UNDER GOD, UBER ALLES

When California courts decided Michael Newdow’s case -- getting rid of the “under God” part of the pledge of allegiance his daughter was reciting at school -- there were derisive hoots that next there would be attempts to remove references to God from our currency, oaths and government architecture.

That would be nice, actually.

Now is not the time, as the United States has more pressing problems: Its political and health care systems are broken; terrorism threatens; the deficit swells. You name it, the United States suffers from it, and all take precedence over the willful striking of God from public discourse. But the inclusion of God in politics and its products is simply silly.

As was noted in 2002, when Newdow’s case was heard in Sacramento, Calif., and rejected, and as will be noted again now that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear an appeal, God was only added to the pledge in 1954. You may remember the year: Teachers were fired for failing to sign loyalty oaths, and U.S. senators unanimously voted to impose up to a $10,000 fine and five years in jail for belonging to the Communist Party; Eisenhower got us into a war in Vietnam; racism was rampant, even established legal policy for much of it.

This is just another policy that may require rethinking from the 1950s.

But people want to protect God -- who, I’ve heard, can protect himself -- by keeping him in the pledge, and apparently on U.S. currency and elsewhere as well. (Although why it’s so nice that our dollar bills say “In God we trust” is a mystery. “Gimme a copy of Hustler. In exchange, here’s a strip of cloth-paper hybrid that refers to God.”) This makes sense for a country where, as noted by New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof in August, a representative 83 percent of Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus and 58 percent believe it is necessary to believe in God to be moral.

What’s worse than this sloppy urge Americans have to defy common sense is their even more pressing need to share their beliefs with others. This goes beyond silly. It’s offensive and ill-mannered. Pushing religion is not like trying to gather votes for a politician, an initiative or a recall, because religion is supposed to be private. And the intent of the First Amendment on the matter seems clear enough: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It doesn’t mention a specific religion, but religion in general, and when the government includes all sorts of references to God in its materials, that violates the spirit of the amendment.

It doesn’t matter how long those references have been around, or even if the founders of the country chose to cite their religious beliefs at every opportunity. They also boasted of the equality of their new nation’s inhabitants and kept slaves anyway -- but we seem to have gotten beyond that quirk.