Some Believers Cringe at 'Under God' Defense:
"Americans who take religion seriously must surely have winced this week at some of the defenses mounted of the phrase 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Please don't imagine, for example, that pledging allegiance to a nation 'under God' is meant to suggest that God actually exists. "

Don't imagine that the phrase suggests that God watches over the nation, blessing and judging it, or that the nation is accountable to God, if that God exists. Certainly the pledge's wording doesn't imply that the nation's indivisibility and promise of liberty and justice for all is somehow tied up with that condition of being "under God."

No, nothing like that. At least, not for the phrase's defenders at Wednesday's oral arguments before the Supreme Court. For them, "under God" only means that once upon a time the nation's leaders thought things along those lines.…

the solicitor general, Theodore B. Olson, said the phrase was not a prayer or a ritual. It was only one of the constitutionally permissible "civic and ceremonial acknowledgments" of the religious heritage on which the nation was founded.

The government's brief to the Supreme Court spells this out in its analysis of the pledge's current wording: "What it really means is, I pledge allegiance to one nation, founded by individuals whose belief in God gave rise to the governmental institutions and political order they adopted, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

During the oral argument, Justice David H. Souter brought up a similar defense, the conclusion from a lower court that the pledge's words about God were merely an example of "ceremonial deism" useful for "solemnizing public occasions."

Wince.

Were the citizens and legislators who created an uproar over the Ninth Circuit's ruling upset because students might lose out on a historical reminder or a moment of "ceremonial" deism?

And why aren't more believers distressed when language that pretty clearly affirms an existing, active, transcendental God must be defended as nothing more than language about what the nation's framers thought two centuries ago?…

In fact: The Pledge dates from the Civil War, and did not then have the words 'under God'; in it. A.I.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/27/national/27beliefs.html?pagewanted=all&position=