I think that all the fury over the Eisenhower insertion of “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance is just that, fussy fooling with words. The Allegiance Pledge was fine for all of us before it included the word, “God”, in and it will be just fine without the “word”, “God” if it is withdrawn. However, it seems that there are a great many God-loving people who, in this 21st Century society have taken up arms against the atheists and other non-God believing people who live here along with them. So, I have another suggestion that would satisfy at least me.
Suppose we look at the Pledge and ask ourselves what are we pledging allegiance to? The answer is that we are NOT pledging allegiance to God. That would bring a whole mess of trouble for most of our people are not united on just what God we believe in. When we say the Pledge, we are pledging allegiance to a symbol of our nation, a flag, and affirm that, following the bloody division of the war between North and South, it is, once again, one and indivisible. A better way would be to Pledge our faith in our national resources, the beauty that is left in our forests and mountains, plains, rivers and lakes. That would be hard to insert into any pledge but the sentiment could be added somehow by someone with a better grasp on the language.
For just the sake of argument I would leave the pledge as it was originally but will suggest that saying “under the Constitution” would be correct and a concrete reality rather than reference to an unseen and not easily definable entity as “God”. We should not be affirming a political agenda each time we utter pledges.
We are still arguing over what the founding writers of the Constitution and, hence our government, meant when establishing the institutions under which we live. We have the loose constructionists and the strict constructionists and some who want to add frivolous amendments just for this one word in the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States. This is a classical example of the attempt to draw attention away from other, more pressing and difficult questions by focusing on something that will satisfy a small and militant group who wish to impose their vision and beliefs on the rest of us.
I do not think that “under the Constitution” does it, but I offer it as a talking point. I suggest that it is far less controversial than the subjects contained within the use of the word that declares we all are products of a “Creator of the Universe” instead of a process of evolution, a theory, that is another matter and another problem that we should steer clear of if we wish to remain friends.