Kevin Seamus Hasson - Believers, Thinkers, and Founders: How We Came to Be One Nation Under God

How can they get away with it? Public schoolteachers couldnt lead their classes in pledging allegiance to one nation under Jesus, could they? So how can they get away with one nation under God?

That was the essence of atheist-activist Michael Newdows famous challenge to the words under God in the Pledge of Allegiance as he was representing himself before the Supreme Court of the United States. And if the meaning of the phrase under God couldnt be stretched as far as dogmatic atheism, then it wasnt nearly elastic enough to be constitutional in Newdows book. So, no one nation under Jesus, no one nation under God. Period.

It was an extraordinary moment, even by Supreme Court standards. Here was a litigant claiming the constitutional right to forbid public schoolchildren from invoking the traditional source of all of their, and our, natural rights. Whats more, his argument had a certain logic to it, albeit in an appalling sort of way. If you couldnt say one nation under Jesus, just how could you say one nation under God? Call it Newdows Conundrum.

Americas traditional theory of rights is an elegant one: the government must respect our rights because they come to us from a source prior to, and higher than, it. Compare our theory of rights to that of Magna Carta. Signed at Runnymede by King John of England in 1215, Magna Carta was a landmark document drafted by feudal barons to limit the kings powers. Magna Carta states, in part, that we grant to Godthat the English church is to be free and to have all of its rights fully and its liberties entirely. Grant to God. Hilarious. In Magna Carta, the king actually purports to grant rights to God.

By contrast, the Declaration of Independence insists that rights enforceable against the king are given by God to each individual. As the Declaration puts it, our rights are endowed to us by no one less than the Creator himself, so no merely human power may legitimately deprive us of them. If all goes well, the state can and should secure our rights in lawsecure the blessings of liberty as the preamble to the Constitution says. If things go wrong, the state can, and too often does, violate our rights. But thats the worst it can do. It cant actually amend or nullify the rights themselves. They didnt come from the state in the first place, so the state cant take them away. They come from the Creator, which is why theyre inalienable, so the theory goes. In the tradition of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, we are a nation with liberty and justice for all because we are a nation under God.

Michael Newdow, though, begged to differ. He wanted his daughter and all public schoolchildren to pledge their allegiance only to a very different sort of nation. That nation, as envisioned by Newdow, would also offer liberty and justice for allbut it could do so only because it would not be under God. Otherwise, in his view, it wouldnt be offering liberty and justice for atheists. The secularist challenge to the American tradition had thus finally reached its logical extremeAmerica: One Nation Under Nobody.

Popular outrage continued to erupt. Ever since a lower court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, had struck down under God in the case almost two years before, an assortment of voices had vied with one another to see who could pour the most scorn on that courts opinion. The bases for the criticisms varied widely. And some were more coherent than others.

The most strident gave short shrift to Newdows Conundrum. In fact, they flatly denied its premise. To hear them tell it, America was, always had been, and must always be a formally Christian country. For them, the term