I Pledge Allegiance . . . Or do I?

Al Mohler reports on this week's Pledge of Allegiance decision in California:

A federal judge in Sacramento ruled Wednesday that it is unconstitutional to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates the right of children in the public schools to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."

A debate on this ensued on Zeitgeist between Joe Carter and John Mark Reynolds that is an example of the kind of in-depth substantive debate the blogosphere can provide us when it is functioning at its best.

First I'll give links to these posts then write out some of my own thoughts.

Al Mohler's Commentary.

John Mark Reynolds - The Pledge.

John Mark Reynolds - In the Year of Our Lord.

Joe Carter - Rousseau's Allies: Civil Religion and the Pledge of Allegiance.

John Mark Reynolds - To Disagree with Joe.

And just for fun, here's a link to a Wikipedia entry on the Pledge of Allegiance.

What is most interesting to me is the debate between which God is being referenced in the pledge.  Joe Carter, John Mark Reynolds, and Al Mohler all agree that the God of the Pledge is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Mohler summarizes:

Because of this, Christians must not defend the presence of the word "under God" in the Pledge as a direct reference to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--the Triune God whom Christians worship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Given this, the debate between Joe and John Mark centers around the place of civil religion in our nation.  Reynolds knows it is not the Christian God who is necessarily referenced in the Pledge but says this ruling shows a lack of appreciation for civil religion in our society.   He sees civil religion as a good thing because it limits the power of the government.  Even though the Christian God is not specifically referenced, this civil religion embodied in the pledge acknowledges that the state is not ultimate.

Joe Carter argues against this, pointing to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who developed the concept of civil religion:

as a way to keep the Christian “rebels” allegiance aligned to the state rather than to their religion.

As best I can discern, Reynolds response to Carter is that nobody today understands civil religion in the way that Rousseau understood it.  Your Oldsmobile wasn't your father's Oldsmobile and our civil religion isn't Rousseau's civil religion.

But whereas Carter, Reynolds and Mohler don't believe the God of the Pledge is the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, and whereas Carter and Reynolds are debating the definition and place of civil religion, it is clear that Michael Newdow, the plaintiff has Christianity in his sights here.  Newdow allegedly represents three sets of parents, of whom Mohler says:

The parents also allege that they individually have been "made to feel like a 'political outsider' due to the 'government's embrace of (Christian) monotheism in the Pledge of Allegiance.'"

Of course the judges and the courts in these cases aren't naming the Christian God as the God whom they are disestablishing.  In fact, it seems they are fully embracing the unknown God of Rousseau's civil religion.   Again, I turn to Mohler:

After all, the Court has ruled that symbols and references to a divine being are allowable only insofar as those references point to no specific deity. Beyond this, the courts have ruled that the only permissible reference to deity is a reference that so reduces the definition of deity that it appears difficult for all but the most ardent atheist to object.

I tend to agree more with Joe here in his views on civil religion, although John Mark Reynolds makes some important points.  Small victories are still victories, and if some type of civil religion can help limit governmental power and provide some measure of freedom to worship that's a small but important victory. 

On the other hand, if the three men I have quoted here are correct that the God of the Pledge is some unknown God I'm going to have a hard time mustering any enthusiasm to argue about this one way or another.

The deeper issue for Christians is that, regardless of what God we identify with the God of the Pledge it is clear that Newdow and other plaintiffs in these kinds of suits are specifically attacking the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.   

I liken these things to the antics of high schoolers on the eve of the big game.  One of the time honored traditions of high school sports is for people from one school to steal or deface the mascot of the other school.  This sends a message of disdain - "we hate you, you're ugly and we're going to whip your sorry excuse for a team this Friday night." 

As Mohler says, things like this and the battle over the Ten Commandments are battles over symbols.  In one respect I don't think such things can really hurt the church of Christ anymore than stealing the other team's mascot physically hurts the other team.  A coercive or hostile government doesn't have the power to thwart the spread of the gospel. 

