







































Righteous Pledge: The Pledge of Allegiance and the Implicit Curriculum of American Civil 

Religion in the Eisenhower Era 

Dennis Gunn 

Iona College 

 

Abstract 

The insertion of the words “under God” into the 

Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 represents the 

implicit curriculum of American Civil Religion 

during the Eisenhower Era and attempts to 

preserve the place of religion in America’s public 

schools during the Cold War. This article 

examines efforts to amend the Pledge against the 

backdrop of trends in American society during 

the 1950’s and how it impacted the patriotic 

curriculum of both public and parochial schools.  

Introduction 

In 1954 the United States Congress 

officially changed the Pledge of Allegiance to 

include the words “under God,” which would be 

recited as part of a daily ritual already well-

established in America’s public schools. At a 

time when religion was fading from the explicit 

curriculum in U.S. public schooling, this change 

symbolized a renewed emphasis on education for 

“godly citizenship” as part of the implicit 

curriculum of American civil religion in public 

schools in the 1950’s. This article explores how 

the notion of “one Nation, under God” 

represented attempts to infuse religion into the 

civics curriculum in public schools in the United 

States throughout the Eisenhower era. It 

contextualizes those efforts within broader social 

trends of a religious resurgence during the 

1950’s. And it interprets those efforts against the 

backdrop of a renewed national narrative that 

saw America as a religious nation in opposition 

to the forces of “godless” Communism during the 

Cold War. While others have highlighted the 

symbolic significance of the change to the pledge 

as representing the wider culture of American 

civil religion in the 1950s (Marty 1996; Ellis 

2005), I argue that “under God’s” addition to the 

pledge had educational significance as well by 

becoming part of a curriculum of civil religion 

that recast the ideal of American patriotism as a 

religious value during the Cold War-a time of 

changing U.S. religious values and political 

interest in those values as part of the ideological 

arsenal against Communism. At the same time, I 

suggest that Catholics-who promoted the change 

to the pledge through the Knights of Columbus-

saw this as an opportunity to bolster their place 

in the mainstream of American society by 

promoting the values of patriotic citizenship in 

Catholic schools. Overall, this article examines 

the way in which the change to the Pledge of 

Allegiance reflected wider shifts in American 

society in the mid-twentieth century and ways in 

which religious and patriotic sensibilities 

continued to influence the curriculum of public 

and parochial schools in the United States as part 

of a Cold War ethos. 

  

Method and Sources 

 This article utilizes both archival and 

historiographical sources. It examines popular 

support for the revised Pledge and a renewed 

citizenship curriculum by civic and religious 

groups through an analysis of materials 

published during the 1950’s. It draws on archival 

sources from the Collections of the Knights of 

Columbus-which spearheaded the change to the 

pledge-whose Supreme Council Archives are 

located in New Haven, Connecticut as well as 

material from the Archives of the Religious 

Education Association in the Special Collections 

at Yale University Divinity School Library, also 

in New Haven. It uses material from the Papers 

of Francis Julius Bellamy, who authored the 

original version of the Pledge, archived in the 

Special Collections in the Riverside Library of 

the University of Rochester. And it analyzes 

educational policy and citizenship curricula at 

the state level by examining guidelines issued by 

various state education departments alongside 



24 
 

curricular material used to teach citizenship in 

public and parochial schools throughout the 

1950s.  

Insertion of the Words “Under God” into the 

Pledge of Allegiance 

The Pledge of Allegiance in its original 

form-minus the words “under God”- had been 

composed by magazine editor Francis Bellamy, 

the son of a Baptist minister, in 1892 and was 

first published in the Youth’s Companion, a 

popular children’s magazine during the 

nineteenth century, whose contributors included 

Mark Twain and Jack London. James Upham, 

whose uncle, Daniel Sharp Ford, was owner and 

editor of the Youth’s Companion, was manager 

of the magazine’s Premiums Department and 

was responsible for boosting circulation.  With 

an eye toward both advertising and advancing 

patriotism Upham devised a plan for the 

magazine to promote having a flag above every 

schoolhouse in America. In coordination with 

this effort, he commissioned Bellamy to compose 

a pledge that schoolchildren could recite while 

saluting the flag as part of their daily school ritual 

to coincide with the 400th anniversary of 

Columbus’ coming to the Americas. (Ellis 2005) 

As Bellamy later explained: 

I was at that time with the Youth’s 

Companion of Boston doing work with 

James B Upham, a member of the firm. 

Mr. Upham felt that a flag should be on 

every schoolhouse. The Youth’s 

Companion fostered a plan of selling 

flags to schools through the children 

themselves, at cost, which was so 

successful that 25,000 schools acquired 

flags in one year. 

Mr. Upham also had a greater scheme, the 

result of which was that every school in 

the land on a certain day would have a 

flag raising, under most impressive 

conditions. The day was to be Columbus 

Day 1892-the 400th anniversary of the 

discovery of America…I was made 

Chairman of the Executive Committee 

for that work and immediately began to 

enlist the support of not only the 

superintendents of education in all the 

states, but also worked with governors, 

congressmen, and even the President of 

the United States. The result was a 

universal holiday for Columbus Day, 

1892 by Proclamation of Benjamin 

Harrison (Francis Julius Bellamy Papers, 

Box 3, Folder 5).  

Bellamy went on to describe how the 

Pledge itself came about: “Of course the nub of 

the program was to be the raising of the flag with 

a salute to the flag recited by the pupils in 

unison…It was my thought that a vow of loyalty 

or allegiance to the flag should be the dominant 

idea. I especially stressed the word ‘allegiance.’ 

So, Mr. Upham told me to try it out on that line” 

(Francis Julius Bellamy Papers, Box 3, Folder 5). 

The result was simple:  

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the 

United States of America, 

And to the Republic for which it stands, 

one nation, indivisible 

With liberty and justice for all. 

