The first teacher was a fire-breathing Catholic-the church he attended was a renegade sect, a hyper-traditionalist splinter from the Catholic Church, too conservative to be recognized by the Catholic Church proper. And, as a practicing Catholic with a little knowledge of the Church, let me tell you: You have to be a reactionary among reactionaries to get thrown out of the Catholic Church.
The second teacher was an atheist. He was a clever, demanding teacher of computer science whose only joys, seemingly, were teaching C++, playing chess and writing essays on the follies of faith.
Strangely enough, both of them agreed that the words "under God" should be stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance. The Catholic felt that, since hardly anyone meant it when saying "under God," it was blasphemous to invoke the Divine in vain. The atheist thought that it was a silly invocation of a nonentity. Needless to say, the two of them got along very well with each other.
Religious questions have a curious way of fogging even the most objective commentators, and I think that that's what happened to both of them. The question of whether or not the phrase "under God" should be included in the Pledge is, in my opinion, a strictly legal question, and should be judged by the muster of our Constitution, not by the religious preference of any given commentator.
In a world where we all understood and agreed on the substance of our constitutional jurisprudence, this simple, no-nonsense approach would solve the problem entirely. If the Constitution forbade mentioning God in public schools, He would have to stick to churches, synagogues, and mosques. Likewise, if the Constitution were silent on the subject, the question would be left to the electorate, which would be free to ask children to invoke the Almighty before geometry class.
Unfortunately, the Pledge of Allegiance is a legal mess, and hardly anyone agrees on what precisely the Constitution says about God. As we all know, the phrase "separation of church and state" occurs nowhere in the Constitution, so our only choice is to rely on the Supreme Court's tangled series of opinions on the matter. And, I'm afraid that even the Supremes are confused.
Take the recent and famous case of Elk County School District vs. Newdow. The plaintiff, an atheist by the name of Michael Newdow, broke every rule of politesse at the Supreme Court by successfully demanding a Scalia recusal and by having the temerity to argue on his own behalf. Fortunately or not, depending on your perspective, Newdow lost his case on a technicality-the Court's opinion, authored by the most liberal justice on the bench, John Paul Stevens, held that Newdow lacked standing since he's a divorcee without custody of his daughter. To quote Stevens' opinion: "In our view, it is improper for the federal courts to entertain a claim by a plaintiff whose standing to sue is founded on family law rights that are in dispute when prosecution of the lawsuit may have an adverse effect on the person who is the source of the plaintiff's claimed standing." In other words, the grand judgment of the Supreme Court is that you can't sue on behalf of your little daughter (of whom you don't have custody) if the media blitz is going to make life hard for her.
The dissenters-Justices Rehnquist and, in parts, Thomas and O'Connor-blasted Stevens for his "proverbial excursion ticket" of an opinion and noted that our public discourse has included religious rhetoric since Washington. But all of that, in my humble, non-lawyerly opinion, is legal water under the bridge. Here's the critical point: Congress passed a law in 1942 prescribing the Pledge, the State of California chose to make it a mandatory observance for public schools and the school district in question chose to comply with state law. Three levels of popularly-elected government have agreed that the Pledge of Allegiance is a great idea, there's nothing in the Constitution itself that forbids the inclusion of the words "under God," and the case law is so muddled that even the liberal half of the Supreme Court decided to take a pass. So, the Pledge will be said.
At the end of the day, what do I personally think about the words "under God"? It doesn't make much difference. Like Congress, the California State Legislature and the Elk County School Board, I had a choice. And, I think that opponents of the phrase "under God" would do well to argue their case in the theater of America democracy and then to give Americans that same choice: state by state, citizen by citizen, in the good old American way.
Montana can be reached at jmontana08@amherst.edu