Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
September 22, 2002
Why I'm Not Saying the Pledge of Allegiance Anymore
I was a teenager the last time around; when the anti-war protests were at their height, and Vietnam was a vexed and divisive political question, I was just a shade too young to know anyone personally who went. Nevertheless, the clamor all around me was inescapable, and I learned to take the untrustworthiness of government as a premise of adult thinking, and to hear overt expressions of patriotism as encrypted statements justifying and supporting war. At the same time, in the heyday of hippie-dom, one acerbic observation by the poet Robert Frost struck me as prophetic: "I never dared be radical when young," he wrote, "for fear it would make me conservative when old." Well, I wasn't much of a radical in those days -- when I got to college I went to class, got married young, kept my shoes on and my bra unburned - which perhaps explains why I am assuredly no conservative now.
Reaching further back into memory, there were two texts that grade school children were expected to recite every day in my school; they were the Lord's prayer and the pledge of allegiance. My Unitarian Universalist parents and church made a point of assuring me that if I didn't want to say the Lord's prayer, I didn't have to - and in point of fact, I didn't mind that much; it was an opportunity to show off my prodigious capacity for memorization. But no one ever suggested that I might have any objection to the pledge of allegiance, and so I dutifully recited it daily during my school years, and whenever I have been called upon to do so since then. Thus it is perhaps one of the ironies of the year just past, that in the wake of last September, I have experienced more unambiguous feelings of simple patriotism than I had ever previously known, and in the same year I have renounced saying that particular pledge ever again.
This summer's flap started, as most of you probably know, with a suit brought by a self-identified atheist on behalf of his daughter, who is being asked to say, or at least hear, the pledge of allegiance as part of her public school education in the state of California. While acknowledging that previous rulings have established his daughter's right not to participate personally in reciting the pledge, Michael Newdow maintains that her being compelled to "watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that ours is 'one nation under God,'" violates the principle of separation of church and state. Perhaps surprisingly, given the climate of the times, the U.S. circuit court agreed. "A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation 'under Jesus,' a nation 'under Vishnu,' a nation 'under Zeus,' or a nation 'under no god,' because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion," Judge Alfred T. Goodwin wrote for the three-judge panel. Needless to say, orthodox and conservative reaction to the ruling has been swift and strong. California lawmakers have been asked by the National Republican Congressional Committee to instruct local school boards to ignore the decision; within hours of the ruling, the Senate voted a resolution in support of the Pledge 99 - 0; and federal legal counsel has been instructed to intervene and defend its constitutionality.
All of which is testimony to the power of habit, for this particular collection of wording is neither as long-standing nor as politically pure in its origins as those who are now rushing to its defense might suppose. Most of us know more about the history of the pledge of allegiance today than we did a few months ago, but it is worth observing that its author was Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian Socialist, brother of Edward Bellamy, the author of the Utopian novel, Looking Backward. Fired from his pulpit because of objections to his socialist sermons, Rev. Bellamy was hired by Daniel Ford, owner and editor of The Youth's Companion, the leading family magazine of its day, comparable to the modern Reader's Digest. Ford had been a supportive parishioner in Bellamy's Boston congregation, and when the minister was forced out, hired him as an assistant. In 1892 Francis Bellamy was also serving as chairman of a committee of state superintendents of education in the National Education Association, and in this capacity he prepared the program for the four hundredth anniversary celebration of Columbus Day in 1892. He structured this public school program around a flag raising ceremony and a flag salute - his 'Pledge of Allegiance.' After contemplating the words of the familiar slogan of the French revolution - liberty, equality, and fraternity - Bellamy concluded "No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all." His original pledge was to 'my flag', and contained no mention of God.
In 1923, almost thirty years after its first publication in the pages of The Youth's Companion, the words of the pledge "my flag" were changed to 'the Flag of the United States of America' by the National Flag Conference, under the leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Bellamy disliked this change, but his protest was ignored. Thirty years later, at the height of national anxiety over "godless communism", the wording was changed again, to incorporate the now controversial phrase 'under God'. Bellamy's granddaughter says he also would have resented this second change. He had been pressured into leaving his church in 1891 because of his socialist sermons, and in his retirement in Florida, he stopped attending church altogether because he disliked the racial bigotry he found there.
Thus do the cycles of history circle back upon one another; I find it delightfully ironic that the most conservative members of the federal government are now seeking to defend a statement originally crafted by a man whose political convictions would have made him a target of investigation, certainly had he been alive sixty years later, and even perhaps today. I also got a chuckle out of the many creative suggestions for substitute language that were floating around in the wake of the circuit court's June decision. "One nation, under investigation" was offered, as well as "under indictment", and my personal favorite, the geographically indisputable "one nation, under Canada!" But I have to confess that, having had my attention called to the actual language of this statement, and consciously considered it for the first time in at least 42 years of reciting it, what appalls me is not the presence or absence of god-language - though I heartily prefer Bellamy's original version. What troubles me more, and what indeed I am not willing to do hereafter, is the idea of giving my allegiance to a flag.