  

Thus, from its inception the Pledge of 

Allegiance was intended to be a part of the 

implicit curriculum of American patriotism and 

was designed to foster a spirit of patriotic fervor 

among America’s schoolchildren.  It quickly 

gained in popularity and became a staple in 

American public schools by the early twentieth 

century (Ellis 2005; Leepson 2005).    

Knights of Columbus and the Pledge of 

Allegiance 

As early as April 1951, at the quarterly 

meeting of the Supreme Board of Directors, the 

Knights of Columbus voted to amend the Pledge 

of Allegiance by inserting the words “under 

God” after “one Nation” for use in its own Fourth 

Degree Assemblies throughout the United States 

(Knights of Columbus Supreme Council 

Archives, Columbia Magazine, August 1955). 



25 
 

The following year, various State Councils of the 

Knights of Columbus adopted resolutions that 

the Knights “instigate the general adoption of an 

amendment to the Pledge of Allegiance to read ‘I 

pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States 

of America and to the Republic for which it 

stands, one Nation, under God, indivisible with 

liberty and justice for all.’” Among these were 

Florida, New York, Michigan, South Dakota, and 

Georgia (Knights of Columbus Supreme Council 

Archives, Proceedings of the Supreme Council 

1952).   

In September 1952 Luke Hart, who had 

been elected Supreme Knight of the Knights of 

Columbus, acting in his role as President of the 

National Fraternal Congress of America 

suggested adopting a resolution calling on the 

U.S. Congress to amend the Pledge of Allegiance 

to include the words “under God,” pointing out 

that it was a phrase used by Abraham Lincoln in 

the Gettysburg address (Knights of Columbus 

Supreme Council Archives, Box 646, File 1998). 

The proposal was greeted with enthusiasm and 

was adopted by the national body with several 

state Fraternal Congresses following suit. A 

month earlier the Supreme Council of the 

Knights of Columbus had adopted a similar 

resolution petitioning Congress to officially 

change the Pledge and copies of the resolution 

were sent to the President, Vice President, and 

Speaker of the House (Knights of Columbus 

Supreme Council Archives, Columbia Magazine, 

August 1955). Hart, a lawyer from the Midwest, 

served as Supreme Knight of the Knights of 

Columbus from 1953 to 1964 and oversaw the 

expansion of the Catholic fraternal organization 

in the mid-1950’s and early 1960’s just as 

Catholics were entering the American 

mainstream (Kaufman 2000, 114). The 1960 

election of fellow Knight and the first Catholic to 

become a U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, 

signaled shifting attitudes toward Catholics in 

American society-despite the persistence of anti-

Catholic bias on the part of some-and indicated 

the eagerness of American Catholics to embrace 

their identity as patriotic citizens.  

The Knights of Columbus had been 

founded in the previous century at a time when 

anti-Catholic bias was rampant. Established in 

1882 in New Haven, Connecticut by Father 

Michael McGivney, a parish priest concerned 

about the inability of many working-class 

Catholics to provide for their families in case of 

death, the Knights started as a way to provide life 

insurance benefits to low-income Catholic 

families and to promote fraternity among 

Catholic men, many of whom were recently 

arrived immigrants (Kaufman 1992). Quickly 

gaining in national popularity, the Knights of 

Columbus as a fraternal organization, at once, 

represented the desire of American Catholics to 

emulate the values of Americanism and, at the 

same, time defend Catholics over and against 

incursions by the Protestant majority. 

Throughout the nineteenth century anti-Catholic 

sentiment had found various expressions 

including the emergence of the “Know Nothing” 

party earlier in the century and attempts to keep 

Protestant values front and center in public 

schools-a move which sparked the development 

of a parallel system of parochial schools by U.S. 

Catholic Bishops (Loughery 2018, 111-138). 

When a Catholic, Al Smith, ran for President in 

1924 the issue of his religion remained a 

stumbling block for many Protestant voters.  By 

the mid-1950’s, however, Catholics were 

beginning to assert greater political influence and 

to find an even greater voice on the national stage 

(Dolan 1992, 417). The Knights of Columbus’ 

leadership over the issue of amending the Pledge 

of Allegiance offered an opportunity to 

demonstrate Catholics’ loyalty as Americans and 

to influence the public discourse over the place 

of religion in American life.  

Creation of the Modern Pledge  

In April 1953 Michigan congressman 

Louis Rabaut, a Catholic whose son was a Jesuit 

priest, introduced a resolution on the floor of the 

U.S. House of Representative to insert words 

“under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance-the 

measure previously proposed by the Knights of 



26 
 

Columbus and which had been replicated by 

numerous fraternal organizations throughout the 

United States including the American Legion. 

However, his efforts did not gain traction until 

1954 when President Eisenhower threw his 

support behind the resolution after hearing a 

sermon at New York Ave Presbyterian Church 

by Reverend George Docherty, who was then 

chaplain to Congress. In his sermon, Docherty 

spoke of the “little Muscovites” who could 

pledge allegiance to the hammer and sickle, but 

who could not pledge allegiance to their nation 

“under God,” which he argued was “a distinctive 

factor in the American way of life” (Quoted in 

Marty 1996. 299).  This sentiment resonated well 

with Eisenhower’s own belief in the significance 

of the religious character of the United States.  

In many ways Eisenhower himself 

represented the revival of a religious spirit in 

American life during the 1950’s. Schooled in the 

Bible as young boy, yet not particularly religious 

himself, he said that during his time as Supreme 

Allied Commander in Europe during World War 

II he had rediscovered his faith which led him to 

be baptized as an adult. He even went so far as to 

compose and deliver a prayer for his own 

inauguration, reportedly telling Evangelist Billy 

Graham “Billy, I believe one reason I was elected 

President was to lead America in a religious 

revival” (Quoted in Marty 1996, 306). After 

hearing Docherty’s sermon, Eisenhower 

enthusiastically endorsed the idea of inserting the 

words “under God” into the Pledge, believing 

that it was an opportunity to instill in American 

schoolchildren a firm conviction of the 

“dedication of our Nation and our people to the 

Almighty” (Marty 1996, 300).  

