A Good Little Mention

A couple of years ago, there appeared a fine collection of essays on American conservatism in the 1960s, edited by Laura Gifford and Dan Williams. I wrote one of those essays. In it, I examined how Orthodox Jews positioned themselves vis-à-vis the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. I just now came across a review of the book. Here is an excerpt:

"Each essay is about fifteen pages long, clearly focused, and tightly written—in this sense, they are models of scholarly writing. Several stand out, if for different reasons. Justin Coffee's essay on Spiro Agnew is the best in the book. How many of us remember that Agnew, before he became a national disgrace, had been an upwardly mobile suburbanite and then a progressive governor whose move to the right mirrored that of millions of other Americans? Almost as good is Robert Daniel Rubin's piece on how Orthodox Jews split from American Judaism's dominant liberalism; it is an excellent reminder that Jews in the United States are not monolithic in their politics." 

Review of Right Side of the Sixties 

How pleasing it to have my writing acknowledged in this way. And kudos to Justin Coffee! 

Before All the Tea

It has been more than six years since Barack Obama’s first successful run for the presidency. And it has been more than six years since the rise of the Tea Party, the antigovernment movement sitting at the right flank of American conservatism. To its detractors, the Tea Party represents a departure within politics, a movement of unprecedented venom toward progressive ideals, even toward the political process itself. Venom aside, the Tea Party is not, in fact, unprecedented. It has been around for quite some time, operating under various names.

Thirty-four years ago, the nation’s political attention was riveted on the rise of what seemed an unprecedented, sharply rising groundswell of political conservatism among public officials and citizens alike. Dubbed the “New Right,” this movement signaled a coalition between conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats, or “Dixiecrats.” In fact, this coalition had been gaining strength since the early 1960s, largely in response to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and the Supreme Court’s rulings on desegregation, church-state separation, and criminal rights. But it wasn’t until the 1980 election that what Congressional Quarterly dubbed the “conservative coalition” helped bring a president into office. Like today’s Tea Party, the 1980s New Right drew most of its strength from white Christians living in the southern and western states. And, like the Tea Party, it made its mark especially within the Republican Party, whose right wing had gradually been accumulating greater and greater influence.

Mainstream observers reacted to the New Right much as the mainstream would later react to the Tea Party. To most of the journalists, scholars, politicians, and activists witnessing its ascendance, the New Right represented a break with the comity and centrism that had long enabled public institutions not to explode with regularity. These observers worried—aloud and often—that political equilibrium itself faced an unseemly challenge. The New Right, and its impact on its opponents, should remind us that American politics has not changed all that much over the past three-and-a-half decades.

Nowhere did the early-1980s New Right make its presence more felt than in the United States Senate. In November 1980, with Republicans gaining control of the Senate for the first time since 1955, the conservative coalition took a quantum leap forward. Sixteen new Republicans senators were elected that year; at least half of them enjoyed volunteer and financial support from far-right organizations, including groups with religious orientations and “moral” agendas. The election doubled the ranks of New Right senators.

Most of these newly elected conservatives, along with their allies already on the Hill, were filled with raw passion and were prepared to fight for what they believed to be the will of ordinary Americans—that is, the will of white, conservative Christians allegedly disinherited by the national government. “The conservative Republican Senate freshmen came crashing onto the enemy shores of liberal Washington, riding the crest of the New Right wave, self-confident and even self-righteous, convinced that they held the new franchise on truth,” wrote the Washington Post, observing that “all of the New Right senators saw themselves more as missionaries of a new political gospel than as politicians.” The most recent electees adopted a confrontational style. They were not terribly given to compromise, eager as they were to arrest decades-long liberal policies. Nor were they shy about it. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.), elected in 1976, explained that “ours is an offensive battle,” while recently elected William L. Armstrong (R-Colo.) eagerly anticipated “pursuing the peaceful overthrow of government” through the use of “confrontation politics.”  The chamber’s customary decorum was anathema to these conservative radicals; political pragmatism was no more than a wet blanket on their missionary fires.

The well known activist Paul Weyrich could only crow approvingly that “the New Right—and to an extent we’re like communists in this—feels victory is inevitable.” But, to their critics, the far-right senators were impetuous bullies. Some critics dubbed them the “popsicle brigade” on account of their childishness and refusal to observe protocol. Others were more harsh. The executive director of the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action declared, “They are the new primitives. . . . They want to repeal the twentieth century.” An AFL-CIO lobbyist complained that “they made the Senate a meaner place . . . and they do it with such Christian fervor.” For syndicated columnist Nina Totenberg, history might have been in the making. “One hopes we haven’t reached the point in this country where civility and caution go out the window. One hopes we are not being faced with a sort of right-wing Red Guard that is unswervingly bent on its own form of cultural and constitutional revolution.”

