#98, August 7, 2002
I am fascinated by the controversy over God’s role in two
American institutions: the Pledge of Allegiance, and money.
Americans have not always pledged to “one
nation under God.” For our first one hundred and seven years, there was no
Pledge of Allegiance whatsoever. Francis Bellamy (no relation to Francis Scott
Key) penned the original Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. It wasn’t until 1954,
with the Cold War raging against the godless Communists, that Congress
de-secularized Bellamy’s pledge, putting God in the middle of “nation
indivisible.” Now… the rest of this story: Bellamy, author of the God-free
version, was not only a Baptist minister, but also a leader of the Christian Socialist
movement.
I recited the Pledge every school day for
thirteen years, through the heart of the Cold War. Those Communists were
atheists, and proud of it. When their burly leader said, “We will bury you,” I
envisioned grim Commie troops swarming up the California shore, shovels in had.
God had to be on our side, that’s for sure. God would never let me be
buried alive… would he?
The Cold War now is history, the evil
imperial Russians now our friends. In its place, we have the Warm War on
terrorism, a war that has just about everyone wrapping God up in a flag. One
thing you can say about terrorists, be they Middle Easterners or Oklahoma City
bombers: more than anyone, they hold firm the fundamental conviction that God
is on their side.
That very God, the one that takes sides, must
have cheered last week when a one ton bomb fell on the hideout of a Palestinian
terrorist leader, killing the leader and fifteen innocent civilians. That God
must have applauded a few days later when a shopping-bag bomb blew a fleshy
hole in a Jerusalem University cafeteria, killing seven innocents. He might have
even shrugged off our B-52’s accidental bombing of an Afghan wedding party,
which killed 30 innocents.
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez sang of this kind of
worship in the ballad, “With God on Our Side”: “But now we’ve got weapons of
the chemical dust, / if fire them we’re forced to, then fire them we must, /
one push of the button, and a shot the world wide, / and you never ask
questions, with God on your side.”
Do you see the dangerous pattern here? Do you
suspect we are living by rules that, if carried to their logical extension,
will carry the human race to a tragic conclusion? Where might we look for
another way?
The answer can be found in money-- more
precisely, printed on money. I don’t mean the motto “In God We Trust”-- that
puts us back in the “my God’s bigger than your God” debate. Besides, like God
in the Pledge, putting God on the money was a later development in our nation’s
history. I’m talking about the original money motto, “E Pluribus Unum.” It
means, “out of the many, one.”
The “many” were the many independent
colony/states, which abandoned some of their sovereignty for the strength and
security that comes from the “one”, from united cooperation as a nation. See
how this principle works at lower levels: from the many individuals to the one
family, from many families to one clan or tribe, from clans to cities to
kingdoms to states to nations. My point: why stop at nations? Why can’t we
simply acknowledge that life would be better for every “one” if we pursued
united cooperation as the human species, and made it our highest
priority.
I don’t know exactly how we will get there,
if it involves the UN or something new. I can tell you that our current
administration’s disregard for international arms, human rights, and
environmental agreements is taking us in precisely the opposite direction.
Perhaps we should reconsider the pledge. May I suggest a version I wrote a
quarter century ago? “I pledge devotion to the Earth, our one and only home,
and to the life this earth sustains, one spirit indivisible, with freedom and
fulfillment for all.” It’s a start.