A piece in the current First Things by Princeton scholar Robert George, for whose continuing wisdom and leadership the Church in this country and America itself are much in debt, constitutes a dramatic reminder that we must be alert always for attempts to undermine our religious Constitutional foundations.
Recently, at Princeton, he recalls, a pamphlet was made available for a conference; it contained texts of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The cover bore the logo of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
Professor George, who, like many American adults, memorized Lincoln’s masterpiece in grade school, could not help notice that the phrase "under God" ("that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom") was missing from the printed text. Why?
That there are several "versions" of the Gettysburg Address, Dr. George readily acknowledged. He also noted that two "versions" do indeed omit the phrase in question: the Nicolay draft and the Hay draft. Both are now in the Library of Congress. The other three, however, including the one recognized as authoritative, the Bliss copy, include the words "under God." The Bliss document (named for publisher Alexander Bliss) is on display in the White House. The two remaining documents, known as the Everett and Bancroft copies, are enshrined, respectively, in Springfield, Illinois’ Historical Society Library, and in the Kroch Library at Cornell University.
Moreover, Dr. George points out that three independent reporters, including one for the Associated Press, wired their accounts of the Address to their editors immediately after Lincoln spoke. All three stories included "under God," and, explains Dr. George, "no contemporaneous report omits them."
Another point made by Professor George is that the Bliss text of Lincoln’s address, the one viewed by scholars as most authoritative, is the only one to which Lincoln affixed his signature.
Why then, would anyone want to omit the phrase, "under God"? One effort to explain the deletion has been, and continues to be, the allegation that the words cannot stand the test of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Resorting to the deletion is merely an effort to save Lincoln from committing a Constitutional error.
Such an argument betrays outrageous arrogance, of course. But ignorance of the meaning of the words "God" and "religion" is also quite evident. The First Amendment assumes the truth of Transcendence, and postulates that religion, as the Roman pagans of antiquity recognized, pertains to man’s relationship to God. Indeed, the two key Founding Documents of our nation, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, arise from and develop from an acknowledgement of God the Creator.
We must all continue to be vigilant about the erosion or deliberate exclusion of religious discourse in our founding documents and in the writings of our Founding Fathers. As Yale University historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom expressed it in his opus magnum, "a nation that is unaware of its past bears an alarming similarity to a person suffering from amnesia: a crucial element of its being is absent." (A Religious History of the American People).
