COMMENTARY: Removing `God’ from Pledge Won’t Harm Faith

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Once again, we’re arguing over whether we should keep God out of our public schools. As if we could. I don’t think God takes marching orders from us. So I do not share the anxiety of those who claim that a U.S. federal judge’s recent order to remove the […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Once again, we’re arguing over whether we should keep God out of our public schools.

As if we could. I don’t think God takes marching orders from us.


So I do not share the anxiety of those who claim that a U.S. federal judge’s recent order to remove the words “under God” from our Pledge of Allegiance is just one more step in a steady march toward a heathen nation.

In a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reader Pamela Muich Jearls echoed the apparent sentiment of many:

“For those individuals who call themselves Americans, if you do not like the words `under God,’ please pack your bags and leave. Please obtain citizenship in China, a Godless country, it will be perfect for you. These so-called Americans are a disgrace to the USA, to their families and children, their fellow co-workers. … Then you wonder why terrorists state that `we are a Godless country.”’

There’s that word: godless. As if the failure to display publicly our faith proves we have no faith at all.

The court ruling places responsibility for faith where it belongs, on the private individual. Surely people of faith don’t need the rote recitation invoking God’s name where it doesn’t belong to believe God still shows up every day in America, with or without the invitation. In fact, my own faith has been bolstered in recent weeks by witnessing acts large and small throughout our country. God’s will is being done from sea to shining sea.

Consider, for example, the cavalcade of rescue efforts since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Financial contributions to the American Red Cross have surpassed those donated after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And that is just the beginning of the heroism of Americans reaching out to save total strangers from the grip of despair.

All you have to do is scroll through some of the images captured by photographers covering the Gulf Coast tragedy to see God at work. Amid so much suffering and loss, acts of compassion and selfless courage make my spirits soar.

We saw Terrence Gray, a police officer in Gulfport, Miss., waist-high in water as he pushed to safety a boat holding Lovie Mae Allen and her oxygen tank.


We saw a tattered rooftop in New Orleans’ St. Bernard Parish, where someone painted in large white letters these names: Avarese, Sacco, Harris, Scortino, Brandon, G.U.M., Daquine. Next to this list were two more words: Are Alive.

We saw a large, unnamed man holding a tiny infant over his shoulder as he gently draped a blanket over the body of an old man in New Orleans who died at the convention center.

Schoolchildren held fundraisers, servers donated their tips, businesses posted prayers of support on their front-yard signs. Celebrities stepped out of their zones of self-absorption and engaged in hands-on rescue efforts, and if that isn’t a miracle, I don’t know one.

And we in the media found our spine when one journalist after another _ even at Fox News _ beheld the horror and demanded to know why the federal government had abandoned so many of its own people in need.

“I am called to protest the injustice against my neighbor,” the Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon said Sunday in a visit to my church. He is professor of mission and peace at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, the same town in which that reader wrote such an angry letter.

Kinnamon’s interpretation of God’s work resonates with those who embrace Christianity as a call to action on behalf of those who don’t have it in them to fight. Every day, I meet Americans who live this faith by offering a reservoir of hope and encouragement in a land parched from anger and neglect.


I see God in the faces of those who protest the war, and those who show up for the services of fallen troops they never met.

I see God in the healing touch of doctors and nurses and volunteers who care for the swelling numbers of the poor.

And I see God in the righteous fury of those who champion the homeless, advocate for the overworked and underpaid, and demand that every citizen’s vote be counted.

I don’t know if each and every one of these people believes in God, but they help me believe every single day.

MO/PH END SCHULTZ

(Connie Schultz is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)

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