Americans fighting their own holy war

ALTHOUGH the 11 September Commission’s hearings in Washington this week garnered most attention from the world’s press, they were not the only show in town. The Supreme Court was sitting too, and, as most Americans appreciate, that tends to guarantee a pretty good show. This week was no exception.

Even by the standards of the nation’s highest court, however, Michael Newdow makes for an unusual plaintiff. This California doctor, representing himself in an act of chutzpah that was matched only by the quality of his performance, has launched an assault on the most elemental of American traditions - the pledge of allegiance. This is startling stuff indeed.

Since it was written in 1892, the pledge has been a fixture in the daily life of American schoolchildren, who place hand on heart each morning and swear allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, proclaiming in unison that "I pledge allegiance to the flag, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

So far, so secular. In 1954, however, in an effort to point out the differences between the United States and the godless Soviet Union, the phrase "under God" was added in a unanimous vote in Congress. The following year, Congress decided that all US currency should carry the motto "In God we trust".

On Wednesday, Chief Justice Rehnquist wondered if the unanimity of these votes suggested that the issue of the pledge’s "under God" clause was less than divisive, only to be slapped down by Mr Newdow who pointed out "that’s only because no atheist can get elected to Congress". This drew applause from the public gallery, prompting an irritated Mr Rehnquist to threaten to have the courtroom cleared if there was any repetition.

Mr Newdow argues that the words "under God" make the pledge a prayer and that, therefore, it is unconstitutional for his nine-year-old daughter to have to participate in a ritual that demolishes the fiercely protected barrier between Church and State.

The girl’s mother, a born-again Christian, disagrees. Theoretically, the pledge is an optional exercise but, as Mr Newdow persuasively argued, that is an option easier to exercise in theory than in practice. As he put it, "I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God. And every school morning, my child is asked to stand up, face that flag, put her hand over her heart and say that her father is wrong."

In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that prayers at high-school graduation ceremonies violated the constitution because they, to all intents and purposes, coerced student participation. Mr Newdow made the same point in his argument before the court and proudly suggested that "my daughter’s going to be able to walk around and say that ‘my father helped uphold the Constitution of the United States’."

This is an argument that goes back to the founding of the Republic. During the deliberations over what would become the US constitution, Benjamin Franklin at one point proposed opening each day’s proceedings with a prayer, only to be rebuffed by Alexander Hamilton who argued that such a move would suggest to the public that the assembled gathering was desperate and too badly in need of divine intervention.

From the beginning of the Republic, the separation of Church and State was held sacrosanct. George Washington might have asked for God’s blessing in the war against the British, but the new Republic would be a triumph of reason and open to men of all religious persuasions and none, even if the founding fathers themselves were almost all devout Protestants.

For if there’s one essential truth about the United States these days, it is that the principal divide in the country is no longer between rich and poor, or even black and white, but between the devout and the unbelievers. Clearly, racial issues remain immensely important, but race is both an openly acknowledged problem and one that, although far from solved, is at least moving in the right direction. By contrast, the cultural war between religious and secular is only getting worse.

The case before the Supreme Court is the latest skirmish in this grinding cultural war. Mel Gibson’s The Passion drove another nail through the idea that the United States could comfortably reach any kind of consensus about religion. For the first time in living memory, religious conservatives had no problem with graphic violence on the big screen, while liberal atheists disparaged the pornographic brutalism of Gibson’s vision.

Last year, foreigners chuckled as devout Christians flocked to the state courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest against the (court-ordered) removal from the building of a slab depicting the Ten Commandments.

To some extent, the argument over gay marriage is but another front in this wider, deeper cultural struggle. The religious Right (and in this case many on the religious Left, too) sees no difference between the Church’s definition of marriage and the civil, secular, definition of the institution. "Activist" judges in Massachusetts and elsewhere disagree.

If further evidence were needed that a religious revival is under way, it came this week as Congress passed legislation making it a crime to hurt or damage unborn children. To godless Europe, this is an extreme measure; to many Americans, it is commonsense.

There is another point to be made too. The notion that the United States was and is a great and divine experiment is central, indeed crucial, to the idea of American exceptionalism. The US remains a profoundly evangelical country, even if the constitution explicitly rejects the idea of a State-sponsored established religion.

As Abraham Lincoln put it at Gettysburg: "It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth."

Lincoln’s argument was that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were sacred documents and the texts for the "political religion of the nation". Slavery, therefore, was the original sin that needed to be extirpated if the United States was to live up to the founding fathers’ ideals. The bargain made at the Continental Congress between the northern and southern states could not hold forever without betraying the fundamental ideals of the fledgling republic.

Slavery became an affront to the moral purpose of the United States. It was a betrayal of the nation’s higher calling.

The idea of manifest destiny, still deeply felt today, may trouble non-Americans more than any other aspect of contemporary American culture, be it secular or religious. But it is nothing new. Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt both believed themselves to be in the business of saving other countries from themselves. There was, in that respect at least, no contradiction in their minds between the interests of the divinity and the United States.

In other words, US religious fervour is inseparable from the political mission the United States has believed itself to be engaged in ever since its founding. In that respect, the modern-day US remains a deeply old-fashioned place, burdened with the sense of obligation (and righteousness) not seen in Europe since the 19th century. The spirit of noblesse oblige lives on and America is destined to be an inspiration for the rest of humanity. Some may see this as hubris, of course, but it is an essential element of American amour propre.

That sense of divinely inspired improvement will endure regardless of whether or not the Supreme Court agrees with Mr Newdow and removes "under God" from the pledge. As George Bush put it after 11 September, "Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them."