From a Civil War coin to the Pledge, how 'under God' entered public life

Pull a coin out of your pocket. Go ahead. Turn it over and read the small print, the part everybody ignores because it has been there their whole lives. Four words, "In God We Trust," stamped into the metal by a government that, we are told by some, has no business mentioning the Almighty.

Now here is the part that should make you grin. Those words did not sneak in during some quiet moment of piety. They were put there in a national emergency, by a Treasury Secretary who was trying to hold a country together while it was killing itself. And the two words in the Pledge of Allegiance that cause so much fuss, "under God," got there in the middle of another emergency, when the country was staring down a rival empire that had made atheism part of its state ideology.

So let me tell you the story the way it happened, in order, with the dates. Because when you read the dates, you notice something the lawsuits and the cable segments leave out. These phrases were not put in to impose a faith. They were put in to say what kind of country we are, at the moments when we most needed to say it.

The terms, and the claim

A few definitions first, because the argument turns on them.

A motto is a short statement of a nation's creed. The United States has had more than one. "E Pluribus Unum," out of many, one, was on the Great Seal from 1782. "In God We Trust" became the official motto in 1956.

A ceremonial acknowledgment is a public statement that mentions God without requiring anyone to affirm it, pray, or join a church. Scholars use the phrase "ceremonial deism" for it, and the Supreme Court has used it too.

An establishment of religion, in the sense of the First Amendment, is a government church: official clergy on the public payroll, compulsory attendance, civil penalties for dissent. That is the thing the Founders wanted to forbid.

The claim I will defend has three parts. First, both phrases entered public life in times of national danger. Second, both were meant to mark the line between a free nation and its enemies, not to coerce a believer or a skeptic. Third, a free people can keep such acknowledgments and still honor the conscience of the person who objects, and the best way to see that is to look at how the law treats the objector.

Chapter one: the coin, 1861 to 1864

In November 1861, with the Civil War months old and going badly, a minister in Ridleyville, Pennsylvania, the Reverend M. R. Watkinson, wrote to the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. He proposed that the coins of the country carry a recognition of the Almighty, so that the nation's coins would openly recognize the Almighty. Chase took the idea up with James Pollock, the director of the Mint, and the two worked on a motto over the next couple of years.

Take a moment with the scene. It is a country in the middle of a war that would end up killing something like 620,000 soldiers, by the estimate historians most often use. The Union has lost at Bull Run. The Treasury is printing money and borrowing it. And a cabinet officer who has a hundred other crises on his desk takes time to think about what is stamped on a two-cent piece. That tells you what the people of that era thought coins were for. A coin was the one thing that went through every hand in the country, from the richest to the poorest. If you wanted to say something to the whole nation at once, you put it on money.

Chase drafted wording in a December 1863 letter to Pollock, first "In God is our trust" and then "In God We Trust." The Coinage Act of April 22, 1864, authorized a new two-cent piece, and the motto "In God We Trust" appeared on it. Over the following decades it appeared on some coins and not on others, and it became required on all coins and currency only with the 1955 law I come to below. But the principle was set: in the year 1864, when the republic's survival was an open question, the Treasury put a statement of trust in God on the money.

Notice what it was not. It was not a law requiring anyone to pray. It was not a tax for churches. It was a motto, a few words of national creed, put out by a government that was at that moment fighting to preserve a union and, by the end of that war, to end slavery. And the phrase has a lineage worth knowing. The final stanza of Francis Scott Key's poem from 1814, the one we sing as the national anthem, includes the line "And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" The idea had been in American civic language for half a century before it reached the coin.

Chapter two: the Pledge, from 1892 to 1954

The Pledge of Allegiance has a different origin. It was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and a magazine editor, for a campaign to put American flags in public schools around the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage. The original text was short. It said nothing of God. The wording was adjusted a couple of times in the 1920s to specify the flag of the United States of America.

Then the Cold War came. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union emerged as a power whose official ideology treated religion as a delusion to be stamped out. The Soviet state closed churches, imprisoned clergy and promoted atheism as policy. For Americans who watched this, the contrast was not abstract. One side of the world said that rights came from God and that the state was limited by them. The other said that rights came from the state, which therefore could take them back.

That contrast is what moved a great many people in the early 1950s. The Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization, began to adopt the wording "one nation under God" at its own meetings in 1951 and then campaigned for the change in public life. A Presbyterian minister in Washington, the Reverend George Docherty, preached a sermon on February 7, 1954, with President Eisenhower in the congregation, arguing that the Pledge as it stood lacked what sets American life apart. Resolutions were introduced in Congress. They passed with broad support.

On June 14, 1954, Flag Day, President Eisenhower signed the law adding the words "under God" after "one nation." In his statement on signing it, he said the words would reaffirm the place of religious faith in America's heritage and would strengthen the spiritual weapons that are the country's most powerful resource in peace or in war. That is a paraphrase, and you can check the exact text in the Public Papers of the Presidents.

So the Pledge changed because of a rival. It was a statement of the principle that separates a constitutional republic from a totalitarian state: our rights are not the gift of government, and government answers to something higher.

Chapter three: the motto becomes official, 1955 and 1956

The coin story had a second act. In 1955 Congress passed a law requiring the motto on all American coins and currency. In 1956, on July 30, a joint resolution declared "In God We Trust" to be the national motto of the United States. President Eisenhower signed it. Up to that date, no motto had been set by law; "E Pluribus Unum" had served in practice.

