October 15, 2003 - Back when the Congress lobbied mightily by the Knights of Columbus and American Legion spoiled the meter of the secular Pledge of Allegiance by inserting the parenthetical "under God" into "one nation, indivisible" I opposed it on artistic grounds. Being a high school student I demonstrated my discontent by refusing to speak those words whenever I was called upon to take the pledge. In the half-century since I have continued that practice, not out of ideological purity but from a decent regard for the author and the elegance of his original language.

But as I consider the pith of the arguments that will be made before the Supreme Court, and especially now that America is entering into its own self-imposed Babylonian Captivity, I recognize that there was a more basic, if unconscious, reason for my discomfort than artistic nicety. At the core of the uniquely American concept of individual liberty is freedom – freedom from the imposition of an approved orthodoxy whether it be religious or political. It is the freedom of each American to choose his private thoughts and to utter public speech to express them. With that freedom comes another – the freedom to choose to remain silent and to be protected in making that choice. That freedom is part of my own as well as America’s heritage and one that is most precious.

Root and branch my family came to this continent to escape the imposed orthodoxies of European regimes. Huguenot and Quaker; Scots Calvinist and English Catholic; Silesian Schwenkfelder Pietist; they all came to put themselves beyond the reach of princes’ prescriptions of orthodox piety. When time and revolution ripened into the political maturity to create from the many that one nation born in 1776 they embodied the liberty that they had sought in the First Amendment written by Cousin Jimmy Madison’s pen.

When I learned the Pledge of Allegiance in its original un-edited form my country was engaged in a bitter struggle against powers in Europe and Asia antithetical to liberty; powers that sought to impose prescribed and religious purity by conquest and coercion. Yet in the aftermath of that war and the ideological struggle that succeeded it my country flirted with that oleaginous blend of religious and patriotic fervor that led us to label our adversaries as Godless Communism and symbolize that new American orthodoxy by vandalizing the elegance of the Pledge of Allegiance written by an agnostic socialist as the nineteenth century faded into the twentieth.

Perhaps it is fitting that an hundred years later; as America embarks itself on a seemingly endless war in which many describe the enemy in overtly religious terms that the core of our freedom and liberty should be again addressed by our highest court in the most basic terms posed by two inserted words. The question posed is whether America is a secular nation or is it a religious expression of a God – and if it be the latter, whose sectarian God is it? Will we continue to be the one nation melded from the many or will we fracture that unity into sectarian shards for future historians to fit into an imperfect picture of what we once were?