On February 10, 1954, Senator Ferguson 

of Michigan introduced a resolution calling for 

the amendment of the Pledge on the floor of the 

Senate. When he discovered that a similar 

resolution had been pending in the House for ten 

months, he withdrew the resolution and Rabaut’s 

resolution to insert the words “under God” into 

the Pledge of Allegiance-with Eisenhower’s 

endorsement-received unanimous bipartisan 

support in both the House and the Senate with not 

a single dissenting vote (Marty 1996, 301). 

Louisiana congressman Overton Brooks 

captured well the spirit of the resolution when he 

endorsed it by saying, belief in God distinguished 

“free people of the Western world from the rabid 

Communist;” that “We in effect declare openly 

that we denounce the pagan doctrine of 

Communism and declare ‘under God’ in favor of 

free government and a free people” (Marty 1996, 

301). This sentiment echoed the feeling of many, 

including the President, that the religious 

character of the United States needed to be 

preserved and codified for future generations.  

On Flag Day, June 14, 1954, on the steps 

of the U.S. Capitol Senator Ferguson and 

Representative Rabaut recited together the newly 

revised Pledge. This marked the culmination of a 

concerted effort to maintain a religious emphasis 

in the implicit curriculum of American patriotism 

and marked the beginning of further efforts to 

ensure that religion would not disappear from 

U.S. public schools.  

 

Supreme Court Cases Involving the Flag 

Salute in Public Schools in the 1940s 

Ironically, in the decade prior to the 

insertion of the words “under God” into the 

Pledge of Allegiance there had been legal 

challenges to the intrusion of the state into 

religious matters of conscience precisely around 

the issue of saluting the flag in public schools. 

During the 1940s the U.S. Supreme Court heard 

two significant cases that dealt with freedom of 

conscience regarding students’ refusals to salute 

the flag based on religious reasons. The 

Jehovah’s Witnesses objected to saluting the flag 

which they believed served as an idol and was 

therefore prohibited. Listing “Reasons Why a 

True Follower of Jesus Christ Cannot Salute a 

Flag” they outlined their case stating that not 

only was a flag salute a form of idolatry, but also 

“flag saluting is part of a creed of a sect of so-

called patriots, teaching a ritual of patriotism and 

from such, all true Christians are commanded to 

turn aside” (Quoted in Fennell 1936, 8-9). In 



27 
 

1938, the Gobitises, a Jehovah’s Witness family 

from Minersville, Pennsylvania won a district 

and appellate court ruling that allowed their 

children to return to school after they were 

expelled from the local public school for refusing 

to salute the flag based on their religious 

convictions. The school district appealed the 

ruling of the lower courts and the case 

Minersville School District v Gobitis appeared 

before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940. 

Surprising many, Justice Felix Frankfurter, who 

had been appointed to the court by FDR and had 

a reputation as a civil libertarian-having helped 

organize the ACLU in the 1920s-sided with the 

school district in this case. Writing the majority 

opinion of the court he stated that “The ultimate 

foundation of a free society is the binding tie of 

cohesive sentiment” and that since the flag was 

“the symbol of our national unity,” public 

schools were allowed to compel students to 

salute the flag in order to promote “that unifying 

sentiment without which there can ultimately be 

no liberties, civil or religious” (Minersville 

School District v Gobitis 310 U.S. 586, 591-601 

(1940)).  This ruling only served to underscore 

the place that the daily recitation of the pledge 

held in U.S. public schools as part of the implicit 

curriculum of American patriotism and it 

reinforced the significance of the pedagogy of 

symbols in promoting American values and the 

American way of life.  

A related case also involving the 

Jehovah’s Witnesses and the saluting of the flag 

in public schools came before the court in 1943-

West Virginia State Board of Education v 

Barnette. The Barnett sisters had been expelled 

in 1942 from their local four-room schoolhouse 

in Charleston, West Virginia for refusing to 

salute the flag since, like the Gobitises, they too 

were Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this case, however, 

the court reversed its earlier ruling in Gobitis and 

ruled that students do have the right to refuse to 

salute the flag based on religious grounds. The 

Court noted that “the compulsory flag salute and 

pledge requires affirmation of a belief and an 

attitude of mind” (West Virginia State Board of 

Education v Barnette 319 U.S. 624 (1943)).  

Thus, if this belief conflicted with one’s religious 

beliefs it was a legitimate expression of religious 

freedom to refuse to salute the flag. By then, the 

backlash against the Gobitis ruling had mounted 

in both the religious and secular press. The 

Christian Century said of the ruling it is “bitterly 

ironical that a free government should inflict a 

penalty for refusal to salute a symbol of freedom” 

(Quoted in Marty 1996, 217). The secular press 

also balked at the ruling with 171 newspapers 

attacking the decision. A year before Barnette 

came before the court, Congress had also 

considered the issue of requiring the flag salute 

and passed a law officially recognizing the 

Pledge of Allegiance while also making the flag 

salute and recitation of the pledge voluntary. It is 

also interesting to note that this same law 

changed the flag salute from the traditional 

“Bellamy salute” with a raised right arm-which 

was considered too reminiscent of a Nazi salute-

to the right hand placed over the heart (Ellis 

2005). 

Writing the majority opinion in Barnette, 

Justice Robert Jackson cited the purpose of 

public schools in a free society, emphasizing that 

schools serve the vital role of “educating the 

young for citizenship.”  He went on to state that 

public education in a democracy should “not 

strangle the free mind at its source [or] teach 

youth to discount important principles of our 

government as mere platitudes.” Rather, public 

education should lead students to make their own 

informed decisions about what they believe, 

value, and cherish most as free citizens. Here, the 

court recognized that a patriotism that it is 

compulsory is weaker than that which is 

voluntarily. Jackson concluded: “If there is any 

fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is 

that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what 

shall be orthodox in matters of politics, 

nationalism, religion, or other matters of 

opinion… or force citizens to confess by word 

their faith therein.” (West Virginia State Board of 

Education v Barnette 319 U.S. 624 (1943)).  



