First Parish Sermon Archive

In times of ordeal, people are good about rallying ‘round. They put aside their
differences and pitch in to help, to comfort each other, drawing strength and hope from
the sense of their connectedness. In the days and weeks after September 11, that spirit
was much on display in our land.People who attempted to raise points of view that would threaten our sense of
unity - from any angle, from Pat Robertson’s to Susan Sontag’s — were appreciated by a
few but harshly assailed by popular opinion. It seemed the people did not want debate,
however thoughtful or sincere. We seemed to want, more than anything, to be one.

I have a sense, though, that that sense of national unity is beginning to fragment
or fray. This is hardly surprising. Two reasons come quickly to mind. First, for a variety
of reasons people are trying to associate the mood of common endeavor with their own
pet project, which could be low, low financing on a new car they have to sell, or some tax
plan, or some tendentious view of human history.

Second, despite the ubiquitous sense of pain, loss, anxiety, and fear, there are
actual issues at hand about which people disagree passionately. If you doubt it, next time
you are with more than one or two other people, ask, So what do you guys think about
our policy toward Israel? Or just observe, in as neutral a voice as you can affect, Boy,
there are sure a lot of flags around these days. I find feelings run high, and quickly.

I talked a little bit about the flag last week myself, and more about the pledge that
people make to it, about which I have some high feeling. In response to a number of
conversations and requests, I’m going to return to that theme again this week at greater
length, and the whole question of the use of the word God in our national discourse
because I think the way it has been used amounts to another attempt to commandeer our
unity of utter dismay to advance a particular political point of view, one with which I
disagree.

What happened for me was, I started seeing signs out in front of businesses that
said, “United We Stand” and right under it, “In God We Trust.” Those two don’t go
together, if the “we” who stand united is meant to be the people of this country. Because
some of us believe in more than one god, or no god, or a goddess, or whatever. When it
comes to Americans, in God only some of us trust, and I think we all have a commitment
not to care one way or the other, however much we may ourselves believe in God or not.

But it’s not a simple matter, is it. After all, “In God We Trust” is our national
motto. The words are on our coins, on our bills, on our courtroom walls, and if a current
national effort succeeds, they will be on the walls of our children’s classrooms as well. It
can seem as if this is a theistic, even a Christian, or at least a Judeo-Christian nation, and
always has been, one nation under God, like it says in the pledge of allegiance. But it
didn’t always say that, and it shouldn’t say that now.

For those who weren’t here last week, I have to take a paragraph and tell what I
said when the children were still here then. I said most people love their country,
whatever it is. It’s good if they love the whole world, too, but most people love their
country in some way; and there are lots of things to love about our country. Then I said
there were lots of ways of loving a country. I didn’t mention any of the nasty ways. I
mentioned some ways everyone can love the country, like being kind. I mentioned others
things that some people did, like voting, or keeping up with the news if you still a kid.
Some people love the country that way; some people don’t. Eventually I got around to
loving the flag, which is important to some people as a way to love the country, but isn’t
to others. “Some people even pledge allegiance to the flag,” I said, “and the children may
be asked to do that sometimes in school. And you may really like doing that. It may seem
like a good way of saying, you love the country. So you can say that if you want … but if
you don’t want, you don’t have to. This is America, and one of the things we most love
about our country is its freedom, especially our religious freedom, and if you don’t want
to talk about ‘one nation, under God,’ you certainly don’t have to. Me, I never do. But if
you want to say the pledge, that’s fine to do, too, if that’s what you believe.”

I didn’t know how to say that any better to kids who range in age from 6 to 12, so
after they left I encouraged parents to consider talking about the subject more with their
children, because I knew at least the older children could understand that it’s not just a
question of being true to your own faith when you’re asked to spout theological doctrine,
but it’s also about being true to our national commitment to keep the state out of the
business of fostering religion, particularly any one version (like belief in God). So even if
you did believe in God, you might want to refuse to acquiesce in a practice so antithetical
to American freedom.

