What's the motto with our country?

"...And to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God and Jesus Christ who died on the cross for all of our sins and then rose on the third day, indivisible, with liberty and justice for most."
--Schoolchildren, "Moral Orel: Omnipresence"

A common piece of trivia invoked by those who would try to undermine separation of church and state, usually under the faulty premise that America is a "Christian nation," is our national motto: "In God We Trust." It's printed on our money, after all, so it must be true. America is, according to our pledge of allegiance, "one nation, under God." Always has been, always will be.

Except, no, it hasn't always been. And hopefully it won't always be.

Prior to the 1950s, the United States had no national motto. In 1782, three mottos were approved to adorn the Great Seal of the United States: "E Pluribus Unum" (from many, one) on the front, "Annuit Cœptis" (approves the things having been begun) and "Novus Ordo Seclorum" (new order of the ages) on the back. Both sides of the Great Seal can be found depicted on the back of the one dollar bill. But though these mottos were approved for the national seal, no act of legislation established a national motto. The phrase "In God We Trust" first started appearing on US currency in 1864, during the Civil War. But still, America had no national motto.

Fast forward to the 1950s. The Cold War was on, and McCarthyism was alive in the American consciousness. In 1954, following two years of lobbying for the change by the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic fraternal order), a sermon by Rev. George Docherty convinced President Eisenhower that "under God" should be added to the pledge of allegiance. Two years later, in 1956, "In God We Trust" was adopted as the national motto of the United States by act of Congress.

America was keen to define itself in polar opposition to the Soviets. They were evil; we were good. They had communism; we had capitalism. They had dictatorship; we had democracy. And--we thought--they were atheist; we were Christian. But here we drew the wrong dichotomy.

The problem with the Soviets was not that they denied God, but that the right of the people to free thought was replaced by subservience to the government. Americans confused belief in God with the right to hold that belief. By letting our fear of the enemy translate into government endorsement of a particular religious outlook, we were no better in that regard than the Commies.

The Cold War left us with two terrible threats to our future: an extensive nuclear arsenal, and fodder for the false conception that America is a Christian nation. And the latter may be more dangerous, because it has its finger on trigger of the former. For the good of ourselves and the world, we must disarm, restore separation of church and state by reopening the national motto and pledge of allegiance to all Americans, including those who do not believe in God.

President Eisenhower said, "These words ['under God'] will remind Americans that despite our great physical strength we must remain humble. They will help us to keep constantly in our minds and hearts the spiritual and moral principles which alone give dignity to man, and upon which our way of life is founded." But President Eisenhower was wrong. What makes Americans strong is not their humility before God, but their humility before each other. You and I may disagree on any number of levels (including religion), but as an American I remain humble, refusing to think myself more worthy of freedom than you. And all I ask in return is the same courtesy.

Dartmouth baccalaureate service: almost all-inclusive

Two weeks have passed since my graduation from Dartmouth College. Life goes on swimmingly, though I must admit it's disconcerting to no longer be classified as a "student." I think the official technical term for my current state of affairs is "unemployed."

As a bit of parting commentary on Dartmouth, I'd like to say a little bit about the baccalaureate sermon held the day before Commencement. Though Dartmouth is committed to promoting diversity in the student body, little attention seems to be paid to atheists, and never have I personally felt more alienated at Dartmouth than at the baccalaureate service.

Perhaps it seems odd that I would feel excluded by a religious service; certainly I should have expected nothing else. But paradoxically, it was the sermon's attempt at inclusiveness and diversity that put me off. The American baccalaureate sermon has historically been a Christian tradition, and coming from a Christian family, I was actually somewhat looking forward to sharing a bit of ceremony with my family. But ever eager to promote diversity, Dartmouth opens its baccalaureate service to include all religions. The program included a traditional Navajo prayer, a reading from the Bhagavad Gita, a reading from Isaiah, and a reading from a Tibetan poem.

As inclusive as the College tried to be, the atmosphere was to the express exclusion of atheism. Speakers at the event were eager to quote the oft-lionized Presidents William Jewett Tucker and John Sloan Dickey, whose comments essentially boil down to, "It doesn't matter what religion you subscribe to, just as long as you're religious."

I wouldn't have a problem if they kept baccalaureate as a traditional Christian service, endorsed solely by the campus Christian community. Nor would I have a problem if the College wanted to endorse a ceremony inclusive of every student on campus. But the College abandoned the former in a failed attempt at the latter.

It hurt, because it felt like the College was reaching out to everybody but me.

To be fair, the speakers were relatively light on theology, preferring instead to speak about the importance of morality and conscience. The keynote address by Reverend Fred Berthold Jr. actually started off with a nod to science that was on the whole positive apart from some errors of fact and characterization*. He then spoke about how all of the major religions share similar codes of morality (and invited us to pick up a handout after the service listing those codes). This is, of course, a dubious claim. The main similarities between the lists are "Don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, and don't commit adultery;" beyond that, there's quite a bit of divergence on the specifics. Furthermore, the moral codes of any specific religion are not static over the course of history (consider attitudes toward slavery, for instance). Rev. Berthold also included a (highly dissatisfying, actually) list of moral rules from a "modern philosopher," philosophy professor Bernard Gert (under whom I studied Human Nature my sophomore summer, and from whom I learned little about human nature but a lot about language). But as close as I came to appreciating Rev. Berthold for his nod to science and his comments on the importance of morality in our post-graduation lives, he lost me entirely with his closing remarks, which featured the stale old First Cause argument for God's existence**.

That piece of theology put the whole affair in context. If it were all about morality, then there's no reason an atheist shouldn't have been invited to give his or her perspective. No, the implication is that morality only comes from a supernatural authority (no matter what your specific understanding of that authority amounts to). Berthold didn't go so far as to say atheists are all immoral (presumably God is working through us without our knowing it), but the idea that morality comes from religion is the same misconception that leads many to demonize atheists.

So if baccalaureate is supposed to be about God, then let it be about God and not a grab-bag of miscellaneous supernatural belief systems. If instead you want it to be about lessons in morality, then religious affiliation or lack thereof should be irrelevant, as we're all children of our moral Zeitgeist.

There was one aspect of the service that I really enjoyed. For the Recessional, the organist played Widor's "Toccata" from his Fifth Symphony, the same song used as the Recessional every year for the Easter service back home. Of course, it's a million times better at Easter with the addition of brass and tympani, but I still love a good pipe organ, and Mom and I were at least able to mime the cymbals at the appropriate times.

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* He referenced some recent news article in astronomy that supposedly proves Newton's laws of motion wrong. First of all, any new findings won't make Newton wrong; his laws are still accurate at the scale to which they apply. Any new theory of gravitation, for instance, still has to reduce to F= -GMm/r^2 for two bodies under proper approximations. Second, we've already known that Newton's laws were incomplete on astronomical scales; see Einstein's theory of general relativity. But I don't blame Rev. Berthold for his mis-characterization so much as I blame sensationalist science reporting.

** The First Cause argument is the one that goes something like, "Something had to start the Big Bang, right?" Wrong, actually. I won't get into details here, but very roughly, common conceptions of causation break down at a singularity, such as that which is thought to have originated the Big Bang.