I find that Facebook is a wonderful source of adrenalin-inducing anger, laughter, and the occasional “SAY WHAT?!”  I encountered the latter last week when a Facebook friend who is my age posted one of those “if you (fill in your own cause, belief, or threat here), share this” memes. This particular one had to do with the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Share if you want to keep saying the Pledge of Allegiance like we did when we were children.” He was, of course, referring to the phrase “Under God.”

Unless his childhood began after he entered high school, this argument has about as much validity as the (probably apocryphal) argument for the King James Bible: it was good enough for Jesus, and it’s good enough for me.

The phrase “Under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, changing the 62-year-old pledge. A few years later (1957) we started putting “In God We Trust” on our paper money.

(There are a couple of ironies here. The Pledge of Allegiance was written by a socialist, and the first use of “In God We Trust” on coins was during the civil war, and it’s said that at least part of the reason was to emphasize that God was on the Union side.)

I really don’t mind saying “under God” in the Pledge, nor am I particularly opposed to have “In God We Trust” on my money (even though E Pluribus Unum does, I think, speak more to where we came from). However, I am upset by the thinking behind both of those additions.

They were came from the Cold War, some politician’s idea of what it would take to set the United States apart from Godless Communism. If we wanted to be different from that bunch of atheists over there, we had to slap a slogan on something. This was the same era that gave us Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities committee, guilt by association and black listing.

We proudly adopted our slogans, and we’ve kept on doing it for these sixty-plus years. To me it’s troublesome that people don’t seem to question whether adopting a slogan or inserting a couple of the words into the pledge is really useful in terms of showing other people that our people (at least some of them) believe in God. (Another interesting tidbit: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all have their phrase for “In God We Trust.” And unless you teach at certain small colleges you can safely contend that they’re talking about the same God.)

I would suggest that if we really want to show the world that we trust in God we quit trying to substitute slogans for actions. Instead of calling for indiscriminate carpet bombing, let’s go back to basics:

 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

That, of course, is the separation of the sheep from the goats. Doesn’t say a word about passing Religious Freedom laws to protect pastors from a problem they don’t really have. Doesn’t say a thing about banning, prohibiting, or pushing away. Not a syllable about putting us above another. None of the easy things.

It seems that, at least at the political level, we’ve decided that we can substitute a slogan for actually doing anything. Else how could the Georgia legislature spend all that time on multiple religious freedom bills and no time at all on the twenty percent of our children who are (in the sanitized bureaucratic lexicon) “nutritionally insecure?” How can we, who have been given so much, ignore the needy, the mentally ill, and those who are simply trying to save their and their families lives?

It seems that the most important thing is to have a good slogan and protect people from the somewhat distant eventuality that they may have to associate with those they call sinners. There’s a place in the Bible that talks about that, too.

Selah.