The date is worth lingering on, because it comes two years after the Pledge amendment, in the same decade, in the same fear. The nation had been through Korea. The Soviets had the bomb. Congress and the President looked for a short line that would tell the world what we stood for, and they chose the one from the Civil War coin. That is the kind of continuity a good historian likes: a phrase that was born in one era of national danger was revived and made official in another.

I will add one point of fairness here. Critics are right that the 1950s language was partly a response to communism, and that it was a political act. It was meant to be. The Founders also made political acts when they declared independence "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence." A nation is allowed to say what it believes about the source of its rights. The question is whether it can do so without compelling its citizens, and that is the question the courts have asked.

The objector's best argument

Here is the steelman. A citizen who is an atheist, or a believer in a faith that does not use that language, hears a government say "one nation under God" and feels counted out. She says that a Pledge recited daily by schoolchildren, with the teacher leading, carries an unmistakable message that the nation is a religious one and that she belongs to it a little less than her neighbor does. She says the Constitution forbids the government from taking a side on the question of whether God exists.

That is a serious position, and it has been put forward in court by decent people. I would answer it in four numbered steps.

1. No one is required to say it. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), the Supreme Court held that a school cannot compel a student to salute the flag or recite the Pledge. The decision came from the middle of the Second World War, a period when patriotic feeling was high, and Justice Jackson wrote that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion. A student who does not wish to say the words may sit quietly. The remedy for the objector was written into the law before "under God" was added.
2. The words are an acknowledgment, not an establishment. An acknowledgment that a nation's rights come from a Creator is the Declaration's own language, "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." No one has ever argued that the Declaration established a church.
3. The alternative is a government that must scrub its past. The 1864 coin and the 1954 law are part of the record. A rule that treats every mention of God in public life as unconstitutional would require a national edit of the Declaration, the anthem, and the oaths taken in courtrooms.
4. A free country can bear a ceremonial phrase. The test is coercion, and the objector in America has legal protection that a dissenter in a one-party state does not.

The courts: Newdow and after

The Pledge reached the Supreme Court in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004). A father, Michael Newdow, sued on behalf of his daughter, challenging the school district's policy of teachers leading the Pledge with the phrase "under God." The Ninth Circuit had held the policy unconstitutional. The Supreme Court reversed, but not on the main question. Justice Stevens, for the Court, held that Newdow lacked standing to sue on his daughter's behalf, because he did not have custody of her and the child's mother, who did, did not share his objection. Justice Scalia took no part.

Three justices, Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices O'Connor and Thomas, wrote separately that they would have reached the merits and upheld the Pledge. The Chief Justice said that the phrase is a patriotic exercise and not a religious one. Justice O'Connor wrote that the Pledge falls under the heading of ceremonial deism and is not an endorsement of religion. Justice Thomas reached the same result by arguing that the Establishment Clause should not be applied against the states and that a recitation involving no legal coercion is constitutional.

So the Supreme Court has never held "under God" unconstitutional, and the three justices who wrote on the merits would have upheld the Pledge.

Why the phrases marked a line

Let me say what I think all this means, in plain words.

Atheist communism was not a rumor in 1954. It was the official doctrine of a nuclear-armed state that ran concentration camps, had murdered millions of its own citizens, and wrote the destruction of religion into its program. The phrase "under God" in the Pledge was a flag planted on the other side of that line. It said that in this country the person comes before the state, and that there is a law above the law of the government.

That is why the phrase has lasted. It is not a decoration. It states a principle that, depending on your temperament, you can call theological or constitutional: if our rights are the gift of a Creator, then no legislature can vote them away, and no party can claim to be their source. Jefferson put it this way in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII: "And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?" A shorter, edited version of the passage is carved on a wall of the Jefferson Memorial.

The dates are the lesson. A free people says "under God" when it needs to remember that no earthly power is the last word. In 1864 it needed to remember it because the Union was bleeding. In 1954 it needed to remember it because a rival was telling the world otherwise. Whether you say the words or not is, thanks to Barnette, your own business.

What to read next

The posts on the Court's long argument about church and state give the background. Start with Everson v. Board of Education, the school bus case that changed church and state, then read two schoolgirls, a flag salute and the 1943 ruling that protected conscience for the case that protects the objector's right to stay silent. The Founders' own view of public acknowledgment is in Washington's 1789 and Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving proclamations side by side, and the question of why a free republic needs religion and morality is taken up in Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable. The argument about the Declaration's phrase is in Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics. Read the Declaration and the Constitution at the site's Constitution page, and the symbols themselves at the flag page.

The case in brief

1. "In God We Trust" came onto American coins in 1864 through the Coinage Act of April 22, after a minister's 1861 letter moved Treasury Secretary Chase, in the middle of the Civil War.
2. "Under God" entered the Pledge on June 14, 1954, Flag Day, in the Cold War, when the great rival of the United States held atheism as state doctrine.
3. Congress made "In God We Trust" the national motto on July 30, 1956, two years after the Pledge amendment.
4. The objector is protected by Barnette (1943), which bars compelled salutes, and the Court has never held the phrases unconstitutional. In Newdow (2004) it dismissed on standing while three justices would have upheld the Pledge.
5. The phrases state a principle, not a creed: rights come from a Creator, so government answers to something higher.

What you can do: read the Declaration's second paragraph aloud with your family and talk about why its authors named a Creator.