Colin Kaepernick and the Pledge of Allegiance

Government educators against allegiance to the nation and government.  More evidence for vouchers.

In the link below, the author asks whether Christians can learn anything from Colin Kaepernick?  Yes, they can.  They can learn that being a millionaire and living in a Constitutional Democracy affords one the privilege to protest one's country based on trumped up charges about cops unsupported by anything resembling a decent argument.  Much more beyond that, I can't say.

But here is more. Christians can learn that Kaepernick is just acting like the first century church in not pledging his allegiance to the modern day Rome. Give it a read and see what you think.  I don't want to linger on the obvious fact that pledging allegiance to Rome and the U.S. are disanalogous in several salient ways, one way being that pledging allegiance to Caesar was also an acknowledgment of him as divine.  Instead, I wish to comment briefly on the following:

"[T]o pledge allegiance is a profoundly religious act."*

This strikes me as not only false, but fairly obviously so.  The Pledge of Allegiance has been in public schools for decades and in one form or another in existence for over a century, and I know of no Supreme Court challenge to it per se as violating the Second Amendment's Establishment Clause.  There have been arguments against it on the basis of its inclusion of "under God," but not on the basis of the act of pledging allegiance itself. (These arguments, I might add, are specious, since "under God" affirms theism in general and no particular religion.  Judges would do well to dwell for a moment on this fact).  If pledging allegiance to the U.S. were a religious act, government officials would be in violation of the Establishment Clause all the time.  In fact, any distinction between the secular and the religious in most public affairs would be impossible in the United States of America.  The plain fact that such a distinction is not only possible, but actual, gives the lie to the claim that pledging allegiance is a religious act, let alone a profound one.

A pledge is a promise, allegiance a loyal commitment. We make and pledge allegiance all throughout life to various people and causes.  I promise a loyal commitment to my family, friends, church, city, state, and country.  I'm religious, but non-religious people do the same.  But there are few who think that all pledges are absolute and inviolable.  Such pledges come with the tacit acknowledged that the pledges are conditional.  No one thinks that if the United States were to turn into a Stalinist regime--violating objective norms of justice on a grand scale--that all who have pledged to her obedience remain duty bound.  And few think that if your spouse is found out to be engaged in sex-trafficking, that a pledge of allegiance requires being an accomplice.

So too the pledges are hierarchical.  God-family-friends-local community-state-country (or at least this is the order of a right thinking conservative).  Such a hierarchical acknowledgment is perhaps implied in the Pledge of Allegiance itself--at least in its most popular form today.  "I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the United States of America....One nation under God...."  The nation is under God.  What does this mean?  The phrase is ambiguous.  It could mean that God is high above in the heavens. It could mean that the nation is divinely favored by God.  According to the previous link, Congressional testimony suggests instead that it points to the fact that belief in God has been a significant part of the nation's heritage and foundation.  The phrase arose because of opposition to the U.S.S.R.which was communist and Marxists, and therefore atheistic.  If there is anyone whose pledge of allegiance to the state is a pseudo-religious act, it is the Marxist-communist; for him, the material world is all that there is and the state the closest thing to an omnipotent agent.

* It is doubtful that when one sings the National Anthem that one is pledging allegiance to anything at all.  The act seems more of an expression of gratitude for the goods one has received from one's nation and a degree of solidarity rather than a promise of any sort.

ESPN is Wrong (as usual) on Mizzou

Howard Bryant begins his article with the following:

Despite its complex web of allegiances and rivals, the dynamic that doomed Missouri system president Tim Wolfe and school chancellor R. Bowen Loftin was quite simple: It was the workers versus the owners, the little versus the big, the invisible versus the invincible.

The power of the Missouri football team provided the fulcrum, because money ultimately forced the action. But so much of the uprising was rooted in the frustration of minority students facing years of entrenched racism. 

 It all stemmed from a movement addressing major offenses that were deemed too trivial by an administration whose only response had been to advise that the slapped get tougher, have thicker skin, get over it.

First, there are no owners of universities, unless, since Missouri is a state school, one thinks that the owners are the tax-payers.  But the president is no more of an owner than the board which appoints him, and no more of an owner than the faculty or the students.  They all "own" the university if we want to call it that.  Second, it's not true that the administration's only response had been to advise that the "slapped get tougher."  It has been reported that the president met with students personally.  As well, it has been reported that one of the drunken students who made the racial slurs was removed from campus until campus disciplinary proceedings run their course.  Third, the reported evidence of "entrenched racism" consisted of a nut who scrawled feces (!) and a couple jerks who spat racial epithets at a school with over 35,000 students.  Are we to think that the student body, professors, and administration at large are by and large racists?  Fourth, though the football team no doubt provided the final muscle to upend the president from his presidency, the power of the football team is overrated.  It is only the action of the football team in combination with the progressive radicals that provided the impetus.  As David French writes,

If you think football players are suddenly all-powerful, imagine a counter-factual — like a “strike” by a few players in solidarity with an athlete wrongfully convicted by a campus sex assault tribunal, or a stand in solidarity with a team chaplain under fire for allegedly offending the LGBT community. Would ESPN fawn all over them, celebrating their courage? Would faculty and radical students extol them as heroes? Would a university president and chancellor step down within 48 hours in response to an athletic cry for religious liberty? Student-athletes can’t even figure out a way to be fairly compensated for the billions in revenue they bring to college athletics. Powerful? Only when weaponized by the campus Left. The story at Mizzou is the same old story we’ve reading and watching since the Sixties. Radicals rule.

Read French's other devastating critique.  Excerpt:

Closeted campus conservatives are worse than useless. Indeed, their very timidity contributes to the narrative that there is something shameful about their beliefs. To read anonymous letters from professors who are afraid to “out” themselves in a hostile campus culture is to read the sad dispatches of people too pitiful for their profession. Do something else, anything else, than merely sit and watch while the revolutionaries shred the Constitution, reject our culture, and assert their own will to power.The true shame is that it doesn’t even require actual courage to defeat the university Left, just a tiny bit of will — a small measure of staying power. No one is shooting at trustees. No one is beheading professors. There’s no guillotine in the quad. Instead, campus “leaders” tremble before hashtags and weep at the notion of losing a football team so inept that it couldn’t score a touchdownthrough most of the month of October. Let them strike. With an offense that inept, the SEC won’t even notice.These are the times that try men’s souls? No. These are the times of men without chests. The Left has the will to power. University leaders have no will at all. They have earned nothing but contempt.

Does God Care About the Outcome of Sporting Events?

Oxford philosopher Brian Leftow tackles that question: (incidentally, my pastor when I was at an ECC church in Lafayette, IN was good buddies with Leftow):