"One Nation, Indivisible . . . "

". . . with liberty and justice for all." That phrase, many years ago, when I learned it through daily recitation, had a specific meaning to me. This nation, my United States, it taught me, was a rock solid entity that guaranteed "liberty and justice" to me and to all those who honored the American way of life.

That guarantee was apparently not enough for some Americans.

In the 1950s war was raging! On the heels of the Korean War (June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953), that most ominous (if least deadly) "Cold War" pitted world Communism and it's missiles against our Democratic Republic and against other free countries around the world.

Enter the opportunists at the Knights of Columbus, a Roman Catholic mens group. No doubt in the grip of the insecurity that is a byproduct of religious fervor, the KofC decided to use the fear generated by that Communist threat as an evangelistic opportunity. Starting in 1951, they bombard the U.S. Congress with a total of fifteen resolutions, all of them calling for the insertion of the phrase "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance.

Apparently the Knights of Columbus looked at the Communist system and saw only one thing that differentiated it from our American system of government; the Communists were avowed atheists.

It's quite amazing really: the Knights of Columbus saw what the whole world saw: a system of government that denied basic freedom to its citizens, denied individual ownership of property or goods, denied them a fair system of justice or any method to redress their grievances, a system that treated its citizens like slaves and sent them to gulags for punishment -- and all the Knights of Columbus could see wrong was that the Communists didn't allow their citizens to attend church on Sunday.

It took three years of badgering (and, no doubt threatening) but finally on June 14, 1954 (Flag Day) President Eisenhower (the same president that started the tradition of "prayer breakfasts" in the White House) signed a bill into law that authorized the insertion of the words "under God" into the Pledge of Allegiance after the words "one nation." Suddenly, with the stroke of a pen, the power of that phrase "one nation, indivisible" was lost forever; it became conditional. After June 14, 1954, if you did not believe that the God of the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic Church was as powerful a force in this country as are the concepts of freedom and liberty you had just drawn the short end of the stick.

We are not now, nor were we then, a nation under God! Granted, we were and are a nation where the majority of the citizens have been raised since childhood on biblical fairy tales; a nation where the majority of its citizens are too insecure to live their lives without constant reassurances of a "forgiving God" and "a land of milk and honey" awaiting them after death. But it became a matter of public record on the 14th of June in 1954 that those who did not believe themselves to be "under God" . . . those who did not live in that fantasy world, were somehow excluded from the full benefit of the promise of "liberty and justice for all."