The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has recently ruled that recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in U.S. public schools is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion so long as it includes the words "under God." There is little question in the minds of many that the decision will be reversed on appeal. However, the issue is now on the table, and if this particular case is reversed the same issue will undoubtedly resurface in a slightly different form in the future.

Incredibly, it seems that the time has come when the words "under God" in the Pledge must be defended, even within our own Seventh-day Adventist Church.

To make this case, one could hardly do better than the dissenting judge in this decision, Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez. His thoughtful dissent (readable with Adobe Acrobat) comprises the last six pages of the decision, and is easy (and heartening) reading.

Judge Fernandez reveals his commitment to common sense and practical wisdom in the following lines:

Upon Newdow’s theory of our Constitution, accepted by my colleagues today, we will soon find ourselves prohibited from using our album of patriotic songs in many public settings. "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" will be gone for sure, and while use of the first and second stanzas of the "Star Spangled Banner" will still be permissible, we will be precluded from straying into the third. And currency beware! Judges can accept those results if they limit themselves to elements and tests, while failing to look at the good sense and principles that animated those tests in the first place. But they do so at the price of removing a vestige of the awe we must all feel at the immenseness of the universe and our own small place within it, as well as the wonder we must feel at the good fortune of our country. (Emphasis mine)

Although I find that Judge Fernandez most accurately states the heart of the matter, the logic of the concurring judges seems to be largely unassailable based on U.S. Supreme Court precedent and the tests it has set up. However, a few of the concurring judges’ reasons seem dubious: they postulate "coercion" mostly with reference to peer pressure, and base the charge of "endorsement" upon an understanding of simple belief in God as a "religion," just as Islam or Adventism would be, a stretch I would not make nor do I believe the Founding Fathers would have made. At the same time, it seems self-evident that the words "under God" do not have a secular purpose, thus causing them to fail the "secular purpose" criterion of the Lemon test.

Thus it is clear to me, from the reasonably careful arguments put forward by the two concurring judges, that no good constitutional argument exists for including the words "under God" in the Pledge that wouldn’t also allow, for example, a simple generic prayer to be said at a school graduation or sports event, or even at the beginning of every class day, if the leader or teacher so desires, with voluntary participation.

So why do I support including the words "under God" in the Pledge? My reason is simple: I believe the "tests" set up by the U.S. Supreme Court only in recent decades take the principle of "separation of church and state" too far. I believe they take it further than any of the Founding Fathers could have imagined or wanted, further than was intended by the First Amendment, and further than is ultimately good for the United States.

Let’s be honest: Michael Newdow’s challenge is not really about the constitutionality of the words "under God," or any supposed "injury" to his daughter, who attends Sunday School. It is about a far more extensive, step-by-step effort, begun in 1962 with challenges to prayer in public schools and subversive of the most basic American values, to remove all mention of God from the American public sphere. Indeed, Newdow’s challenge is part of an effort to sanction only one belief system: that of atheistic secular humanism.

Newdow himself doesn’t plan to stop with the Pledge; after all, no good reason exists to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge that doesn’t also argue for removing "In God We Trust" from U.S. coinage, for removing the chaplain and his prayers from the U.S. Senate and the armed services (paid for by your tax dollars and mine), and for deleting the ceremony of swearing in the president with his hand on a Bible. Make no mistake; these time-honored forms and institutions are all on the list for attack and removal.

For many well-intentioned religious Americans who wish to keep the United States on the steady course set by its founders and clearly based on Judeo-Christian values, there is the temptation to push for government advancement of ideology specific to one’s religion, and even for coercion in favor of it.1

For the Seventh-day Adventist who keeps in the back of his or her mind a certainty of eventual religious persecution at the hands of the U.S. government, I believe there is an opposite and equally perilous temptation: to push, in the poor company of the religion-hating Far Left, for the banishment of all things religious from the public square; a separation, not of church and state, but of God from national public life. These are two very different things.

As a Seventh-day Adventist, I have little doubt we will need to change sides at some point and take our stand against a government that will begin to coerce religious observance, possibly under dire threat to the existence of the United States. At the moment, the fight seems to be, rather, against an activist judiciary with an agenda that tends more truly toward coercion against all religion in matters public.

No, God doesn’t need those words in the Pledge of Allegiance; he does not need anything. But America needs children who become adults with good ethics. Those ethics don’t come through the air or the drinking water; they come through teaching. As the great French observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, pointed out, "liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith."2 The ultimate power of schools is in inculcation, not only of facts but also of values. If those are not values undergirded by simple ethical monotheism, they will surely be the values of what I believe is also a faith-based and evangelistic system: radical secularism.

So on one hand you have George Washington, who called God-based religion "indispensable" to this country’s liberty and democracy. On the other hand you have Michael Newdow, who, when asked why he filed his lawsuit, replied, among his better reasons, that it was "a cool thing to do…everyone should try it."

I’ll take George Washington.

Notes and References

1. For an excellent new book that clarifies the role of religious belief in the founding of the United States, see Michael Novak, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002).
America, 2 vols. (1835, 1840), accessed online. See the author’s preface.

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