Under Which God?

Here’s Rodney Clapp on the Pledge of Allegiance:

The Supreme Court’s June ruling on whether “under God” should be part of the Pledge of Allegiance passed with relatively little notice, since the case was rejected on procedural grounds. For those who paid attention to the arguments, however, it conclusively exposed the incompatibility of American civil religion with any kind of robust Christianity. If one considers Elk Grove Unified School v. Newdow theologically, with the conviction that God ultimately refers to the Creator-Redeemer met in Israel and Jesus Christ, then the “God” Americans are to pledge their nation to be “under” is at worst an idol and at best the true God’s name taken in vain.

Clapp goes on to discuss the Justices’ various arguments for why “under God” should be retained, ranging from Chief Justice Rhenquist’s assertion that invoking the name of God is not a “religious exercise” but a “commendable patriotic exercise,” or a simple recognition of our nation’s history, to Justice O’Connor’s adversion to a “ceremonial deism” that is in no way intended to provoke religious sentiments such as awe or penitence.

In other words, the “god” of the Pledge is – according to its defenders – utterly devoid of theological content.

Clapp concludes:

Short of hanging on to the muddy, vacillating devices of ceremonial deism, Christians appear to face one of two choices. One is the open, deliberate restoration of Christian theocracy. Then the referent of “God” in the pledge would be clear and honest. Some evangelicals and conservative Catholics lean in this direction, but gingerly and equivocatingly, if not disingenuously, because of the sheer infeasibility of theocracy in a pluralistic America. With most contemporary Christians, I would argue that theocracy is not only politically dangerous but theologically disastrous.

We are on much more solid theological ground if we turn to the other choice. That choice is to recognize what the Bible and such exemplars of the Christian tradition as Augustine have taught us: to see and trust that the church and not any nation-state is preeminently the social agent through which God works God’s will in history. The church catholic stretches throughout the world and is its own “public,” crossing the comparatively sectarian boundaries of nation-states. Knowing themselves first of all as “citizens with the saints,” Christians may then, like the Babylon-dwelling Israelites counseled by Jeremiah, work and pray for the welfare of the cities (and nations) in which they now dwell, but never confuse those cities with the kingdom for which the church stands.