Thursday, January 15, 2004
We've got bigger problems than the Pledge of Allegiance.
This term, the United States Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance. It's the latest episode in a long-running serial involving attempts to use the courts to stifle all public expressions of Christian belief. The following comment is an extract from an editorial in Christianity Today magazine.
At issue is whether the phrase "under God" suggests a government establishment of religion, and therefore whether the pledge should be banned from public schools. We firmly hope the justices leave well enough alone.
The arguments for the validity of these two controversial words "under God" are varied and strong, as many commentators have already noted. Robert Destro of Catholic University of America presented a fine summary of the political arguments in an amicus curiae brief:
All three branches of our federal government have long recognized the premise from which Jefferson argued his Declaration of Independence, namely that our freedom is grounded in an authority higher than the State … If reciting the Pledge is unconstitutional simply because it refers to a nation "under God," then reciting the Declaration of Independence, which refers to the Creator as the source of rights, is surely cast in doubt. And that would mean that publicly acknowledging the traditional grounding of our rights itself arguably violates those very rights. That would be an earthquake in our national ethos.
Professor Destro seems mistaken about only one thing: the earthquake happened long ago. It wasn't one big shock, but mini-tremors that over decades created a deep chasm in American life.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brought this chasm to America's attention in 1978 in his now-famous Harvard commencement address, "A World Split Apart." In the last three centuries, all moral and spiritual limitations, all Christian notions of duty and sacrifice, have slowly been discarded in the West. While we've safeguarded human rights, "man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer … We have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life."
The spiritual decline has only accelerated in the 25 years since. We live in a political/economic nexus that not only permits but actually protects those who practice evil. In the slavish and mindless pursuit of liberty, we've ended up with a system that guards the rights of pornographers to commodify sex, of advertisers to entice people to hedonism, of executives to pursue a life of greed, of abortionists to kill innocent human life.
This is not a godly system, though it is a system under God—or, more precisely, under God's judgment. The prophetic words spoken against Israel long ago are tragically timely: "Ah, sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly, who have forsaken the Lord … The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and bleeding wounds" (Isa. 1).
Retaining the phrase "under God" is not going to protect "Christian America" from functional secularism. That earthquake has already shaken our nation. But the phrase will continue to signal the source of our liberties, and to whom we stand accountable for the misuse of liberty.
