Fourth Foundation

For the sake of simplicity let's say that there have been four moments when America fundamentally altered it's sense of self: Articles of Confederation, Constitution, Lincoln, and Ike's change of our motto. I know that this is over simplistic at so forth but bear with me. Like lots of sensible people, I blame Reagan for the mess in which we find our selves and like lots of other folks I like Ike's military industrial complex speech, yet today is the anniversary of his signing into law the change for E Pluribus Unum to One Nation Under God. That this was a change dictated, at least in part, by the on-going struggle with the USSR is, I think, true. At the same time the phrase "Out of Many One" is one of those lovely phrases that capture an ideal of what it meant to be an America and, like all Latin tags, it is multivocal. For many of the WWII movies the phrase evoked the multiethnic character of the Army that defeated the fascist threat. For some dedicated to the idea of meritocracy the tag is redolent of the struggle for one man or woman to achieve greatness. At its heart, I think, it meant that this was a nation, like some someone or another named Legion, that contained multitudes all dedicated to a common proposition.

The phrase "One Nation Under God," on the other hand, transforms our national identity into a narrow and exclusive vision. Tom Paine, a notorious atheist, is written out of the national identity. Our collective struggle to animate the notion that the founding generation held

these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed 

 became a sectarian and exclusive commitment to being a godly people.