Maggie Phillips’s article about the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in American schools provokes a consideration of another issue: the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Is this still part of daily school life?
When I was in elementary school (the Dark Ages of the 1950s), we recited both the pledge and the prayer every day. To my recollection, no one refused, no one objected. It was the way things were done.
In retrospect, the prayer was a more interesting part of our day. My school, in suburban Philadelphia, had a Jewish population of around 90%. Did anyone take umbrage at a required Christian recitation? Nothing in the language of the prayer mentions Jesus, so God (the Father, or any combination of numbers) was understood as pretty generic.
Aside from making me aware of odd words like “indivisible” and “trespass,” for which I was grateful, the formulaic articulations had little effect. I became neither patriotic nor religiously observant. Obedient, yes; flag-waving, no.
The main function of both recitations was to acknowledge the start of our daily business. Patriotic affirmation and religious humility could have been replaced by virtually any short recitation, any mantra, in any language, and would have served the same function.
– Willard Spiegelman