Pledge Of Allegiance Essay

The issue I plan to address for my research paper is the debate for the Pledge of Allegiance to be integrated into the school system. I also plan on addressing the inclusion of the words “under God” and the series of lawsuits that followed the congressional change. I became interested in this topic hen I discovered that its integration to public schools it was closely linked with the mandatory inclusion of an American Flag in every classroom. This idea was created and promoted by James B. Upham insisted that we needed to instill a sense of nationalism in students at public schools. I remembered reading somewhere that the inclusion of the American Flag was actually an idea created by a company who manufactured flags, so this topic sparked my

I then found all of the books and read through the passages that I thought might be useful. The three most helpful books that I found were: The United States and the Supreme Court, Religion and Education and Second Drafts of History. In “Religion and Education” there two linked chapters, assessing why the Pledge of Allegiance should and should not refer to God. In the first passage Richard Neubaus, a Roman Catholic Priest, argues for the reference to God. Neubaus states that the two word phrase should be looked at as a petty attempt to link the ideas of nationalism and religion, at the height of the Soviet scare, in order to distinguish ourselves from the godless Soviets. However, although the words may be harmless now, he warns that removing them from the Pledge of Allegiance might result in political backlash muck like a surgery gone wrong. Neubaus claims that as the words are causing no harm to the whole right now, and the best option is to leave them alone, allowing the people who enjoy them to continue and allowing the people opposed to the two word phrase to understand that it is just as generic as any other two word phrase in the pledge. The argument against the reference to God is made by Elisabeth Sifton, a senior vice president of Farrar. She uses a variety of seemingly more logical arguments, beginning by stating that the inclusion of