Our sacred Pledge in jeopardy

Our American Government is founded on the concept of the individuality and the dignity of the human being. Underlying this concept is the belief that the human person is important because he was created by God and endowed by Him with certain inalienable rights which no civil authority may usurp. The inclusion of God in our pledge therefore would further acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon the moral directions of the Creator.

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– House of Representatives Report on the Pledge of Allegiance, 83rd Congress, May 28, 1954 ("House Report")

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Shortly after World War II and as the Cold War with the Soviet Union was heating up, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the United States Congress placed the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance so that the "consciousness of the American people will be more alerted to the true meaning of our country and its form of government." Congress and the president recognized the simple truth that in July 1776 our nation was founded on a belief in God who endowed us with certain unalienable rights that could not be taken from us. Through this addition, they said, "the children of our land, in the daily recitation of the Pledge in school, will be daily impressed with a true understanding of our way of life and its origins."

Less than 50 years later, in 2003, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California held that the voluntary recitation of the Pledge in a school classroom was unconstitutional because "the mere presence in the classroom every day as peers recite the statement 'one nation under God' has a coercive effect" upon children who do not want to say those words. The United States Supreme Court dismissed that case on appeal, but in 2005 another California federal judge ruled that reciting "under God" in the Pledge in schools is unconstitutional.

Thus, there is a battle raging in our courts over our sacred Pledge, but this is about more than the Pledge of Allegiance; it is about the acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God. Attorney Michael Newdow, an avowed atheist who filed the original lawsuit challenging "under God" in the Pledge, has also filed a suit demanding that "In God We Trust" be removed from the nation's money. In Alabama, federal district Judge Myron Thompson ordered the removal of a Ten Commandments monument saying that "the state may not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Judeo-Christian God."

To contend that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from the straightforward acknowledgment of God in the Pledge is the height of absurdity. It is simply not the case that the government "establish[es a] religion" – which is what the First Amendment forbids – by acknowledging the sovereignty of God. God and religion are not synonymous. As Congress explained when it added that important phrase to the Pledge:

[T]he adoption of this legislation in no way runs contrary to the provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. This is not an act establishing a religion or one interfering with the "free exercise" of religion. A distinction must be made between the existence of a religion as an institution and a belief in the sovereignty of God.

That this must be the case is evident from the fact that "[f]rom the time of our earliest history our peoples and our institutions have reflected the traditional concept that our nation was founded on a fundamental belief in God." Several colonies – including Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Maryland – were started as havens for the freedom to worship God. The colonies broke with Great Britain "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." Every state's constitution acknowledges God. Even the United States Supreme Court has admitted that, "We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a supreme being." Zorach v. Clauson, 306 U.S. 312 (1951).

Yet neither the plainness of this distinction nor the unbroken history of official acknowledgments of God has stopped atheists such as Mr. Newdow or radical groups like the ACLU from trying to enlist the federal courts in the task of excising God from the public square. They have found friendly ears for their arguments in the federal courts, which have ordered the removal of Ten Commandments displays from public buildings, commanded state legislatures to stop praying, and now twice halted the recitation of our Pledge of Allegiance in some of the public schools of our land.

For the sake of the country, drastic action must be taken to defend our right to acknowledge God because, as Ronald Reagan once observed, "If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under." Next week we will discuss what we can do to protect the Pledge and other acknowledgments of God.

Read Judge Moore's own story about the battle over the Ten Commandments: "So Help Me God"