"Under God" has served its purpose

The United States is the only Western nation that forces its children to participate in a daily indoctrination ritual. The Pledge of Allegiance ritual is obviously more suited to a small, shaky dictatorship than a confident, free country such as ours. We should do away with the forced Pledge ritual entirely as a national embarrassment.

But, while we're arguing over distinctions within the ritual, I think a strong case can be made that reverting to the original Pledge wording--which did not include an endorsement of monotheism--or performing a new alteration on the Pledge makes sense in these changing times.

When the Pledge was written in 1892, this was the wording:

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

"Under God" was not anywhere in the Pledge. The author, Francis Bellamy, wanted to stress unity, not division. For more than five decades, the Pledge included no endorsement of religion whatsoever.

It was only at the height of the Red Scare that the Pledge was altered to declare the United States to be an inherently monotheistic country, and it was for reasons unique to the time (emphasis added):

In 1954, after a campaign initiated by the Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus, Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan sponsored a bill to amend the pledge to include the words "under God," to distinguish the U.S. from the officially atheist Soviet Union, and to remove the appearance of flag and nation worship.

At the time, the greatest perceived threat to the United States was from godless Communism. So, if you accept the logic that a daily indoctrination ritual makes the fabric of the country stronger, it makes sense to force children to distinguish themselves from our main enemy. Every day, children in the Soviet Union were being told that they were godless. In the United States, children were being told that their nation was "under God." When WWIII came, children on both sides would know whom they were supposed to shoot.

But that was then.

Today our enemies are terrorists, and they are not godless. To put it mildly. Our enemy has (roughly) the same God that we're supposed to. Our enemy is really, really "under God." If we're going to apply the same logic now that got "under God" added to the Pledge in 1954, we should alter the Pledge in a way that distinguishes us from our current enemy.

I propose:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, so long as you call Him "Jehovah" or "Yahweh," but definitely not "Allah," indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.