I knew the older children might get that, because I was ten when I got it myself.
That was the year the words “under God” were added to the pledge, and I knew that was
un-American. I have to confess, my 10-year-old political consciousness had already been
raised because it was 1954, the year of the Army-McCarthy hearings, therefore the year
that the Sawyers finally got a television set. So I saw Sen. McCarthy in action, and I
knew he was a bad guy. Not that I imagined the Communists were the good folk. No, to
me heroism was to have had no connections to the Communists party but still to refuse to
answer questions the Committee had no business asking, questions about one’s political
views, which should be off limits to governmental intrusion.

So then along comes the change in the pledge, and I wouldn’t do it, and I never
have. Mostly I’d say the pledge, but without those two words. These days I don’t say it at
all. By now I know more of the history, how in 1940 the Supreme Court upheld the
expulsion of two Jehovah’s Witnesses from a public school in Pennsylvania for refusing
to say the pledge, which their religion forbids them to do. It was a disastrously bad
decision, followed by ugly incidents of intimidation against Jehovah’s Witnesses, most
famously in Kennebunk, Maine. In 1943 the Supreme Court reversed itself in another
case involving Jehovah’s Witnesses. This gives me a chance to quote the notable
sentences by Justice Jackson, writing for the Court: “If there is any fixed star in our
constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be
orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to
confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an
exception, they do not now occur to us.”

And, at least here in Massachusetts, children are not required to take part in the
pledge, and teachers, while they are expected to initiate the pledge in their classes on
occasion, need not say the words themselves. Or - here’s an idea that’s been going
around of late, as the pledge is being initiated more often at schools and other public
gatherings - people can tinker with the wording. You can just leave out “under God,” but
one person substitutes the word, “many faiths” - “one nation, many faiths, with liberty
and justice for all.” Another person just says the beginning and end: “I pledge allegiance
to … liberty and justice for all.”

(It reminds me of the story of the child who grew curious that every week in
church her father recited the Apostle’s Creed, even though she knew he was an agnostic
and a skeptic. She asked him about that, and he replied cheerily that it was really no
problem, he just left off the first three words: “I believe in.”)

Tinkering with the text on an official level has been going on from the beginning.
The pledge was written in the summer of 1892 by Francis Bellamy for the 400th
anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the New World. It was published in a popular
children’s magazine where he worked, and used in Columbus Day celebrations all over
the country, which were planned by a committee of state superintendents of education, a
committee Bellamy chaired.

Originally, the pledge said, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for
which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” He had thought
of saying “with Equality, Liberty and Justice for all,” but knew the other committee
members opposed equality for women and African-Americans. (Of course, you can put
the word back in if you want, as some people do, just as some anti-abortion groups end
the pledge, “with Liberty and Justice for all, born and unborn.”)

A few months after it was first published, a small change was made in the pledge
["and to the Republic"]. “In 1923 and 1924 the National Flag Conference, under the
leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution,
changed “my Flag” to “the flag of the United States of America,” apparently wanting to
make sure that the millions of new American immigrants understood what flag was
intended. “Bellamy disliked the change, but his protest was ignored.”1

(Bellamy, by the way, was a cousin of Edward Bellamy, who wrote the hugely
influential utopian novel, Looking Backward. Like his famous cousin, Francis was a
socialist, which seems to have been the reason he was pressured into leaving his job as a
Baptist minister in Boston.)

In its updated form, his pledge finally received official recognition from Congress
in 1942 as part of an act regarding the use of the flag. And then came 1954 and the last
official change, adding God. It was that kind of a time about then. The tag line “So help
me God” was added to the oaths of office for federal judges and justices. In 1955, the
phrase “In God We Trust” was required on all coins and bills. The year after that, “In
God We Trust” became our national motto.
Our motto always had been “E Pluribus Unum,” ever since 1782. It means, one
from many parts. “In God We Trust” first appeared on coins during the Civil War, in
1864, echoing the words of Francis Scott Key in the fourth and final verse of the Star-
Spangled Banner, “Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, And this be our motto:
‘In God is our trust.’” (By the way, that song, first published in 1815, didn’t become our
national anthem in 1931. Few of these designations and practices are as old as some may
think.)