Nor were liberal senators any more comfortable with their fervor. George McGovern (D-S.D.), whose own tenure in the Senate had recently been terminated through New-Right electoral efforts, noted that the “zealotry, self-righteousness, and vindictiveness” of the new breed of senators “connote something radically different from the authentic conservatism of, say, Robert Taft or Senator Goldwater.” Liberal Republicans were equally alarmed. Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.) admonished opponents of legalized abortion that “we’re not running this country on instructions from Mount Sinai,” while Robert Packwood (R-Or.) complained of the New Right’s “Cotton Mather mentality,” a “narrow, unforgiving . . . feeling that ‘God speaks to me [and] I will tell you what He says.” Another senator anonymously scolded his far-right colleagues: “The democratic process presupposes that you have differences of opinion, but you respect your opponent’s point of view and the element of compromise that the process requires.”

In 1981, several New Right leaders, including James McClure (R-Id.), Jake Garn (R-Ut.), Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.), and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) assumed important committee-leadership posts. CQ declared 1981 a year of monumental change. “The conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats—the backbone of President Reagan’s support in both House and Senate during the 97^th Congress—in 1981 showed a strength unequaled in the 25 years Congressional Quarterly had measured the coalition’s muscle.” This was especially the case in the Senate, where the coalition defeated Northern Democrats in ninety-five percent of floor votes.

Many New Right Senators and their constituents, like today’s Tea Partiers, felt frustrated by their movement’s failure to achieve far-reaching legislative victories. Mainstream Republican leaders, including President Reagan, prioritized economic reform over moral reform, thereby denying cultural conservatives legislative victories on abortion and school prayer, among other issues. Still, the larger New Right gained a great deal of momentum in the Senate and grew sanguine about its prospects for ultimately turning its socio-political vision into law.

The parallels between the early 1980s and our own time are striking. Trends now and then, in conjunction, demonstrate the cyclical nature of politics in the United States. Power is fleeting; coherent coalitions are like the sand. The Tea Party will not remake American politics, and neither will it disappear.

Past the Roadblocks and onto the Freeway!

This Monday marked a crucial moment for me. I ended months of pre-writing and finally began writing a draft of the introduction to my book. Thus set into motion, the process will carry me. I feel great. And I am confident that I will get a draft of my manuscript to my editor by October 31, 2015.

Getting down to writing the book has proven challenging. On long academic pieces, I work slowly, a victim of my perfectionism. I struggle to get past the burdensome sense that I am not yet prepared to begin tackling the issues. I fear that I don’t know enough, that I haven’t yet read or reread the important materials. I worry that I haven’t kept up with the literature enough to be ready for any fellow historians who might blindside me. “Is this guy Rubin an idiot? Doesn’t he know that his stupid argument has been repeatedly been debunked? Why has he conducted such an obsolete study? Why did he bother writing such a book?”

I then drag out and apply my trusty old wherewithal, and I remember that such responses are unlikely. And, if anyone should respond in that manner, then I need not care a whit. Every book has its critics—lots. I should be delighted if enough people read the book to bother eviscerating it. What could be more fun than to join the historiographical fray, the give and take among smart, excited scholars?

Above all, I remind myself what I’ve been telling students for years. Writing is not the end result of the thinking process; writing is the thinking process. A horrible draft of my introduction would be a gift to myself, as it would enable me to get my ideas out, rearrange them, add and subtract, and generate a strong product. Now is the time to write badly! Now is the moment to heave up stones of thought, so that I might chisel them into what my mind’s eye already sees clearly.

Angry in Seattle

Something has me baffled. In my new home town of Seattle, there’s this popular church that seems very un-Seattlelike. I’m having trouble squaring the place, and especially its pastor, with the Seattle I have come to know.

Over many years, I have found Seattlites, across different venues, to demonstrate the egalitarianism and tolerance for which the city is famous. That has been reinforced over the past three months, during which I’ve made Seattle my home. Respect for difference informs people’s attitudes and fills their conversations.