We see this by the example of the early church in its Roman environment and by the modern Chinese church in its communist environment.   In both cases, governments went to great extremes to stamp out Christianity and the church grew all the more.  We also have Jesus' promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18).   A hostile government may separate the wheat from the tares, but ultimately it cannot thwart the spread of the gospel.

Still we must respond to these things and the first thing Christians need to do is remember that the Christian faith was made to thrive in a hostile environment.  The Bible tells us how we can respond to hostility by loving our enemies, praying for those who persecute us, blessing those who curse us and doing good to those who hate us (Matthew 5:44).  We can also rejoice that we have been granted the privilege of suffering for Christ (Phil. 1:29-30).  Anger, retaliation, name calling and the other standard fare of much of our national discourse must not be present in the lives of Christians.

Also, Os Guiness has been reminding us for years that one of the greatest mistakes Christians ever made was to posture themselves as a persecuted minority. We may now or some day find ourselves in the minority, and may find ourselves to be persecuted, but the biblical posture is to remember that these are normal things for Christians.  Though we may become persecuted and be in the minority in the city of man, our identity is determined by our citizenship in the City of God and this is the controlling factor in all we do.

At the same time we are not merely passive in response to these things.  Christians can and should respond actively to these things.  In that regard, my first concern is that we realize that this one particular issue is one particular part of a much larger whole. We need to keep in mind that this is not just a battle about the Pledge of Allegiance.   As Al Mohler says:

Michael Newdow and company will not be satisfied until the United States government is not only secular, but secularist.

This is a symptom of something much larger and I am concerned that Christians need to keep this big picture in mind.  I'm not qualified to speak on the political dimensions of this, and won't except to say that I agree with the following words from Nancy Pearcey's book Total Truth:

We have learned that "politics is downstream from culture, not the other way around," says Bill Wichterman, policy advisor to senate majority leader Bill Frist.

Which is not to say that politics does not play an important role in resistance to the secularization of our society.  I just mean that the secularization process won't be stopped by mere legislation. 

If secularism is the philosophy being adopted in our society, secularization is the process by which is it being adopted.  Secularism is an idea or philosophy that rejects religion and religious considerations.  Secularization is a process whereby God becomes less and less necessary to explain more and more of life.  Craig Gay speaks similarly in his book The Way of the Modern World:

The thesis we will advance in the following chapters isthat one of the most consequential ideas embedded in the modern institutions and traditions and habits of thought is theological. Stated bluntly, it is the assumption that even if God exists he is largely irrelevant to the real business of life.  To put this somewhat more tactfully, contemporary society and culture so emphasize human potential and human agency and the immediate practical exigencies of the here and now, that we are for the most part tempted to go about our daily business in this world without giving God much thought.  Indeed, we are tempted to live as though God did not exist, or at least as if his existence did not practially matter.  In short, one of the most insidious temptations fostered within contemporary secular society and culture, a temptation rendered uniquely plausible by the ideas and assumptions embedded within modern institutional life, is the temptation to practical atheism.

Granted, the Michael Newdow's of this world aren't mere practical atheists, they are full blown, total world and lifeview atheists.  But Gay's words are still relevant. It is the practical atheism of the masses that provides a plausibility structure in which the philosophical atheism of a minority can thrive.  Or, to say it another way, secularization provides the plausibility structure for secularism.

At the risk of frustrating the reader I'm not prepared to offer any concise arguments or easy steps to combat this secularization process.  The stuff we regularly read from folks like Craig Gay, Os Guiness, Nancy Pearcey and others is appropriate here.  We must live as if God exists, and He is sovereign in every sphere of life.  We must wrestle with what it means to glorify God in all that we do in every field of endeavor.  We must recover the great intellectual tradition of the church which was abandoned in the last century. 

In short, we need to engage the short term, immediate issues like this battle over the pledge in light of the greater long term issue of secularization.

