Why are People No Longer Allowing the Pledge of Allegiance to Be Recited in School?

Dear Akasha,

You have asked a very important question. During the last 40 years, Americahas moved farther and farther away from God. A fairly small group of people has been working hard to try to remove God from public life. They have been doing it by claiming that our country's Founding Fathers (and the Constitution they wrote) intended to oppose referring to the God of the Bible or the Christian religion in public schools. They claim that talking about the Christian religion in schools violates the principle of "separation of church and state." (Did you know that the Con-stitutiondoes not even include such a phrase?) The Founding Fathers did not hold such a view —since they frequently referred to God in their public actions and statements. The Declaration of Independence, for example, refers to the "Creator" and "Divine Providence."These are obvious references to the God of the Bible.

The Pledge was written in the late 1800s. The words "under God" were added in 1954 by Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower. Millions of children have repeated the words since that time. America is being changed from a nation whose people once generally accepted the God of the Bible, into a nation that believes all religions and gods should be accepted as real. This is sad. It remains true that "blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord" (Psalm 33:12).

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