As we celebrate July 4, a more inclusive pledge

VALLEY NEWS

FROM VALLEY NEWS

6-28-2025

Driving through the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside, a first-time visitor would find it hard not to notice the billboard admonishing: “Everyone shall give an account of himself to God.” The US dollar bill features the inscription, “In God We Trust.” When someone takes an oath of office, he has to repeat “So help me God.” If you sneeze, someone is likely to say, “Bless you,” even if they do not know you.

When I came to the U.S. a few decades ago, I felt there was too much of God here. That was the only cultural shock I felt on arrival, but very soon it wore away because it seemed that the American people don’t give much meaning to it, except probably to keep the big guy in the sky on their side, in case ... well, you don’t know.

Much as an Englishman talks about the weather, most Americans use God as a social and linguistic crutch, a placeholder — unless they feel stressed and threatened as in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks when Americans mixed God with patriotism to make a volatile cocktail of rhetoric that permeated every corner of public discourse, from bumper stickers to presidential speeches. “God Bless America” became both a mantra and a mandate, of sorts.

More than ever, American political discourse, including from the White House, especially today, is suffused with references to God despite the constitutional brick wall between the church and the state. The American people celebrate July 4 under a new triumvirate: God, patriotism, and now, America First. The triangulation makes the United States a less secular, less free country.

Freedom means choice. Making a choice also includes choosing your own God, monotheistic or polytheistic; or even a no-God, non-God, Godot. It is not the government’s business to tell an American what god to choose; thus speaks the Constitution, and so ruled the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on June 26, 2002.

That decision came after a lawsuit filed by lawyer and physician Michael Newdow, an atheist who complained that his elementary school daughter’s First Amendment rights were violated when she was given no choice but to “watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that ours is ‘one nation under God.’ ”

Does that mean that atheists have no place in these United States? A 1943 U.S. Supreme Court ruling held that children cannot be forced to recite the pledge, though the school’s public address system may blare it loudly. Nonetheless, only a handful of states — sources vary as to which ones — don’t require schools to set aside time for the Pledge of Allegiance. Vermont is among them. New Hampshire requires public schools to make time for the pledge, but students are not required to recite it.

Until 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance included the phrase “one nation indivisible,” but to fight godless Communism, Congress changed the pledge to include “one nation under God.” The wall between church and state cracked. And since then, God — not a sectarian one, Catholic or Protestant, but a generic God, the Supreme Deity—has found a place in public discourse.

“A profession that we are a nation ‘under God’ is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,’ because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion,” Judge Alfred T. Goodwin wrote for the three-judge panel in the Newdow case.

Such a profession violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which mandates that the government shall stay neutral in matters of religion. It sends a wrong message to impressionable children that if they do not participate in the recitation of the pledge, they might become “outsiders.” You know how children are. They don’t want to be left out.

Most of the American people, like the dissenting Judge Ferdinand Francis Fernandez, scorned the fear that the United States might become a theocracy because of the inclusion of “under God” in the pledge. The court has indicated a glaring contradiction in what the US Constitution professes and what the American people want to believe and practice. The pledge excludes some Americans, Hindus who worship multiple gods and goddesses; atheists and agnostics; or those like the Buddhists, who believe in nirvana, a state of supreme bliss, tranquility and purity that is attained when the self is absorbed into the infinite.

The recitation of “one nation under God” is psychologically coercive because it forces people to accept monotheism as the sole religious path available to them. The pledge not only violates the Constitution but also negates cultural pluralism. It violates freedom of choice.

The ruling was stayed and eventually overturned, and in 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided a definitive ruling by tossing the case on procedural grounds.

So the central issue remains unresolved: Can a pluralistic democracy include “under God” in its civic rituals without marginalizing those who don’t — or can’t — believe? The answer, I believe, lies not in the courts or Congress, but in the culture’s willingness to embrace difference without sanctifying a single worldview. More than ever, it is imperative today to be open-minded.

A significant 2025 court decision highlights this ongoing tension. In Roake v. Brumley, a unanimous panel struck down Louisiana’s law requiring a Ten Commandments poster in every public classroom, citing the Establishment Clause and reaffirming the 1980 Stone v. Graham precedent.

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, it is time to return to the original words: “One nation, indivisible.” No God, no exclusion, no coercion. Just a pledge to unity, liberty and justice for all.

Narain Batra lives in Hartford.