The Pledge of Allegiance...Great if we Practiced It

We humans tend to squint our eyes against truth. The reason is that truth is so unsettling. “I came not to bring peace but division,” says Jesus. In other words, there is no way God’s kind of truth can advent our soil without making a scene. There is no way this kind of Truth can come calmly into our lives and still be Truth.

Truth be told, it’s been that way with all great moral truths and movements of history. The cold war of the eighties. The civil rights movement of the sixties. The abolitionist movement. The right of women to vote. The equal rights amendment. And presently the churches fight over homosexuality. My goodness, I could go all the way back to Galileo who said the earth was round and not flat, and was labeled a heretic by his beloved Catholic Church when this unpleasant truth advented the old, unchanging status quo of his world. All of these events carried a moral truth that people did not want to accept, therefore making it unpleasant truth.

Well, this brings me back to our Pledge of Allegiance. I believe it contains Truth that would be very close to God’s heart. The problem is we don’t practice what it says. For instance:

One nation under God? The unpleasant truth is that we can’t define our nation like that when our crime rate is the highest of any civilized country in the world. We’re killing and terrorizing each other and evidently are having an effect on our kids too, as over 500,000 weapons, mostly handguns travel to school every day in this country. But we’re so anesthetized to it, because it happens so often. A nation under the leadership of God? I don’t think so, until we begin to get responsible enough to love and therefore share God’s freedom. I think it is better not to live than not to love.

Indivisible? The unpleasant truth is that we are as divided as pieces of a glass that has just shattered on the floor, which creates no unifying peace among us, because peace cannot happen as long as people live in pieces. Don’t we know that the seed of disrespect regarding people not like us invariably gives birth to division, the siblings of which are hatred and violence? As Jesus said, “it’s easy to love your own kind.”

With liberty and justice for all? The unpleasant truth is that liberty is an illusion if it doesn’t include the responsibility to give freedom and love to others, which is part of the truth that Jesus said would make us truly free. And justice for all? The unpleasant truth is that there is no justice for all, only for some, and most of those never think about the millions of fellow citizens who have been dealt injustice nationwide. It’s easy to think “justice for all” as long as injustice doesn’t fall our way.

I think you know as well as I do that our pledge has great truths inherent therein, but our spirits and actions have some holes in them, so let me suggest something. As you say the pledge next, think of it as a hope for the better in all of us. Think of it as prayer. Think of it as God’s painful sword that will heal the wounds of our country.

God’s truth will always give us hope, if we choose to walk in God’s truth and not the illusory truth we created to keep us feeling good, while others struggle to get by. If there is a way that we are going to get better, it lies in first taking a full look at the worst. That’s where the sword of Christ comes in; dividing us so that we may together see our illusions in order that we may be better unified (the ultimate paradox). Looking at the comfort of our illusory truth, then turning toward the unpleasant truth that promises to free us and promises to us good new days. As I see it, this is our only option if we are to share unity and hope and peace in this society!