Believers, Thinkers, and Founders: How We Came to Be One Nation Under God Continued

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Legal Challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance…

Prior to World War II, Gobitis challenged his school district’s requirement to have his children recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  Consider the backdrop when the Supreme Court heard the case in April 1940.  Germany had just invaded Norway. Europe was plunging into war, and American involvement looked inevitable.

This was a difficult time to refuse to pledge allegiance to the United States of America. Less than six weeks later, as the Germans marched through France, the Supreme Court handed down an 8–1 opinion saying the Gobitis children had no right to refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The Court believed that patriotism and national unity were paramount. “A society…may in self-protection utilize the educational process for inculcating those almost unconscious feelings which bind men together in a comprehending loyalty, whatever may be their lesser differences and difficulties,” it said. And that was that.

Just 3 years later, Barnette challenged the West Virginia State Board of Education, and the United States Supreme Court seemed to reverse course, holding that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment protects students from being forced to salute the American flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance in public school.

Relying upon the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment, it didn’t throw out the Pledge altogether. It didn’t ban it from public schools, or prohibit teachers from leading the Pledge’s recitation. Instead, it protected the Barnettes’ right to opt out, while allowing the rest of their classmates to continue saying the Pledge voluntarily. Live and let live.

Why allow the school recitation of the Pledge to remain intact, then ban the so-called Romper Room Prayer (“God is great. God is good. Let us thank Him for our food?”) over far more abstract objections? The difference is the nature of the constitutional right that is at issue in each case. In the school prayer cases, for example, the state was held to be in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

As British writer G. K. Chesterton once quipped, “Thank God there are pacifists, and thank God there aren’t more of them.”

Newdow’s Conundrum

In 2000, Michael Newdow filed suit to stop his daughter hearing the words “under God” when her second-grade classmates recited the Pledge. While the school district’s policy did not require students to recite the pledge, it did require the teacher to lead the class in a unison recitation.

In 2002, he took his case to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, contending that the Elk Grove, California school district violated the First Amendment’s command that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” by requiring teachers to lead students in the Pledge.  And there something completely unexpected happened. He won. A three-judge panel split 2–1; struck down the Pledge for its inclusion of the words “under God”; and, invoking the Establishment Clause, prohibited schoolchildren from continuing the recitation that had started school days for roughly half a century.

The ruling caused quite an uproar. The president promptly pronounced it “ridiculous,” the U.S. Senate voted 99 to 0 in support of an unedited Pledge, and the House of Representatives expressed its disagreement with the court by a vote of 416 to 3. Nevertheless, after still more legal wrangling, the Ninth Circuit stuck to its guns and refused to rehear the case. The battle then went to the Supreme Court.

If you can’t say “one nation under Jesus,” how can you say “one nation under God”? This became known as “Newdow’s Conundrum.”

Following briefing and argument, the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit’s prohibition on including under God in the Pledge, but it did so on the narrow (but now familiar) grounds that Newdow lacked sufficient standing to bring the case—because he was a noncustodial parent. It never had to reach the more momentous question of whether the Pledge violated the Establishment Clause by including the words under God.

With the case remanded to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the same court that had previously ruled for Newdow, reversed course and split in the other direction, 2-1.  The Ninth Circuit majority’s opinion is particularly enlightening. It holds that Congress had “two main purposes” for having one nation under God in the Pledge. The first was “to underscore the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers that God granted certain inalienable rights to the people which the government cannot take away.” The second was to “add the note of importance” that “in our culture ceremonial references to God arouse.”

It’s interesting to note that the secularist challenge to the American tradition had thus finally reached its logical extreme—“America: One Nation Under Nobody.”

Can we really maintain a principled, robust reading of the First Amendment only at the cost of emasculating the basis of natural rights in the first place?  What if it is possible for the government to acknowledge the existence of a God who is the source of our rights—and mean it—without doing so religiously? What if, at least sometimes, the existence of God is a philosophical conclusion and not a religious dogma at all?

An Inescapable Question…

 The seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is most famous (some might say infamous) for what has come to be known as Pascal’s Wager. Pascal posited that all of us—believers, thinkers, atheists, and agnostics alike—face the same practical choice: Will we live our life as if God exists? Or will we conduct ourselves as if He does not?

