God and Russians (many of them) are atheists, believers in a plurality of gods, believers in religions that do not assert the existence of a God. Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Unitarians, and some types of Jews and Christians now have conscientious grounds for objection.

Indeed, the more one thinks about what "one nation under God" means, the more religious people it excludes. As a Reform Jew, I hold that God loves truth and righteousness, and that these values can be imagined as residing in an ideal community-rather like Immanuel Kant's "kingdom of ends." I also believe, however (again, with Kant), that no actual nation instantiates them adequately, and that, in consequence, no actual nation enjoys God's sponsorship.Merely recognizing God's existence cuts no ice: what interests God is the committed pursuit of justice. So I myself would object to the pledge on such grounds and would now not want to recite it, although in high school I did so, not having thought very much about religious matters. I don't think that America is "under God" any more than Israel, or India, or Britain, or Germany, or Syria, or, for that matter, the Soviet Union in the 1950s is "under God": all nations should strive for right conduct, and if they do what is just, God will approve their actions. But God doesn't play favorites: God loves justice, peace, and righteousness, and doesn't single out a particular nation, flawed as all nations are flawed, for special loving protection. Or so I hold. But at the time, the phrase (introduced by the Knights of Columbus) was clearly intended to show why the U.S. was superior to godless communism.Well, one could argue convincingly that it is in fact superior, but that argument would have to be made, and the mere fact that the U.S. is a nation of believers (on the whole) certainly does not make it a nation of righteous believers.

Maybe "under God" means "subject to God's judgment," not "enjoying God's favor and protection." That is not what the people who introduced the words meant by them, on the whole, since most believers think that all human beings are subject to God's judgment, but the whole point of the language was to introduce a distinction between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This, however, is a reading through which someone like me might attempt to reconcile the disharmony between the pledge and my beliefs. Still, this leaves many Jews on the outside: those who, like many leaders of Reform Judaism through the centuries, have denied the existence of a personal God and who have conceived of God as a force of rationality and order in the cosmos, in the manner of Spinoza. Isaac Meyer Wise, one of the greatest leaders of Reform Judaism in America, was a Spinozist, and he could not have accepted the pledge in its current form.

Even if we did have a situation in which the theological views of all Jews and Christians were consonant with reciting the pledge, which we don't, that would hardly deal with the legitimate grievances of Hindus, Buddhists, Unitarians, agnostics, atheists, and others. It's important to notice, then, that it is not simply a matter of excluding nonbelievers, and that the issue cannot be solved by retreating to a nonpreferentialist version of the Establishment Clause. Lots of believers, and more every day (as Hinduism and Buddhism continue to grow), have cogent objections to the morning ritual. It states that America is a monotheist nation with a particular type of theistic conception, and this statement, in turn, entails the further statement that they are not fully equal to those monotheists in the public square. There is bound to be stigma in this, particularly in the light of the history of the demonization of Hindu polytheism in India by British monotheists, a history that the "reasonable observer" would be sure to learn.

At this point we might try to say that the pledge, while sectarian, is voluntary, and does not coerce anyone. Certainly it is a good thing that after Barnette, recitation of the pledge cannot be made mandatory. The question is whether this disposes of the constitutional question. Justice Kennedy, as we've seen, has prominently emphasized a coercion-based theory of the Establishment Clause. His theory of the Establishment Clause, however, is unconvincing, for surely an establishment issue can be present even when an observance, or a display, is utterly noncoercive, as Justice O'Connor's endorsement test has repeatedly emphasized.

Even if we liked the coercion theory, however, it would not help rescue the pledge, at least not if we accept Justice Kennedy's analysis of Lee v.Weisman. If the suggestion that one ought to stand during someone else's reading of a graduation prayer is viewed as coercive, on the grounds that peer pressure and fear of stigma are coercive to young people, the pledge is surely much more coercive. The children involved include far younger children, and the act of not reciting, while other children are reciting with their hands over their hearts, is more conspicuous than the act of nonparticipation in the graduation prayer-even if one thought that sitting down was the only way to express nonparticipation. Justice Thomas, in his opinion in the pledge case, helpfully recognized that under Lee v.Weisman the words "under God" are unconstitutional. His radical solution was to deny the incorporation of the Establishment Clause and to throw out a whole series of precedents. If we are not ready to accept his doctrine, we should still accept his reading of Lee and the problem it poses for the pledge.

