Removing "under God" -- A return to tradition?

With their hand placed over their hearts, the children were assembled in the school yard and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. In their recitation of the Pledge, they did not utter two words, “under God.”

The aforementioned was a scene in The Bells of St. Mary’s, a 1945 film about an ailing inner-city Catholic school.

When the movie was made, the Pledge of Allegiance did not include the words “under God.” Those words were added in by law in 1954, after a push by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization. Back then, proponents of using the words argued that the use of those two words would set the United States apart from other countries.

Now, some are trying to remove the words “under God,” pursuing the matter as far as the courts. In 2005, a California district court ruled that requiring the pledge in public schools constitutes an endorsement of monotheism after the Supreme Court a similar case just one year before that went through the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, finding it was brought by a non-custodial parent of a student. Florida’s highest court, in 2006, found a 1942 state law requiring students to stand and recite the pledge was unconstitutional.

Recent challenges, however, have met with different results. The same Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in early 2010 ruled that the words “under God” were patriotic, and not meant to endorse a religion. In November, a Boston appellate court upheld a New Hampshire court’s ruling that requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance does not violate students’ rights.

Those who favor retaining the words “under God,” meanwhile, challenge the claim that the words promote an officially sanctioned religion, instead maintaining that the First Amendment was meant merely to prevent Congress from adopting an official state religion. They also see the removal of the words as a further encroachment of secularism upon American culture.

However, modern opponents of compelling students from saying the pledge argue that doing so constitutes a government endorsement of religion, which they say contradicts the section of the First Amendment prohibiting Congress from establishing a state religion.

The effort to prohibit public schools from requiring the pledge, and therefore the words “under God” is indicative of a fear that it mandating the pledge would promote specific religious philosophies. While that effort is not waged by traditionalists who savor the old ways, removing “under God” would represent a return to the pledge as it was prior to 1954 — like what the little actors and actresses recited in the scene from The Bells of St. Mary’s.