The Associated Press had an odd error in today's story about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to consider whether government can encourage students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. The reporter wrote, "The First Amendment guarantees that government will not 'establish' religion," which is not what the First Amendment says. The amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," a considerably more nuanced phrasing. One reading of the "establishment" clause is that Congress shall not establish an official church; another is that Congress shall make not laws that give preference to any religion (even Christianity) over any other.

Court cases generally have preferred the letter reading; the reporter seems to be in the first camp. Is this just more of that ol' conservative media bias? Well, it's probably just sloppy work, but it is interesting that so few people are willing to make the conservative case against the Pledge. I considered it here, and Roger Clawson mentioned it here. In my fundamentalist religion, saying the Pledge was just one of many real-life examples of how hard it was to live the proper Christian life. We were taught not to take oaths, nor to take the name of the Lord in vain. That meant more than not cursing; it included any casual reference to God, such as "Oh, my God," and rote phrases such as the Lord's Prayer and, yup, "one nation under God." When that phrase came around in school recitations, I clammed up.

This wasn't some wild-eyed notion. Hesitancy about naming the Deity was once a common feature in many religions, including Catholicism; monks used to wash themselves before the writing the name of God when they were copying the Bible by hand. And the Pledge case makes a good argument for returning to the practice of keeping God out of public rituals: Everybody agrees that you can't force people to swear fealty to God and be true to the First Amendment. The pro-Pledge argument is, essentially, that its reference to God is so generic and watered down that it doesn't amount to a religious sentiment. Is that an argument that religious people really want the Supreme Court to adopt?