This past election cycle, patriotism was suddenly cool again. In one typical rally, Kamala Harris spoke of “the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American.” The crowd of seventeen thousand responded with a chant of “U.S.A.!” This was quite the turnaround: back in 2020, when the talk among Democrats was all about systemic racism and the sins of 1619, it did not seem that there would soon be bipartisan consensus around the United States, or its symbols, like the American flag. In 2024, the flag was everywhere at the Democratic National Convention.
But as we settle into the new normal (or abnormal) of President Trump’s second term, and as everyone seems to adopt or re-adopt patriotic symbols and even patriotism itself, there is one dog that hasn’t barked. The recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools seems to have largely avoided controversy since 2020. And yet its status is more complicated than ever. The lack of discussion around the Pledge of Allegiance is all the more surprising because its history of controversy is perhaps as heated as that of the flag. The fate of the Pledge, as it falls in and out of favor, reads like a geologic time scale of America’s cultural fixations: religion, personal autonomy, race. As are the times, so are the nature of Pledge disputes. In my quest to figure out the state of the Pledge today, I spoke with families and educators across the country, and they described a range of personal experiences with this national ritual.
The regular, often legally-mandated recitation of the Pledge in public schools was interrupted by the school closures that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. New teachers may not know that they are even required by law to lead students in the recitation. And many students began school online, and have had no experience of the Pledge. It has gone from being ubiquitous to being—what? Nobody seems to know for sure. The Pledge will survive our tumultuous political moment; in some places, it is even thriving. But where the practice appears to be dying out, the cause is not usually animus, but apathy.
At Sarah E. Wagner High School in New York City, the Pledge of Allegiance is awkward. So says recently-graduated senior Haidy Wahba. “The daily school announcements will ask everyone to rise. Some kids don’t,” Wahba said via text message that she sent to her sister, Mariam Wahba, to share with me. The students who choose to stand, the younger Wahba said, don’t actually recite the Pledge, nor put their hand on their heart.
Once Covid-19 school closures ended, it “just felt weird to do that every morning,” Wahba said. “Plus being back in school was awkward all around.” Despite recent national protest movements against what many Americans see as systemic problems at the heart of American life—racism, sexism, and troubling foreign policy—Wahba described an attitude toward the Pledge that seemed closer to indifference than active opposition. “Most teachers would stand for the Pledge if they were in a room with an American flag,” she said. “A few students would follow on occasion. It wasn’t something anyone would judge you for, whether you participated or not; it just gradually stopped being a part of our daily routine.”
This death on the vine is a marked shift from the experience of her sister, seven years her senior, who grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, hand over her heart. “That’s deeply troubling,” Mariam Wahba said. “It signals a broader decline in patriotism and the values that define America.” She believes that the pledge might seem minor, but it reminds young Americans that they have a duty to the common good. “What other values will we start to leave behind?” she said.
The original Pledge of Allegiance read as follows: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands—one Nation indivisible—with liberty and justice for all.” This earliest version made its print debut in 1891 in Youth’s Companion magazine, and its origins may seem surprising in light of today’s culture wars. Francis Bellamy, a socialist and a Baptist minister, wrote the Pledge to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Bellamy would go on to lobby Congress to endorse the Pledge for recitation in American public school classrooms; he was also an advocate for elevating Columbus Day to national holiday status.
Over the ensuing thirty years, the text evolved into the memorable singsong recitative that we know today. In 1923 and 1924, the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution convened a National Flag Conference, at which they determined that, to avoid confusing immigrant children, “my flag” should instead be “the flag of the United States” (they later appended “of America” for good measure). Although Congress enshrined the Pledge of Allegiance text when it adopted the U.S. Flag Code in 1942, the present version wasn’t adopted until 1954, after the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal organization, lobbied Congress to add “under God” to the recitation.
The first religious controversy surrounding the Pledge predated “under God,” however. Observant Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose beliefs prohibit them from taking oaths, went to court over the Pledge in 1940. After initially ruling against them, the Supreme Court decided in 1943 that the First Amendment prohibited compelling students to salute the flag or recite the Pledge.
