Dear Pledging Patriots:

At the close of the 1800s, the United States was swamped with immigrants. Nearly 15% of the nation was foreign born, with a majority coming from northern and western European countries. It was noted that in 1890, one in six Chicago residents had been born in Germany. There were also a substantial number of new American residents from Ireland and eastern Europe. They were largely poor and alarmingly Catholic. Most, regardless of their country of origin, were arriving on American shores having formerly been pledged to kings and other associated royal potentates. Coming to America required not only the acquisition of a new language, but also a changed understanding of citizenship. Republics are very different from monarchies.

Concern over the new arrivals’ ability to assimilate and a fear that they lacked understanding regarding allegiance to their new country raised great suspicion among the established U.S. citizenry. Catholicism was deemed a threat because of a perceived ultimate commitment to a Roman Pope, monarchism was dedicated to foreign royalty, and anarchism was understood to advocate violent repudiation of both. All threatened to undo the American commitment to democratic republicanism. While there were many programs dedicated to cleaning up the politics of the great unwashed, we have one project that endures to this day. It was called the ‘schoolhouse flag movement,’ which aimed to place an American flag above every school in the nation.

At the center of this flag-waving movement was a magazine called The Youth’s Companion. They sold both subscriptions and flags to school districts across the nation. By 1892 they had sold over 26,000 flags to schools, yet the market was far from saturated. In 1893, the magazine’s marketing department decided to link flag sales to the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America and to feature a special flag pledge salute at the Colombian Exposition in Chicago. Francis Julius Bellamy, co-director of The Youth’s Companion marketing division, penned the Pledge of Allegiance to be printed and distributed with every flag and subscription sold. Bellamy’s pledge was simple: I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.

The recitation of the pledge was to be performed with the right arm stretched towards the flag, a motion called the Bellamy salute. (During WWII this motion was replaced with the ‘hand-over-heart’ gesture because the original arm position too closely resembled a Nazi salute.) In 1923, curiously the year of my parents’ birth, the ambiguous words “my Flag” were replaced with a more specific reference: “the Flag of the United States of America”. Bellamy had thought their flag marketing could go international, so he had intentionally avoided reference to any particular flag.

As is well known, in 1954, responding to the Communist threat of the times, President Eisenhower encouraged Congress to add the words "under God," creating the 31-word pledge we say today. Curiously, Bellamy’s granddaughter protested the insertion of God into her grandfather’s pledge. He had been a Baptist minister and a Christian Socialist, believing in the absolute division between church and state. Throughout his life, Bellamy had championed the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources, which he believed was inherent in the teachings of Jesus. He had been fired from his Boston church for preaching against the ravages of capitalism, and when in retirement he moved to Florida, Bellamy stopped attending church altogether because of the racism he witnessed there.

I provide all this background to present my real musing for today, which pertains to the last addition to the Pledge, “under God.” (As a side note, I’ve included no footnotes or references to the above information. I am not a historian, and each of the ‘facts’ presented can be found or refuted through simple Googling.)

As most Americans my age, I’ve been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance my entire literate life. A highlight of my kindergarten days was the privilege of holding the flag during the television taping of Romper Room, although I must confess it was not early patriotism which filled my soul with pride; it was the opportunity to be the center of attention. But I digress. I also wrote about the Pledge of Allegiance back in April of last year; you can read it here. Clearly, this has been rattling around in my head for some time.

As a Rotarian, we begin each club meeting by reciting the pledge. Rotary prides itself on its international reputation, and I sometimes wonder if clubs and districts elsewhere offer Pledges to their own flags and systems of government. Each time I participate in this ritual, I must confess my ambivalence with the insertion of the divine into a statement of national loyalty, often absenting from the phrase (“one nation… silence…indivisible”) in the same way I pause after saying “sins” in the Lord’s Prayer while waiting for all the “trespassers” to catch up. I do so as my own private protest against the blurring of church and state. I don’t push the issue; to my knowledge my fellow Rotarians are completely unaware of my radical silence.

Every few years there is a resurgence of controversy regarding the Pledge. Years ago, columnist Dave Barry (I think, but I was unwilling to buy a subscription to Miami Herald to confirm) suggested that the phrase “under God” in the Pledge was nothing more than an exclamation in the minds of most Americans, sounding more like, “one nation (gosh darn it!), indivisible…” I still chuckle at his interpretation.

Over the past several months I’ve been thinking not about the phrase, but about the commas. Listening to most groups recite the pledge, this portion usually sounds like bullet points or ingredients in a recipe: 1) One Nation, 2) Under God, 3) Indivisible, 4) With liberty… As stipulated in the 1954 version adopted by Congress, “under God”, however, is not a separate attribute. It is a prepositional adjective modifying “one nation”; there is no comma. This construction leaves little doubt as to congressional intent—there is a direct line from our political republic to God’s sovereign gaze, unlike those ‘godless’ commies.

I’ve been wondering about shifting that comma to: “one nation, under God indivisible,” thereby linking indivisibility rather than our nation to God’s intent. While this does nothing to quell my discomfort with blending politics and religion, it does refocus our understanding of national unity. By a simple shift of punctuation, the pledge could suggest that our nation may only be united when we understand how God, not we, intend indivisibility. It also suggests that a divided nation loses any claim to divine mandate. If we cannot get along, we forfeit God’s affirmation and blessing.

Of course, I have no plans to lobby Congress with my Great Pledge Punctuation Transformation Act (GPPTA); they clearly have significantly more pressing issues to ignore.  And perhaps this whole line of thought is the result of too many hours in hospital waiting rooms over the past two weeks. But there is a part of me that believes words matter, and when people think about what they’re saying rather than parroting what they’re told, hearts change, and sometimes words change too.

Pledging allegiance to God’s intended indivisibility, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor