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Christian organizations' responses to the Supreme Court's "under God" ruling have slowed to a trickle, but division continues. (See yesterday's Weblog if you missed remarks from most of the biggies.)

Family Research Council president Tony Perkins sides with Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the Rutherford Institute's John Whitehead, and a few others in lamenting that the Court based its decision on Michael Newdow's legal standing, not on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance. "I believe the Supreme Court should have used this opportunity to uphold the right of school children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance," Perkins said. "Look for more atheists to come out of the closet in the near future with new attacks on the Pledge. The High Court will not be able to sidestep this issue for long."

Concerned Women for America's Jan LaRue, however, has expanded her earlier comment praising the ruling. "The Court's ruling on the issue of standing is by no means 'just a technicality,'" she says. Her analysis is headlined with a praise for the Court's "pledge for parental rights and judicial restraint."

The Catholic League says the decision is imperfect, but good enough. "It is too bad that the substantive issue of whether recitations of the Pledge in school are legal wasn't addressed," says William Donohue. "It is regrettable only because there is a concerted effort in this country, led by organizations that are openly hostile to religion, to eliminate all public vestiges of our religious heritage." That effort "must be stopped dead in its tracks" rather than merely thwarted, he says. Still, he enthuses, "This is not a good day for the radical secularists. Which is why it is such a good day for everyone else."

So far, however, almost all of the pundits have merely remarked on the headlines rather than on the actual court opinions. Indeed, it's important to take note of the diversity of the justices' arguments on this case. Justices Thomas and O'Connor joined in Chief Justice Rehnquist's "concurring" opinion that "under God" is constitutional, but the three of them cannot be further apart in their reasons for believing that. Rehnquist says "under God" is merely a historical nod to religion; Thomas says it's a contemporary but acceptable reference to religion; O'Connor says it's not a reference to religion at all.

Rehnquist says, "Our national culture allows public recognition of our Nation's religious history and character." The Pledge, he argues, is a "recognition of the fact … that our Nation was founded on a fundamental belief in God." It's okay because it's historical.

Thomas, however, says that the Pledge is truly religious in a contemporary context. "Pledging allegiance is to declare a belief that now includes that this is 'one nation under God,'" he says. "It is difficult to see how this does not entail and affirmation that God exists." But such an affirmation is okay under the Constitution, he says, because the First Amendment merely bars the establishment of a national religion and asking students to recite the Pledge doesn't do that.

O'Connor, however, denies that "under God" has any religious meaning. In fact, she says, the words don't really mean anything; they simply "serve to solemnize an occasion instead of to invoke divine provenance." The Pledge and other references or commemorations of religion in public life "are more properly understood as employing the idiom for essentially secular purposes. … Any religious freight the words may have meant to carry originally has long since been lost."

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48