Hollow pledge: the problem with 'under God'

Christian Century, Nov 16, 2004 by Rodney Clapp

Henotheism in premodern times, according to Niebuhr, centered on clan or tribe. Its pervasive form in the modern world is nationalism. "Nationalism shows its character as a faith whenever national welfare or survival in regarded as the supreme end of life: whenever right and wrong are made dependent on the sovereign will of the nation, however determined; whenever religion and science, education and art, are valued by the measure of their contribution to national existence."

Henotheism is not the theism of any stripe of serious, intentional Christianity--especially not after the German church's experience under Nazism. What Olson and O'Connor propose at worst is idolatry--if they mean to posit a henotheistic and false "God" of the American flag in addition to the one and true living God. At best, if they mean merely to allow or encourage professed Christians to confuse the Living God with the "generic God" propping up the pledge's "ceremonial deism," they propose a taking of the Lord's name in vain. Either way lies serious theological error and offense.

Newdow definitively exposes the theological incoherence and dubiousness of "ceremonial deism" in its many forms. American civil religion. and its construction of "God," has necessarily always been a vague, makeshift affair. Though many early Americans surely heard patriotic and public references to "God" its a reference to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit of classical Christianity, it is clear that Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin intended the word less specifically, regarding "God" as a more removed, impersonal and deistic entity, The unfolding increasing pluralism of the U.S. population has meant that national, official references to "God" have had to become more and more plastic and elusive. In today's America, the word must be stretched to include not only Protestants, Catholics and Jews, but significant numbers of Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other citizens representing various world religions. If that is not enough, more than 10 percent of American citizens declare themselves atheistic or otherwise nonreligious. Official references to "God" must be capacious--or insignificant--enough not to disenfranchise these citizens.

Short of hanging on to the muddy, vacillating devices of ceremonial deism. Christians appear to face one of two choices. One is the open, deliberate restoration of Christian theocracy. Then the referent of "God" in the pledge would be clear and honest. Some evangelicals and conservative Catholics lean in this direction, but gingerly and equivocatingly, if not disingenuously, because of the sheer infeasibility of theocracy in a pluralistic America. With most contemporary Christians, I would argue that theocracy is not only politically dangerous but theologically disastrous.

We are on much more solid theological ground if we turn to the other choice. That choice is to recognize what the Bible and such exemplars of the Christian tradition as Augustine have taught us: to see and trust that the church and not any nation-state is preeminently the social agent through which God works God's will in history. The church catholic stretches throughout the world and is its own "public," crossing the comparatively sectarian boundaries of nation-states. Knowing themselves first of all as "citizens with the saints," Christians may then, like the Babylon-dwelling Israelites counseled by Jeremiah, work and pray for the welfare of the cities (and nations) in which they now dwell, but never confuse those cities with the kingdom for which the church stands.