Daily Bible Study with Purpose

“On June 14, 1954, at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s urging, the Congress legislated that “under God” be added, making the pledge read: 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.” 

The original pledge took root in the late 19th century. In 1891, Francis Bellamy, the son of a Baptist minister and a former preacher himself accepted a job with the family magazine Youth’s Companion. Put to work in the magazine’s promotions department, Bellamy was tasked with creating patriotic programs for schoolchildren ahead of the Columbian Exposition’s dedication in October 1892, the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

 

It was not long before calls to insert “under God” gained momentum. Enter the Rev. George Docherty. “I came from Scotland, where we said ‘God save our gracious queen,’ ‘God save our gracious king,'” Docherty told the Associated Press in 2004. “Here was the pledge of allegiance, and God wasn’t in it at all.” “An atheistic American is a contradiction in terms,” Docherty said in his sermon. “If you deny the Christian ethic, you fall short of the American ideal of life.” Until he died in 2008 at age 97, Docherty was known for his support of racial equality. His church was often a home for civil rights and antiwar demonstrations. Docherty was with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. During one of the civil rights marches across the bridge in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday. Docherty criticized the Vietnam War from his pulpit, even when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was in the congregation.