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Journal of the American Academy of Religion Advance Access originally published online on February 14, 2007
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2007 75(1):121-149; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfl065
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Pledge of Allegiance and the Meanings and Limits of Civil Religion

Grace Y. Kao* and Jerome E. Copulsky{dagger}

* Grace Y. Kao, Assistant Professor, Religious Studies Program, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 204 Major Williams Hall (0227), Blacksburg, VA 24061, gkao{at}vt.edu
{dagger} Jerome E. Copulsky, Assistant Professor and Director of Judaic Studies, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 215 Lane Hall (0227), Blacksburg, VA 24061, copulsky{at}vt.edu


  Abstract

Recent court challenges to the constitutionality of teacher-led recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools have centered on the question whether the Pledge is to be understood as a religious or secular ritual, given its post-1954 addition of the phrase "under God." After a brief discussion of Establishment Clause jurisprudence on this question, we argue that the category of civil religion usefully illuminates what is at stake in constitutional debates about the Pledge and in similar rituals. We develop four perspectives through which the Pledge of Allegiance in particular, and civil religion in general, can be understood to function: preservationist, pluralist, priestly, and prophetic. Thus the ongoing controversy surrounding the Pledge of Allegiance is best understood not as a dispute between "believers" and "atheists," but on the contested meaning, significance, and propriety of civil religion in America itself. In the end, we suggest that even without the contested phrase, the Pledge would remain a potent ritual of civil religion, serving all four functions, and urge further serious study of the religious significance of the phenomenon of civil religion.

A version of this paper was presented at the Law, Religion, and Culture Consultation of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 21, 2005.


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