Pascal asserted what a poker player might call the “pot odds” favored piety. That is, the return on a correct bet that God exists would be enormous—eternal happiness—whereas the cost of that bet if it turned out that there was neither God nor afterlife would be much more modest—merely, he said, some quantity of guilty pleasures forgone in the here and now. Or, “You bet your life”, so to speak.  That argument remains as controversial today as when it was published in 1669!

Every government must either respect its people’s rights because they arise from a source higher than and prior to it, or it must admit that it harbors no such principles. In which case, it must concede that all that stands between it and totalitarianism are its own policy choices.

Before Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence, Alexander Hamilton wrote in a pamphlet defending the justice of a revolution: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

Lest there be any doubt, as soon as it finished drafting and proposing the Bill of Rights to the states, Congress petitioned President Washington to declare a national day of thanksgiving to God for its successful completion of that task.

Fast forward to the 1960s, where President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address is one of the most famous. In it he stressed America’s continued “belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.”

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan said, “We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free.”  In the twenty-first century, Barack Obama began his second inaugural address by quoting the Declaration, reemphasizing that freedom is “a gift from God” to be “secured by His people here on Earth.”

It may be all but incomprehensible to us today that President Abraham Lincoln would suggest, in the middle of the most terrible war in American history, that the nation deserved the terrors of that war as punishment for violating the inalienable rights of the slaves. But that is precisely what he did.

Justice William O. Douglas noted: “the institutions of our society are founded on the belief that there is an authority higher than the authority of the State; …that the individual possesses rights, conferred by the Creator, which government must respect.”

Our “institutions” do indeed “presuppose a Supreme Being,” precisely because they presuppose the existence of a source of rights that is prior to the State. As Justice Antonin Scalia notes, the Court has quoted that line with approval several times since. The Congress has repeatedly harkened back to the Founder’s principle of God given rights.

British author G. K. Chesterton came to the United States for a national lecture tour in 1921 and observed that America is the only nation in the world that was founded on a creed.  Chesterton went on to say that the Declaration of Independence, though it mentions God, doesn’t provide Americans with any particular religion, but it is significant that Americans have “a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.”

Where the English nation historically has had Anglicanism, and before that, Catholicism, America instead has a philosophy.

…With a Great Deal at Stake in the Answer

That “we are all created equal” is one of the things that most identifies us as Americans. As distinct from, say, Saudis, Indians, and even the British, Americans of all ages and circumstances instinctively resist attempts to erect velvet rope lines between classes of people. Discrimination of any sort is seen as one of the worst social offenses one can commit.

Simply put, America would not be America without the conviction that we’re all, in a very important sense, equal.

To say there is no God is to do more than simply tinker with one of the most famous one-liners in history; it is to change the starting point of our whole explanation of who we are as Americans. What answer could ever take its place?

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) speaks of the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950) speaks of the “recognition” of those rights. The European Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000) states that “the Union recognizes the rights, freedoms, and principles set out hereafter,” and the European Constitution (2004) affirms that “The Union shall recognize the rights, freedoms, and principles set out in the Charter of Fundamental Rights.”

In short, in Europe as in America, fundamental human rights must be grounded in something or someone prior to the state and higher than the common consensus of the majority. If we have such rights, it is only because we have been “endowed” with them.

If there is no God, we have no inalienable rights, and there is no basis for our equality.

Thinking About Thinking About God

Aristotle concluded that there is a God is based solely on reason, unsupported by any religious scripture or divine revelation. To simplify greatly, we can say he argues that the world in which we find ourselves must have had, at its beginning, a “first mover” that set it in motion. “The first mover, then, exists of necessity…and it is in this sense a first principle.” Aristotle adds that “on such a principle…depend the heavens and the world of nature.”

Thomas Aquinas restated Aristotle’s argument in his famous “five proofs” of the existence of God. The five proofs:

1. “From Motion” (anything in motion needs something to start it moving; there must be a “First Mover” to start it all);
2. “From Efficient Cause” (similar to “From Motion”—every effect must be caused by something);
3. “From Possibility and Necessity”;
4. “From Perfection”; and
5. “From Design”—in turn, have themselves been criticized, tweaked, and restated for the past 750 years.

