by John Brant

Created on: March 06, 2010   Last Updated: March 07, 2010

In 1954, Congress officially added the words “under God” to the pledge of allegiance. At the time, Congress, the President and most of the people of the United States understood that those words belonged in the Pledge.  Unfortunately, many people now forget that God has always played a pivotal role in the United States’ history, and that to previous generations, the United States fulfilled its mission of ensuring liberty for all people with the confidence that they also served God’s will. 

Indeed, they understood that if they did not acknowledge the existence of God, then their belief of natural rights that no government could rightfully abridge was false.

The Bill of Rights does not give anyone rights. To the Revolutionary leaders and the creators of the new government, the Bill of Rights only stated that our government acknowledged rights that all men had shared since the beginning of time. 

Governments had violated those rights throughout history, but the rights still existed at the time. This concept of rights cannot be true without acknowledging the existence of God and his hand in the creation of the human being. 

Without the existence of a higher being, then no higher laws than those of man could exist. And if the highest creator of laws was man, then humans and their institutions could determine what rights people had, if they had rights at all. 

However, the Revolutionary generation acknowledged a higher creator—God—and a higher law than that of mere humans. The words “under God” also acknowledge a Creator, but do not identify a particular religious belief with him. 

Revolutionary leaders had no uniform belief as to God’s nature, and all branches of Christianity and other religions found representation in the Continental Congresses. But all recognized the importance of God to the future of their nation. 

Thomas Jefferson, considered a Deist by most historians, acknowledged the fact that for rights to be “inalienable,” they had to come from a source greater than human society, or, said in his words, they were “endowed by their Creator.” 

Samuel Adams had stated in On the Rights of Colonists that liberty was something all people shared as an entitlement of the “eternal and immutable laws of God and nature.” 

This generation, and many in America that followed it, understood that God gave people

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