One of the most basic obligations that I learned growing up as a humanist was to guard the integrity of my given word. Who and what I am as a human being is not predicated on the role assigned to me by a supernatural creator; neither am I merely a cog in the pre-ordained workings of some cosmic machine. Rather, I am what I say I am; I am the loyalties I give, the promises I keep, the values I affirm, the covenants by which I undertake to live. To give my loyalties carelessly, to bespeak commitments casually, is to throw away the integrity that defines me, that helps me to live in wholeness and to cherish the unique worth and dignity of myself as a person. When I am trying to describe to people unfamiliar with our tradition how the early Unitarians and the Universalists were similar to each other, I point out that for both groups, it was of fundamental importance that no one should come to church and repeat words that they did not believe or the meaning of which they did not understand. To do so would be to lie to God, and whatever else they may have been unsure of, they were sure that this could not possibly be what God wanted. The integrity of conscience cannot be a privilege of freedom that we demand, if it is not also a discipline by which we regulate our own conduct. We had better mean what we solemnly, publicly say and sign.
One of the most fundamental concepts that I learned in theological school was the larger meaning of idolatry. It's not just about bowing down to graven images or praying to the wrong god; it's really about confusing what is ultimate with transient, trivial or illusory things. To behave as if money were the most real and valuable thing in life would be idolatry. To think that one's own nation has the right to tell everyone else what to do would be idolatry. To give over to another person the responsibility for making the challenging decisions of one's own life would be idolatry. But above all, to mistake the symbol of what is ultimate, or the name of what is ultimate, for what is truly ultimate, is idolatry. To mistake the nation as it moves through history with the ideals on which that nation was founded is idolatry; and to mistake the nation's flag for the nation itself is idolatry multiplied. My allegiance is to liberty, to equal justice, to human dignity and peace. It is not, and never really has been, to any flag - and I never should have said that it was. I never will again.
I suppose in truth that I can imagine a situation in which I might repeat the pledge of allegiance as an act of participation in someone else's cultural artifact, as I do for instance the Lord's prayer at a funeral service; because it honors the convictions of another person, not because it expresses my own. As part of the poetic heritage of our culture, let it stand; but no longer a living promise, and not my own.
Still, I am left with a deeper dilemma, and it is one that lies at the heart of liberal religion and the larger liberal tradition, which is why idolatry is not always such a simple thing to renounce. It is easy to be clear that my allegiance is not to a piece of cloth, nor to a particular arrangement of colors on cloth or anywhere else. But having rejected that, where am I willing to say that my allegiance lies? Liberty and justice, peace and human dignity; these are all very well, and indeed the ultimate values in the service of which I would wish to spend my life and gifts. But how does one go out and work for liberty, exactly, or for peace? They are not objects, lying about in the street. And this is where the founding myth of Christianity has something to teach us, for all that is ultimate, our dearest values and most cherished aspirations, remains abstract and impotent until it is given incarnation. Incarnation, literally the taking on of flesh, is the process of making real and tangible in a world of material objects and physical forces, the abstractions to which our allegiance is given. We do this through the creation of real things, objects, events, relationships, institutions, that bring those values to life, that give them form. If we value peace, we create institutions like the United Nations, dedicated to nourishing peace; we seek to eliminate the weapons of war. If we value justice, we create constitutions and a system of judicial checks and balances that will help to make just decisions. Whatever our values are, we have to clothe them in the skin and bones of this world, in the buildings of our cities and the practices of our culture, in the art we make and the songs we sing, in the churches we join and the schools we run, in the machines we invent and the jobs we do. But here's the tricky part; all that stuff, the institutions and the systems and the inventions, it's always flawed. We never get it exactly right; we never fully and perfectly incarnate the ultimate ideas to which our allegiance is given. Human fallibility and the finitude of the cosmos always, always pull us up short; we never have enough time, enough resources, enough patience, enough wisdom and courage, enough power, to create anything that entirely realizes our greatest intentions. Thus whenever we try to do what we must do, try to incarnate the values of our allegiance and make them real in the world, we end up with an outcome that is not worthy of our absolute loyalty; we end up with a candidate for idolatry, every time.