The Pledge will survive our tumultuous political moment; in some places, it is even thriving. But where the practice appears to be dying out, the cause is not usually animus, but apathy.
Later, lawsuits in the middle of the 20th century challenged “under God,” on the grounds that compulsory Pledge recitation violated atheists’ and nonbelievers’ First Amendment rights. When high-profile atheist John L. Lewis charged that the Pledge was a violation of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses, a New York district court decided that the Pledge was not a religious exercise. Lewis took his case to the Supreme Court. Thirty states joined to ask the court not to take the case, and in 1964 the justices refused to review the New York district court decision. This was just two years after the Cuban missile crisis, and Cold War fears of the atheistic Soviet horde remained powerful. God served as a convenient shorthand to distinguish Communist from patriot.
But if courts have upheld the Pledge, they have also upheld abstention from it. In 1977, a federal district court came down on the side of New Jersey teen Deborah Lipp, a junior who faced expulsion from her public high school for staying seated during the Pledge of Allegiance. Sure, she was upset about government corruption and systemic inequity, she told a New York Times reporter. But as befit someone coming of age in the “Me Decade,” Lipp explained, according to the Times, that sitting out the pledge “was not so much a protest against the country or the flag as it was an affirmation of her own right to choose to stand or sit during the pledge ceremony.”
The same year, 1977, first-term Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis vetoed a bill that would fine public school teachers who declined to lead the Pledge of Allegiance (the state legislature overrode the veto). During the 1988 presidential contest, Republican rival George H.W. Bush would seize on Dukakis’s veto. “’What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” Bush asked a friendly crowd at the time. Gallup polling showed that Bush’s opinion reflected contemporary public sentiment.
The wave of patriotism that swept America after September 11, 2001, engendered new controversies over the Pledge, as localities sought to boost participation with new Pledge mandates. In a series of cases throughout the aughts—the heyday of New Atheism—atheist groups came to the defense of students who challenged the “under God” language.
Today, many state laws still require schools to play the Pledge of Allegiance over the school PA system, or for a teacher to lead recitation in class. According to Freedom Forum, a First Amendment advocacy nonprofit, although forty-six out of fifty states have some form of Pledge requirement, a majority of those states also offer participation exemptions. Some states, including Florida, Texas, Utah, and Pennsylvania, require parental permission for a student to refuse participation. Hawaii, Arizona, Vermont, and Wyoming do not require schools to say the Pledge at all.
In 2017, a high school student in Texas took her school to court for refusing her right to sit out the Pledge of Allegiance. According to a statement from her legal representation, the advocacy group American Atheists, the student had “exercised her constitutional right to decline to participate in the Pledge out of her objection to the words, ‘Under God,’ and her belief that the United States does not adequately guarantee ‘liberty and justice for all,’ especially for people of color.” She eventually received $90,000 in a settlement with the Texas Association of School Boards and her former teacher.
Colleen LaPlante is a military spouse whose children attend a private Christian school in Georgia, and last year attended a public school in northern Idaho. “It felt pretty standard in both places,” LaPlante said, of the Pledge’s recitation. My informal survey of friends and contacts around the country found examples ranging from total non-participation to robust Pledge participation. A family friend in Washington, D.C., whose children attend public school and who teaches at a charter school, said that neither school recites the Pledge of Allegiance, and there is no issue. A couple parents of middle schoolers described tepid, pro forma cooperation with Pledge requirements at their kids’ schools, perhaps more indicative of middle-grade malaise than civic restiveness.
One might guess that Pledge participation fits a predictable red state/blue state narrative, but I found no evidence of that. A college friend whose daughter attends a small public elementary school in Melrose, Mass., which went overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024, said the school says the Pledge daily during morning announcements. “It’s kind of just part of the morning routine,” she said. “Not necessarily a big deal.” For her part, she said her daughter is “fine with it,” saying that the purpose is “‘to honor America.’”
At Bulkeley High School in Hartford, Conn., a blue city in a blue state, with 97.1 percent minority enrollment, the Pledge of Allegiance is read every day over the intercom. I asked if students participated, and the male voice that answered the school phone went from monotone to surprised. “Yeah!” he said.
