One nation under God? Let’s act like it

Is America one nation under God? As a lifelong American citizen who wouldn’t even consider living in another country, my answer always defaults to “yes.” I tend to say yes to a lot of things by rote when unchallenged. I think it’s a byproduct of being human.

American humans proudly tout their professional baseball and football team finalists as “world champions.” Never mind that our major sports teams compete almost exclusively in the United States, or that some nations use the terms football and soccer interchangeably. The Marshall Plan rebuilt many of those countries after WWII. Now they’re thanking us. “Hey America, keep taking our tired, poor, huddled masses and we won’t snicker at your ‘World Champion’ fetish. You’re welcome.”

Many of us recited the Pledge of Allegiance, the source of “one nation under God” in grade school. The Pledge, reputedly written in 1892 by American Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, was updated with “under God” by President Eisenhower in 1954.

Maybe we should highlight another concept in the Pledge of Allegiance: indivisibility. GOP internal wrangling spews the opposite. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks once cited a loss of moral knowledge among Republicans leading up to and since Jan. 6, 2021, thanks to “the panic of Rush Limbaugh,” the lowering of acceptable behavior standards and rising tolerance for violence.

The Bible says all nations exist equally, so America qualifies as a nation under God. Now if we just acted like one.

Jim Newton

Itasca