Pledge of Allegiance: Overview

Introduction

The Pledge of Allegiance is a brief patriotic oath of loyalty to the American flag and the United States. It is most commonly recited in schools, but has also been adopted as an official formality by certain political bodies and at ceremonies conferring citizenship. Its purpose is to unify citizens around a cultural symbol, the flag, meant to encapsulate the country's ideals of unity, liberty, and justice, while demonstrating allegiance to the nation and the American way of life. However, the pledge has been the focus of much public debate and numerous court cases. Groups have variously sought to remove the pledge from classrooms, to keep it, or to revise it.

Controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance comes from several positions. One centers on the issue of patriotism. Proponents of the pledge often argue that the educational system is responsible for teaching patriotism to students, and that the pledge engenders a sense of belonging and loyalty as it prepares them to be full-fledged citizens. Some religious groups, however, refrain from saying the pledge because their first loyalty is to God rather than to a nation. Other opponents criticize the pledge on political grounds, protesting against what they see as overly nationalist sentiment or government hypocrisy, for example.

An even more prominent aspect of debate centers on the invocation of God in the official text of the pledge. Critics argue that this represents a violation of the separation of church and state interpreted in the First Amendment, as enforcing the recitation of the pledge in public schools or government proceedings signifies state endorsement of religion. Proponents of the pledge and its invocation of God range in their opinions, from the argument that the issue has been blown out of proportion and that mentioning God, even for non-believers, is harmless, to open endorsement of greater integration between church and state.

Understanding the Discussion

Allegiance: Loyalty to a cause, group, or individual.

Atheism: A lack of belief in a god or gods, and especially an active disbelief that any deities exist.

First Amendment: A part of the US Constitution that reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." It is one of the major reference points for arguments regarding the Pledge of Allegiance.

Pledge: A promise or an oath.

Separation of church and state: The concept in US politics, rooted in the First Amendment, that the government should be clearly distinct from any religious belief or organization.

History

In contemporary times, American flags are widely displayed in both public and private spaces and the Pledge of Allegiance is recited on a daily basis in many schools. However, despite popular belief, neither tradition dates back to the founding of the United States. Instead, these practices only became common at the end of the nineteenth century as part of a concerted effort to inculcate in the populace patriotism and "American" values—largely as part of widespread social anxiety about increasing immigration, especially of people considered to be of different races. An early salute to the American flag was written by educator George T. Balch in the late 1880s as a way to promote patriotism among students: "We give our heads and our hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one Flag." It became popular in schools but was gradually replaced by the better-known Pledge of Allegiance.

The origins of the modern Pledge of Allegiance are disputed. Most sources officially credit Francis Bellamy, a Christian socialist and former Baptist reverend who emphasized the humanistic values in Christianity, with developing it in August 1892. His version was published the following month in the magazine the Youth's Companion as follows: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands; one Nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all." However, rumors long circulated that those words were derived from an earlier version, possibly written by an unrelated student in Kansas named Frank E. Bellamy for a contest organized by the same magazine. (In 2022, historians discovered a Kansas newspaper from April 1892 listing a pledge almost identical to Francis Bellamy's.)

Regardless of its exact origins, it was Francis Bellamy's version that popularized the pledge. He later noted that he had been inspired to replace Balch's salute with a more formal vow of allegiance. Bellamy and Youth's Companion editor James B. Upham wanted to increase national pride ahead of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, an event for which the magazine was selling American flags to schools. This patriotic marketing effort had several layers of historical context, in addition to the growing wave of immigrants and efforts to promote assimilation. One was lingering tensions from the Civil War (1861-65); many southerners were required to take an "Oath of Allegiance" to the Union before they were given their political rights. The war also partly inspired the word "indivisible" in the pledge. Meanwhile, socialists like Bellamy worried that capitalism promoted the selfishness of the individual over the welfare of the group.

Notably, this version of the Pledge of Allegiance did not mention God. The pledge did not immediately become a defining text in the American experience, but over time it was widely adopted in American public schools. It also evolved over the years. A wording change in the 1920s made explicit that the flag referenced in the pledge is that of the United States of America, which proponents argued would prevent immigrants from confusing it with any other flag, such as from their country of origin. (Bellamy reportedly disapproved of this change.) The pledge was originally accompanied by a salute in which the right arm was held up and out away from the body, which became known as the Bellamy salute. This later fell out of favor due to its similarity to the salute used in Nazi Germany, however, and was replaced in the 1940s by the act of holding the right hand over the heart while reciting the pledge.