And so it is with this great and terrible, wounded and fragile, incandescent and heedless nation of which we are citizens. This country is an aching attempt to incarnate in history the magnificent propositions that all people are equal in worth and dignity, that freedom and justice are human birthrights, that we must live together in a covenant of mutual responsibility and consent. These great ideas, liberty, equality, human kinship, are no good to us floating in some philosophical ether. They must be brought into the institutions of a government that can make them real in the world - a government that will necessarily in practice fall short of the ideals upon which it was established, over and over again. Our founding fathers knew this, I believe; that is precisely why they strove with all of their considerable knowledge of history, their intelligence and creativity, to formulate a system that should be not so much perfect as self-correcting. They knew that they left slavery as a festering sore in the body of their new nation, that future generations would have to bear the pain of excising; they knew that temptations and emergencies and threats would come; they knew that power-hungry leaders would arise; they knew that they could not know their own blindnesses, even to things as simple as equal justice for women. They knew that they could not solve in advance all the problems that we their progeny would confront. They could only try to pass on to us, down the generations, their allegiance to the ideals, for ideals are the one thing that can travel through time uncorrupted. The incarnation of those ideals at any given moment would be our own responsibility.
I will not give my allegiance to a flag; it is too flimsy a thing, in good times or in bad; if it is even a symbol for the values I most cherish, that is only because of the sacrifices that others have made in its name. I will not commit the idolatry of mistaking the flag for the nation, or the nation for the ideals. Yet I must find an abiding place for my loyalty, lest it evaporate into the mist of disincarnate values, powerless to give any shape to the real lives that we live in the real world. Therefore my allegiance is to my country as an expression of its ideals. To the extent that the republic for which our flag stands is faithful to the premises of its founding and to the practices that have evolved over two centuries to safeguard our freedoms and equal justice, it has my loyalty, my devotion, even my pride. But to the extent that it is a finite and imperfect expression of the ideals to which my allegiance is ultimately given, to the extent that it falls into deceit and self-deception, into arrogance and coercion and violence, into self-serving secrecy and double standards of justice, to that extent my loyalty must take the form of protest, and my devotion must be expressed in dissent.
I submit to you, my friends and fellow citizens, that we find ourselves today in such a time. If we do not raise our voices, loudly and soon, the elected leadership of this country will be justified in thinking that they have our consent to what they have done and are doing and propose to do. They will believe that we are indeed willing to exchange our liberties for the mirage of security. The world will be justified in thinking that the United States has acted in singleness of mind and purpose, that revenge and greed are cornerstones of our character as well as our policies. If a librarian can be found guilty of a federal felony for telling a reporter that government agents want a list of what you have been reading; if any American citizen can be locked up without charges filed, access to counsel, or legal recourse, for as long as the government chooses, simply because it has designated that person an "enemy combatant;" if your house can be searched or your telephone tapped or your e-mail monitored without your knowledge or any judicial process; if the president of the United States can unilaterally order the attack of another sovereign nation, against the advice of our allies and without consulting congress, what liberties are we still protecting? What is it that remains of the free or the brave, in this land that is our home?
It is sometimes claimed that these are temporary measures, implemented to respond to a situation of crisis. Yes, and I have a bridge I'd like to sell you too. In his book, Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs, who now works at the Independent Institute, wrote that wars and other national traumas always inspire growth in government power and erosions in protection for individual liberty. After the war is over, much, but not all, of the crisis-inspired power is surrendered. There is always some permanent loss of liberty. If Higgs is right, and the war on terrorism follows in the wake of past crises, the situation may gradually improve somewhat. But Americans will probably never again be as free as we were on September 10, 2001.
I say, let it not be in our name. I say, if we can do nothing else, let us go down kicking and screaming, trying to let the rest of the world know, trying to send a message in the bottle of history to our children's children, that some of us didn't want it this way. Some of us didn't want war, didn't believe in our nation as a global bully. Some of us pledged our allegiance not to a flag of stars and stripes, but to a premise of freedom and an ideal of justice. But maybe, just maybe, there is another possibility. Maybe we are not as alone as we might think. Maybe the people next door and down the street and around the block don't want this either, don't want a war without meaning and a government without limits. Perhaps, if we raise our voices, if we sign the petitions and write the letters and file the lawsuits and fund the initiatives, then perhaps - we may go to jail. Or perhaps, we may awaken a rising chorus of "No, not in our name!" from our fellow citizens, and turn back this flood tide of old oppressions in new packages.
I don't know how many of you remember, but last year here in this assembly hall on Sunday September 16, we lit candles, more than 200 of them, as a pledge. I said then, I believe that no matter who else forgets them, I am forever summoned to remember my connection to my fellow beings, to be vigilant for my own and others' freedom, to give substance to the trust upon which we construct the meaning of our shared world. From the lips of every teacher who ever gave wisdom to the world, I am instructed to love mercy, to seek the good of all people, and to believe at every hour, even this hour, in the possibility of peace. I meant it then, and I mean it still. If you set your light beside mine that day, or if you would join now in allegiance to the principles of liberty, justice, human dignity and peace, it is time to stand up, to speak out, to find ways of working together to safeguard these endangered ideals. We dared not be radical when young, Frost and I; we never said anything about what comes later!
Will you join me in song?