Pledge Of Allegiance Essay

On June 14, 1953 — Flag Day — President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law a contentious modification to a 60 year old tradition: the phrase “under God” was to be inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance. Supporters of the bill claimed that its passage would make the Pledge more consistent with America’s tradition of faith and spirituality. This appears to be a contradiction: how can changing the Pledge make it more traditional? President Eisenhower wrote that the phrase would serve to “remind [us] of the spiritual and moral principles [...] upon which our way of life is founded”. This exemplifies a key tactic used by those Christians who called for substantial changes to the incorporation of religion in America’s public schools: the appeal

However, the nature of that role is rather convoluted. In reflecting on the development of the modern US educational system, Reese points out that the “power of tradition” is clear, but that “it is not self-evident what the phrase means or how society’s expectations evolved over time.” Just as the emendation of the Pledge of Allegiance to include the phrase “under God” represented both a break from tradition (the words were not previously part of the pledge) as well as an affirmation of tradition (the change was cast as a fortification of core American values), so too did the various movements concerning religion in the classroom rely on the argument that tradition is founded not in historical practice, but rather in foundational values and ideals. This helps explains why many Christian denominations came to very different conclusions about the role of religion in the classroom, despite their common grounding in “tradition”. Indeed, these differences evidence the fact that the tradition they spoke of referred not to long-established customs (as the term might commonly be defined), but rather to core values and ideals, such as common theistic background, the salvation of the youth, or the separation of church and state — as the specific case may