The Pledge of Allegiance - 24 October 2003

Where were we when I was so smashingly interrupted?

Well I was going to say, and I will say: every Monday morning in every public elementary school in America the children rise and then they recite (or they could choose to listen to the class chanting) the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States.

It's a single sentence and this is how it goes:

"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."

Last week it was announced in Washington that next February the nine justices of the Supreme Court will meet one morning and begin to consider the complaint of an atheist parent who says it's against the Constitution that he should have to make his daughter listen to "a ritual proclaiming that there is a god".

When it does come up I imagine the young atheist will have a hard time restraining himself from a cry of shame as he stands and watches the nine justices bow their heads in prayer, as is their custom.

What clause in the Constitution does he believe is being violated? Why the very first amendment, the first item in the Bill of Rights.

It is written in the most guileless English: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".

What could be simpler? What could be also vaguer? - The moment you reflect what the 18th Century meant by "establishment" for instance.

So many words have changed their meaning drastically since the 17th and 18th centuries - much of the Bible, much more of Shakespeare, is not understandable without explanatory footnotes.

To the Founding Fathers who wrote it "establishment" meant a religious sect.

What a pity they didn't write the sentence the other way round: "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Oh but by the way, we're not going as a nation to have a preferred sect, it's too late for that, it would lead to endless dissension between the Congregationalists of Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Catholics of Maryland, the Quakers of Pennsylvania..

"So, to be clearly understood, gentlemen, let's make it plain: we shall not have a national religion like the Church of England.

"That being so it must be made equally plain that no law of Congress can prohibit any man or woman practising his/her own religion freely, everywhere - in church, in the street, in Congress, at home, away - freely."

For 150 years this reading was simply assumed by most people. As a learned history of the Supreme Court tells us: from the founding era at the end of the 18th Century, well into the 20th Century, religion was thought to be a significant and legitimate component of American public life.

By the 1940s, however, American public life had become largely secular.

One short, offhand sentence covers a tremendous fact: the decline of religious belief in the general population of the Western nations, deeper still in Europe.

In France in 1960 one family in three were weekly churchgoers. Today it's one in eight.

In England today only six people in a hundred claim to be devoutly religious. In the United States the comparable devout figure is 65%.

But there's been a dramatic increase in the Americans who don't want religion to appear in any shape or form in public life.

Hence these continual appeals to the courts, from keeping religious symbols of any public building, all the way to banning the use of the word god in political speech.

To put it more formally, the atheists have gone bananas in the extent to which they misinterpret the first amendment - as you'll see from the final appeal of this young father who wants "under God" taken out of the pledge of allegiance.

Well, let's go back to the pledge and its invention.

It was composed by an ex-minister and published in a magazine called The Youth Companion.

When? That's the point - 1892.

The Congress leapt at a happy idea. Since the upcoming 12th October marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, that would be the perfect day to introduce the chanting of the pledge as a daily ritual in the elementary schools.

And so it was. But no mention of under God. "One nation under God" did not appear until 1954.

Why 1954 I wondered? I never saw a story explaining why. I thought some digging was necessary and it's turned out that a little digging produced a load of pay dirt.

In early 1954 at a conference of the four allied powers occupying Germany, the United States, Britain and France were all for reunifying Germany under one government.

The Soviets were absolutely opposed and had in Europe armies five times the size of the combined allied armies. So that was that.

Far away in French Indochina the French were collapsing against Vietnamese guerrillas fighting to be independent.

The French begged President Eisenhower to help with American troops. Eisenhower said no troops.

But he made an impassioned public assertion that the defeat of Communism in South East Asia was vital. That if one country went Communist the neighbours could fall too, like a row of dominoes.

This was a pressing fear in Washington at that time, fears for Malaysia, Indochina, for Burma and India.

Also 1954 was the heyday of a middle western senator who, after a high State Department official had been convicted of passing papers to the Soviet Union, launched an immensely popular campaign to root Communists out of American government.

He gave us alarming numbers but he never actually came up with a positive Communist who had not declared himself.

Nevertheless, such was the fear of the time that from Moscow to Asia "godless Communism" might prevail.

President Eisenhower, many public men and women, used that phrase over and over.

And it was by executive order on Flag Day 1954 that President Eisenhower ordered the pledge now to read "I pledge allegiance to the flag" and so on, "and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God indivisible."

So far as the young protesting father's concerned, the villain of the peace is not - as most people think - the Congress of the United States but the late, great Ike, supreme commander of the invading forces in Europe and later president of the United States.

If the young father wins surely somebody will then mount a crusade to have erased from all dollar bills of every denomination the sentence printed in brazen capital letters: "In God we trust".

And if he wins that will entail destroying every bill and totally reprinting the United States currency.

It would cost the Treasury - the taxpayer, that is - well, it's been figured maybe $7-8bn.

But what's that to the average taxpayer? He's already going to have to find 20 billions for tidying up Iraq.

A recent visitor from Europe remarked at some point how often in daily conversation here he had heard the passing phrase "just before 9/11", or "about a month after September 11", or "Oh, 11 September changed all that."

I tried to explain to him how we felt personally outraged, what a traumatic event it was and perhaps one you could not feel if you saw it on television from 3,000 miles away.

To have had this feeling and find it still there deep inside, since we were never told that American intelligence agents had foiled plotted atrocities as large and murderous as the bombing of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

How I wish I had read two years ago a piece I came on the other night when I picked up one of my standby bedtime books, Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi.

He's writing about a recollection of life in the South where he'd spent so much time of his youth.

This passage, however, is about a sharp distinction between social conversation in the North and the South in the decade after the end of the Civil War. I imagine this piece must have been written about late 1870s or 1880.

"In the North one hears the war mentioned in social conversation once a month, sometimes once a week but as a distinct subject for talk it has long been relieved of duty.

"Given a company of six gentlemen, four possibly five were not in the field at all. Add six ladies and you will have added six people who saw little of the dread realities of the war and ran out of talk about it years ago.

"The case is very different in the South. There every man you meet was in the war and every lady you meet saw the war. The interest in the war is still vivid and constant, it's what AD is, elsewhere they date from it.

"Things happened 'since the war' or 'during the war' or 'about two years after the war'.

"You can't talk pale, inconsequent matters when you've got a crimson fact in your head that you're burning to fetch out. This gives the inexperienced stranger better than anything else the sense of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is."

Invasion is the key word. We felt that the bombing of the Towers and the Pentagon was an invasion of this country.

We came, as perhaps Europeans could not, to feel that this was the beginning of a war, of the Third World War and an alarming novelty of war: one against a worldwide enemy who is invisible.

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