Dear Editor:
To hear some people talk, you'd think the fate of the United States turns on whether the phrase "under God" is removed from the pledge of allegiance. The argument goes like this. If "they" (note: not "we") take that from the pledge, the next thing you know they'll go after "In God we trust" on our coins. Eventually, America will be without God!
What a twisted piece of reasoning. Were we less a God fearing people in 1942 when the pledge was adopted without "under God"? Were we an unholy nation prior to the Civil War when there was no reference to God on our currency? I can't see that we are a more godly people today for having these slogans than we were before "they" put them in. Making a reference to God in pledge and motto in no way makes us a more faithful people. It doesn't even show that we are a spiritual people. If there is a measure for spirituality, it is not in what we say we believe but in how we care for the least fortunate among us and how we conduct ourselves among the nations.
Many of us worry less about an anonymous "they" taking God out of America than about certain religious groups trying to foist their brand of religion on the rest of us. It begins with the falsification of history. The references to God in the Declaration of Independence, we are assured, are drawn from the Bible. False. Those references are drawn from Thomas Jefferson's deist philosophy. The principles of American democracy, we are told, are founded on the Bible. No, they are not. Representative government and democracy are not biblical concepts. If you want to study the basis of our governmental system read Locke and Montesquieu.
It is asking too much of the wall of separation between church and state of which Jefferson spoke to protect us from the quacks who want to rewrite the history books. People are free to speak, believe, and even publish falsehoods to their hearts' content as long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others. However, as long as the government and religious beliefs are kept apart, we can be assured that the revisionist's nonsense attains no official sanction. Perhaps the reader will pardon my irony when I say, thank God for the First Amendment.
Don Viney
Professor of Philosophy
Pittsburg State University
Pittsburg, KS
Copyright 2003 Don Viney