In 1942, the US Congress included the Pledge to the Flag in the United States Flag Code (Title 36) for the first time. In 1945, the codified Pledge to the Flag was officially renamed the Pledge of Allegiance. The Cold War subsequently drove another revision of the text. Aiming to underscore American opposition to the state-sanctioned atheism of the communist Soviet Union, groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Knights of Columbus began including "under God" in the pledge. In 1954, Congress voted to add the phrase to the official text of the pledge in the Flag Code and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into law.

Even before the words "under God" were added, mandates that the pledge be recited in public schools (which became more common during World War I) incited controversy at times. Among the first and most recurrent incidences of resistance to the pledge were by certain religious groups, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, who refuse demonstrations of loyalty to any earthly power. After two Jehovah's Witness students were expelled from a public school in Pennsylvania for refusing to recite the pledge, the first landmark case on the issue reached the US Supreme Court with Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940). The court ruled in favor of the school, and there followed several incidents in which Jehovah's Witnesses were discriminated against or even faced violent reprisals for ongoing refusal to pledge allegiance to the nation. However, this decision was overturned three years later in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, in which the Supreme Court ruled that students could not be forced to recite the pledge, citing the principle of free speech provided in the First Amendment.

Other court cases continued to follow the Barnette ruling over the following decades. A 1978 federal court decision, Lipp v. Morris, clarified that students had the right not only to refuse to recite the pledge but also to refuse to stand during its recitation. Nevertheless, debate continued, and the issue increasingly became part of partisan political divisions. The conservative wave of the 1980s saw many Republicans embrace the pledge of allegiance as a public signifier of patriotic American values, while Democrats were more likely to criticize it on both freedom of speech and freedom of religion grounds. In 1988, Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush attacked his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis for being unpatriotic because Dukakis had vetoed a bill mandating public school teachers to lead their classes in the pledge. Bush also publicly expressed doubt whether an atheist could categorically be an American citizen, thus vouching for the centrality of the "under God" clause.

The Pledge of Allegiance Today

The controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance saw renewed attention in the twenty-first century. In 2002, a federal appeals panel heard the case Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow. Michael Newdow, an atheist, had brought the suit to challenge the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in his daughter's California school, arguing that the phrase "under God" amounted to state endorsement of religion. While similar legal challenges had been made before, the case was notably far-reaching and drew much media interest. The panel found for Newdow, but a hold was placed on the ruling almost immediately and the case was appealed. In 2004, the Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the case on the technicality that Newdow did not have full custody of his daughter, without ruling on the constitutionality of the pledge. However, in concurring opinions, three Supreme Court justices suggested that requiring teachers to lead the pledge would not violate the Constitution.

Later federal rulings in similar cases tended to agree with those concurrences. For example, in 2010 two appeals courts held that the Pledge of Allegiance is intended to be patriotic rather than religious, and that recitation is fully voluntary, so it does not conflict with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Legal challenges to the use of "under God" at the state level also had little impact. In Massachusetts, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2014 that the pledge did not violate the state constitution. In New Jersey, a 2015 ruling similarly blocked an effort to remove the words "under God" on the grounds that students were not being individually required to recite the pledge. Proponents for keeping the Pledge of Allegiance with the contested phrase continue to note that it does not specify any specific god, and that it is not obligatory to recite the pledge. Opponents continue to argue that the phrase both endorses religion and coerces belief in monotheism.

Other incidents involving disputes over the pledge of allegiance have also generated considerable public attention, if not new legal precedent. For instance, in 2019 there was high-profile controversy when a Black eleven-year-old student in Florida was arrested after arguing with a substitute teacher who confronted him for not standing during the pledge and reportedly suggested he should "go back to Africa" if he did not respect the flag. The case against the student was closed without any charges, but some activists highlighted it as an example of how pledge requirements could potentially create a hostile environment for dissenting students, and how the issue could overlap with problems of racial injustice and freedom of speech as well as freedom of religion.

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