Under whose God?

Guest post by Capt. Fogg

What should I say,
Since faith is dead
And truth away from you is fled.

- Thomas Wyatt -

I’m one of the dwindling few who clearly remembers Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech in 1961. It had moments of honest eloquence not often reached by presidents arriving or departing -- or by their professional speechwriters. It has been mentioned often of late because of his dire warning about the growing power and influence of the “military industrial complex” which as he predicted, has gained enough power to perpetuate the need for armaments and policies that make not only war and talk of war a constant, but which supports bellicose and paranoid attitudes in the public and private arena. For opposing a fraudulent arms race, for recognizing the military’s needs as different from the needs of peace and stability, Eisenhower will be remembered and should be better heeded.

But there is another Eisenhower legacy, one which can be seen in that speech and heard in classrooms and read about on editorial pages today. He talked about faith, about spiritual blessings; he talked about nations under God as being the upholders of the good and identified non-believers with enemies of freedom. Had he really forgotten the faith and religious rhetoric of the enemies of freedom he helped defeat only 16 years earlier? Was he yet unaware of the scarcely countable centuries of religious persecution and tyranny and war by, in and between nations under God? In the words of his final address, it is the atheists who are the enemy and not because they are totalitarians, but atheists.

The notion that it was God who stopped Hitler from taking England seems to have some currency in that country, now that the huge sacrifices of her military and civilians are being forgotten. I’m sure many Americans feel that it was God-fearing America alone who won the war against the God-fearing fascists and not the atheists from Mother Russia. Mythology and false history, like entropy increase over time and Eisenhower was happy to play along with a faith-based interpretation of it, whether or not it offended the single most basic founding principle of our nation: that our government derived its legitimacy entirely from the consent of the governed and not from God.

I was 9 years old in 1954 when a teacher whose name I have forgotten told me I had to affirm that I lived in a nation under God because the President said so. I wouldn’t do it then and I will not today because I consider it an illegal intrusion into my private beliefs and an illegal establishment of religion and an illegal requirement to make a religious oath. Yet somehow it’s passed into the mythology and people support groups who insist that the Eisenhower clause was written by the pious founding fathers who dreamed of theocracy. Herein lies, I do fear, the end of America. The truth is what they say it always has been and not what it was and so it shall ever be.