I am therefore fascinated by the prominence of one particular Christian church thriving in the heart of the city. Mars Hill Church was founded in 1996 by its pastor and leader, Mark Driscoll. Driscoll’s brash, informal style has earned him a wide local following, just as it has brought him fame and notoriety nationwide. The renegade culture of Seattle’s Ballard district, home of Mars Hill’s first and main location, has infused the pastor’s style. In his writings and interviews, Driscoll talks openly about sex, referring directly to masturbation and fellatio. He and his congregants cut a decidedly hip appearance. Driscoll himself can be found in t-shirt and sweatshirt, and he has at times worn a Mohawk-type haircut. Many of his congregants sport body piercings and tattoos. Among those who are drawn to Driscoll—and there are thousands—some cite his cool, dressed-down style, as well as the edgy rock that fills Mars Hill’s pews, as the basis for their attraction.

Driscoll has drawn widespread attention for more than his style. Notoriety has come Driscoll’s way on account of his crude, antigay, anti-woman, testosterone-driven pontificating. Ugliness is his standard fare. Much of it appears in print or on video. His crude, tough-guy persona speaks especially to young men, whom Driscoll aims to rescue from a mainstream culture that supposedly feminizes them. In a 2009 in depth analysis of Mars Hill, historian Molly Worthen 

found that

what bothers Driscoll—and the growing number of evangelical pastors who agree with him—is [the standard] portrayal of Jesus as a wimp, or worse. Paintings depict a gentle man embracing children and cuddling lambs. Hymns celebrate his patience and tenderness. The mainstream church, Driscoll has written, has transformed Jesus into “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” a “neutered and limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture that . . . would never talk about sin or send anyone to hell.”

Molly Worthen, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?,” Jan. 6, 2009.

At the center of Driscoll’s theology is “complementarism,” the notion that God intends women to serve their husbands as helpmates—to “complement” men rather than live as their equals. To empower women, Driscoll believes, is to offend God. Thus, the Episcopal Church, in anointing a woman as a bishop, had ventured down a slippery slope toward naming “a fluffy baby bunny rabbit as their next bishop to lead God’s men.”  

Craig Welch, “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church,” September 13, 2013.

Apparently, misogyny makes for good theology. In a 2001 blog post signed pseudonymously but later claimed as his own, Driscoll informed readers that

the first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may seem, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while. . .

Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.  

Jenny Kutner, Evangelical Megachurch Begins Closing Branches after Pastor Calls Women “Penis Homes,” September 8, 2014. 

Homemaker indeed.

                  ------------------------------------------------              

The vulgar Driscoll has recently come upon hard times. Large numbers of his congregants have become troubled by him, and many have departed the church. As a result, Mars Hill has been forced it to close some of its satellite churches and reduce its staff. This has prompted Driscoll to step down from his position as pastor of Mars Hill Church.

A number of factors combined to bring relentless scrutiny and then discredit to the popular preacher. Driscoll has come under fire for plagiarizing sections of his book, _Real Marriage,_ and for devising a complicated scheme to exaggerate sales numbers. He has been widely accused of misusing church funds. A group of twenty-one former Mars Hill pastors resigned and wrote an open letter calling for Driscoll’s removal, charging him with spiritually abusive tactics. Outed as a bully and a cheat, Driscoll chose to diminish his public visibility—at least for a while. Warren Throckmorton, “Twenty-One Former Mars Hill Church Pastors Bring Formal Charges against Mark Driscoll," August 21. 2014.

Enough background about Driscoll and Mars Hill. Scads of blogposts and articles abound.

                  ------------------------------------------------             

Most noteworthy to me is that ground zero for Driscoll’s ministry has been Seattle. What’s up with that? Seattle is often identified as the gay-friendliest city in the U.S. It is the city that housed the famous 1999 uprising against the World Trade Organization. A 2011 study identified Seattle and Portland (Maine!) as the cities containing the highest per capita number of atheists. Here, radicals of all stripes fill the coffee houses and pubs. No Mississippi, this town!

How is it that Seattle provided Mark Driscoll a large, boisterous, and outspoken support base? Should we simply rest assured that Mars Hill is not a representative voice amid Seattle’s chorus, but simply a loud and dissonant one? Could there be there two Seattles, one progressive and one reactionary?

These explanations might perhaps be valid. Driscoll’s supporters are certainly not typical Seattlites. Apparently, there does exist a reactionary element among the city’s residents. But I wish to point to another factor, one that exerts a subtle but real influence on the city’s political culture.

