Joe Kennedy, who served in the Marine Corps before he coached the Bremerton High School Knights, a small town public school football team near Seattle, used to offer post-game gratefulness to God by kneeling at the 50-yard gridiron. In the public display of his faith, the teams’ players, supporters and sometimes even politicians would join him. He was said to have been inspired by the movie Facing the Giants, in which a Christian high school football coach Grant Taylor offers his thankfulness to God: “If we win, we praise Him. And if we lose, we praise Him. Either way we honor Him with our actions and our attitudes. So I’m askin’ you … What are you living for?”
The Bremerton school district objected to Kennedy’s display of his religion at a public event because that violated the First Amendment’s religion clause, which enjoins the state to be neutral in religious matters. As a football coach in a public school, Kennedy happened to represent the state willy-nilly. In 2015 the Bremerton school district suspended him, after which he resigned and sued the school district for the violation of his First Amendment religious right of free expression.
In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court, for a second time, has begun to consider whether a public school employee can exercise his faith in the public in a way that might coerce schoolchildren, some of whom might practice other faiths, to join him against their will. For more than six decades, the Supreme Court has affirmed the constitutional principle that the church and the state must remain separate. But times have changed. The Supreme Court has a conservative outlook. Regardless of its decision, God is never absent from public affairs in America.
Consider this: If you are visiting the United States for the first time, you might feel that there’s too much God here. This is perhaps the first cultural shock you might feel on arrival; but very soon it wears off because the American people don’t give much meaning to it, not as much as Islamic militants do to their resounding cry, Allah O Akbar. And Americans invoke God often because sometime they have nothing else to say.
Driving through the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside, a visitor would find it hard not to notice a billboard admonishing, “Everyone shall give an account of himself to God.” The U.S. dollar bill says, “In God We Trust.” When someone takes an oath of office, he or she has to repeat after the person who administers the oath, “So help me God!” If you sneeze, someone will say, “Bless you,” even if the person does not know you.
Most Americans invoke God as a conversational crutch — much as Frenchmen say “Bonjour,” the Brits say about the weather, “Is it hot enough for you?” or late night comedians use the “F” word — unless Americans feel really threatened, as it happened in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks when they mixed God with patriotism.
It is also true that, more than ever, the American political discourse, including whatever wisdom spouts from the White House, is suffused with references to God despite the constitutional brick wall between the church and the state.
You can’t live in fear and be free, and so invoking God sometimes makes you feel free from fear. But to be free also means to make your choice. Making a choice also includes choosing your own God, monotheistic or polytheistic; or even the God-Particle that the CERN lab in Switzerland has been trying to discover. It is not the government’s business to tell an American what God to choose, thus spoke the U.S. Constitution, and so ruled the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on June 26, 2002. The decision came after a lawsuit filed by a physician, Dr. Michael Newdow, an atheist who complained that his elementary school daughter’s First Amendment rights to be free from God were violated when she was given no choice but to “watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-run school leads her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that ours is ‘one nation under God.’”
Forty-seven states require the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in public schools with an option to opt-out. Until 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance included the phrase “one nation indivisible,” but to fight the godless communism (the Soviet or Chinese variety), Congress changed the Pledge to include “one nation under God.” The wall between church and state seemed to some extreme secularists to crack a little bit. And since then, God — not a sectarian one, Catholic or Protestant, but a generic God, a mythical supreme deity — has found a frequent place in the American public discourse.
In a 2-1 ruling, Judge Alfred T. Goodman of the Circuit Appeal Court ruled the Pledge that we are a “nation under God” is identical to saying we are a nation “under Jesus,” a nation “under Vishnu,” a nation “under Yahweh.” Such a profession violated the First Amendment mandate that the government shall stay neutral in matters of religion. It would send a wrong message to impressionable children that if they did not participate in the recitation of the pledge, they might become “outsiders,” the judge wrote.
The court discovered a glaring contradiction in what the U.S. Constitution professes and what the American people want to believe and practice. The Pledge excludes polytheists who worship multiple gods and goddesses, for example, Hindus; atheists and agnostics; or those like Buddhists, who believe in Nirvana, a state of supreme bliss, tranquility and purity that is attained when the self is absorbed into the infinite.
It has been argued that the recitation of the Pledge that includes “one nation under God,” is psychologically coercive, because it forces people to accept monotheism as the sole religious path available to them. The Pledge not only violates the Constitution but also negates cultural pluralism. It violates freedom of choice. We should return to the original wording in the pledge, “one nation indivisible,” so it is argued.
Most Americans, like the dissenting Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez, however, dismissed the fear that the United States might become a theocracy because of the inclusion “under God” in the Pledge. The Appeal Court’s ruling was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2004. Late Justice William Rehnquist said, “To give the parent of such a child a sort of ‘heckler’s veto’ over a patriotic ceremony willingly participated in by other students, simply because the Pledge of Allegiance contains the descriptive phrase ‘under God,’ is an unwarranted extension of the establishment clause, an extension which would have the unfortunate effect of prohibiting a commendable patriotic observance.”
In the Kennedy v. Bremerton School District case, which will be decided in June, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority might come to a similar decision that bending a knee at a football game for winning is no different from kneeling for racial justice.
Narain Batra, a scholar of the First Amendment, is the author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation, and the most recent, India In A New Key. He lives in Hartford. Contact him on Twitter @NDBatra.