I have to admit that I found the recent brouhaha about the reference to God in the American Pledge of Allegiance ("…one nation under God, indivisible…") to be a bit…well, irrelevant, if not over the top - and that goes for both the people clamoring for God to be removed from the pledge and the people foreseeing the complete disintegration of the country if God were to be removed.

This recent editorial by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Times (username: wrreaders, password: wrreaders), however, sparks a new interest in the issue for me.

First of all, I have to wonder if all these people proclaiming the sanctity of the Pledge of Allegiance would suddenly want to ditch the pledge altogether if they found out that it was written by a (gasp!) socialist. That’s certainly not very American, now, is it?

Also, because I did my best to ignore all stupid news while I was on vacation, and because I didn’t actually know anything about the Pledge of Allegiance beforehand, I was quite surprised to discover that God only found his way into the pledge in 1954. The Baptist minister who wrote the pledge back in 1892 didn’t find it necessary to mention God, but Congress in the age of McCarthy apparently did. Why people would now clamor to hang on to a remnant of such a dark time in American history is a bit of a mystery to me.

So, considering the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the (supposed) separation of Church and State in America, the God reference should probably go. But as long as no one is being forced to say the pledge, I honestly find it hard to get all riled up about anything.

As a completely random side note, I’d like to add that while I do quite like the text of the Pledge of Allegiance, every time I say the pledge myself, I have a vivid mental image of a witch standing on a podium in the middle of a public library - and I’ll tell you why.

As a kid, the Pledge of Allegiance was completely incomprehensible to me. The sentence structure is weird - "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, etc.etc."… First of all, I didn’t know what a republic was, but I did make the connection to the word "public", which - being the little bookworm that I was - led me to think of a public library. Secondly, the "for which it stands" threw me off - and that’s where the standing witch came from. Put the standing witch in the public library, and there you go - my version of the Pledge of Allegiance.

How ungodly is that?

Further reading…