28 
 

In his dissenting opinion, hearkening 

back to his earlier decision in Gobitis, Justice 

Frankfurter stressed “We are told that a flag 

salute is a doubtful substitute for adequate 

understanding of our institutions. The states that 

require such a school exercise do not have to 

justify it as the only means for promoting good 

citizenship in children, but merely as one of 

diverse means for accomplishing a worthy end.”  

He recognized that while “patriotism cannot be 

enforced by the flag salute,” in this case “The 

right of West Virginia to utilize the flag salute as 

part of its educational process is denied” since 

“Only a persistent positive translation of the faith 

of a free society into the convictions and habits 

and actions of a community is the ultimate 

reliance against unabated temptations to fetter 

the human spirit” (West Virginia State Board of 

Education v Barnette 319 U.S. 624 (1943)). No 

doubt, Frankfurter believed that the flag salute in 

schools played an important role in the implicit 

curriculum of American citizenship by 

symbolically reinforcing those values around 

which a democratic society ought to be unified. 

Yet, the Gobitis and Barnette cases and the 

controversy surrounding them in the 1940s-a 

time when American democracy was seen as 

under attack around the globe-reveal the inherent 

tension between the centripetal and centrifugal 

forces within American democracy itself-

whether the unum ought to overshadow the 

pluribus or whether there truly can be an e 

pluribus unum. Debates about how best to instill 

those same democratic values in American 

schoolchildren reflected that same tension and 

seemed to tip the scale to one side or the other 

while trying to maintain a delicate balance 

between the two.  

By the mid-1950s, however, after 

emerging victorious against threats to democratic 

freedom in the form of Fascism during World 

War II and after entering into the Cold War 

struggle against forces of Communism, there was 

a decided shift in American society back toward 

Frankfurter’s earlier notion that  “The ultimate 

foundation of a free society is the binding tie of 

cohesive sentiment” and that the flag served not 

just as “the symbol of our national unity” but as 

a sacred symbol of our democratic values. This 

shift toward the unum laid the groundwork for the 

insertion of the words “under God” into the 

pledge, thus enshrining it even more prominently 

on the altar of American civil religion during the 

Eisenhower era. 

   

The Implicit Curriculum of American Civil 

Religion  

In 1955-the year after the words “under God” 

were inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance- 

President Eisenhower told the American Legion 

as part of their “Back to God” campaign that 

“Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, 

the most basic expression of Americanism. 

Without God there could be no American form of 

government, nor an American way of life” (New 

York Herald Tribune February 21, 1955).  That 

same year, sociologist Will Herberg published a 

book that captured this American creed at mid-

century. The book titled Protestant-Catholic-Jew 

emphasized the “common faith” of the American 

people and the United States as a “Judeo-

Christian” nation. To describe the essence of this 

“common faith,” Herberg coined the phrase the 

“civic religion of the American way of life” 

(1955, 101-2). This description reflected well the 

religious values that were on display during the 

Eisenhower era-an era that produced religious 

celebrities who reflected popular religiosity in 

the United States represented by figures such as 

Billy Graham, Fulton Sheen, and Norman 

Vincent Peal who used the media to appeal to 

wider audiences beyond traditional sectarian 

boundaries. The era also gave a receptive public 

platform to theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, 

Paul Tillich, and Abraham Joshua Heschel who 

became members of a new religious 

intelligentsia, often appearing in the popular 

press and offering intellectual justification for the 

emergence of a uniquely American approach to 

religion that was broad, inclusive, and cohesive.    

Pulled to the center of American life by 

the homogenizing effects of suburbanization in 



29 
 

the post-World War II era, many Americans 

found comfort in the values of family, stability, 

and prosperity-values that seemed to converge at 

the confluence of politics, economics, and 

religion in the 1950s (Krause 2015).  At that 

center, both church and school offered stabilizing 

influences to counterbalance fears-both real and 

imagined-of the Communist menace that seemed 

to threaten that very way of life. In the wake of 

the baby boom and riding the crest of post-war 

prosperity, the suburbs grew at a tremendous 

rate. Between 1951 and 1970 the suburban 

population more than doubled in the United 

States, going from thirty-six million to seventy-

four million in just twenty years (Kaledin 2000, 

121). As a largely white emerging middle class 

migrated to the suburbs previously marginalized 

ethnic and religious groups were integrated into 

the modern democratic experiment of suburbia, 

while cities themselves became increasingly 

more segregated along racial, ethnic, and 

economic lines.  

Moving beyond the ghettoization that 

many Catholics and Jews experienced in 

American cities earlier in the century, the newly 

created suburbs invited a new way of being 

religious as part of the American mainstream. 

Church basements became the new meeting 

houses where school, religious, and civic groups 

converged around a culture of conformity 

marked by bake sales, pot-luck suppers, and Jell-

O molds in support of raising children in the 

American way of life. Among the rows of freshly 

built houses, car lined driveways, and non-

descript houses of worship, civic associations, 

like the American Legion and the Knights of 

Columbus dotted the landscape of America’s 

suburbs and became agents for promoting the 

American creed. Schools, both public and 

parochial, became central to their project as 

places of socialization into this common faith in 

the 1950’s and the Pledge of allegiance became a 

rallying point for various groups seeking to 

reassert the central place of religion in American 

civic life.  

