On June 14, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a bill to insert the phrase “under God” into the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance that children recited every morning in school. Previously, the pledge—originally written in 1892—had contained no reference to religion. The push to add “under God” to the pledge gained momentum during the second Red Scare , a period when U.S. politicians were keen to assert the moral superiority of U.S. capitalism over Soviet communism , which many conservatives regarded as “godless.” Court cases about whether students should recite the pledge had already reached the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1940s, before “under God” was added. In the decades after the 1954 addition, there were numerous other lawsuits related to the pledge. Video: Freedom of Religion in the United States The Original Pledge Was a Marketing Gimmick The first version of the Pledge of Allegiance was written for the Columbian Exposition in October 1892 to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. Historians have long identified its author as Francis Bellamy, an ordained Baptist minister and Christian socialist who got a job working for the family magazine Youth’s Companion . (In 2022, historians raised new […]