In New Haven, Conn., where there is a state law mandating that time must be set aside for the Pledge every day, a spokesman for the school district agreed to survey the schools. Weeks later, he replied that he’d found “twenty-six schools in compliance regarding the Pledge, five out of compliance, and nine still not responding.” He also said that “at an upcoming meeting, principals will be reminded about the legal requirements to leave time for the Pledge and to display the flag in each classroom”—displaying the flag also being a requirement of state law.
Even in the famously liberal Portland, Oreg., the Pledge still has its adherents. “From what we’ve gathered, students have the opportunity to recite the Pledge at least once a week,” said Portland public schools communications specialist Sydney Kelly, Indeed, state policy is that schools must give students the opportunity to recite the Pledge once weekly at a minimum. Kelly notes that the Pledge of Allegiance “hasn’t been super-relevant” as a topic, so they do not monitor or collect much in the way of data on participation. “We’ve heard from staff who oversee schools that the level of student participation varies and can be sporadic,” Kelly said.
If courts have upheld the Pledge, they have also upheld abstention from it.
A longtime friend, a military spouse whose family recently returned from a military assignment in Hawaii, said her children attended a private school where the student body was predominantly military-connected. Every day, she said, students and staff assembled to recite the Pledge as a school in front of the flag. Fifth-graders were responsible for raising, lowering, and folding the flag every day. It was meaningful, my friend explained, “because they made it a whole school event.” It was a different approach than the “rushed-through, check-the-box thing,” she had experienced at school. “The kids and I appreciated [the Pledge] more in Hawaii than I did as a kid,” she said. “It was built into the curriculum.”
That children of servicemembers might be more inclined to appreciate a patriotic exercise is perhaps unsurprising, but the emphasis on the Pledge seems to be common to religious private schools, too. In a Flag Day blog post this year, Jeff Polet, the director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald Ford Presidential Foundation, noted that his children said the Pledge daily when they attended private Catholic schools, “but never in the public ones” they attended.
On the whole, Americans seem to love the Pledge of Allegiance, at least in the abstract. A July 2024 Rasmussen survey of over 1,200 American adults found that 55 percent favored requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily (although this number is down from 61 percent in 2019). A 2022 YouGov poll found that 52 percent of respondents favored daily recitation of the Pledge.
Media stories from recent years about municipalities suspending the Pledge are notable mainly for the overwhelming pushback those decision received. “A Minnesota city voted to suspend the Pledge of Allegiance,” reads a 2019 Washington Post headline. “It didn’t go over well.” A left-leaning city council voted to cease recitation of the Pledge—something they had done at the beginning of meetings since 1980, during the Iran hostage crisis—in an effort to be more inclusive. Residents took to both local and social media to complain, and a month after they unanimously voted to suspend the Pledge, the city council unanimously voted to bring it back. A similar situation played out in Fargo, N.D., in 2022; the city school board quickly reversed course on a decision to suspend reciting the Pledge at its meetings, after a local and national outcry.
Earlier this year, middle school students in Eatonville, Wash., attempted to address waning Pledge participation in their local public schools. After a teacher assigned a project to analyze the Pledge’s thirty-one words, the Pledge became so meaningful to the children that in January 2024 they lobbied to introduce a bill to the state legislature, which would have required school districts to teach the Pledge’s history and meaning in each grade. Eatonville sits in Washington’s solidly Democratic 10th Congressional district, in Pierce County, which went for Biden in 2020. The bill’s sponsors, however, were three Republican state senators, one of whom, Phil Fortunato, blames partisanship for the bill’s failure. “The Democrats killed it in Rules Committee because they did not what [sic] to have to vote for it on the floor,” he said via email.
Aaron Terr, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the free-speech organization, said his group has had two cases regarding the Pledge of Allegiance, one in Indiana, one in Massachusetts. In both cases, the schools quickly rolled back policies requiring students to comply with the Pledge, either by pausing in the hall or by standing for the recitation. Currently, no serious challenge to the Pledge is being argued in the courts. If the practice is dying out in some pockets of the country, the kids in Eatonville may have been onto something. “I think if the teacher is properly connecting the Pledge to civics,” said Amy Fields, an Oklahoma teacher, “there is a place for the Pledge.”