Posted on 06/27/2002 5:23:29 PM PDT by Pyro7480
June 27, 2002 8:45 a.m.
Civic Education?
A nation a world away from the chambers of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court.
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San Francisco federal judge's decision to ban recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance on the grounds that it is an unconditional endorsement of religion is the logical culmination of a decades-long erosion of the notion of civic education. Legal scholars will haggle over the reasoning of the decision, which unlike past rulings apparently seeks to end the Pledge for all rather than to grant exemption from it for some, as the court has evolved from protecting the rights of a few dissident individuals to mandating what everyone should say and do — regardless of the democratic decision-making of elected national, state, and local governments and school boards. Social critics will point out the zany ultimate logic of such capriciousness — our very money with mottoes like "In God We Trust" is as much an endorsement of religion as the Pledge; so are congressional prayers and the president's periodic invocation of the deity. Are we to airbrush our national currency or sue our president for using religion metaphors in public ceremonies?
But more importantly, the Pledge, like the National Anthem, is one of few remaining vestiges of the old idea of civic inculcation — all the spiritual cargo bound up in schools, athletic events, and meetings, where for a few moments each week we are reminded that all of us from diverse ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds remain part of the same republic. The United States is different from any country in the world — in that it has no common or official race or religion, or much of anything other that shared ideals to keep as a single united populace. It would be hard for a Mexican or Swede to be accepted as a naturalized Chinese citizen; by the same token, few Christians could find solace in Saudi Arabia. Even Europe is having great difficulty with the multiracialism that we take for granted in the United States.
So the key to our unity is a shared commitment to republican ideas of liberty and justice: one nation, with a strong religious heritage, that learned through great sorrow the price of division. The sanctioning of our oath under God is not merely an assertion of religious belief, but an appeal for divine blessing of this rather strange and mysterious "new order of the ages." In small, symbolic, and easily caricatured ways — our national anthem, our coinage, civic prayers, and the Pledge — our nation struggles to remind our citizens that there are more spiritual ties that bind us than natural affinities that divide us.
More regrettable is the court's decision at a time of war, when the world is looking at the mettle of the United States to see whether its notorious self-indulgence and rampant individualism will prove too strong and keep us from uniting in our hour of peril. Few abroad consider the danger to America arises from religious fundamentalism, excessive indoctrination, or cultural regimentation. No, the slur against us Americans is that we are at times self-indulgent, unwilling to express any notion of transcendence, and apt to put the well-being or even the whims of a tiny few above the general interest of the society at large.
So while our elites quibble and bicker about the propriety of traditional American patriotic protocol, the rest of the nation braces for a long and difficult war — one which will be won or lost, not simply through our technological superiority, but by the unity and will of a diverse people a world away from the chambers of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court.
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