The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [6]
In Congress, there was little opposition. At the time, American culture had a more homogeneous feel than it does today. White Christian values and images predominated in the media and in popular culture. There was little popular sensitivity to practitioners of Buddhism, Hinduism, or other religions that did not embrace the concept of a single deity—let alone to nonbelievers.
Naturally, there were many individual citizens who objected to altering a text that had served the country through two world wars and the Great Depression. Judy Hyman, who was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, remembers that her father, Bruno Giordano Shaw, was furious. An atheist named for the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy, Bruno Shaw would rail against the addition of “under God” to anyone who would listen. Such personal protests continue to this day. My friend Kevin Kelly, a psychiatrist in New York City, wrote this in an e-mail message:
As an unregenerate child of the ’60s, I object to the Pledge even without a deity in it, because it seems to me that if you believe in the ideals for which “the Republic for which it stands” stands, you won’t want to force anyone to pledge allegiance.
Some people protest by abstaining from saying the Pledge. Others simply fall silent when the phrase “under God” comes along. One man, Billiam Vanroestenberg of Plattekill, New York, stopped saying “under God” because he found it a contradiction. Vanroestenberg told the Associated Press that he regularly omitted the phrase when reciting the Pledge at his local zoning board meeting because he felt that a nation truly under God would not discriminate against gay people, like himself. Then, in March 2004, Mr. Vanroestenberg and his partner were married by the mayor of New Paltz, New York. At the next zoning meeting, he resumed saying “under God.” “They all sort of applauded afterward,” he said.
It was as if Abraham Lincoln had entered the room. The president who saved the Union had inherited the founders’ firm belief in what E. D. Hirsch has called “a religious devotion to democracy.” And he seemed to foretell Vanroestenberg’s sudden change of heart about the “under God” phrase once the law was changed. Said Lincoln, in his famous 1838 Lyceum speech, called “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”:
Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap—let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;—let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;—let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.
It’s unlikely that Lincoln’s understanding of “gay” would correspond to that of Mr. Vanroestenberg, but no doubt the two men, separated by almost two centuries, share a near religious devotion to democracy.
What turned out to be the loudest “under God” protest to date came in the year 2000 from Michael Newdow, an atheist who filed suit alleging that recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in his daughter’s California public school violated the constitutional separation of church and state. Even though his daughter had the right to opt out of saying the Pledge, Newdow argued that school recitation of the “under God” Pledge sent an officially sanctioned message to his daughter that conflicted with his own religious tenets as a nonbeliever.
The case found its way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and in 2002 the court issued a surprise ruling in Newdow’s favor. The opinion set off shockwaves of anger and disbelief. In Washington, politicians blasted the decision and crowded the Capitol steps to recite the Pledge en masse. Under then attorney