There is one remaining way out, and this is to say that the pledge is one of those traditional historic ceremonies that does not create a problem because it is part of "ceremonial Deism" and simply expresses our historical tradition. In her opinion in the pledge case, Justice O'Connor plausibly points out that some manifestations of religion in our public life can be defended along such lines. (The Court has often said similar things.)

Some references to God may indeed be defensible in this way: the use of "In God We Trust" on our currency, the "God Save this Honorable Court" that opens the sessions of the Supreme Court. These ceremonial manifestations of religion may bother some people. And yet, they have been around for a very long time, and perhaps we now accept them as part of our history rather than as containing any devotional message. Or so Justice O'Connor's argument goes.

Let's now look at Justice O'Connor's four criteria for saying that a traditional observance does not constitute a constitutional violation. And let's compare "In God We Trust" to the pledge. Although Justice O'Connor herself tries to argue that the pledge is all right under her criteria, I think we'll see that this argument is unconvincing.

First, Justice O'Connor mentions history and ubiquity: the questionable item must have been in place for "a significant portion of the Nation's history." This criterion is important because it seems right to be more forgiving about something that is a historical relic than about something contentiously introduced in recent times. Here "In God We Trust" looks very different from "under God" in the pledge: the former has been in place since right after the Civil War, the latter only since 1954. "Reasonable observers have reasonable memories," Justice O'Connor once said, and many living Americans remember the sudden change in the pledge, as well as the debate surrounding it, which was highly theistic in content, stressing the need to get Americans to stand behind a symbolic affirmation of our difference from "godless Communism."

Second, she mentions absence of worship or prayer: there is a difference, she says, between asking someone to join in a ritual observance and simply making a statement that doesn't ask people to affirm anything. Here "In God We Trust" looks pretty good: we pass money around all the time without thinking of ourselves as endorsing that sentiment, and it would take a real haggler (of the sort that Justice O'Connor spoke when she mentioned the possibility of a "heckler's veto") to be very upset about the presence of time-honored words on the coins we use. The pledge is of course entirely different: impressionable children are being asked to join in a ritual observance that is an affirmation of God as well as of country. The whole point of the pledge was that it was an act of quasi-worship, suited to inculcate strong patriotic emotions in young children. The whole point of adding the language of God was to make those same children think that we (unlike the Soviet Union) are in a nation that is protected by God. Barnette has sufficiently established that the recitation is not devoid of affirmation: that's why the children had a legitimate grievance. Now the affirmation includes religious affirmation.

The third criterion, and an important one, is absence of reference to particular religion. As we've seen, it's virtually impossible to construct a religious reference that is not somehow particular, and Justice O'Connor acknowledges that the pledge is indeed particular, excluding Buddhists, Hindus, and others. She then retreats to the position that it derived from a time "when our national religious diversity was neither as robust nor as well recognized as it is now." I find this unconvincing. First of all, the numbers of people who accept a divergent religion should not decide the constitutional question. Second, the reason there were not many Hindus here until recently was that immigration law kept them out by restricting immigration quotas to the proportion of the population that a given national origin occupied in 1895; this imbalance was rectified only by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. So it seems doubly churlish to keep people out unfairly and then to say, "Because we succeeded in keeping you out for so long, we don't have to take your religious sensibilities into account." Third, there were lots of agnostics, atheists, Reform Jewish Spinozists, Deists, Unitarians, and others who could not endorse the religious conception of the pledge all along. Moreover, there can be little doubt that the movement to add "under God" to the pledge was connected to a desire to denigrate most of these people, as fellow travelers with "atheistic communism." ("Ceremonial Deism" is an odd name for a ritual affirmation that a Deist would be very reluctant to endorse, since Deists think of God as a rational causal principle but not as a personal judge and father.)