These values were also reflected in the 

ubiquitous medium of television which spread 

the gospel of middle-class prosperity. Alongside 

religious celebrities, like Catholic Bishop Fulton 

Sheen, who offered an explicit curriculum of a 

generic “feel-good” faith well suited to the era, 

television presented an implicit curriculum of a 

new social imaginary of solid, middle-class 

values that reinforced the culture of affluence 

being lived out in the newly emergent suburbs 

(Krause 2015). Margot Henricksen observes that 

“Reflecting American society of the baby boom 

and suburban sprawl, television upheld the 

family as the unifying center of values and as the 

firm base of American security.” She contends 

that “This world focused itself internally, 

particularly on the lives of the children” as found 

in popular television shows of the era such as 

“Leave it to Beaver “which portrayed the nuclear, 

suburban family as a stable place for children to 

grow up (1997, 90). Here, “parental authority 

was wise, necessary, and beneficent” as “parents 

taught their children to be responsible and honest 

citizens” (Henricksen 1997, 90). Although not 

explicitly religious, such portrayals neatly 

coalesced with the aims which the advocates of 

American civil religion sought to promote: God, 

country, and family.    

The Cold War and a “Common Faith” 

The insertion of the words “under God” 

into the Pledge of Allegiance and subsequent 

revisions to the citizenship curriculum in the 

nation’s public schools in the 1950s represented 

an attempt at introducing an implicit curriculum 

of American civil religion at a time when 

religions’ explicit influence in public schools 

was beginning to wane. It was a revision of the 

curriculum of American patriotism which recast 

the traditional Protestant trope of America’s 

providential destiny in a new light to reflect a 

new national awareness of America as a “Judeo-

Christian” nation. Or, as President Eisenhower 

suggested, “millions of our school children will 

daily proclaim in every city and town, every 

village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of 



30 
 

our nation and our people to the Almighty. To 

anyone who truly loves America, nothing could 

be more inspiring than to contemplate this 

rededication of our youth, on each school 

morning, to our country's true meaning.... 

reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith 

in America's heritage and future” (Eisenhower, 

1954). Such sentiments openly expressed by a 

U.S. President reflect the religious ethos of the 

1950s which became the high-water mark for 

formal church affiliation with nine out of ten 

Americans professing belief in the divinity of 

Jesus Christ according to one survey in 1954 and 

ninety-six percent of respondents professing a 

particular religious faith in 1957 (Whitfield 1996, 

83).  

Historian Martin Marty argues that this 

religious resurgence in American society in the 

1950’s was tied to a popular patriotism framed 

over and against the “godless Communism” of 

the Soviet Union (Marty 1996, 313). To be a 

good American meant to be a religious citizen 

and to be a religious citizen meant to be a good 

American. This sparked a renewed emphasis on 

developing a moral education for godly 

citizenship in public schools. Encouraging a non-

sectarian approach to teaching the value of 

religious faith and common moral principles 

consistent with the American way of life became 

of paramount concern for many civics educators 

who stressed the religious character of American 

citizenship. For example, the Religious 

Education Association’s journal Character 

which was started in the 1930’s became 

Character and Citizenship in the 1940’s and 

simply The American Citizen by 1950, taking the 

religious aspect of good citizenship as a sine qua 

non (REA Archives, Record Group 74, Boxes 

38-39). 

Along similar lines, a 1956 report by 

Waco Public Schools in Waco, Texas 

emphasized “respect for symbols of democracy” 

as an essential component of the civics 

curriculum. Here, a group of junior high school 

teachers asserted that “The corner stone of our 

American way of life was faith in God” and that 

“Christianity in action is the essence of 

democracy” (Waco Independent School District 

1956, 15). Listed among the “symbols of 

democracy with which all American 

schoolchildren should be familiar” was not only 

the Pledge of Allegiance but also “Grace (“Each 

in his own way”)” (Waco Independent School 

District 1956, 45). It stressed belief in God as 

foundational to democracy in the United States, 

not only respecting but endorsing religious 

principles and practices as part of the school 

civics curriculum.  Such sentiments were 

reflected in similar reports and various civics 

curricula from school districts throughout the 

United States during this period. A year later, a 

report on Nebraska’s public schools stated “In 

our school program, and especially in our social 

studies, we have much opportunity to emphasize 

moral principles which undergird our nation’s 

liberties. We have furthermore the opportunity to 

develop in our young people an appreciation and 

understanding of the significant part that faith in 

God has played in the development of our great 

country.” Citing the words “under God” in the 

Pledge of Allegiance and the recently added 

inscription, “In God We Trust,” to U.S. currency, 

it affirmed that a common faith in God is 

foundational to the principles of American 

democracy wherein belief that “Man is a spiritual 

being of dignity and worth because he has his 

origins and destiny in God, his creator” is 

“fundamental in our nation’s moral and spiritual 

foundation” (Nebraska Dept of Education 1957, 

10). Yet, this emphasis on teaching the moral and 

spiritual foundations of the United States was not 

limited to schools in the South or Midwest; 

rather, even more liberal states such as New York 

adopted “an appreciation of the moral and 

spiritual values of the past” and an “enthusiasm 

for the American way of life” as aims for its 

civics curriculum during the 1950’s (Bureau of 

Secondary Curriculum Development 1954, 13).  

As a 1955 report of the National 

Education Association on Public Education and 

the Future of America states: “The great ethical 

concepts of Judeo-Christian morality could be 



31 
 

taught without reference to particular sectarian 

interpretations. The moral foundation of the 

school program could be preserved while the 

rights of individual conscience were honored” 

(NEA 1955, 20). It goes on to extol the value of 

public schools as promoting those values 

whereby “public schools contributed 

magnificently to making ‘One nation, under God, 

indivisible with liberty and justice for all,’” 

highlighting how public schools have “sought to 

develop in children the moral and ethical 

commitments which are common to all of the 

great religions” and that “This common basis of 

ethical values has both raised the level of the 

nation’s morality and left each individual free to 

pursue the religious dictates of his own 

conscience” (NEA 1955, 68-69). “Thus,” the 

report concludes, “while public schools are 

prohibited by their very nature from teaching 

sectarian religious doctrines, they have 

contributed immeasurably to the spiritual growth 

of the American people, to the ethical foundation 

of American democracy, and to harmonious 

working relations among the varied groups 

within the United States” (NEA 1955, 70).  

