The theme for this Fourth of July Sunday is "False Promises-The Real History of Our Pledge." The texts are, from the Letter of James: "Live well, live wisely, live humbly-for it is the way you live, not the way you talk, that counts!" And from the Gospel of Matthew: "Jesus said to his companions: 'You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace-for in making your remarks sound more religious, they become less true. Just say 'yes' and 'no'-for when you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.'"

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I must confess to you on this Fourth of July—this high holy day of hot-dogs and heated devotions to God and country—that I am not feeling very patriotic.  In truth, I am struggling with what it means to be a citizen of this country.  For sadly enough, we have become a nation that now oscillates between self-satisfied isolationism and unbecoming “do it our way and our way alone” imperialism.  We have adopted a policy of “pro-active, preemptive war” which drew us into Afghanistan and Iraq and which will, if not corrected, draw us into Iran, and Syria, and North Korea.   Added to the mix is a babbling blur of Christian religio-patrio fanaticism that flows from the lips of our President and his Cabinet—a fanaticism that causes these folk to flat out fail to exegete the biblical proof texts they quote or to examine the history of the country they call us to pledge our allegiance to!  Obviously they have failed to listen to Jesus’ remarks in Matthew “Don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace—for in making your remarks sound more religious, they become less true. “   We should nail that quote to the doors of the White House and of Congress!

Rippling flags . . .and nationalistic rhetoric . . .and pledges of allegiance . . .they are all part of this day.  Yet I would dare to argue that rippling flags, and nationalistic rhetoric, and pledges of allegiance are used to turn us away from the truth—to divert our attention from the task of living well, and wisely, and humbly as a nation which is part of the world community.

This is why I want to take a moment today to look at the real history of our country’s Pledge of Allegiance—a history I stumbled upon a few years ago.  This history literally blew me away—for the original intent of this pledge is very different than what we have been taught or told.  So listen well—and learn!

Now the author of the original Pledge of Allegiance was a progressive Baptist Minister name Francis Bellamy.  Interestingly enough, he was also a Christian Socialist.  After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary in 1880, Bellamy accepted his first pastorate at the First Baptist Church of Little Falls, New York—a rugged industrial community. Upon his arrival, he quickly became concerned about the state of the many factory-workers in the area that were not only under-paid but under-fed as well.  Thus, as one church member said about him on the first anniversary of his ordination, “Rev. Bellamy is a man of magnificent physique, imposing and magnetic.  I do wish, however, that he would stop talking about the poor and the despised so regularly!

Five years later, in 1885, Rev. Bellamy accepted a call to the Bethany Baptist Church in Boston, Massachusetts—a mission church supported by the Baptist Social Union.   Through its financial support, the Union hoped to expand the Baptist faith among the growing upper-class of the city.  Yet, through his work with the poor in Little Falls, Bellamy now felt that it was his duty to bring spiritual uplift to hard-pressed workers and their families in Boston—and so he made sure that the worship service at Bethany Baptist was always focused on the plight of the poor, with an overarching emphasis on charity, philanthropy, education, and spiritual nurture.  The church began to grow—but as one member of the Mission Board observed, it was the ‘Working-poor and not the wealthy” who were filling up the pews.  Added to this, many conservative members of the Baptist Social Union became increasingly bothered by what they referred to as “ Bellamy’s socialist agenda—preaching sermons about Jesus’ special concern for the downtrodden and the early church’s’ call to share their possessions with those around them with a total disregard for class or condition!  This is wholly unacceptable!” the Union Board declared, and so they drastically reduced their financial support of Bellamy’s ministry.

In a letter to the Board, written in the winter of 1891, Bellamy explained why he sympathized with the underprivileged.  “The Bible is full of sympathy for the poor,” he wrote, “and the Savior was the poor man’s friend. Yet I have never preached against the rich.  In fact, I have, on occasion, avoided reading the many biblical statements against them.  But I do admit that I have condemned covetousness as the most prevalent sin of our day and have emphasized that the New Testament condemns this sin at greater length than any other.  And so I am a Christian Socialist on the basis of the Scriptures alone.”

Six months later, with the church under financial duress, Bellamy was forced to resign! And he never served the church again!

But there is an interesting twist to this story—a twist that would give Bellamy a whole new forum in which to share and promote his Christian Socialist beliefs.  One of the members of the Bethany Baptist Church was the progressive businessman Daniel Ford, the publisher of “The Youth’s Companion”—a family magazine with the largest national circulation of its day (around 500 thousand subscribers).  Daniel Ford had begun attending Bethany Baptist Church because he liked Bellamy’s sermons on human liberty and communal commitment and his negative judgment on extreme individualism and materialism, and Ford had stayed because he believed strongly in the church’s welfare activities.  Now, with Bellamy out of work, Ford offered him a job at his magazine—with the special task of not only “shaking things up”, as Ford put it, but overseeing the magazine’s promotion of a National Public School Celebration for Columbus Day.

Bellamy went right to work—urging the young readers of “The Youth’s Companion” to ask their teachers and school boards to support this National Public School Celebration, and to set up local committees composed of citizens, teachers, and students.  State Superintendents of Education were asked to issue a circular to school officials and teachers urging them to support the observance.  And at the center of this celebration of Public School Education was to be, at Bellamy’s suggestion, the United States Flag.  Teddy Roosevelt, then a member of the Untied States Civil Service commission, made this statement about Bellamy’s celebratory plan:  “The Public School System and the Flag stand together as powerful symbols of American civilization.  The Public School System is the leading form in which the principles of equality and fraternity take shape across our land, while the Flag represents not only those principles of equality, fraternity, and liberty, but also the great pulsing nation with all its hopes, and all its past, and all its moral power.  So it is eminently fitting that the Public School System and the Flag should stand together on Columbus Day!”