Seattle is unquestionably a liberal city. On display here is a key element of liberalism: egalitarianism, including the tolerance for difference that typically accompanies it. Yet, while egalitarianism dominates Seattle culture, it entwines with a rather different ideology, one that sometimes combines easily with it and sometimes does not. That different ideology is anti-establishmentarianism. For some Seattle radicals, “the establishment” is the Enemy One. They complain that the autonomy of ordinary people is always under siege by those who exercise the lion’s share of power. Such sentiments surfaced colorfully during the WTO protests and in the local initiatives of Earth First!. In Seattle and elsewhere, anti-establishmentarians celebrate the “uncorrupted” grassroots and resent the powerful elites who would squash the grassroots under their heavy heel.

Anti-establishmentarianism cuts either toward the left or the right, depending on the kind of elites who draw its ire. Some anti-establishmentarians conceive power primarily in political terms; others focus on economic power; still others understand power mostly as a cultural phenomenon. These differences matter, because they determine where on the ideological spectrum one is likely to fall.

Critics who focus on the economic establishment tend to sit on the left. This has been the case in the U.S. at least since the 1880s, when radical labor and farm unions advanced the cause of poor laborers by denouncing the corrupt “plutocrats” who used their unconscionable wealth to control the nation. By the turn of the century, left-wing anarchists would play important roles in the more radical unions.

Yet, even when anti-establishmentarianism cuts leftward, it differs from other left-wing ideologies. This is demonstrated by the left’s complicated reaction to Lyndon Johnson. For those with a social democratic bent, the Great Society epitomized government’s proper role of helping increase economic equality. But for anti-establishment leftists, the Great Society’s intrusion into private life signaled an improper grab for power. The latter generally maintained that people could do more good by organizing themselves than by signing their power away to the state. Anti-establishmentarians, even on the left, tend to mistrust government, to view it as part of the power elite—along with the military, the university, and the corporations.

Given Seattle’s anti-establishmentarian strain, it is not shocking that one can find, among some residents, a disdain for those in political and cultural power. And that disdain potentially alienates them from the city’s dominant liberalism. Anti-establishmentarians who focus their ire on the state fall somewhere between the left and right; their orientation is more toward libertarianism than toward the social democracy more typical of the American left. Meanwhile, those anti-establishmentarians most concerned with culture register only disgust for liberal “elites.”

Mark Driscoll and his flock evince anti-establishmentarianism of the cultural breed. They mistrust “over-education” and the “political correctness” to which it gives rise, including gender and sexual-orientation equality. Driscoll’s diatribes are red meat to his followers, many of whom hunger for brute, unsentimental leadership. When he stokes men’s sexual aggression toward women (within the bounds of marriage, of course), he enacts revenge-by-proxy against effete liberals and their libertine morals. He vindicates those for whom morality emanates outward from the gut, for whom love is raw rather than cultivated. No “hippie, queer Christ” for these Christians.

Driscoll’s masculinity-run-rabid contradicts nearly all that Seattle represents. His mistrust of women and disdain for LGBT folks may seem anathema to Seattle culture—and, overwhelmingly, it is. But not entirely. The anti-establishment impulse that runs through the city’s culture manifests occasionally as conservative populism. When it does, it can provide fertile ground for the sort of right-wing evangelicals who resonate with the rumblings of a Mark Driscoll. Strange, but true.

Yom Kippur Redux

I suggested in my previous post that, this year, the prayers of Yom Kippur did not speak to me. A few days after writing those words, I was again confronted by the Yom Kippur liturgy. I was forced to reconsider my verdict.

Recently, I began teaching a course in Jewish ethics to middle-school children and their parents. Last week, we unpacked a brief passage from a text read on Yom Kippur. The text came from the Haftarah, a cycle of readings taken from the Prophets, a series of late books within the Hebrew Bible. The Haftarah portion read on any given Sabbath or holiday complements other parts of that day’s liturgy, including the portion read from the Torah, the five books of Moses.

The Haftarah is often the most moving and unsettling part of the service. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible stood outside the societies in which they lived. Typically, they rebuked their contemporaries for their decadent, selfish, self-absorbed behavior. It was the mission of the prophets to alarm their fellow Israelites and exhort them to act as God had commanded them. To a modern-day reader, the prophets come off sounding ethical, insightful, and inspired, if eccentric. They seem wide awake. They seem worthy of emulation.

The Haftarah passage that my class and I examined last week was from the Book of Isaiah. In it, the prophet Isaiah describes for us what the Yom Kippur fast, in his opinion, ought to consist of. His is not the typically private, self-absorbed fast. Rather than focusing on his private prayers and his bodily discomfort, Isaiah engages with conditions outside himself.

