Invocations of the deity are mostly meaningless
By Tom Teepen
The U.S. Supreme Court has decided to enter the case challenging the Pledge of Allegiance, but note that the court is tiptoeing in, not stomping.
The justices know a minefield when they see one.
First, the court wants to be reassured that Michael Newdow had legal standing to bring the complaint in the first place.
He was at the time the noncustodial parent of the daughter in whose name he sued, protesting that in effect she was forced to attend a religious ceremony by California's requirement (as in many states) that public school days start with recitation of the pledge.
And, too, the three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals first seemed to find the pledge unconstitutional but amended its ruling to narrow the decision just to the constitutionality of its use in public classrooms. The justices can now make it clear that the constitutionality of the pledge per se is not at risk.
All that still leaves plenty of room for alarmists on both sides of the argument to sound their tocsins, with religious and political zealots claiming once again that God is being thrown out of American life like a bum at the Ritz and civil liberty absolutists sure that even the smallest stumble off the line of church-state separation is a fatal footfall on the famous slippery slope that will tumble us into theocracy.
All this jousting is over two words - "under God" - that Congress hammered into the pledge with legislation in 1954.
The purpose was religious. In
that chilliest of the Cold War seasons, the idea was to strike a pose favorably contrasting godly capitalism to godless communism.
The 9th Circuit was not making crazy law when it found that reciting the pledge in public schools is an unconstitutional imposition of religion - of specifically monotheistic religion at that.
That's all the more so when young, uncritical minds are being forcibly influenced. After all, that was the intent of the laws altering the pledge and requiring its invocation.
Still, the justices could concede all that and vacate the finding on the grounds that the consequence is so minimal the abuse does not rise to the level of constitutional insult.
We have managed to dodge religious tyranny even though our coins declare a trust in God and the justices open their court sessions with a pitch that God save the nation and their honorable selves.
In short, we're practiced at invoking God without meaning it, so what does it matter?
Whatever the Supreme Court decides about the constitutionality of the practice, it is precisely on that point that the religious, more than any nervous civil libertarian, ought to have doubts about its wisdom.
What end of faith can be served by the rote and usually off-handed invocation of a vague deity who amounts to nothing more than a verbal tic, a habit of the tongue, a presence as unbidden and fleet as a hiccup?
These tropes of public piety, typically played out for political advantage, are the empty calories of spiritual nourishment.
* Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers, 72 Marietta St. NW, Atlanta, GA 30302; e-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com. |
