Live from the Nuke Free Zone

Wouldn’t it piss you off if the government had your children, every day, claim that the nation stood “under no god”?

Yes, I’m going to comment on the Newdow plea. I’ve thunk it over a while and don’t see room to debate anymore, so this is going to be a lecture.

As theocrats in the past have used government power and resources to proseletyze their religion at the state or local level, their excuse has always been that the First Amendment only applies to Congress: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. That doesn’t work here. The Newdow case is all about law Congress made.

Back in the 1950s we were in a bit of a competition with the century’s second worst evil dictator over which of us would rule the world. To get the people behind it, we exaggerated our differences and rubbed out our similarities, making Russia and Communism appear frighteningly alien. So along with having totalitarian maniacs draw up lists of people who asked their bosses for raises, someone noticed that the Pledge of Allegiance sounds like something that Commie kids might say in Moscow! Obvious answer: ditch the official Pledge because we’re a free society founded on rebellion against authority, right?

Wrong! Noting our revolutionary foundation would allow people to point out that the Soviet Union was founded on a very similar revolution against an authoritarian monarch. Instead, we had to find a distinction and magnify it. In Stalin’s Communism, you worship the State and pretend that you’ve done away with religion. The United States, on the other hand, had a lot of Christians, a few Jews, a bunch of people who just don’t give a damn, and no one else in numbers enough to matter at the ballot box. The Pledge could be made explicitly un-Communist by establishing it as an affirmation of religious belief, by adding the words “under God”. This would induct generations of schoolchildren whose parents can’t afford private education into the mainstream Christian religion and the Jews won’t care because it’s their God too, while strict constructionalists and minorities can be brushed aside by calling them Communist traitors who want Stalin to win.

So Congress passed a law adding those words to the Pledge and President Eisenhower signed it into law, both all the while affirming that yes, this is a prayer and it is intended to establish Christianity as the official religion of the United States. Today the chief defense of the modified Pledge is that recognition of a single, nameless God is non-religious. Despite rejecting that argument as bullshit on its face, let’s explain exactly why it’s bullshit.

The main point of Judaism is to declare that there is one supreme God. This is seen in the Shma, Judaism’s central prayer, and in the first few of the Ten Commandments. Recall that the mainstream religions at the time might be variously beholden to singular deities or pantheons, or might be belief systems involving no deity at all.

Some in the United States only consider “God” part of secular culture because our most prominent religions are Judaic and minorities are so rare that they’ve never had any experience with any other belief system. They aren’t familiar with other religions in which there can be several Gods, a named God, a Goddess, or no God at all. These religions — Atheism, Wicca, Shinto, Santeria, and many others — do exist in small enclaves. Congress’s declaration that we are a nation “under God” is a repudiation of their beliefs.

For fairness I must note that I am opposed to the concept of a mandated Pledge of Allegiance at all, except for government personnel, since it waives the right to revolt which is central to the nation’s founding. The prayer within it is merely an additional insult. I might frighten the odd right-winger who accidentally stumbled onto this site by pointing out the Pledge’s origin as a piece of honest-to-God Socialist propaganda, but that rhetoric doesn’t matter to me. If we must have a pledge, let us go back to the original draft form which is far less offensive:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with Equality, Liberty, and Justice for all.

Props to Scalia for actually recusing himself from this case. That was unexpected considering how he defended his independence in the Cheney case by pointing out what a great friend of Cheney’s he is.