The class then broke out into three-person groups. I joined together with one of the groups. We began our study by reading a passage from the Haftarah portion:

No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.

(Isaiah 58:6-8)

The two fathers, one student, and I examined ourselves in light of the passage. We discussed our own attitudes and practices regarding homeless people. We considered whether we personally could have “take[n] the poor wretched into [our] home.” We didn’t agree about the usefulness of Isaiah’s prescription. But we all felt challenged by the words.

Suddenly, Yom Kippur didn’t seem so beside the point. Suddenly, I found myself pushed to engage in the most important sort of action. What could be more crucial to right living than to sacrifice one’s own comfort, and even safety, so that others might share in life’s basic necessities? And what could be more difficult to do?

Suddenly, Yom Kippur felt too audacious, too difficult. A week after dismissing the day’s worship as not in keeping with my spiritual yearnings, I was confronted by exhortations too demanding for my rather timid social justice practices. And this had significance for my spiritual life. I had spoken a bit too soon.

I am probably not likely to invite homeless people into my home (especially nowadays, when my family and I don’t have enough room). But, if I can remember to bear these words in mind next year, I will be tasked to build an outward, interpersonal dimension into my fast. Yom Kippur, refracted through the day’s Haftarah reading, perhaps requires me to get out of my head—on a day when most Jews are unusually inside their own heads. I am reminded that to repent is to act differently, to do what is difficult. Next year, I hope, I will bear in mind that seeking forgiveness requires more than words. It requires that I demonstrate a readiness to live more generously, more compassionately. It requires me to wake up and love.

What was it I was saying about “idol worship”?

Present but Absent on Yom Kippur

This weekend marked the passage of Yom Kippur, the most powerful day in the Jewish calendar. Its liturgy and rituals press the worshipper, issuing fierce demands. Yom Kippur is not for the faint hearted.

On Friday night and Saturday, I observed Yom Kippur. The liturgy and rituals spoke loudly, but not to me this year. They did not seize and hold me captive. My heart, mind, and soul strayed from the prayers and occupied themselves elsewhere.

It was seventeen years ago when Yom Kippur services helped restore me to the religion of my upbringing. On that day, I was emotionally overcome, partly from abstaining from food and drink (and coffee!) for approximately twenty-seven hours, as is the custom. Fasting intensifies the solemnity we participants feel as we engross ourselves in self-reflection, examining our thoughts, words, and actions from over the past year for all traces of mean-spiritedness, dishonesty, and dishonor. We spend the day in synagogue confessing our transgressions and asking God (the Father, the King, the Deity-out-There) to forgive them. We come clean, and we pledge to behave more virtuously.

For many years, Yom Kippur’s activities have inspired me. They have invigorated me. On Yom Kippur, I have affirmed my alignment with what is right and what is good.

What made this year different? Well, throughout this entire year, I have held closely to the practice of examining my thoughts, words, and behavior. Being in the habit of self-examination robbed this year’s Yom Kippur of its singular importance.

Yet there was an even more critical factor. This year, Yom Kippur’s confessions contrasted jarringly with my deepened ongoing spiritual practice. The Yom Kippur prayers felt empty and inauthentic, foreign to my evolving mode of spiritual immersion. For the first time, I felt not at home in this liturgy that has so enraptured me.

Increasingly, I immerse myself within a loving force, a force that I enter, a force that enters me. Rarely any longer do I turn to a heteronomous God who judges me. Imagining myself as observed and judged by an external force seems only to reinforce the illusion that I am separate from the source of all power. Yom Kippur, in my experience, asks me to stand before God and quiver. At no point during worship do I feel lifted and carried by a loving current.

This Yom Kippur, I couldn’t bring myself to stand before God the Judge. I could not dam myself off from the current of love that carries me to infinite expanses.

Throughout my time in prayer this Yom Kippur, my focus drifted away from the confessions at hand. Instead, I found myself meditating, confirming my oneness with the One. Instead of begging forgiveness from the heteronomous God, I focused on my soul’s light and invited it to fill me. I did not stand before God. I melted inside God.

Inside God, the One Energy flows through me. I am powerful, a conductor for the One Energy. I do not cower before an external God who sits in judgment.

Perhaps, in upcoming years, a deeper experience of Yom Kippur will come to me and fill my worship with renewed purpose. Until then, I will annually attend Yom Kippur services and abstain from eating, in solidarity with the Jewish people. Maybe next year I will reconnect with the day’s confessional prayers. Right now, they feel absurd, an exercise in idol worship. So be it.