What about "In God We Trust?" Well, it has in principle the same problem, but it was not introduced with intent to exclude and denigrate, and the fact that it does so much better on the first two criteria seems to me to suggest that the third criterion might be waived in that case. The criteria are not supposed to be necessary conditions of acceptability, just good things to look for.

Finally, minimal religious content: the reference must be "highly circumscribed" and easy to avoid. On this count the pledge does well enough, if one imagines that children who object could simply drop those two words, while reciting the rest.We do have the Lee v.Weisman worry, however, again in this case: if what the objector wants to do is to make it clear that she doesn't go along with the ritual as the majority practice it, she will have to do something more than silently omit two words. She will have to ask for an excuse, or stay seated, and this will make the pledge every bit as onerous as the prayers that were rejected in the whole string of school prayer cases. If the defender of "under God" now says that the words don't mean anything much, have no content, she has the history of the addition of the words to contend with: for people felt that they were very important and had significant religious content. Moreover, defenders of the pledge today argue that it does have substantial content.

Here again, "In God We Trust" seems on stronger ground: most people don't think of it as religious at all, and are able to use the currency without noticing it.

We should agree with Justice O'Connor and the entirety of the tradition that I've described: there are traditional references to religion in our public life that should not be pruned away and that pose no constitutional problem. It is extremely doubtful, however, that the pledge, in its current form, is among them.

Given public feeling on the issue, it would cause a national crisis were the Supreme Court to say that the words "under God" are unconstitutional. If we adopt Justice Breyer's theory of interpretation, then, we can find a way round the problem: a test of constitutionality is whether deciding the other way would threaten civil peace. This principle seemed, and seems here, unfortunately ad hoc, favoring majority beliefs and making a virtue of convenience. As an account of the meaning of the religion clauses, Breyer's conflict principle should be rejected. Nonetheless, one might reach the conclusion that the Supreme Court ought to hold off in this case by a different route-for example, one might introduce considerations of judicial modesty and caution, arguing that, for institutional reasons, judges should usually be reluctant to cause a national crisis. If there is uncertainty about the correct way of proceeding in such a momentous case, it is probably wise for the Court to avoid the issue as long as possible- hoping that, in the meanwhile, greater public understanding of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other related religions, as well as a greater appreciation for conscientious moral atheism and agnosticism, will undermine the perception that the opponents of the pledge are all dangerous subversives. From the vantage point of these practical concerns, it was extremely unfortunate that the case that went to the Supreme Court was brought by an outspoken atheist who openly scoffs at religious belief. It was a good thing that the Court was able to find a way around the case, by holding that Newdow did not have standing, since he did not have custody of his daughter. It was also basically good for Justice O'Connor to do what she did, misapplying her own analytical criteria: it is much better to have the analytical framework right and make a mistake about this or that case than to veer to a new analytical framework that is on balance weaker (as Justice Breyer did in the Ten Commandments case).

On July 19, 2006, the U.S. House passed, by a vote of 260-167, a bill removing jurisdiction, in the matter of the words "under God" in the pledge, from the federal appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court. This move is deeply to be regretted, because it undermines judicial independence and the very idea of the separation of powers. Proponents seem to be pursuing their immediate goal in a way that neglects the larger long-term structural issues the bill implicates. Fortunately, a companion bill in the Senate is likely to fail.

How can we make progress on this divisive issue? First of all, we simply need to talk about the issue and its history far more than we do, and members of affected minority religions need to get involved. It would be good if all Americans understood the history of "under God" in the 1950s, and understood, as well, the reasons many believing Americans, as well as nonbelievers, have for being troubled by the words. The participation of the Hindu and Buddhist communities in the recent Ten Commandments case is a welcome sign for the future. Hindus sometimes duck away from challenging monotheism, and can even represent themselves, at times, as quasi-monotheists, because they are tired of being pilloried for their polytheism and, as new immigrants in a vulnerable position, they desire respectability. It would be wonderful if they would tell Americans frankly that they worship Rama and Shiva and Ganesha and other gods, and that the pledge refers to a monotheistic conception that denigrates them. Buddhists, whether immigrants or American converts, should also join this conversation, explaining that theirs is a genuine religion and yet recognizes no God. Confucianists, Taoists, and others should enter the debate as well. It would also be very helpful if more Jews and Christians who hold views that render the language of the pledge problematic would say forthrightly what these reasons are.