There have been at least three legal challenges to the theistic addition that have
reached federal appeals courts, but each court has ruled that the use of the word God is
not religious, which I don’t understand. But I do understand that even if it’s legal so far,
to my mind it’s still not right. It’s not in the best American tradition, which does not
presume to take sides in matters of faith.

Which may just mean it’s not in the tradition favored by me and by our religious
movement … at least the tradition that has been favored by our religious movement for
the second half of our time here in Wayland. The first half, especially at the beginning,
we were pretty cozy with the idea of church and state working so closely together they
were two parts of one whole. When the congregation was gathered here in 1640, it was
understood that the colony was a theocracy, governed by God as revealed in the Bible as
interpreted by Calvin as taught by the clergy. In 1660, for example, the legislature (the
General Court) of the Bay Colony ordered the county courts “to purge all churches within
their several jurisdictions of unorthodox teaching.”2 Comparisons to the Taliban go a bit
far, but there certainly was the same sense of religious certitude and intolerance.

And that insensitivity is an American tradition, too. I have found this notion of
dual traditions helpful when it comes to the inclusion of religion in our national public
life. The notion is nicely developed in a book I’ve cited here before, The Godless
Constitution by historians Isaac Kramnick and R. Lawrence Moore. Because there
certainly is a history of official favoritism, especially on the state level, not just toward
theism but toward Christianity in general and Protestantism in particular, even particular
denominations (as anyone from Utah can tell you).

Kramnick and Moore document it. When the Constitution was written in 1787,
“eleven of the thirteen states had religious tests for public office written into their
constitutions.”3 To hold office in Massachusetts, you had to believe in the Christian
religion (and even that was a lot more liberal than the earliest days of the settlement,
when you had to belong to a church to vote, and to belong to a church you had to be able
to tell of your conversion experience). “Pennsylvania required its officials to be
Protestants who believed in God and in the divine inspiration of the Old an New
Testaments; in Delaware all elected and appointed officials were required to profess
‘faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only son, and in the Holy Spirit, one God
blessed forevermore.”4

One could go on, and I have been known to. There are some pretty colorful,
passionate passages from orators who argued for including religious tests for office holding in the Constitution, or who later argued from the Civil War on for a
Constitutional amendment affirming “Almighty God as the source of all authority and
power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among nations, and his
revealed will as the supreme authority.” I like quoting that because I get to quote as well
Horace Greeley’s reply when the amendment was first proposed. He said, “Almighty God
is not the source of authority and power in our government; the people of the United
States are.”

That catches the spirit of the other tradition Kramnick and Moore track, which has
been the dominant one from the start. The people who drafted the Constitution knew the
practices in most of the states - and they chose not to repeat them on the national level.
Religious as they were individually, they chose not religious but secular government,
which takes no interest in religion except to protect its exercise.

We are not the country some like to imagine, devoted to Jesus and God and the
Bible. Oh, most Americans may be so in their personal practice and in their beliefs. But
the numbers grow yearly of those who are not part of the national consensus. The scholar
and author Diana Eck writes that the United States is the most religiously diverse society
on earth.

But just as important as the practical reality is the age-old national commitment,
so humane and essential, to be a people who do not imagine that a person’s citizenship or
goodness or worth depends on any religious test, a people whose public life struggles to
be free of every religious confinement, a people devoted to freedom of faith. In times of
ordeal, we need to rally ‘round and stand united in that trust.

1 John W. Baer, “The Pledge of Allegiance: A Short History”
(http://www.vineyard.net/vineyard/history/pledge.htm.
2 Jacob C. Meyer, Church and State in Massachusetts From 1740 to 1833 (Cleveland: Western Reserve
University Press, 1930) 7-8.
3 Isaac Kramnick and R. Lawrence Moore, The Godless Constitution 30.
4 Kramnick and Moore 30