The Pledge

This is something Nick and I have actually debated before. I'm starting to come around to his way of thinking regarding the pledge, but I never thought about the viewpoint of a teacher before, so this article was very interesting.

Confessions of an Atheist Teacher: My Pledge Was a Lie

I don't exactly remember the first time I said the Pledge of Allegiance as a public school teacher, but it must have been in a classroom of twenty-seven 4th graders at around 7:55 on an August morning in Virginia in the mid-90s. We must have stood with the windows to the soccer field on our left and our Jamestown display on the right, facing the flag at the head of the classroom near the chalkboard. After that first day, I have a vague idea that a student was assigned the rotating job of "Pledge leader," getting me off the hook for the other 179. Maybe that's why my first year of Public Pledging is an elusive ghost of a non-memory.


I've met Big Brother, and it's me
Now it's two years later. I've been demoted to kindergarten -- remedial, at that. My job is to keep a hyperactive 5-year-old in roughly the same hemisphere as his classmates as often as I can. In "morning circle" he sits on my lap on the floor, both of us Indian-style, while everyone does calendar and show and share. Then we all get up for the Pledge, my little charge with great bounding enthusiasm after too much sitting still, and I stand there with him, showing him how to be a good little Pledger with his hand over his heart and the words flowing from the tip of his tongue, just like his classmates. As a good example, I stand that way too and say the words and make eye contact while he tries hard to parrot me and keep up with the others.

"One nation, under God," we both say every single morning. One day it hits me: does his family even worship a god? They live on my street, and both cars always seem to be in the driveway on Sunday mornings. But there's no mechanism for asking; absent an official request initiated by my little guy's parents, we Pledge away just the way Uncle Sam tells us to.

I realize with some amount of surprise that I feel guilty. Putting words in a child's mouth -- words he may or may not have chosen himself -- makes me feel I've overstepped my bounds as a state employee. I'm teaching -- no, training -- him to blindly, obediently say an oath of allegiance to a country -- a commitment no five-year-old can begin to understand. I've become the worst kind of Big Brother, the kind that preys on the minds of innocent little kids, shaping them to suit someone else's idea of national purpose. And pretending I believe those words myself, just to motivate him to say them too ... well, I begin to see myself as a lying hypocrite, cast in that role by my employer.


Don't tell
That same year, I'm assigned to a new supervisor in the special ed department. We get to talking during planning period and she learns that I once attended a Catholic boarding school in her home town in Maryland. She assumes I'm still Catholic, but I correct her matter-of-factly. "I'm a humanist now," I tell her. "That means I'm nonreligious."

"Oh, Mary Ellen," she says, with the sound of excited conspiracy in her voice. "I know now what our goal should be for this year -- to bring you back to the Catholic Church." Tension builds between us during the school year; this is the teacher who will evalute my performance and determine my raise, if any. I try to avoid the topic of religion altogether, but she just can't. One morning, just before spring break, she spontaneously exclaims in front of another teacher, "Jesus has risen whether you believe in him or not, Mary Ellen!"

In May, I ask to be reassigned the following year, and I am. I never tell the principal why, and he never asks, but more importantly I've absorbed a painful lesson about being a religious minority in a public school. The lesson: tell no one.


Freedom: just for students?
Fast forward to 2001. I've survived elementary school, mostly by working in the computer lab where morning exercises aren't an issue. Now, I've been promoted to high school. Five periods a day my students and I delve into Web design, HTML, and a programming language called Visual Basic. At ten every morning the school broadcast is supposed to interrupt whatever we're doing. We turn on the TV to hear the day's announcements, say the Pledge, and observe the state-mandated minute of silence.

I'm supposed to stand and model the Pledge for my students during that time, then enforce the minute of silence, but I don't. I sit at my computer, working on the day's assignments and testing my students' code. If the kids want to Pledge, and then be silent for a minute, they can do that. But I don't instruct them to, and they don't -- ever. They work, eat, and socialize, and I don't stop them.

I keep waiting for the principal to tell me that a parent has complained about my not observing morning exercises -- not even demanding silence during "the minute" -- and I wonder what I'll say if that happens. After years of "fitting in," I'm feeling liberated in the freer atmosphere of high school; I'm ready to assert my rights.

The problem is, I'm not sure I have any. It's students, not teachers, who've been granted freedom of non-participation by the Supreme Court. When you hire into a government teaching job, you agree to push the government's agenda. Right now, that gig includes an expression of religious belief I haven't held since the age of ten. What's an atheist teacher to do? What's any teacher to do? It's uncharted territory, and teachers are navigating without maps.


Testimony to the Supreme Court
By 2003, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the Pledge of Allegiance case, I'd left behind the world of public school education. I now work in the humanist movement, where morning rituals are a matter of individual preference and never, to my great relief, involve the government's God. The entire freethought community rallied behind Michael Newdow when his case was accepted; supporting amicus briefs were filed by my employer, the Institute for Humanist Studies, our coalition partners, the Secular Coalition for America, and quite a few others. Students' religious freedom and the theme of "coercion" were common threads.

In reading these briefs, I began to wonder if the High Court has ever considered the plight of teachers forced to push the majority deity on kids as a condition of employment.

In a testimony which was eventually submitted as part of the American Humanist Association's brief, I tried to provide that perspective. I wrote: "My active participation in these daily exercises was then, and remains now, a source of internal conflict centered around deep-seated ethical principles inspired by my worldview. From my vantage point as a state employee entrusted with the care and education of its youngest citizens, my leading the Pledge by state mandate required me to choose between my professional duties and the Constitutional freedoms of my students; between a peaceful standing in my school community and the exercise of my own Constitutional rights; and between my school's standards of learning and a daily practice requiring children to abandon the critical thinking and free inquiry demanded of them in every other setting. There were no correct choices; each bore a price for someone...

"In a civics lesson, my children might have learned that oaths are solemn promises of serious intent, never sworn casually," I continued. "Instead, they innocently and blindly swore the Pledge each day, hands on heart, for no reason other than that I -- their authority figure, placed there by the state -- led them.

"I was there to show them how to position their bodies, where to fix their eyes, where to place their hands, and what words to say in rote unison -- words that were neither theirs nor mine, but had been established by their government as the orthodox expression of patriotism. My students were to repeat this ritual 180 times per school year for 13 years -- two thousand, three hundred forty Pledges per child, not counting athletic and extracurricular events."

Now that the Court has chosen not to rule on the constitutionality of 'under God,' but rather to sidestep the issue by focusing on a technicality, it's my fervent hope that more parents will step forward to challenge the 1954 act of Congress which baptized the Pledge in the name of a monotheistic God. But I hope that teachers, too, will take up the cause. To date, they've been reluctant to speak out, and some educational associations have even supported the preservation of the religious Pledge.

Arguments in favor of that phrase (including those forwarded by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in her concurring opinion) claim that 'under God' is but a ceremonial reference to our heritage as a nation founded on principles of religious freedom. But these semantic runarounds miss the real point. Teachers, more than any lawyer or judge, know that to a child, God means God. Teachers know, too, that when they use the word in an official classroom ritual, they've endorsed the idea of that God in every child's mind. It's just as simple as that.


-Mary Ellen Sikes, IHS
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