Against the backdrop of such concerns 

for finding ways to promote a moral education 

rooted in a common faith which supported the 

principles of American democracy were fears 

that the American way of life itself was under a 

constant existential threat both ideologically and 

materially by the forces of an atheistic 

Communism. The year after the NEA report was 

issued, for example, the Civil Defense Education 

Project of the U.S. Department of Health, 

Education, and Welfare published a manual titled 

Education for National Survival: A Handbook on 

Civil Defense for Schools (U.S. Dept of Health, 

Education, and Welfare 1956). Opening its first 

pages with a photograph of a hydrogen bomb 

exploding over Bikini Atoll along with an artist’s 

rendition of “a hydrogen bomb fireball over the 

skyline of New York,” it cautions that “Civil 

Defense is today a vital aspect of our daily lives 

and probably will remain so for some time,” 

covering topics such as “the nature of possible 

enemy attack,” “warning time,” and “civil 

defense planning” (U.S. Dept of Health, 

Education, and Welfare 1956, 5, 8, 10-12). Civil 

defense films, pamphlets, and even comics books 

instructing student what to do in case of a nuclear 

attack became a regular staple of classroom life 

across the United States during the 1950’s 

alongside “duck and cover” air-raid drills which 

impressed upon schoolchildren a real sense of 

potential imminent danger lurking just over the 

horizon. As Margot Henricksen observes in Dr. 

Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in 

the Atomic Age: “American children perhaps felt 

the psychological impact of living in the atomic 

age most keenly, but their anxious experiences 

spoke of the larger cultural anxiety that 

impugned, if quietly and underhandedly, the 

tranquil reputation of postwar America.” She 

argues that “The civil defense debate revealed an 

America divided between the nervous and the 

calm (whether that calm was real or induced), 

and children were introduced to this split life 

through school drills, where fear suddenly 

intruded, then receded, where—as one educator 

put it—children were trained to become both 

‘disaster­minded’ and ‘competent to survive’” 

(Henricksen 1997, 108). 

These cold war fears helped shape the 

curriculum of American civics throughout this 

period and gave an added sense of urgency to 

concerns for bolstering religious values in public 

schools under the broad canopy of promoting a 

common faith in American civil religion in 

juxtaposition to the “Communist threat.” Schools 

relied on the implicit curriculum of American 

civil religion to reinforce the values of the United 

States as a “Judeo-Christian” nation, seen as 

essential for upholding the American way of life. 

Such concerns crystalized around the insertion of 

the words “under God” into the Pledge as a 

concrete expression of that common faith not 

only in “One nation, under God, indivisible,” but 

in the very future of the United States itself. 

American Civil Religion and the Pledge of 

Allegiance 



32 
 

In his analysis of civil religion in U.S. 

public schools, sociologist Adam Gamoran 

emphasizes that the daily ritual of saluting the 

flag and the content of the Pledge of Allegiance 

was designed to promote belief in a national 

community, that the nation is subordinate to God, 

and that loyalty is owed to the nation. (1990, 

235). Along similar lines, Peter Gardella argues 

that the American flag itself came to be seen as 

“a sacramental object” which symbolizes the 

land, the people, the government, and the spirit 

of the United States (2014, 81). Gardella points 

out that “The values and icons of American civil 

religion serve to help unify the ethnically and 

religiously diverse citizens of the United States, 

and to help them identify as Americans” (2014, 

7). Thus, the ritual aspects of schooling serve to 

reinforce the implicit curriculum of patriotism 

through the values, behaviors, and expectations 

embedded in the daily rituals of school life 

(Eisner 1985, 90-97). In the case of the Pledge of 

Allegiance, the values of conformity and 

uniformity are reinforced through unison 

recitation, collective participation, and shared 

attention to the flag as an object of ritual 

devotion.  Leisa Martin in her contemporary 

study of students’ perceptions of the daily 

recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools 

concludes that it does, in fact, reinforce the 

values of loyalty and patriotism and serves to 

instill in students a sense of pride in the nation 

(2012, 58). These were precisely the educational 

aims that the originators of the Pledge hoped to 

achieve and ones that those who amended the 

Pledge in the 1950’s hoped to promote.  

Gamoran argues that “schools may be the 

most important agent of civil religion in 

contemporary American society” through its 

“symbols, rituals, and holiday celebrations” 

(1990, 236). Such was certainly the case in the 

1950’s with its stress on the United States as “one 

Nation, under God” (Marty 1996, 294). 

Educators, politicians, and religious leaders 

during the Eisenhower era found solace in 

extoling this ideal as expressing their aspirations 

of what they hoped and believed America to be. 

The daily recitation of the Pledge, the singing of 

patriotic songs such as “God Bless America,” 

and the reading of foundational documents in 

American history which made explicit reference 

to God such as the Gettysburg Address served to 

promote the implicit curriculum of American 

civil religion in public schools and foster a 

collective sense of national unity which merged 

patriotism with piety in pursuit of a national 

identity.   

In 1956 Congress passed House 

Resolution 243 which adopted the motto “In God 

We Trust” as the official motto of the United 

States, having already made it mandatory to be 

imprinted on all U.S. coins the year prior 

(Knights of Columbus Supreme Council 

Archives, Box 417, File 011). Along with the 

insertion of the words “under God” into the 

Pledge, this move further solidified efforts to 

place religion at the center of American life in the 

1950’s.  