Meanwhile, we need to talk more about Justice O'Connor's helpful criteria and how they apply in a wide range of cases, refining the criteria themselves, adding to them if new helpful criteria can be found, and saying more about how many of them need to be present in order for a religiously divisive practice to be constitutional.

This national conversation is not taking place. One reason is the reluctance of many dissident religions to get involved in public discussions of their dissident conceptions, for fear of stigma for themselves and their children. That is why it ended up being an atheist who brought the famous case, a fact that proved very bad for public understanding of the issues. The pledge, as I've argued, is offensive to many believers, as well as to atheists. Most Americans, however, currently think that only atheists have a problem with it.

Another reason the conversation is failing, more problematic still, is the reliance of American liberals on the language of "separation of church and state": because they think it's self-evident that "under God" violates "separation" and is bad for that reason alone, many liberals don't bother to investigate the deep inequalities and hierarchies that it constitutes. Let's, then, try speaking the language of equality and endorsement, and see how far we can get.

Excerpted from "Contemporary Controversies: The Pledge, Evolution, Imagination, Gay Marriage, Fear of Muslims," in Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Law School.
Footnotes:

1. Asch's experiments are discussed in detail in both Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harpercollins, 1992), and Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

2. See also Douglas Laycock, "Theology Scholarships, the Pledge of Allegiance and Religious Liberty," Harvard Law Review 118 (2004), 155-246, who similarly likes her criteria but not her application of them to the Pledge.

3. See my The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), chapter 9.

4. See Laycock, discussing a number of interpretations by believers.

5. Associated Press, July 19, 2006.

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"Under God:" The Pledge, Present and Future

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Many public school districts in America require daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. At this point, school authorities know that they have to permit an exception for any child who conscientiously objects to participating. Moreover, by now commands not just grudging acceptance, but widespread approval.

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Support for keeping "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is popular in America. Even some atheists, as well as normally staunch defenders of secularism and church/state separation, question whether it's necessary or appropriate to remove "under God" from the Pledge. A variety of arguments and claims are offered by apologists for the current Pledge of Allegiance, all of which fail.

Either these apologists ignore the basic arguments of critics or they are historically and factually inaccurate. The best defenses and justifications for keeping "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance offer no good reasons not to get rid of it.

Tradition is one of the most popular arguments in defense of any violation of the separation of church and state. Some seem to believe that violations of church/state separation are somehow rendered constitutional so long as the government is able to get away with it for long enough. In effect, this would create a statute of limitations on violations of the Constitution, a situation that would not be accepted in any other situation.

Who would allow government violations of free speech or the Fourth Amendment simply because it's "tradition"? Even if this were a legitimate excuse, though, the phrase "under God" was only added to the Pledge in 1954; a Pledge without "under God" is, if anything, an older tradition.

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Defending and Justifying 'Under God' in the Pledge

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Support for keeping "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is popular in America. Even some atheists, as well as normally staunch defenders of secularism and church/state separation, question whether it's necessary or appropriate to remove "under God" from the Pledge.

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Dear Future President,

I know there are many major issues/topics in our country to be discussed, and that all are equally vital. It must be difficult seeking to please millions of American citizens everyday with the decisions you make, knowing that not all will be happy. Even so, I would like to bring to your attention an issue that is significant to me, involving our country's Pledge of Allegiance.

