June
27, 2002 8:45 a.m. Civic
Education?
A
nation a world away from the chambers of the Ninth U.S. Circuit
Court.
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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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?