The philosophical debates on the existence of God haven’t stopped since the Founders’ time. Albert Einstein grappled with the issue in the last century and declared himself on the side of the rationalists who think that there is only the God of nature. That is, he was convinced of the existence of a “God who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns Himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

Perhaps the most accessible thinker on this subject (maybe because he was one of the few trying to be accessible) was C. S. Lewis. Lewis begins his famous book Mere Christianity by reasoning about a phenomenon we all observe in ourselves: our innate sense of right and wrong.

To be clear, the Philosophers’ God is not a different God than the Living God whom believers embrace. He is, rather, only as much of the Living God as can be known through reason alone. The portrait of God that these philosophers are able to draw, when left completely to their own devices, is not much to look at. In fact, it’s not really a portrait at all.

All believers in God are theists, but not all theists must be believers. They can simply be thinkers, if that’s as far as their lights lead. It’s a question of respecting the distinction between believing in God and being convinced, or knowing, of God’s existence. Believing is a function of faith. Knowing is a function of proof—of rational conclusion.

Without adhering to any religious tradition, one can be rationally convinced—and reasonably assert—that there is a Supreme Being, a Cosmic Something, a Philosophers’ God. And therefore, one can be rationally convinced that there’s a transcendent source of our equality and rights.

The Education of the Founders

The Founders were heirs of the intellectual tradition of “thinking about thinking about God.” One need not believe any faith tradition’s account of how we came to be, much less the process by which everything else came to be as well, to be convinced that we were in fact not accidental. In fact, one need not believe anything at all to be convinced. This distinction—between believing and knowing—is at the heart of the matter.

Even though they didn’t adhere to the same theology, people like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington recognized their common intellectual inheritance of the Philosophers’ God—an idea by then already steeped in centuries of intense discussion among some of the most esteemed minds in history.

Nationalist philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, who was yet another giant in the history of mathematics, penned the classic question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He responded to it by critiquing Descartes’s ontological proof and offering his own version instead. The careful study of natural philosophy heavily influenced the thoughts and beliefs of America’s founding generation. It was a study that sought to understand and formulate ideas about the natural world’s existence and causation within it. But, as we’ll see, it also provided a springboard for the Framers’ political ideas.

At the time of the Revolution, attending college was a relatively rare feat—there were only about twenty-five hundred college graduates on this side of the Atlantic. So, the fact that twenty-seven of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence graduated from college either in America or Europe is a sign of their collective intellectual firepower. To be sure, the other twenty-nine signers were no intellectual slouches. They were the products of a primary education that left them well versed in the liberal arts and natural philosophy.

Framing a Nation Under God: The Political Philosophy of the Founders

For Madison, as for Seneca seventeen centuries earlier, our greatest possessions are the rights endowed to us by our Creator. They may be insecure, they may even be violated ruthlessly by force, but another person cannot truly take them away, because their origin lies in something higher than the person who possesses them or the person who violates them.

No wonder Thomas Jefferson insisted that his Declaration harmonized with Cicero. The Roman statesman could not be more clear: Right and wrong in their essentials do not change, not across time or across geographical boundaries. What is just and true by nature, he said, comes to us from God and remains true whether or not we obey it.

“Under God”: The Backstory

Considering how central the ideas of God-given rights and natural law were to the Founders, it is not surprising that the phrase under God turns up frequently in the writings of the revolutionaries. So, for example, on July 2, 1776, the day when the Continental Congress voted for independence but two days before the Declaration was adopted, George Washington used the phrase in his general orders to the soldiers risking their lives for that independence:

The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army—Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; this is all we can expect—We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die.

Madison reinforced his sentiment in a document written under his own name and delivered to the General Assembly of Virginia, “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe.”

Madison and Hamilton thus agreed with Jefferson that the American Revolution was a fight for “the rights of human nature” and that those rights had an “Author” higher than King George III, Parliament, or any other purely human institution.

Jefferson’s Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom makes an argument beginning with the premise “Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free,” and goes on to argue shortly thereafter that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”

In sum, there can be little doubt that at the time the Constitution was drafted, the idea of God-given natural rights was the fundamental premise of America’s political philosophy.

You Say Deist, I Say Theist

Benjamin Franklin was an acknowledged Deist, wasn’t he? Wasn’t Jefferson one, too? So isn’t the Philosophers’ God really just the Deists’ deity, and for that matter, doesn’t that make the Declaration of Independence just a Deist document? And if not, what’s the difference?