 

Comments

[Jeremy Pierce]

Isn't it clear that those who instituted those words in the pledge were standing in the monotheistic tradition history that includes Christianity? There's only one being who matches up to the things that tradition says about God, even if you don't include any of the statements distinctive to Christianity. That means that the term 'God' in the pledge does indeed refer to the being that tradition refers to by using that term. It's clear that there are statements about God that the pledge and the civil recognition of God in other places leaves out, but that doesn't mean that the word doesn't refer to God. That argument relies on a semantic fallacy.

[David Wayne]

Jeremy - your point is well taken. I didn't come at this from a semantic angle and I don't think the guys I quoted did either. That little article I linked from Wikipedia simply says that the words "Under God" were added to distinguish America from atheist Russia. Joe's stuff on civil religion is arguing that our notions of God in American civil religion owe as much or more to Rousseau as to the monotheistic tradition.

[Jeremy Pierce]

I didn't read all the links until now. I don't think Al Mohler and John Mark Reynolds are making the mistake I was just talking about. Mohler says the statement is silent on the issue of what things are true of God, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the statement refers to some nonexistent entity that isn't the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The statement is simply silent on whether God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That suggests to me that he'd be happy saying that it refers to God but that people who utter it may not believe that God has all the properties Christians attribute to him. I have no problem with that view. Reynolds' view doesn't seem to me to be relevantly different in terms of what I was saying.

It's not clear to me whether Joe is making this mistake. The problem with his post is that he speaks of Buddhists, Wiccans, and Hindus, who do not use the word 'God' to refer to any deity anything like God. Jews and Muslims, on the other hand, do stand in the monotheistic tradition beginning with the God of Abraham, the one true God. Words for deity or the absolute or higher powers in the mouths of the people Joe lists do not refer to God. Words for God in the mouths of Muslims and non-Christian Jews do refer to God, but they come from someone who believes different things about God than Christians do (and thus false things about very important elements of God's nature). They still refer to God with those terms, or else they couldn't be believing false things about him.

The reason I think Joe's case is difficult to make is because I'm not sure Wiccans, Buddhists, or Hindus think they are referring to anything when they say "under God". I'm fairly sure they're on Newdow's side here and think they're having to say something that isn't about any existing entity. That means they're not in the discussion. Those who say "under God" in the pledge and mean anything related to the tradition of the God of Abraham refer to God. Those who don't seem to me to be meaning the expression very differently from what it means in the English language in this part of the world in our time given the historical background behind it. So I just don't think his argument makes any sense.

[johnMark]

As Christians when we say the pledge, maybe we can say "One Nation under Jesus." I'm sure that would turn some heads.

[Barrie]

As an Australian, where we have no contentious 'anti-establishment of religion' clause but are nevertheless basically a secular state, may I make a few comments on this?

Surely the original intention of these words should be supported - that the state must not create a state church of any Christian variety.
No other God was in view then, but any denominationalism was. The more recent 'Under God' phrase is surely based on exactly the same cultural tradition. To what does 'In God We Trust' mean on US coins, if not the same thing?

Americans, of all people, should be wary of arguing that the term 'God' here could refer to the Moslem Allah or a Ba-hai-type Universal One eiher.
This is a certain consequence of defending any concept of 'civil religion'.
Singapore leader and founder Lee Kwan Yew, himself an agnostic, supported civil religion in state schools because every religion effectively teaches a code of morality he thought useful for civil peace and order [a pragmatic decision], but even he would object to submission to Allah's extremer demands.

On the other hand, how can it be argued that the phrase must NOT be included in an Oath, since it cannot be said to 'establish' any particular religion, and its removal denies young Christians the right to express their ultimate allegiance, so restricting them.

Why can't Americans be tolerant, and simply say that anyone who does not want to say the two words is free to remain silent? This could be made explicit on every occasion.

Isn't that what US Christians should argue for, while supporting the intentions of the Founders to guard the non-establishment of any religion?