The Little League Pledge, written by Peter J. McGovern in 1954 and recited at the beginning of many Little League games, begins as follows:
I trust in God
I love my country
And will respect its laws
In this pledge, America is more unapologetically Christian than usual. God is even given priority over federal law. Sure, it never explicitly says the God they’re talking about is the Christian one. But nobody’s confused.
1954 was a big year for God in America. In the grips of the Cold War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower needed something to distinguish his country from the atheistic communist Soviet Union. He fell back on the old American purification trump card: Christianity. The same year that McGovern made America’s pastime a godly game, Eisenhower added “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.
His blatant disregard for the First Amendment was ignored because of one absolute truth: There is no separation of church and state in the United States of America.
The first European colonizers in the Americas were the Spanish conquistadors, equipped with their Requerimiento explaining their “obligation” to kill non-converting Indigenous peoples in the name of God. Their “spiritual conquest” of the Americas, as Hernán Cortés called it, set the stage for the next wave of European colonization: English Puritans, their brains so full of dreams of a white Christian ethnostate on Cape Cod that they forgot they didn’t know how to fish, farm or hunt.
Once those religious zealots got over their complete ineptitude, they spread their desires for a white theocratic paradise across the continent, ruled by the word of the Bible and free of such dirt and sin as Black people, democracy and Catholics. The idea of the “free” country that the United States would purport itself to be in the coming centuries was as familiar to the Puritans as Joel Osteen’s Airbus A319.
A century and a half later, in their haste to eliminate any traces of the British monarchy, the Founding Fathers forgot to omit England’s theocracy from America’s founding documents.
As the Declaration of Independence so brazenly pontificates, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Despite the First Amendment’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” America has always operated with the assumption that Christianity is the baseline, and that any other religion — Judaism, Hinduism, or, Allah forbid, Islam — was a deviation from the norm. That any of the myriad of Indigenous religions would be considered is downright laughable.
Despite the fact that many of the Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians — believing God created man and the earth, then left his creations to their own devices — every “God” tattooed into American society quickly became King James’.
Christianity has always been imbued in every aspect of American life. “God bless America,” we say, eyes overflowing with stars and stripes. “In God we trust,” we affirm, buying a 7-Eleven hot dog. “Year of our Lord, two thousand twenty-three,” we proclaim, festive glasses crooked and diapers full as we watch a blinding sphere creep 141 feet down a flagpole.
The 117th Congress is significantly more Christian than the general American population. According to Pew Research Center, 88% of Congress members identify as Christian — only 65% of the general public does.
Older Americans are more heavily Christian than younger adults; Congress is older on average than the general population, and congresspeople ages 50 to 64 are still more Christian than their non-politician counterparts by 14 percentage points.
On Jan. 20, 2021, Congress watched President-elect Joe Biden take the Oath of Office on a Christian Bible. So help me, God.
Given the U.S. government’s exorbitant Christianity rate, it is unsurprising that, despite the First Amendment, the Bible seeps into American legislatures. Most arguments against abortion are rooted in Christianity, the ludicrous idea that life begins at conception being the most widespread. Despite being antithetical to science and common sense, the originalists on the Supreme Court bench solidified one more aspect of American society as distinctly Christian when they repealed the constitutional right to abortion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
Those great demigods of constitutional law seem to have forgotten (or never knew) that Judaism protects the right to abortion. According to the National Council of Jewish Women, “Jewish sources explicitly state that abortion is not only permitted but is required should the pregnancy endanger the life or health of the pregnant individual.” Oops. So much for religious freedom.
Obergefell v. Hodges, which secured a federal right to same-sex marriage, is still being so vitriolically fought over by conservatives that even Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act in December 2022, to codify the validity of same-sex and interracial civil marriages.
Examples of Christianity’s dirty hands infecting the perpetual open heart surgery of American society could be listed for an eternity. Conservatives love to call the United States a Christian nation, and they’re right. For all intents and purposes, it always has been.
But it doesn’t always have to be. ♦
