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TOP LEVEL
Past Issues
Year 2004
May/June 2004
Editorial - God, Country, and the Justices
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In the public library with my children recently I spotted a DVD version of Gods and Generals. I’ve long had an interest in history—it was for a time my major in college—and the Civil War was an area I particularly concentrated on. Filmmakers have a tendency to rewrite history, but I couldn’t resist checking out the DVD.
Gods and Generals is about civil war. It shows combatants falling like scythed wheat onto the farm fields of some of the early clashes. But it is a stylized killing, made transcendent and ultimately bloodless by elevating it to a pseudo religious event amid the grand chords of triumphal music. 
At first touching, the film’s insistent equating of religious faith with political identification became for me the real violence of this retelling of an epic contest between two parts of what is again a whole. I was reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s famous comment that both sides prayed to the same God, and that both could not be right. True and a truism, I suppose. Still, truisms are not so obvious to those submerged in their genesis.
The Civil War was many things at once. It was, of course, the transfer of real power from an agrarian South to the rapidly industrializing North. It was in many ways the victory of the machine of modern society and methods of war over the arcane old-world views of tradition and entrenched social norms, however problematic some of them may have become. It can be seen as part of the mechanism that moved the U.S. from its English roots to our present multicultural identity. And I think it can be argued that the struggle ushered in a new state-federal paradigm that broke with much of the vision of the Founders—laying the ground for some of today’s religious liberty dialogue.
The Civil War also reached into the religious sentiments of the time and co-opted them. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” immensely popular at the time, shows how militant the religiosity could be in the North—and it ignores the subtlety of Lincoln’s observation. The issue of slavery allowed the Northern leaders to invoke the religious “jihad” of the abolitionists almost as a cover for some very real and structural political differences that had led to secession. In the South there was indeed the conflation of political aims and the bedrock issues of spiritual faith.
However, the film I saw ignored the real and often cynical aim of many in the South to defend a lifestyle and an economy that was not only out of sync with the rest of the country but passé in the larger world, England itself having already outlawed slavery by popular demand.
With this melange of motives and aims, I think the invocation of the Deity was almost profane and, as always, dangerous to true liberty of conscience.
This brings me to the present and the need to comment on the pending Supreme Court review of the Newdow Pledge of Allegiance case. As I write this the news is peppered with reports of Michael Newdow’s surprisingly nimble presentation of his case before the justices. Much hinges on the outcome of this case. At hand are issues of original intent, separation of church and state, the “culture wars” (the most recent skirmish being the battle of the gay married on courthouse steps), and perhaps some sort of recapitulation of the concept of ceremonial deism.
God has indeed shone His favor on the United States in times past. That must be a truism made more real depending on your eschatological outlook. And, as our president said recently, God bless him, the Deity couldn’t have blessed a more deserving people. Self-congratulating theological certainty is certainly a general human tendency, knowing no national boundary. It becomes a little more severe in its effect when we encapsulate our God as a property of the state rather than the state being just one of the stars under His wide heaven. In other words, if we have God, we are just, we are right, we are His authorized agents.
This last construct was exactly the logic, worked to its feudal conclusion, that led to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. It was an arbitrary theology that needed only a supporting prelate or two to have a lock on the people. Eventually the people of Europe threw off this concept. France did it violently in the French Revolution, for a while rejecting the God of the ruling class. England did it in a Puritan Protestant revolution that replaced the king’s certainty of divine authority with one of divine national destiny. In the cold recesses of Russia the czars kept their divine autocracy until exterminated by a militant atheistic revolution.
And thereby hangs a tale with a link to the Pledge of Allegiance!
We all know by now what many had forgotten following years of schoolroom recitation: the words “under God” were added in 1954 at the urging of religious groups, the Knights of Columbus most prominently. The reason: to define this nation as Christian as opposed to godless Communism. It was the height of the cold war, after all. No matter that the conflict was a little more nuanced than that—that Eastern Europe feared a resurgent Germany; that capitalism—freed of the inhibitions against predatory gains that characterized Christian Europe of the Middle Ages and that led to the marginalization of Jews for dealing in usury, etc.—was in a global battle for market access and control; that Russia and the U.S. were in many ways involved in a classic game of global imperialism; that MAD was, after all, a mutually assured destruction pact. Never mind all the ambiguities; many needed to characterize the battle as simply between good and evil—and of course God would be on our side. In retrospect, His will most likely has been served by the collapse of the godless force of global communism. But a certain violence was itself done by the insertion in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Justice Antonin Scalia is wont to talk of original intent on constitutional matters. His point is well taken when we can divine it. Most usually it should be safer to depend on textual interpretation of documents such as the Constitution. He has recused himself from this particular deliberation because he clearly favors the words in the pledge. I think this is one case in which the intent, or expectations of the culture in eighteenth-century America, may be at odds with the text and aims of the Constitution itself.
The society was overwhelmingly Christian—more specifically, Protestant—back then. It is easy to show, as various politically aggressive religious spokespersons have of late, that the conflation of state and God was routine. Even as Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and others set up a calculatedly secular government, borrowing from the British norms and aping much of the classical ideals of Rome and Greece, they clearly shared the assumption that this new endeavor had the blessing of the Almighty.
The question is in some ways whether we perpetuate the usually quaint, but oftentimes dangerous, co-option of God for national behavior; or recommit ourselves to a civil compact made more workable by the personal faith dynamic of an increasingly diverse community. The First Amendment has been worked over many times for meaning—no establishment of religion/no inhibition to its practice. But in this pledge question it might also be well to remember that the Constitution is explicit in prohibiting any religious test for public office. With the pledge, we are very much faced with a religious test—especially if the pledge is required of all students. It seems illogical for the framers of this constitutional requirement to so definitely object to a religious test for public office and yet allow it for all citizens, thereby accomplishing the same negative they clearly desired to prevent.
We can only hope the justices treat this with Solomonic care. To discard the wording out of hand will only inflame the national religious sense that has been so easily co-opted in the past. It might also empower those who have a general antipathy to faith. Perhaps the best course is a narrowly defined opinion that rests on the recognition of the role of ceremonial deism, and makes clear the limits beyond this.
Lincoln E. Steed
Editor
Liberty Magazine
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