Like a Rock

The Pledge of Allegiance is like a rock. Turning it over exposes all kinds of nasty things you’d rather not see. Fortunately for Bush and his gang of thieves, the mandatory recital for school children is again under attack. The last time there was a perceived threat to the Eisenhower Pledge which effectively instituted a mandatory religious oath in direct defiance of the Constitution, half the vehicles on my local streets appeared with “Under God” painted or stickered on the windows and bodywork.

Of course the power hungry religious supremacists immediately went to work inventing a vast atheistic conspiracy to make our various religions illegal, although some religious denominations, particularly the Jews, also took some flack in the local papers. (We know who you are and we’re going to deal with you, opined one editorial contributor) Once again, it’s apparent that there is nothing that brings out the animal in Man like Religion.

Sadly, our educational level being what it is, there is some confusion about when the nation’s founding documents were written and 1954 must seem to be close enough to make Eisenhower’s nod to the Christian Right an expression of the founding fathers’ sentiments. After decades of active mythologizing, few seem to recognize that the need to make oaths either as a requirement for citizenship or office was anathema and is illegal. This is why we are told by Liars for the Lord that the Constitution is really secondary to and dependent upon the Bible.

The need for communal belief and the need to suppress the infidel was not on the mind of Jefferson, Madison, Franklin or Washington, no matter what the various TV religion channels tell you every day and a thousand times on Sunday. The attempt to establish monotheism as a State belief is expressly forbidden, as is the requirement that anyone, whether school teacher or President, profess a belief in order to participate in civic matters. It’s hard to see the oath of allegiance to a Nation “Under God” as anything other than such a requirement.

There are several reasons to object to requiring ritual invocations of children in the public schools. Indeed there are many genuinely religious folk who object to invoking God on matters of politics or other vanities. But of course the kind of Republic that Jefferson envisioned is unstable at best in a country where the ignorant are so easily employed as soldiers of authoritarianism and such is the land we live in. So perhaps when we finally become a Religious Republic, like the Nations of 18th century Europe we were founded to oppose, someone will be able to enjoy the irony – in private of course.

For the time being, one nation under God makes a great smokescreen for three states under water.

Have a look at Blunderford's humorous take on this