As the 21^st of October 1892 rapidly approached, Bellamy began working on a program that would be used in every public school across the country.  The overriding theme of the program was that the Public School System was the one characteristic institution that linked all neighborhoods together in the United States and thus furnished a common bond for a national celebration.  The program was to honor Columbus’ landing in the new world, but, even more, it was to honor the American Public School System as the institution most truly representative of American ideals. (Another interesting point in light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on private school vouchers)

Bellamy diligently wrote the address that was to be read in every school—and the address began with these words, “We assemble here this day that we may exalt the free school that embodies the American principle of universal enlightenment and equality.  For the free school, more than any other institution of our past is the most trusted for our future.  Our founding Fathers in their wisdom knew that the foundations of liberty, fraternity, and equality must be universal education.  The free school therefore was conceived as the cornerstone of the Republic.  Washington and Jefferson recognized that the education of citizens is not the prerogative of church or of other private interests; that while religious training belongs to the church, and while technical and higher culture may be given by private institutions—the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State.  America, therefore gathers her sons and daughters around the schoolhouse today as the institution closest to the people, most characteristic of the people, and the fullest of hope for the people.  We, who today unite under the Flag, understand our duty.  We pledge ourselves that the flag shall not be stained, and that America shall mean equal opportunity and justice for every citizen, and unity for the world!”

And then, as people were asked to stand, the Pledge of Allegiance, which Bellamy composed, was to be spoken.  You have the original pledge in your Bulletin today, just below my Sermon Title, and I ask you now to stand and repeat it with me:

I pledge allegiance to my flag

and the republic for which it stands,

one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. 

Now did that sound strange to your ear?  Did you notice what’s missing?   A few things!  In 1924 the National Flag Conference, under the leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the words “my flag” to “the flag of the United States of America.”  Bellamy was furious with this change, because it had been his ardent hope that the Pledge of Allegiance could become a universal pledge where children around the world could make a commitment to the varied principles of their own countries—but his protests were repeatedly ignored.

Then in 1954, as Billy Graham rose to fame as a Red-baiter warning Americans that they would perish in a nuclear holocaust unless they embraced Jesus Christ, as Norman Vincent Peale grafted religion onto the era’s feel-good consumerism, and as the fear of atheistic communists was running rampant in Washington, Congress, with the support of President Eisenhower, added the words “under God’ to the Pledge.  The legislative history of the Act stated that the hope was to “acknowledge the dependence of our people and our Government upon the Creator and to deny the atheistic and materialistic concept of communism!”  In signing the bill on June 14, 1954 (flag Day), Eisenhower delighted in the fact that from this day forth, and I quote, “millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty!”  That our nation, constitutionally speaking, is in fact dedicated to the opposite proposition seemed to escape Eisenhower then—as it seems to escape so many today.  (And just as a historical side-note, in 1955, with Eisenhower’s endorsement, Congress added the words “In God We Trust” on all paper money, while also making the same four words the nation’s official motto, replacing “E Pluribus Unim”—the Latin phrase meaning one from many which had, since 1776,  served as a reminder of America’s attempt to make one unified nation of people from varying backgrounds and religious beliefs!)  Bellamy’s granddaughter at the time said that Bellamy would have also deeply resented this second change to his universal pledge—for now it was not a patriotic oath as her grandfather had intended but rather it was a political prayer that flew in the face of the intentions of the founding fathers!

But there is one other word missing from Bellamy’s original pledge—and it is this:  “equality”.  Bellamy wanted deeply to include this word in his Pledge because he believed that the American business community had run the concept of “liberty” into the ground.  Liberty had come to mean the “right of great corporations to oppress people, for fraudulent stock sales, and for”, as Bellamy put it, “the economic atoms on the top of the heap to oppress the atoms on the bottom of the pile.  Equality,”  Bellamy argued, pointed to the fact that “society was not a loose collection of atom-like economic individuals but an extended family!  Equality”, Bellamy wrote, “meant equal rights to an education on the part of poor children as much as for rich children.  Equality included the right of people to work and earn a decent living for their families.  And equality meant”, as Bellamy so firmly believed, “that a person’s religious beliefs, or lack thereof, could not be dismissed or demeaned by the State.” 

Sadly enough, Bellamy reluctantly removed this word from his original Pledge because he was informed that “equality” would be an unacceptable concept for the state superintendents of education in the midst of a society which at the time denied the vote and most civil rights to African-Americans and women!

So there it is! There is the true history of our national pledge! I hope it gives you a new perspective this Fourth of July.  For you see, in the current sea of pious political posturing, in this country where it seems like what you say (or don’t say) is more important than the way you live, and at a time when too many think that every turban conceals a terrorist and every accent reveals an anarchist, we are in desperate need of what Wendell Berry calls the “complex, never-completed affection for our land and our neighbors that is true patriotism.”  And as Christians, as companions of Christ’s way, I believe we have the added challenge of living as a body without boarders—a body of equality, as Bellamy would put it, where all people are held as valued members of the global community whatever there personal beliefs or religious practices may be.  That kind of worldview doesn’t require a pledge but rather it requires, as Bellamy wrote, “a radical commitment to equal opportunity and justice for every citizen and an openness to the diversity of the world!”

That may be a difficult truth for many Americans to grasp this Fourth of July weekend, but I firmly believe that it is the only truth that will really set us free.