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Why
I Refuse to Recite the Pledge
Lately I’ve been catching lots of flak for my “disrespectful”
refusal to stand up with everyone else and salute our nation’s
flag. Sure, the Supreme Court long ago affirmed Americans’
right to stay mutely in our seats if we choose. But since
9/11, it has become increasingly de rigueur to recite the
Pledge at many public and official meetings, and there seem
to be more and more self-appointed witch-hunters in the pews
casting an eye about to see who is or isn’t participating
in the patriotic ritual.
Like many other Constitution-loving Americans who refuse to
recite, I could take religious or political offense at the
specific words of the Pledge. “One nation, under God”? Even
if the court decides this phrase (inserted in the pledge during
the McCarthy era) doesn’t violate separation of church and
state, it certainly disregards the Goddesses I have the First
Amendment right to worship as a Pagan. And “liberty and justice
for all”? Our government’s above-the-law wars on drugs and
terror routinely make a mockery of that promise.
But even if they took those words out, I’d still stay seated
for the pledge. I’ve felt that way ever since I was in elementary
school—before I knew anything about politics, before I followed
any particular religion. I was around 10 years old when I
began my quiet rebellion against a ceremony that struck me,
even then, as hypocritical.
The way I saw it, everyone in the classroom was expected to
stand up at the same time, face the same direction, hold their
hand over their heart the same way, and utter by rote the
same words. Where was the “liberty” in that? America, I was
taught, is the land of individual freedom, but the pledge
looked and sounded to me, even then, like an exercise in herd-think.
That’s the dark side of the pledge—its conformist effect on
group psychology. Every time we all stand up in unison and
salute the flag, we are conditioning ourselves to a kind of
Pavlovian response that makes it far too easy for our leaders
to manipulate us on cue. All they have to do is wave the red-white-and-blue,
and most of us will unquestioningly fall in line and follow
them into the next disastrous military quagmire, whether in
the swamps of Vietnam or the deserts of Iraq. The whole phenomenon
reminds me chillingly of those marching ranks of Nazis you
see in 1930s newsreels, saluting and pledging obedience to
their red, white and black swastika flag. Different symbol,
same trick.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good ritual—as long as it’s voluntary—and
I do admire our country’s beautiful flag, the more so since
its five-pointed stars are Pagan in origin (by way of early
American Freemasonry). When I visited the Washington Monument
on George W. Bush’s strife-scarred Inauguration Day, I was
deeply moved by an elderly man performing a personal rite
involving the flag. Wearing his dress military uniform, he
stood before each one of the 50 flags that encircle the monument
and solemnly saluted it. On that divisive day, he seemed to
be appealing to the Founding Fathers for unity, in a way that
was one in spirit with a Tibetan Buddhist’s planting prayer
flags on a sacred mountaintop.
But it’s one thing to pray through a symbol, and quite another
to pray to it. Ultimately, a flag is just a pretty scrap of
cloth—and to swear an oath of allegiance to it is idolatry
in most religions (mine included). How many pious pharisees
who demand that the 10 Commandments be posted in every courtroom
and schoolroom turn right around in those very same rooms
and break the Second Commandment? That’s the one that says,
“Thou shalt not bow down thyself to . . . nor serve . . .
graven images.”
Maybe I’m just a heathen, but I can’t see any difference between
bowing down and swearing to serve a graven image, and putting
your hand to your heart and pledging allegiance to an embroidered
one. It’s ironic that so many early Christians were martyred
for refusing to burn incense or swear loyalty to a statue
representing the Roman Emperor, yet so many modern Christians
insist on saluting and swearing loyalty to a flag representing
the U.S. Government. I wonder how many conservatives realize
that the “time-honored tradition” of the pledge, as the American
Legion recently described it, was invented only in the 1890s
by a socialist minister, Francis Bellamy, the cousin of socialist-utopian
author Edward Bellamy.
The current wave of pledge-piety is part of an insidiously
spreading intertwining of religion and politics—“God and Country.”
Every pickup truck or SUV with a cross or fish on its tailgate
nowadays has a flag pasted right next to it. This blurring
of the bounds between church and state leads directly to theocratic
tyranny—the very thing I thought we were supposed to hate
the Taliban and the Ayatollahs for.
To me, a true patriot is one whose allegiance is to freedom,
not to flags. When I sit out the pledge, isolated and a bit
nervous in a disapproving crowd, I’m inspired by people like
William Tell. Anyone remember why the Swiss hero was forced
to shoot an apple off his son’s head? It was because Tell,
alone among his fellow townspeople, folded his arms and refused
to salute the tyrant’s cap that was tacked atop a pole in
the public square.
—Steve
Rasmussen
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