 

Popular Responses 

Popular support for the change to the 

Pledge was largely favorable. Hearst newspapers 

under the direction of William Randolph Hearst 

Jr.-a rabid anti-Communist like his father who 

died in 1951-promoted the insertion of the words 

“under God” from the beginning. In 1954 the 

Journal-American published an editorial, which 

ran in all Hearst papers, titled “Under God” and 

suggested that “all Americans support a worthy 

change” (Editorial New York Journal-American, 

May 3, 1954). Other news organizations such as 

CBS news televised the recitation of the newly 

revised Pledge in front of the U.S. Capitol on 

Flag Day 1954 under the story heading “New 

Glory for Old Glory.” Popular television 

journalist Walter Cronkite, who covered the 

event for CBS, commented “if we remember to 

display our flags today and every special day, we 

will remember more clearly the traditions of 

freedom on which our country is founded” 

(Quoted in Bishop 2007, 78). As the flag was 

raised, a bugler played Onward Christian 

Soldiers in the background. Yet, despite the hype 



33 
 

and despite Hearst’s propaganda, not everyone 

supported the move. A Gallup Poll in 1954 found 

that 69 percent of Americans favored the change, 

while 21 percent opposed it (Gallup Vault 2017). 

And a small minority of religious groups, such as 

the Unitarian Ministers’ Association of Boston, 

also voiced opposition, suggesting that it 

threatened religious liberty (Marty 1996, 300). 

Nonetheless, the change to the Pledge appears to 

have received widespread popular support, 

sentiments echoed by one local newspaper which 

suggested “America, whose foundations were 

laid in a deep-felt respect for the Almighty, is 

today a God-fearing nation” (Knights of 

Columbus Supreme Council Archives, Box 646, 

File SC-1). Such comments reflect the general 

pulse of a Cold War, Anti-Communist ethos and 

the renewed religious sensibilities of the United 

States at mid-century.  

The Curriculum of American Patriotism in 

American Catholic Schools 

In August 1954 President Eisenhower 

sent a letter to Supreme Knight Luke Hart 

expressing his gratitude for the Knights of 

Columbus’ role in promoting the change to the 

Pledge: 

I am happy to send greetings to the 

Knights of Columbus on the occasion of 

the annual meeting of your Supreme 

Council. Your tireless work for charity 

and brotherhood in communities 

throughout our land has long done much 

to keep Americans aware of the religious 

values which we hold. And this year we 

are particularly thankful to you for your 

part in the movement to have the words 

“under God” added to our Pledge of 

Allegiance. These words remind 

Americans that despite our great physical 

strength we must remain humble. They 

will help us to keep constantly in our 

minds and hearts the spiritual and moral 

principles which alone give dignity to 

man, and upon which our way of life is 

founded. 

For the contributions which your 

organization made to this cause, we must 

be genuinely grateful (Knights of 

Columbus Supreme Council Archives, 

Box 646, File 2004). 

This letter was enlarged and prominently on 

display behind the rostrum at the gathering of the 

Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus in 

St. Louis in August 1954 where it was greeted 

with enthusiasm by the delegates for whom it 

represented the Catholic move toward the center 

of American life-a move which would further 

crystalize with the election of John F. Kennedy 

as President of the United States six years later.  

 Yet, despite Eisenhower’s recognition, 

there were numerous attempts on the part of 

others to take credit for originating the idea of 

inserting the words “under God” into the Pledge, 

including Reverend Docherty and Congressman 

Rabaut. Against these, Hart vigorously and 

vociferously defended the place of the Knights of 

Columbus in the history of the Pledge, writing to 

small, local papers such as The Huntington 

Advertiser of Huntington, West Virginia as well 

as national ones like the Washington Post to 

correct the record (See Knights of Columbus 

Supreme Council Archives, Box 646, File 2000). 

In one such letter, dated July 25, 1957, to the 

editor of the Tri-City Herald in Pasco, 

Washington which failed to credit the Knights in 

an article about the Pledge, Hart told the editor 

“This is a complete fraud and there appears to be 

a studied campaign to promote it” (Knights of 

Columbus Supreme Council Archives, Box 646, 

File 2011). Or, in a detailed six-page letter to the 

Washington Post in March 1955 outlining the 

role the Knights played in amending the Pledge, 

he rebuked the editor for an article it published 

suggesting Docherty was the originator of the 

words “under God” in the Pledge: “I am quite 

surprised that Dr. Docherty would make such a 

claim and I am just as greatly surprised that you 

would write an article setting forth such a claim” 

(Knights of Columbus Supreme Council 

Archives, Box 646, File 2012). Hart’s zealous 

defense of the Knights’ role in the history of the 



34 
 

Pledge indicates the importance which he 

attached to it and the value he and others saw in 

fixing the place of American Catholicism in the 

patriotic imagination of the United States. 

  

Catholic Schools and Civil Religion 

While the Catholic school system had 

been established in the nineteenth century as a 

bulwark against the Protestant-dominated public 

school system and while it continued to offer an 

enclave for American Catholic schoolchildren 

well into the twentieth century, by the mid-

1950’s most American Catholic schools were 

just as eager to appear American as they were 

Catholic.   

A letter to Supreme Knight of the Knights 

of Columbus, Luke Hart, dated June 25, 1956 

expressed thanks for the Knights’ production of 

posters of the Pledge, stating, “the Holy Name 

Men’s Club placed framed copies of the Pledge 

of Allegiance in each of the seventeen school 

rooms and we encourage many societies and 

organizations to do likewise for their schools and 

soon we may look forward to the time when 

every Catholic school room will display these 

works of art, piety, and patriotism” (Knights of 

Columbus Supreme Council Archives, Box 646, 

File 2000). This illustrates the patriotic fervor 

which American Catholics at mid-century 

embraced as part of their identity in the American 

mainstream. As a recruiting poster for the 

Knights of Columbus from this period asked 

“Why be an American? Why be a Catholic? Why 

not be a Communist?” It implored “To meet this 

[Communist] threat to our precious freedoms-

save our American Constitutional form of 

government, our institutions of freedom, and our 

way of life” (Knights of Columbus Supreme 

Council Archives, Box 646, File 2016).  

