How Can “One Nation, Under God” Ever Be “Indivisible”?
The wall of separation between church and state in the United States has often been breached. Now the White Christian nationalism at the core of the MAGA movement threatens to dismantle it.
When I was growing up in rural central Illinois in the 1960s, White Christian nationalism was not just a well-trodden path, it was a highway paved with impenetrable concrete and all of us were on it. At the time, it just seemed natural to me that the United States had always been, could only be, and would always be a White Christian nation.
Every school day of my childhood started with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Every Sunday, at church, we recited the Lord’s Prayer. The link between the two recitations was unmistakable. Christian faith went with American patriotism like bread went with butter.
By the age of five or six, I had made the pledge and said the prayer so often I could do them on auto-pilot. I was a quiet and bookish kid with an overactive imagination. While reciting, I let my mind wander.
As a small child, I didn’t fully comprehend all the words I recited. No adult ever explained to me what the language of the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer actually meant. My stream of thought would catch and eddy around words and phrases I only half understood.
In church, I made mental movies of what it might look like to “trespass” or to “trespass against” someone. In school, when a kid substituted “invisible” for “indivisible” I assumed they just couldn’t wrap their minds around the bigger, stranger word and my thoughts would flit between images of a ghostly deity — the one I imagined was in the head of my not so bright schoolmate — and musing over what kind of nation might be impervious to division.
In my mind as a child, the joint promise of the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance was clear. As long as I avoided temptation and remained loyal to the American flag, my path could never stray from the highway to heaven. But I had doubts.
Neither God in heaven nor an indivisible nation ever seemed more concrete than words to me. I was a skeptic by nature and I paid attention to the national news.
What I learned from the news as a child in the early 1960s made it impossible for me to imagine there could be any sort of deity — Christian or otherwise — promising to hand out tickets to heaven to American patriots. Each night I listened as Walter Cronkite intoned box scores from the War in Vietnam, always large numbers of enemies killed and wounded and smaller numbers for American and allied casualties.
Granted, from early childhood on I was agnostic and tending toward atheism, but I was thoroughly schooled in Christian values and I knew that pledging loyalty to “…one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” was not enough to make such a righteous-sounding vision of America a reality.
Where was the liberty and where was the justice in the atrocious behavior of White people I saw in the news spewing racial hatred and turning fire hoses and attack dogs on Black Civil Rights demonstrators in the South?
My dyed-in-the-wool Republican family and neighbors in rural Illinois did not appear to be at all concerned about the non-American deaths in Vietnam or about the brutal and violent suppression of peaceful Civil Rights protestors in America. Even though their hypocrisy was readily apparent to me, the White Christian nationalist beliefs they passed on to me as a child seemed mostly benign.
Now, more than a half century later, I can see where an unquestioning allegiance to White Christian nationalism has led us. The promise of “one nation, under God, indivisible” has been twisted into the hated-fueled fever dream of MAGA anti-democratic extremism.
Anyone who calls for the nation to complete the unfinished business of “liberty and justice for all” is mocked and dismissed as weak and unpatriotic.
Christian faith has always amplified the polarities of American politics.
Christianity divides morality from immorality, good from evil, the saved from the damned. At the same time, the church preaches unity. In the Methodist church I attended, I was taught to believe any human can choose salvation. But, in the end, there is only one path, the Christian path to salvation and anyone who does not choose it is lost.
Similarly, the American patriotism I learned as a child was both unifying and divisive. I grew up in the long shadow of the Cold War. The addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 was designed to make American patriotic education unambiguously distinct from patriotic education in the Soviet Union. The fundamental conflict with the Constitution’s Establishment Clause was ignored.
In school, it was made clear to me that America had enemies both at home and abroad. We practiced “duck and cover” atomic bomb drills and we were taught to believe there were “pinkos” and “commies” hiding in plain sight on Main Street and constantly plotting to deprive us of our liberty.
For me, the political polarization of today is reminiscent of the 1960s with at least one key difference. In the 1960s, religious and politically conservative White people tended to be complacent and eager to maintain the status quo. Now, White evangelicals are among the most agitated, anti-government activists willing to subvert American democracy to advance authoritarian, minority rule. I did not agree with them then and I strongly oppose them now.
Still, a part of my childhood Christian upbringing has stuck with me and gives me cause for optimism. I was taught loving one another was at the heart of Christian belief. Somewhere, deep inside, I hold out hope for a re-awakening of this fundamental commitment among politically conservative, evangelical Christians. When and if that day comes, White Christian nationalism and the anti-democratic passion it fuels must surely fade into oblivion.
