First American Right

Details: 28 October 2011

The Pledge

One of the recent efforts of the secularists in their campaign to expunge all religion from American cultural life was represented by a citizen from California who brought a lawsuit in federal court trying to impose his desire to disallow the use of the phrase "under God" in the American Pledge of Allegiance to the national flag. The lawsuit was dismissed on a legal technicality, but there are promises from secularists to continue their efforts to get the mention of God out of the Pledge. Those words, "under God", were inserted officially into the Pledge by a bill passed by the U.S. Congress on June 14, 1954, and signed into law on that same day by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said, "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 and war." The President then stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and recited the Pledge of Allegiance officially for the first time using the phrase "one nation under God" .

The phrase "under God" was taken from the Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln, who said "that this nation under God shall enjoy a new birth of freedom...". The effort to bring about that insertion into the Pledge of Allegiance was largely led by the Knights of Columbus in the United States. The original Pledge itself seems to have been composed in 1892 by Francis Bellamy and was first published on September 8, 1892, in a Protestant magazine of the time called "The Youth’s Companion". It was first used publicly when a large group of public school children recited it together at the beginning of the International Columbian Exposition in Chicago (World’s Fair) on October 12, 1892, commemorating "landing day", the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.

Another Absurdity

Sometimes the anti-religion work of the secularists takes on preposterous dimensions. Recently a public school district somewhere in America sent a stern warning to its school bus drivers that they were forbidden to post in their buses any pictures of Santa Claus, the reason asserted being that he is a "Catholic saint", and, therefore, those bus drivers who would post such pictures were "establishing a religion" in violation of the first amendment to the Federal Constitution. Now we all know that the Santa myths came about through ancient Christian devotion to Saint Nicholas, who was the Catholic Bishop of Myra in the fourth century and whose body was brought by the Crusaders to Bari, Italy, where it rests to this day. However, the real and genuine Saint Nicholas did not live at the North Pole, did not have a wife, did not cavort with elves, was not overweight, did not wear a red suit and ride about with reindeer, etc. It certainly takes a very fanatic public-school secularist to identify a figure that has morphed into Santa Claus with an actual Catholic saint.

Most recently, a current federal bureaucrat in the United States Veterans’ Administration forbade the use of the words "God" or "Jesus" in any burial rites in a national cemetery for military veterans and their families. The matter was threatened with litigation causing the bureaucrat to retreat somewhat, saying she only means to forbid chaplains from the American Legion or VFW from using those words, but other chaplains may do so! This is a secularist idea of religious freedom!

Congressional Report

On January 19, 1853, in the midst of some general public outrage in America over the organization called "The American Protective Association" (which was popularly called the "No Nothing Party" from the practice of its members responding to all inquiries with the phrase "I know nothing"), the U.S. Congress received an interesting report from the Senate Judiciary Committee about the first amendment, which already then was beginning to be given a distorted construction. "The first amendment clause speaks of an establishment of religion. What is meant by that expression? It referred without a doubt to that establishment which existed in the mother country, endowment at the public expense, peculiar privileges to its members, disadvantages and penalties upon those who should reject its doctrines or belong to other communions. Such a law would be a "law respecting an establishment of religion". They intended by this amendment to prohibit an establishment of religion such as the English Church presented or anything like it. But, they had no fear or jealousy of religion in itself, nor did they wish to see us become an irreligious people."

"They did not intend to spread over all the public authorities and the whole public action of the nation the dead and revolting spectacle of atheistic apathy. Not so had the battles of the Revolution been fought and the deliberations of the Revolutionary Congress been conducted." The term "atheistic apathy" is an interesting but accurate description of current day secularism and its goals. The Judiciary Committee noted the religious aspects of the 1783 treaty between the United States and Great Britain, which ended our Revolutionary War and, in effect, brought about our national independence, and which begins with these words: "In the Name of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity: It having pleased the Divine Providence to dispose the hearts of the most serene and most potent Prince George the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and of the United States of America to forget all past misunderstandings and differences, etc."

Court Confusion

The U.S. Supreme Court has found itself seriously conflicted in recent times in matters pertaining to the issues of church and state. This is easily seen in the confusing and often contradictory rulings it sets out. There even are occasionally some that actually do not favor secularism. For instance, in 1985 (in "Wallace versus Jafree"), Justice William Rehnquist, rendering the Court’s decision, said, "It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of constitutional history. The establishment clause had been expressly freighted with Jefferson’s misleading metaphor for nearly forty years. There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build a wall of separation between church and state. The recent court decisions are in no way based on either the language or intent of the framers."

In a 1963 case ("School District of Abington Township versus Schempp"), Justice Tom Clark, writing the Court’s opinion, said, "The history of man is inseparable from the history of religion. Secularism is unconstitutional, preferring those who do not believe over those who do believe. It is the duty of government "to deter no-belief religions". The facilities of government cannot offend religious principles. The state may not establish "a religion of secularism" in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion...." On March 3, 1865, the U. S. Congress approved the proposal of Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase to have the U.S. mint inscribe on all American coinage the motto "In God We Trust", to the fury of the rabid secularists even to this day who are trying to get it removed.