WASHINGTON: A court decision revolving around two words — “Under God” — has touched a sensitive nerve among Americans, going to the heart of the nation’s self-image.

Last week’s federal appeals court decision declaring that the Pledge of Allegiance violated the constitutional separation of church and state because it declared that the United States was “one nation under God” immediately stirred frenzied condemnation from Republican and Democratic politicians alike who lined up to recite the pledge in public.

It also unleashed a flood of letters to newspapers around the country, the vast majority lambasting the decision, which most legal experts predicted would quickly be reversed.

“Those people opposed to this ‘forced professing of religion’ perhaps need to embrace God and realize that without him and our faith in him, where would we have been on Sept 11?,” wrote Darcy Opalko of Greenfield, Pennsylvania, to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Maria Rose Pisano of Mount Washington wrote to the same newspaper: “To ban something that is and has been part of our country and serves to proclaim our love and allegiance is not only un-American, it is downright disgusting.”

A Newsweek magazine poll found 87 per cent of respondents supported the phrase and 54 per cent thought the government should not avoid promoting religion. Additionally, 60 per cent thought that government leaders making public expressions of faith in God was good for the nation.

The original pledge of allegiance, written by the socialist Francis Bellamy in 1892, made no mention of God, or even of the United States. It began with the words, “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands.”

The drive to bring God into the equation gathered steam during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s as a way of distinguishing the United States from the “godless Communists” of the Soviet Union.

Congress inserted the words “under God” in 1954. Around that time, it also added the words “In God We Trust” to all paper money and in 1956 made those words the nation’s official motto, replacing “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many, One).

Among industrialized countries, the United States is by far the most overtly religious and may be getting even more so.

Voluntary giving to religious institutions, estimated at more than $55 billion annually, exceeds the gross national product of many smaller nations. There are more churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques per capita in the United States than in any other nation on Earth — one for about every 865 people.

In US history and still today, many of the nation’s greatest political debates have revolved around moral issues and involved religion. It the past, they included slavery and civil rights. Now, they encompass abortion, sexual behaviour, homosexuality, assisted suicide and human cloning.

While these great debates rage, forces in favour and against a greater role for religion in daily life are constantly skirmishing over whether the 10 Commandments can be posted in schools, whether prayers can be said at graduation ceremonies and before high school football games, whether there should be a moment of silent prayer before classes, whether school children can sing secular Christmas songs like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and whether they can form Bible clubs on school premises.

In that war, the appeals court decision on the pledge of allegiance seemed to many Americans to swing the pendulum too far against religion.

Mike Macdonald, pastor of Broad Street United Methodist Church in Mooresville, North Carolina, said that religiously speaking the court decision was unimportant.—Reuters