The United States has been brought up with a Christian background. Our nation was first developed by Christians, and then established by Christians. Biblical references can be seen on our money and on our architecture. Prayers are said before civic meetings, witnesses swear to truth on a Bible, and the words "one nation, under God" are written in the country's Pledge. However, not all are copacetic with this expression. Atheists and humanists believe that the phrase "under God" should be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. Non Believers hold the idea that these words interfere with the separation of church and state required in the Constitution, by alternating the Pledge into a prayer. This, though, is not the case..

Our founding fathers agreed we all have God-given rights; that these rights must be preserved. ​Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase "under God," conveys our understanding that the rights our Constitution protects were not created by our government, but fabricated by a higher power. Who would you trust to create just freedoms more?: an all-knowing being, or a group of men who have never run a government before?

The first leaders of this country were not the only influential figures to declare "one nation, under God" to be important. In their most popular speeches, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson all had similar ideas when speaking about equality, rights, and who granted them the freedoms they were hoping to achieve. If numerous American historical figures agreed a united nation under God was important, why are there copious arguments against this fact?

The words "under God" should be kept in the Pledge of Allegiance, not only because of the United States' Christian history, but also because the phrase represents our nation's history and what makes us so proud to be American. "Under God" was added to the Pledge in 1954 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The then-President urged for this addition to separate the United States from other Communist countries. Americans love to be unique and separated from other country's rules and beliefs, therefore, this inclusion was necessary to display from whom we acquire our privileges.

Can you imagine what our country would resemble, if not for our God-given rights? Or if our government had had to decide what we deserved and what we shouldn't have been allowed? We have God to thank for these freedoms stated in the Constitution, therefore, we should acknowledge that fact by keeping the phrase "under God" in our country's Pledge of Allegiance.

Respectfully Yours,

Maddie

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Keep "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance

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Dear Future President, I know there are many major issues/topics in our country to be discussed, and that all are equally vital. It must be difficult seeking to please millions of American citizens everyday with the decisions you make, knowing that not all will be happy.

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" I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Everyone in East must have heard this phrase at least once in every day at the beginning of school. It has become a habit, and many students don't even know or care about those words. But among us, there are many that get offended by this every single day.

Few of us know that every time we are saying the Pledge of Allegiance, we are also praying to the Catholic God. In a recent survey conducted by Pew Forums, it was found that around 70.6 percent of Americans are Christians including Catholics, 5.9 of Americans believe in another religion other than Christianity, and 22.8 were atheists.

That means nearly 89 million people may get offended by the Pledge of Allegiance every day.

The Pledge of Allegiance was first conceived on August of 1892 by Francis Bellamy who wrote:

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

In 1954, in order to show that the United States was different from the U.S.S.R. by saying that unlike the U.S.S.R, America believed in religion, the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men's group, urged President Eisenhower and Congress to include the words "under God" in the pledge. Now the Pledge read:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

In June 2004, the U.S Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the words "under God" will be kept in the Pledge when troubled parents sued a school that forced students to say the Pledge. However, the U.S Supreme Court is wrong, and the words should be removed as swiftly as possible.

One reason is that although many schools require you to say the Pledge, many have refused to do so because of their parents and their religious beliefs, however, in other areas, people who refuse to say the Pledge have been bullied. For example, one student from Florida was ridiculed as un-American and removed from his class by a teacher when he refused to recite the pledge. A student in California had his purposely lowered and was given detention for omitting the words 'Under God'. Another student claims to have been repeatedly harassed for refusing to say the Pledge as a political protest against the situation in Puerto Rico. She has repeatedly been told that she is disrespecting the U.S.

Though the Supreme Court in 1962 ruled that there will be no mandatory prayer in school, the Pledge directly goes against that law. When the words "under God" were introduced by President Eisenhower, he proclaimed: "millions of school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty. " What Eisenhower was saying was that every day, students would be praying to God.

The most important law that the words "under God" in the pledge of Allegiance also contradict the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment which states that there will be no laws that relates to religion.

The reasons stated above are the many laws that the words "under God" in the Pledge violates and there are many more, thus, the words must be removed.

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The Words "...under God..." Should be Removed from the Pledge of Allegiance

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"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Everyone in East must have heard this phrase at least once in every day at the beginning of school.