"One Nation, under God": Tolerable Acknowledgement of Religion or Unconstitutional Cold War Propaganda Cloaked in American Civil Religion?

Abstract

A recent poll conducted by Newsweek magazine showed that nearly 90 percent of Americans believe that the words under should be included in the Pledge of Allegiance.1 What the poll did not show is the percentage of Americans who are aware of how long the reference to God has been in the Pledge of Allegiance, why it is included, or for that matter how long the Pledge itself has been around. As with many utterances in the public consciousness, widespread acceptance and routine recitation can produce a kind of obscurity that causes few people to ask themselves what they are saying, why they are saying it, and in what sense they live by it.2 This paradox may explain why Justice William J. Brennan, a stalwart3 church-state separationist, once suggested that the reference to God in the Pledge was protected from Establishment Clause scrutiny chiefly because [it has] lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.4 As the Supreme Court has now decided to test that proposition in Elk Grove