`Under God' under assault: a Scottish cleric inspired Congress to add what now is a controversial phrase to our nation's Pledge of Allegiance

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 29, 2002 | by Larry Witham

The minister whose 1954 sermon helped put "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance believes its elimination would amount to "the god of big money defeating" monotheistic faith. According to the Rev. George Docherty, 91, former pastor at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, who lives with his wife in Pennsylvania, society has become "so secular and materialistic" that judges are offended by an allusion to a deity. "But to say that the word 'God' is unconstitutional is heretical" Docherty says. "This was a nation built under God. Unfortunately, the god we worship today is money."

In April 1953, the Korean War prompted suggestions to put Abraham Lincoln's "under God" from the Gettysburg Address into the Pledge of Allegiance, which Congress had codified in 1942. A reported 15 such resolutions got nowhere in Congress until Docherty preached a sermon attended by President Dwight Eisenhower and the national press corps on Feb. 7,1954.

Docherty says he did not write the sermon because of the resolutions--of which he was unaware--but because his son told him of a pledge he had recited in his second-grade class. "I had never heard of it, so I asked, `What is that?'" recalls Docherty, who had arrived in Washington from Scotland in 1950, and served the Presbyterian church until his retirement in 1976. "So I wrote a sermon to amend the Pledge of Allegiance" recalling that he had drawn inspiration from references to a deity in Scotland's ceremonial hymns.

After delivering the sermon, he asked Eisenhower, who was in the front pew, what he thought. "And he said, `I agree'" The news story flashed across the nation, and in the next weeks Docherty received hundreds of letters. Sen. Homer Ferguson (R-Mich.) sponsored a bill, and it was approved as a joint resolution on June 8, 1954. Eisenhower signed it into law on Flag Day, June 14, saying in a statement, "From this day forward, the millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty."

The Pledge of Allegiance first appeared in 1892 in the popular children's magazine, Youth's Companion, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus arriving in the Americas. It was in wide use by 1917, when the United States entered World War I. When dissenters and Jehovah's Witnesses refused to acknowledge the pledge and the U.S. flag, the Supreme Court ruled in 1940 that school boards could compel students to recite the oath but reversed itself three years later. In 1942, Congress said that only it could change the wording.