Tenets of classical Deism, written in the mid-1600s by the so-called father of English Deism, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, summarized it this way: “[God] had implanted in the human soul in the beginning five innate religious ideas: the existence of God, divine worship, the practice of virtue, repentance for sin, and personal immortality.”

Deists distrusted, and some loudly denounced, such things as scripture, clergy, tradition, miracles and the like—anything that involved the claim that God had intervened in the world after He was finished creating it.

According to the late Jesuit scholar Avery Dulles, of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the theological leanings of some twenty have been identified. Three were Deists and quasi-Deists. There were six liberal Christians, two of whom displayed Deist influences, and eleven more or less orthodox Christians.

In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin discusses his youthful conversion from being a Presbyterian dissenter to “a thorough Deist.” As he goes on recounting his life’s journey, he notes that “Revelation indeed had no weight” with him. And yet as he relates all this, he credits “Providence” with guiding him. He manifested the same confidence in Providence’s favor on America. He concludes, “The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men.” Now, his argument for God governing human affairs is an argument from experience, not from theology. Nevertheless, this would not appear to be the prayer of a “thorough Deist,” at least not in the purist European sense of that term. Franklin, it seems, just wasn’t given to orthodoxy, even in his heresies.

Thomas Paine wrote of the Apostles’ Creed: “The truth of the first article [of the Creed] is proved by God Himself, and is universal; for the creation is of itself demonstration of the existence of a Creator. But the second article, that of God’s begetting a son, is not proved in like manner, and stands on no other authority than that of a tale.”

Jefferson was more discreet than Paine.  Writing privately to John Adams: “And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”

So what’s the difference? Deism is a religion that teaches that all that can be known about God by reason alone is all that can be known about Him, period. He does not reveal Himself. Philosophical theism, on the other hand, had—and has—no such limits. It is a philosophy that holds that there is a God who is one, who is good, who is just, and who—unlike the Deist deity—may very well be much more besides.

Theism is a broad conceptual category, an umbrella that makes room for Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and so on—as well as for Deism itself. George Washington is a good example. As philosopher Michael Novak has pointed out, Washington’s faith was more or less orthodox. But when he spoke publicly, he generally used the language of theism.

It is not an overstatement to say that the Revolution was an alliance of theists—orthodox believers joining forces with radical Deists on the basis not of either one’s theology but of their common intellectual heritage of theism.

The Later Life of a Nation Under God

Physicist Dr. John Polkinghorne continues his tireless research to explore the relationship among physics, metaphysics, and religion, with over two dozen books on the topic. Joining him are notable theist scientists such as Stephen Barr, Owen Gingerich, Peter Hodgson, Michal Heller, and Marco Bersanelli, among others.

Stephen Hawking closes his book The Grand Design with a bold assertion refuting any such nonsense as a Creator: “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” But then, not everyone need agree on the Philosophers’ God. That’s the beauty of inalienable natural rights.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is remarkable for another, lesser known reason: it’s one of the very few times Lincoln changed a speech on the fly. “That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The words under God don’t appear in the two drafts prepared in advance.

Lincoln’s invocation was a continuation of that tradition: an appeal not to a specific theological doctrine but to a particular political philosophy rooted in natural rights and the Philosophers’ God.

On February 12, 1948, the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution gathered in Chicago to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday. To mark the occasion in honor of the Great Emancipator, the society amended its opening recitation of the Pledge by inserting the phrase under God—an idea credited to society chaplain Louis A. Bowman. By 1951 the “under God” movement started to gain steam nationwide with the help of the Knights of Columbus, the largest fraternal Catholic organization in the world.

Shortly thereafter, on February 7, 1954, President Eisenhower heard a memorable sermon by Reverend George MacPherson Docherty at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church—a church President Lincoln had sometimes attended.  Here are some words from the sermon:  “One nation under God” this people shall know a new birth of freedom, and under God are the definitive words….We face, today, a theological war….To omit the words ‘Under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive character of the ‘American Way of Life.’”

Four months later, a resolution was introduced by Congressman Louis C. Rabaut of Michigan—and supported by the Knights of Columbus—and adopted by both houses of Congress and signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on Flag Day, June 14, 1954.

The legislative history of “under God” is replete with references to “times such as these,” “communism,” “the conflict now facing us,” “a time in the world,” and “this moment in history.” Individual legislators repeatedly argued for the phrase under God as an express rejection of Communist political philosophy and a reaffirmation of American political philosophy.

