This commentary is by Dave Gram, a former longtime Vermont journalist.
The conservative commentator Guy Page is using his online publication Vermont Daily Chronicle to try to stir up some controversy surrounding a state senator’s decision not to join the Senate in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance as it begins its week each Tuesday.
The Chronicle quotes Sen. Becca White, D-Windsor, as saying she is an atheist Unitarian Universalist, and objects to the phrase “under God” in the Pledge.
With the Pledge in the spotlight, perhaps this is an opportune time to point out some of its shortcomings, and to suggest a far better statement of national purpose as a unifying recitation to open a school day, legislative proceedings and other such events. It goes like this:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The Preamble beats the Pledge in several ways, not the least of which is historical authenticity. The Preamble was written at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, most likely drafted by Gouverneur Morris, a delegate from New York. It was then approved by the Convention as the beginning of the nation’s founding document. The Pledge, by contrast, was written more than 100 years later, in 1892, by Francis Bellamy, then an employee in the subscriptions department of the Boston-based Youth’s Companion magazine. It was part of the magazine’s effort to boost circulation by selling U.S. flags as premiums.
And now, just weeks after the U.S. House passed a resolution denouncing the “horrors” of socialism, marking that ideology as a target for hatred by conservatives, it might be worth noting that Bellamy, the Pledge’s author, was a “Christian socialist” who said he found support for socialism’s basic tenets in the teachings of Jesus. According to a 2010 book “The Pledge: A History of the Pledge of Allegiance,” Bellamy “championed the rights of working people and the equal distribution of economic resources.”
But the problems with the Pledge, and the advantages of the Preamble, extend well beyond the authors’ political views. A second point of comparison is representation. As much as we honor the flag, it is at best just a symbol for the ideas underpinning America’s purpose in the world. The Preamble provides a direct statement of those ideas.
The Preamble works well in a school setting because it provides several good prompts for class discussion: Have we established justice, or are we still working on that? How do we measure the “general welfare,” and what are the best ways to promote it? Where’s the boundary between ensuring “domestic tranquility” and allowing people, in the words of the First Amendment, “peaceably to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances”?
For at least some of those reasons and for one big one in addition, the Preamble also works well in a legislative setting. Lawmakers do well to recall that there are ideas superior to the ones being debated on the floor on any given day, and to get a regular reminder of the constitutional framework to which their own work must conform.
Then there’s the problem mentioned by Sen. White: “Under God” are two words blessedly absent from the Preamble. The unifying statement need not exclude nonbelievers. The phrase “under God” is a favorite target for those who wish to mount legal challenges to the requirement imposed by some schools that students recite the Pledge. As for the Preamble, suffice it to say that it would take quite a feat of judicial activism to find the Preamble to the Constitution unconstitutional.
The Pledge also has some factual problems, or at least arguably so. It declared us to be “one nation, indivisible” 30 years after we literally were split in two during the Civil War. Even today we are frequently described as a “divided nation.”
I touched on the First Amendment raised by “under God,” but even as an expression of religious faith, it has problems. Christians who profess faith in the Trinity believe that God in the form of the Holy Ghost lives within and among us, not above us. (Of course, there may not be a preposition in English that describes God’s real location.) Then there’s “with liberty and justice for all” — again, in the Pledge’s version, not something we are working toward but phrased as if it’s an established fact. Ask the family of Tyre Nichols about that.
A more fundamental difference is that the Pledge imagines a static and unchanging state: simple allegiance to an inanimate object. The Preamble, by contrast, invites continued engagement with a national project to improve the extent to which we are pursuing its goals. Pledging allegiance signals love for and satisfaction with what is. The Preamble calls us, instead, always to be striving toward “a more perfect union.” It’s a goal that seems to need to be newly ordained and established on a regular basis.
That’s the genius: The Framers seemed to know that we still would be working to establish justice and meet the Preamble’s other goals nearly 240 years after they were committed to paper.
That idea of continuous growth and improvement sets the right tone for the start of a school day or legislative week. It says, in essence: Let’s get to work.
