What about the Pledge of Allegiance—and Its Author?

Perhaps few of you know the name Francis Bellamy, but all of you USAmericans know well the Pledge of Allegiance, which he wrote in 1892. Bellamy died 90 years ago on August 28. 

Bellamy’s Beliefs

Francis Bellamy was born in May 1855, the son of a Baptist minister in New York. After graduating from the University of Rochester and further study at Rochester Theological Seminary, in 1879 Francis was ordained as a minister and became pastor of First Baptist Church of Little Falls, New York.

Before his 30^th birthday, Bellamy moved to Boston, becoming pastor of Dearborn Street Baptist Church. After serving five years there, in 1890 he accepted a call to Boston’s Bethany Baptist Church. But the next year, under pressure, he resigned from that pastorate and left the ministry.

There was tension in the church because of Pastor Bellamy’s political views. In 1889 the Society of Christian Socialists was founded in Boston, and Bellamy was elected to serve as the Society’s vice president. He also wrote for their newspaper, The Dawn.

In the May 1890 issue of that paper, Bellamy urged pastors to become Christian Socialists, defining Christian socialism as “the science of the Golden Rule applied to economic relations.”**

It must be noted that the last decades of the 19^th century was the time of the “robber barons,” a pejorative term typically applied to businessmen who used abusive practices to amass their wealth.” It was a time of bad working conditions for many, child labor, and other exploitative practices.

Provisions such as Social Security and laws restricting the employment and abuse of child workers were not enacted until the 1930s, after Bellamy’s death—but had he lived a few years longer, he no doubt would have been delighted with such “socialistic” advances.

Bellamy’s Pledge

After leaving the pastorate, Bellamy took a job with Youth’s Companion, a Boston-based family magazine with half a million subscribers.

As part of the promotion of the World’s Columbian Exposition to be held in October 1892 in commemoration of the 400^th anniversary of Columbus reaching the Americas—and to bolster the schoolhouse flag movement that Youth’s Companion fervently supported, Bellamy wrote this pledge:

I pledge Allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.

Over thirty years later, my flag was changed to the flag of the United States of America. That change was made largely to make it clear to immigrant children what flag they were saluting.

The words under God were not added until 1954, sixty-two years after the Pledge was written by an ordained minister without those words. As Baptist historian (and Thinking Friend) Bruce Gourley has explained, Bellamy’s text “intentionally reflected the Baptist heritage of church-state separation.”

Bellamy’s Pledge Now

As I have written previously, as a Christian I am not a fan of any Pledge of Allegiance to a flag or a nation. (You can read what I wrote about that in my 7/5/14 blog post, which has had nearly 1,200 “pageviews.”)

Apart from that, how can we USAmericans affirm that our country is “indivisible.” There seems to be greater polarity (political divisiveness) now than at any time since the Civil War, which ended 27 years before Bellamy wrote the Pledge.

Inexplicably, last week all 212 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act legislation.

So, not only is there great division among lawmakers, there also seems to be opposition to providing “Liberty and Justice for all.” Among other things, liberty and justice for all surely must make it possible for full voting rights for all citizens.

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** Content in the last two paragraphs was taken from Brian Kaylor, “The Baptist Socialist Who Left God Out of the Pledge” (Word&Way, Aug. 24, 2020).