The Pledge of Allegiance: National Pride or Socialist Garbage?

The Pledge

In and of itself, the pledge of allegiance is an innocuous little thing. It basically reaffirms ones love of this country – or at least it sounds as such.

USFlag.org: I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands,
one Nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

It even claims one nation under God in an attempt to quell any issues about an otherwise secular pledge being recited by Christians. Eisenhower is even quoted as saying that:

USGovInfo: “In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.”

Unfortunately, I believe anything done by politicians to be suspect. At the time we were in the cold war with the God-less communists (mainly the Russians), we were in the midst of McCarthyism, and we were just out of the Korean Conflict (1950-1953). A sound-bite is a sound-bite whether it be 2011 or 1954.

The Author

Francis Belamy, the man credited with penning the original pledge, was a former Baptist minister who left the ministry to pursue his socialist agenda, one that his brother Edward Bellamy also had.

New York Times: “As Jeffrey Owen Jones and Peter Meyer note, the original author of the pledge was a former Christian Socialist minister who hoped to redeem the United States from its class and ethnic antagonisms. Interpretations of its meaning have been growing more conservative, not more liberal, ever since.

The author in question was Francis Bellamy, cousin to the novelist Edward Bellamy, whose “Looking Backward” offered the 19th century’s most popular vision of a future welfare-­state utopia. In 1892, after abandoning the ministry, Francis was working at The Youth’s Companion, a mass-market magazine aimed at schoolchildren.” (keywords being “welfare-state utopia”)

Socialist Garbage

This is a man who was thrown out of a church he pastored because his views were too socialist. This is before the advent of even 1920s Germany, much less Hitler and his Nazi party. Why should we, as freedom lovers, recite this twice amended pledge to socialist ideals. While I applaud his ideas of unity, I am sickened by his attempts to use the pulpit to try and further those views. I am sickened by his marketing the pledge to children first, as if he were trying to over come adult objections by getting the kids to like it (who would become adults themselves in due time).

Here is my appeal to you:
If you are American, if you love freedom, if you want to really honor our servicemen and women, than I urge you to reject the Pledge of Allegiance. I urge you to reject its socialist author and his agenda. I have no problems embracing freedom, nor pledges of loyalty. The Bible is rife with them and they took different forms. Some nationalistic pride is fine, but as a Christian, this isn’t my home. My home is being prepared has been prepared for me in Heaven. Don’t be distracted by dead people who got at least this one thing wrong. I thank God I live in what is still the freest country in the land. I thank God everyday I have the freedom to do as I please. There are Christian brothers and sisters being killed, raped, tortured, and arrested around the world because of faith. There are nonbelievers suffering starvation and agonizing pain while I sit in an centrally heated home. I have all this because God blessed a group of men nearly 200 years ago who worked to lift us up from under the thumb of a tyrant. Let’s not trade one tyrant for another. Squash the pledge, squash socialism, and squash those who would dare try to take to me what God has so graciously given.