Far from it. Elisabeth Sifton warns that

once the Supremes assure them that the Pledge with "under God" in it is constitutional, then local teachers and politicians sympathetic to them might try to amplify it into more openly Christian, even Jesus-specific, formulations. They have a President in the White House who listens to them, a Justice Department sympathetic to their aims, a Solicitor General who is close to some of their principal agents – in short, a perfect political situation in which to further their cause.

Further, claiming that the phrase is harmless, merely a Hallmark card god is a way of avoiding the fact that this is a critical issue - two small words as ABC News concluded tonight, but they expose the question: what are our foundational ideas? Are they to be religion-specific, or tolerant humanist ideas as the founders intended? This is the culture war defined.

Salman Rushdie once said in an interview regarding his novel The Satanic Verses:

... there is an old, old conflict between the secular view of the world and the religious view of the world, and particularly between texts which claim to be divinely inspired and texts which are imaginatively inspired. . . . I distrust people who claim to know the whole truth and who seek to orchestrate the world in line with that one true truth. I think that's a very dangerous position in the world. It needs to be challenged. It needs to be challenged constantly in all sorts of ways...

The root of the culture war reaches all the way to the founding of the country, a mythical place where its easy to project and extract desired meanings. In some ways the arguments about how much religion the founders intended to infuse the government with are moot. The country and the world change, sometimes evolve. We need a flexible, not rigid, foundational structure.

Though the founders believed in a God, they were deists, and as such they understood the fallibility of human institutions and interpretations based on faith. Hence, Paine wrote:

Whenever we step aside from this article, by mixing it with articles of human invention, we wander into a labyrinth of uncertainty and fable, and become exposed to every kind of imposition by pretenders to revelation.

It is by believing in a specific human interpretation of god such as "the Christian collection of books and epistles, written by nobody knows who" that we "the victim of doubt and the dupe of delusion". And because truth and god are not revealed to man in these ways but rather through reason, Deists believe, we found our nation upon the reason of man rather than the delusion (and hence oppression) of a particular religion. In fact in some senses democracy itself is a defiance of religious authority. Lessening our defiance, giving in and retreating are threats to democracy.

Many would argue that the authority of the government comes from god. Isn't this precisely what we're trying to avoid in our nation building in Iraq? Our fear? The fact is that, on purpose, neither the Bill of Rights nor the Constitution mention god. The Declaration of Independence states that the government derives its authority "from the consent of the governed." - not from god. This is the triumph of a secular society.

And while I do not fully agree with the deist view of things, nor the founders idyllic view of reason, I appreciate their insight into the danger of founding a society on the narrow dictates of a particular faith. Many, however, argue that it is "tradition". Well, it's a reinterpreted tradition. An eighteenth century deist would be seen as blasphemous to most who defend the "under god" phrase in the pledge.

Even if you are religious, its easy to see that insisting that one religion be the legitimizing factor and the source of "truth" is at best intolerant. At worst it is racist and hegemonistic. Being a country of diversity we need to fully embrace it, and remove as many barriers to inclusion as possible. Finally, we should ask ourselves under what conditions we are pledging ourselves to a flag and the "nation for which it stands" in the first place. What does this pledging mean or accomplish? Unity and solidarity? Around whose ideals? Patriotism and the flag have been used as weapons by those who would co-opt it and own its meaning, accusing those who do not agree with this or that policy of being "un-american." Political and religious views are attached as riders (or suckerfish) to national symbols which then become corrosive weapons of propaganda, infectious carriers of a specific worldview.

I pledge my allegiance to defending "liberty and justice for all", not just those who wish to restrict its interpretation and benefits to themselves.

One of Salman Rushdie's characters in The Satanic Verses says

"Battle lines are being drawn today, secular versus religious, the light verses the dark. Better you choose which side you are on."

Indeed.