Father Gerard Sloyan of the Catholic 

University of America insisted at the beginning 

of the decade: “The child in Catholic the school 

is being formed in the national tradition. 

Patriotism does not suffer the slightest threat 

within the walls of the Church’s 

institutions…One of the achievements of 

American democratic life is its unity in diversity. 

The Catholic curriculum prepares children for 

worthy participation in the life of the nation, with 

all the rights and obligations attendant thereon” 

(Sloyan 1950, 77-78). A sociological study of a 

typical middle-class parochial school in the 

Midwest toward the end of the decade by Jesuit 

Father Joseph Fichter bore this out. He observed 

that in addition to the teaching of civics and the 

assigning of “citizenship” grades on report cards, 

the school’s Parent Teacher Association included 

committees on “Citizenship” and “Character 

Education” which alongside a parish-sponsored 

Boy Scout troop and Camp Fire Girls Troop were 

designed to promote civic virtues among the 

students (Fichter 1958, 264). Fichter stressed that 

in Catholic schools, “the next generation are here 

being socialized as maturing Catholics in the 

American culture” (1958, 1). He went on to 

observe that the students had moved beyond the 

“ghetto-mentality” of earlier generations and 

displayed the traits of “conformity and self-

control” which he identified as “integral values 

of the American culture” (Fichter 1958, 134). 

Overall, he found that, like public schools, 

parochial schools in 1950’s by and large 

promoted an implicit curriculum of American 

citizenship that encouraged Catholics to 

assimilate into the dominant mainstream culture.   

Catholic Reaction to American Civil Religion 

Yet not all Catholics were happy to 

assimilate. Criticizing what he called a 

“homogenizing Americanism,” Father Leonard 

Feeney in a 1952 editorial in his archconservative 

Catholic magazine The Pilot, warned that “the 

generic religion of the United States of America 

is a meetinghouse Christianity” which, he argued 

would lead to “a confused Christianity” (Knights 

of Columbus Supreme Council Archives, Box 

417, File 005).  These sentiments reflected the 

tension in American Catholicism between 

traditionalists who saw American civil religion 

as a threat and progressives who saw entry into 

the American mainstream as vital to promoting 

American Catholic values. Feeney who was later 



35 
 

censured by the Vatican for his views that 

salvation was reserved only for Catholics 

represented the more extreme traditionalist view 

(Marty 1996, 407). In contrast, more liberal 

Catholic commentators in publications such as 

Commonweal and the Jesuit weekly America 

expressed hope at the opening of American 

Catholicism up to the center of American life 

(See Marty 1996, 416-433).  

More broadly, the Knights of Columbus’ 

efforts to insert the words “under God” into the 

Pledge represented the Catholic rapprochement 

with American values in the Eisenhower era, a 

rapprochement that would find further 

expression in the following decade not only with 

the election of John F. Kennedy, but also with 

Catholic involvement in the Civil Rights 

Movement, and the implementation of the 

reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1961-

1965) which made explicit efforts to update the 

Catholic church, bringing it into dialogue with 

the modern world. By defending their role in 

inserting the words “under God “into the pledge, 

the Knights of Columbus hoped to recast the 

trope of American patriotism, which had deep 

roots in American Protestantism, as inclusive of 

Catholics as well. In one sense, it was seen as a 

mark of Catholic respectability in American 

culture just as Catholics were moving in large 

numbers from cities to suburbs in the 1950s. 

There, they built Catholic schools which 

continued to promote the values of American 

patriotism where Catholic schoolchildren, like 

their public-school counterparts, would daily 

recite the Pledge of Allegiance, professing a 

common faith in “One Nation, under God.” 

 

Conclusion 

While the implicit curriculum of 

American civil religion in the 1950’s found 

various expressions, nowhere was it more 

prominently featured or enduring than in the 

insertion of the words “under God” into the 

Pledge of Allegiance. In one sense, it represents 

the Cold War mentality that dominated the 

Eisenhower era that saw the American way of life 

besieged by the forces of “godless” Communism. 

Yet, in a larger sense, it also represents fears that 

the American way of life was somehow losing its 

religious moorings. The secularization of 

American society which fueled those initial fears 

which led to efforts to amend the Pledge 

continued to accelerate throughout the following 

decade. Supreme court cases in 1960’s that 

deemphasized religion’s place in public schools 

firmly established a strict wall of separation 

between church and state, forbidding the 

devotional reading of the Bible as well as prayer 

in public schools (DelFattore 2004, 52-66). The 

culture of conformity that appeared to mark the 

Eisenhower era seemed to give way to a culture 

of confusion which marked the next decade. Just 

ten years after “In God We Trust” was adopted 

as the official motto of the United States, Time 

magazine featured a front cover asking the 

question “Is God Dead?” (Elson 1966).  On the 

one hand, such dramatic shifts in American 

religious sensibilities seem to make the words 

“under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance appear 

to be a quaint relic of a bygone era. On the other 

hand, they also reflect more perduring concerns 

over the place of religion in public schools. At a 

time when religion was fading from the explicit 

curriculum, proponents of the change to the 

Pledge sought to ensure that religion would 

remain, at least, part of the implicit curriculum, 

lest it fade completely into the null curriculum of 

American public education. Given the rapid 

changes in society in the later half of the 

twentieth century, their concern was not wholly 

unfounded; nor was their desire to preserve an 

appreciation for the religious heritage that shaped 

American values. At the same time, as Catholics 

entered the mainstream and asserted their right to 

be called loyal Americans, the Pledge became for 

them a symbol of their loyalty to the American 

creed. Thus, the insertion of the words “under 

God” into the Pledge continues to serve as a 

reminder of the struggles over the implicit 

curriculum of American civil religion and 

debates concerning the role of religion and 



36 
 

patriotism in American education both public 

and private. 

   

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