When God Pledges Allegiance

A recent court case prompted me to rethink the relationship between God and nation. As per usual, the results surprised me. How delightful it is to surprise myself!

This past May, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that asking schoolchildren to recite the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance did not obstruct those children’s equal protection under the law, which is guaranteed by the state’s constitution. According to the court, the state was not seeking to promote or restrain religious belief. In asking students to recite the pledge, the state was conducting “a fundamentally patriotic exercise, not a religious one."

The court emphasized the voluntary nature of the pledge. No student was being forced to recite the pledge, the court pointed out. Massachusetts was thus abiding by federal law. In West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a student cannot be punished for refusing to recite the pledge. 

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette,_ 319 U.S. 624 (1943). 

For the plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case, the voluntary nature of the recitation was immaterial. Their point was not that their children were being coerced into reciting the pledge. Their point was that their children were being discriminated against and were in danger of becoming ostracized within the classroom. The plaintiffs argued what school prayer opponents have argued—successfully—over the past half century. The voluntary nature of the exercise, they insisted, did not diminish the emotional suffering caused by having either to abstain from the exercise (and thereby become socially marginalized) or to participate in it (and thereby violate their conscience).

The plaintiffs

expressed concern that the recitation of the pledge “marginalizes [their] children and [their] family and reinforces [a] general public prejudice against atheists and Humanists, as it necessarily classifies [them] as outsiders, defines [them] as second-class citizens, and even suggests that [they are] unpatriotic.” They claimed that “[i]t is inappropriate for [their] children to have to draw attention to themselves by not participating, possibly leading to unwanted attention, criticism and potential bullying,” and that at their children's ages, “ ‘fitting in’ is an important psychological need.”

Doe v. Acton Regional School District,_ S.J.C. 11317 (2014).

The plaintiffs were acting on principle. Their children hadn’t actually been bullied or marginalized; other children and parents had not, in fact, condemned them for exhibiting insufficient patriotism or Godliness. For the plaintiffs, the state’s error lay in unconstitutionally aligning itself with religion and, in so doing, failing to extend equal protection under the law to those students who didn’t believe in God. That is, an establishment of religion was being signified—as it was whenever God was mentioned in a recitation led by a state employee and carried out in a public institution.

Whatever the merits of the plaintiffs’ argument, I am struck by how fully and utterly they resisted any mention of God. I understand their antipathy toward organized religion. I feel a bit of it myself. But why battle against invoking the name of God? If one is a disbeliever, then why not simply remain silent when those words are read? Choose to dissent—and then, like any dissenter with the courage of her convictions, incur the costs. How deep is the animus of those who would litigate to remove from the schools any mention of the name of God!

When I first began my doctoral research over a decade ago, I empathized with these parents’ sentiments. At that time, I considered strict separation of church and state proper and necessary to ensure fairness in the classroom. Today, I feel somewhat differently. If the American people see fit to ask their children to swear allegiance to the flag, and if they wish to assert their devotion to God as part of that pledge, then the people probably are within their right to do so. For dissenters to abstain is perfectly reasonable, but I don’t know that their abstention requires special accommodation. The schoolchildren were not being asked to pray or read the Bible. They were being asked to permit their peers to acknowledge God in a brief, two-word phrase. Enduring that acknowledgement might infringe on the atheist minority, but even more would stifling it infringe on the majority.

Equally curious for me is the connection between God and country. What exactly do Americans have in mind when they swear loyalty to “one nation under God”? Are they simply asserting that Americans are loyal and obedient toward God? Or, are they suggesting that God is loyal to America and committed to its wellbeing? History would suggest the latter. Indeed, throughout human history, nations have imagined themselves specially favored in the eyes of God.

Perhaps it is inevitable for a nation to want God as a partisan of its cause, given the insecurities that any nation must endure. Still, the notion boggles my mind. Understanding God at all is difficult enough. Spiritual reality transcends human knowledge. But conceiving of God as a sports fan with team loyalty is bizarre. God the Partisan would be as small as nations themselves—a party to jealousies, injustices, and the worst sorts of violence. Of course, the God of the Torah and Old Testament was often such a party. But, for me, that is a dangerous conception of spiritual reality, one that propels believers into waging war rather than peace. Surely, God has nothing to do with national boundaries and national grievances.

If inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is a problem, the problem lies not in mentioning God’s name. The problem lies in glorifying nationhood to such a degree.