 The
Pledge of Allegiance of the
United States of America
by David M.
Fitzpatrick
Last updated
Sunday, 26 February 2006On 8 September
1892, commemorating the discovery of American 400 years before, the Pledge
of Allegiance was published for the purposes of recitation by
schoolchildren. It appeared in Youth's Companion, a weekly magazine
published in Boston. Although there has been some dispute over authorship
(for some time the original draft was attributed to James B. Upham, one of
the magazine's executives), the magazine later officially decreed that it
was written by 36-year-old former clergyman Francis Bellamy (the Library of
Congress officially recognizes Bellamy as its author). The Pledge was first
used in schools on 12 October 1892 during observance of Columbus Day, by
proclamation of President Benjamin Harrison.
The original text of the Pledge as he wrote
it is as follows:
I pledge allegiance
to my flag, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
The Pledge was amended in 1924 to include
replace "my flag" with "the flag of the United States of America":
I pledge allegiance
to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with
liberty and justice for all.
That was a harmless enough alteration, but on
14 June 1954, with the rampant fear of Communism in the USA (and the silly
belief that all Communists were Atheists and thus all Atheists were evil),
the Pledge was altered by order of President Eisenhower in a frightening
way: the words "under God" were added in order to exclude Atheists from the
nation—indeed, to exclude any non-Xians:
I pledge allegiance
to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which
it stands, one nation,
under
God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Most of us can remember kids (maybe
ourselves!) mispronouncing some of the words. The Pledge often came out
something like this:
I pledge
a lesion
to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for
Richard Sands,
one nation, under God,
invisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Why is it children mispronounce such words
and make the Pledge silly and meaningless? Simply put, young children:
- ...don't understand the pronunciation of
many of the words
- ...don't understand what the words mean
anyway
- ...are very impressionable and
programmable
The last point is key. By having children mindlessly reciting the Pledge, they burn in things like "under God" into
their heads. This is tantamount to
brainwashing. Even non-religious families end up with religious children who
might not have gone that route but for the programming. It's no different
than slapping a kid in Sunday school every week and teaching him the Bible:
he believes it because he's been programmed to since a very young age.
Luckily, the Pledge cannot be required of
children. At the same time, a Pledge talking about patriotism should be only
about patriotism. "Under God" indicates the country is all about Xians and
not about non-Xians. That's wrong. That was a fact clearly lost on Congress
when it unanimously voted to include "under God" in the Pledge in 1954.
After all, Atheists don't get elected to office; the greater vote is with
the larger percentage of religious citizens, and proclaiming Atheism—or
not supporting adding Xian rhetoric to the national Pledge—would
definitely not get you elected again. |