In 2002, Congress was not trying to impress a religious doctrine upon anyone. Rather, they had two main purposes for keeping the phrase “one Nation under God” in the Pledge:

• to underscore the political philosophy of the Founding Fathers that God granted certain inalienable rights to the people which the government cannot take away; and
• to add the note of importance which a Pledge to our Nation ought to have and which in our culture ceremonial references to God arouse.

In short, when Congress amended the Pledge in 1954 and reaffirmed it in 2002, it was expressly drawing on the political philosophy of the Founders, embodied most prominently in the Declaration of Independence. It contended simply that people who live under a government that recognizes a higher power than itself live in greater freedom. By adopting the phrase under God in the Pledge, Congress brought it within the “natural rights” philosophy of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln—the philosophy on which the American system is based—and rejected the Soviet view that all rights are conferred at the pleasure of the State.

What about “Separation of Church & State”?

As it’s used in constitutional law, “separation of church and state” is a shorthand phrase, much like separation of powers. Neither phrase actually appears in the Constitution itself.

The phrase separation of powers refers to the structural principle colloquially known as the “system of checks and balances.” It’s there for the express purpose of making political life difficult. In other words, separation of powers is perfectly good shorthand—provided you remember that it’s shorthand.

For the most part, separation of church and state refers to the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) and the Free Exercise Clause (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) of the First Amendment.

Even while proclaiming loudly that everyone had a natural right to religious freedom, the majority of delegates to the Constitutional Convention were in favor of restricting only federal law on the question of religion. They wanted to leave states free to regulate it as they saw

For all its warts, the history of the Constitution demonstrates clearly how unthinkable it would’ve been for anyone to claim with a straight face that the First Amendment somehow prohibited public recitation of the Declaration of Independence or any of the broad array of other documents referring to God as the ultimate source of our rights.

What about more recent precedents? The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the merits of a challenge to under God in the Pledge of Allegiance, and none appears on the horizon.   As one federal appellate judge observes, it is “noteworthy that, given the vast number of Establishment Clause cases to come before the Court, not one Justice has ever suggested that the Pledge is unconstitutional.” The Constitution, while it secures much protection for religious liberty, does not exhaust the natural right to religious liberty itself.

The Bill of Rights, James Madison feared, could not realistically be expected to secure the full breadth of the rights it would enumerate. He thought it far better to argue under the full expanse of the natural rights to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the like, rather than risk a narrow interpretation of constitutional language itself resulting in a greatly restricted set of rights. Jefferson persuaded him, with the help of some influential state legislators, of the notion that “Half a loaf is better than no bread. If we cannot secure all our rights, let us secure what we can.”

Madison argued that government funding of congressional chaplains was improper. He thought it should be held to violate the First Amendment (a position that even the modern Supreme Court has rejected). The point here is not whether Madison was right or wrong on chaplains, only that well after the First Amendment had become law, Madison saw no problem with measuring a particular governmental action against the “pure principle” of religious freedom.

A Conundrum Revisited

The Philosophers’ God is the sum total of what can be known about God from reason alone. This does not, though, make the Philosophers’ God somehow a God-of-all-faiths, a lowest-common-denominator in the sky. Nor is the Philosophers’ God a “different God” from the God of believers’ faith. He is not some sort of idol or golden calf.

Every American, in other words, is a bit of a philosopher, because our freedom is built on the foundation of certain philosophical propositions. Besides the proposition that we are created equal, President Abraham Lincoln also stressed at Gettysburg the proposition that this nation is “under God.” Neither Lincoln nor those who followed his lead in adding under God to the Pledge were composing a prayer or giving a theology lesson. They were simply affirming a truth that’s part of the bedrock of America’s political philosophy.

Wouldn’t it be far better if we could just call the Creator by his true name? No, actually, it wouldn’t. The great beauty of the Philosophers’ God is precisely that so much of him remains hidden from reason alone.

So, if you can’t say “one nation under Jesus,” how can you say “one nation under God”? Simple. You can’t say “one nation under Jesus” because that is a religious assertion, which the government may never make. The second—“one nation under God”—is a philosophical assertion, and the government makes those all the time.

May America continue to be “One Nation Under God.” Amen.