Dear Christian Citizens:

Yesterday during our Adult Education class in the Parlor, under the capable leadership of Elder Joseph Yount, PhD, we were discussing characteristics of Christian Nationalists. The conversation turned to public school students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of each day, and my mind wandered back to third grade and my teacher, the amazing Mrs. Lauder.

During winter break a new family had moved into the school district, and their youngest daughter, Nancy, was enrolled in my class. At the beginning of the school day, Mrs. Lauder introduced Nancy and told us to make her feel welcome. We all responded with appropriate greetings and applause; then Mrs. Lauder went on to say that Nancy would not be saying the Pledge of Allegiance with the rest of the class. Mrs. Lauder explained that that the new family in the community found their religious faith to be extremely important, so much so that they would not pledge their loyalty or their allegiance to anything other than the God they worshiped.

I remember thinking that made sense. The first commandment does say, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,” but extending that commitment to include our daily pledge to the flag made my family’s level of religious zealotry pale by comparison.

Since Mrs. Lauder never missed a teaching opportunity, she went on to say what the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was about. She explained that the republic for which it stands protected religious beliefs, even the belief to not say the pledge. So while Nancy would not be saying the pledge, we would all say the pledge to defend Nancy’s right to not say the pledge.

I will never forget standing next to my desk saying the Pledge of Allegiance with a newfound gusto. It was as if we, the whole third grade class of Field Club Elementary School, were huddling around Nancy pledging our allegiance to defend her family’s religious freedom. In an odd way, the perfunctory recitation of the Pledge took on a whole new urgency. Like I said, Mrs. Lauder was amazing.

Of course, it was years later that I put together the pieces. Nancy’s family were Jehovah’s Witnesses, a tradition ensconced in Supreme Court precedent many years prior to my third-grade year.

In 1940, in the case of Minersville School District v. Gobitis, the Court held that a public school could force students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag and say the Pledge. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in the majority opinion that conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs.

However, only three years later, in 1943, the Court changed its course. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the majority reversed the Gobitis decision and held that the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits public schools from forcing students to salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance.

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” wrote Justice Robert Jackson for the majority, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

 Clearly, Mrs. Lauder preferred Jackson over Frankfurter.

This sharp reversal in precedent between 1940 and 1943 was not a sudden re-composition of the court; there was only a single new juror, Justice Wiley Rutlidge, added to the bench when Justice James Byrnes was named President Truman’s Secretary of State in 1942. The Gobitis decision which permitted compelled speech passed by an overwhelming 8-1 majority with Justice Harlan Stone providing the sole dissent. But the Barnette case reversing Gobitis passed with a strong 6-3 majority, meaning no fewer than four justices reconsidered their interpretation of the First Amendment in less than three years.

 What had changed was the nation’s understanding of compelled speech. Revelations of Nazi atrocities in the name of coerced nationalism created a newfound repulsion for compelled speech by any state official, “high or petty”. Something as simple as the recitation of a Pledge of Allegiance could no longer be understood as a reasonable requirement when extended to the possibility of greater social oppression.

This post-World War II transformation, which rippled twenty-five years later into my third-grade class, seems to echo into today’s arguments over school policies. What rights are afforded legislators, school boards, teachers or parents to compel or curtail religious, national or academic speech? That’s an essay prompt for other musings, but I do know this: standing by my third-grade desk with hand over heart, there was something invigorating about pledging my allegiance not to a tri-colored swatch of cloth, but to a new student’s right to be included.

Trying to finish my taxes while weighing the tension between policies and people, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor