Whilst it might be a little over the top for people to claim that, it’s not far off the mark. It certainly might make a non-Christian, especially a religious non-Christian, uncomfortable.
What would people say if bits of Sharia law were translated and posted on courthouses in the US?
How about if would like to pledge my allegiance to the principles of our country without also having to either not be really saying the pledge, or being a hypocrite: mouthing a part I don’t believe.
I don’t think that the pledge is really worth the fight, but as long as it’s there, it’s a stain on the decency and quality of the people that support it’s prescence.
Not actually trying to reference you with that last Poly, since I couldn’t feel any more safe or more decent about you or your particular beliefs.
Oh, I don’t know. If 90% of the population was Islamic, and the plaques had been on the courthouse walls for the better part of the past century or longer, what do you think would be said?
Technically I believe God delegates responsibility for nations to the Principalities.
When I hear “one nation, under God,” it makes me think that someone is claiming God is responsible for the nation.
That’s where the buck stops, so to speak. We have the death penalty, unjust wars, poverty, unwed mothers, abortion? Well, we’re under God. Take it up with him.
Any time we place someone in a position of authority, don’t we demand that they be held accountable for what their subordinates do?
jsgoddess’ position is actually quite close to the one taken by many early religious leaders who had a say in the authorship of our constitution and the 1st amendment. Modern day Christian Nation zealots oten forget that.
That God is responsible for the nation?
Gotta see a cite for that one.
No, it’s that in an “Under God” nation, we are passing the responsibility for that country’s actions onto God. I don’t see it as much of a stretch, given how some people use the actions of Saudi Arabia to impugn Isam.
Precisely. Early American Christians had a MUCH more individualistic vision of the relationship between God and man. In previous countries, this relationship had been mediated through the church/state. In most American Protestant’s thinking, this was illegitimate: that relaitonship was direct, between a man and his God, with at most the intercession of ones chosen congregation and community. The government wasn’t supposed to factor into that chain of authority: you were responsible to God personally.
They saw the government as a terrestrial institution: the very last thing from divinely sanctioned and overseen by God. The government was not to hold it’s head so high: it was answerable to men, and it was men who were answerable to their own consciences.
That is precisely my point. I can see no reason for a country ruled by secular law to involve religion. If nothing else, those 10% Christians/others are going to feel (rightly or wrongly) that irrespective of what the law says, justice is going to be biased by the majority’s religious leanings. Likewise, it encourages people to impose their religious beliefs on situations that they would otherwise not.
The traditional argument is a fair one. However, traditionally many things were often interpreted differently than they are today. The classic example would be what your framers (I think that’s the correct term) meant when they said that all men were created equal. Whether they all really meant that or not (and I doubt that they did), it took until the 1960s for this to be resolved in the US. There were sections of your society that operated under what was effectively apatheid until that time. That’s a huge “wow” factor, at least to me.
I’m not blind to similar forces in my country around that time. I’m just trying to show that something that seems reasonable to you and that is based on what people were doing in the time of your grandparents is not necessarily just, fair, etc.
I’d personally structure this thought a bit differently. But I think that before we talk intelligently about ‘allegiance’, I think we’ve got to agree on what the word means, just how significant a giving it is, to give one’s allegiance to this or that. For instance, can an American “pledge allegiance” to the French tricolor as well as to the Stars and Stripes? If not, then surely a Christian cannot pledge allegiance to the American flag, for Christ and America are far more different than America and France; His ways are not our ways, as Isaiah reminds us.
The dictionary tells us that the root of “allegiance” is essentially “liege,” as in a medieval liege lord. I read ‘allegiance’ as being the contemporary equivalent - whatever that might be - of the debt of loyalty and service a medieval subject owed to his liege lord. Multiple allegiances would inherently be contradictory allegiances.
Anyhow, to reframe things: as a Christian, I have a Lord and Savior, and needless to say, he is the only liege lord I need. I wouldn’t think in terms of ‘secondary allegiances’, which I think is an inherently deceptive term, so much as in terms of love, and calling. For instance, I scarcely think of having an allegiance to my wife and my marriage; I love my wife, and I have been and remain called to be one with her in marriage.
Similarly, I love my country, and although the choice of whether to be born an American citizen wasn’t mine, I feel called to participate in the civic life of this country, and I most certainly don’t feel called to seek citizenship elsewhere, even in these extreme times.
But IMHO, that’s got nothing to do with allegiance.
So as a Christian, it’s my conclusion that I can neither say the Pledge of Allegiance with or without the ‘under God’ insert. And similarly, the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion is nothing unless it allows for citizens’ refusing to pledge their allegiance to America because their allegiance has already been given to the entity one worships. So of course recitation of the PoA cannot be mandatory. Fortunately, the Supreme Court reached that conclusion several decades ago.
As far as ‘under God’ is concerned, ISTM that the Establishment Clause means that the state doesn’t side with one religion over another, nor with belief over unbelief. We as individuals, as congregations, and denominations, are free to espouse whatever views of the divine we wish, but the government has no such opinions, nor does it prefer those of any group. As such, the phrase ‘under God’ in the Pledge seems to fly in the face of the underlying meaning of the Establishment Clause.
But that’s something I have an opinion on as a citizen more than as a Christian. My main feeling as a Christian is that when government ‘helps’ religion, it usually doesn’t succeed, which is just as well, because we believe in a God that doesn’t need the government’s help.
Anytime the government does anything it’s essentially mandatory, because what it does comes from the pocketbook and with the authority of the public. It certainly is not going to impress opponents of abortion to tell them that their tax dollars and permission to fund abortions is okay because abortions aren’t MANDATORY.
RTFirefly’s position on not being able to swear fealty to anything but God is not an uncommon one, taken (IIRC) by Jehovah’s Witnesses and Quakers.
Taken to its logical conclusion, I imagine, it would imply that you couldn’t swear faithfulness (in the non-sexual sense) to even a spouse. So any kind of marriage vow would be verboten as well.
I see the “under God” clause in the PoA as sort of hedging your bets. You are pledging allegiance (loyalty, commitment to defense of her interests, acting on her behalf and in her defence) to your country, but making it clear that there is a higher loyalty that would supercede the Pledge of loyalty to America. Sort of like “rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”, in other words. We owe (in my opinion) a certain level of loyalty to our country, and a higher loyalty to God. Thus it is perfectly legitimate to act to try to change the direction of the country if you feel it is deviating from God’s will. Of course, you have to put up with a lot of abuse from others about trying to impose your religion on them. 
But there is a hierarchy of loyalty implicit in the “under God” clause. God comes first, everything else (including your country) comes second.
Regards,
Shodan
As I’ve said, while I don’t think the issue is big enough to waste much time on, it is a helpful guide to the personal and civic decency of its supporters. If people being irritated that you want to make your own religious part of joint patriotism is the sort of thing that mildly amuses you, well, I’m not going to lecture you about it. But it certainly tells people everything they need to know about what sort of person you are and what sort of God you worship. If that’s cool with you and easily dismissed, that’s probably the end of it.
Unless, of course, you believed that you were marrying the person God had called you to marry. And those who are serious enough about their Christianity to regard the swearing of allegiance to worldly powers as problematic are also likely to be the sort who would approach marriage in that way. So there’s really no ‘taken to its logical conclusion’ sort of problem here, IMHO.
I think that’s a legitimate approach. My problem with it is that God’s ways and the world’s ways (let alone America’s ways in particular) are quite different: “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts,” and so ISTM that any such conditional vow of allegiance is so very conditional that it’s probably best not to make such a vow at all, since the very taking of such a vow gives the appearance of promising more than can be promised.
But, Lord, I want to be on top! :wally
flees
Maybe so. I don’t think of marriage this way, so perhaps my view is skewed.
The Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan is a fine woman, and we have been quite happy for the last twenty-two years, and, God willing, can carry on for many more. But if by chance we had never met, I think we might both be as happy with somebody else. And I think that for most of human history, marriages were arranged rather than the model we use in the West now of romantic love and soul mates and so forth. I am not arguing that one model is better or worse than the other, but I suspect that marriage vows historically are much more similar to the Pledge is nowadays - and they are still valid no matter what your view of marriage might be.
I have no choice as to what country I am born in, but I can still pledge my conditional allegiance to that country subject to the caveat that my loyalty to the will of God comes first. Same sort of thing for an arranged marriage, in many ways - I promise to be faithful and supportive to this person I had much less of a role in choosing, subject to the provision that I won’t do anything for her that conflicts with my first priority, which is still God.
I see it more as Polycarp expresses it. My primary loyalty to God means that I am obligated to work to improve and/or correct my country, not in conflict with my commitment to God’s will but in support of it.
It’s a personal decision as to how far you go, obviously, but this implied “God comes first” is implicit in every promise I have ever made. “If anyone comes to Me who does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, even his own life - he cannot be my disciple”, says our Lord (Luke 14:26). One could add “his country too”, and I think it is implied.
Regards,
Shodan