Reflections on the American Pledge of Allegiance

one citizen’s perspective, as I travel the country in a van

“We don’t see things the way they are. We see things the way we are.” — The Talmud

I gotta say, it’s been strange traveling full time around the lower 48 in Van Gogh over this past year. I can’t say that I have felt unsafe exactly, but at times it hasn’t been far off that. There’s a palpable tension in the air many places I go, and I feel distinctly alien and out of place with my trendy converted van and my out of state plates, like I’ve stumbled into a stranger’s home uninvited, and everyone is watching me to make sure I Ieave. 

The border between the two realties we inhabit in our country has never been more stark, and the degree of absolute division between them breaks my heart, as I’m sure it does most Americans. As a boy growing up in the mesquite tree and cactus landscapes of Kingsville, Texas, I remember standing every morning in my elementary school classroom, placing my hand over my heart, and reciting aloud the American Pledge of Allegiance with my classmates:

I Pledge Allegiance to the flag

Of the United States of America

And to the Republic for which it stands

One Nation, Under God

Indivisible

With Liberty and Justice for All

The Pledge has been on a loop, replaying over and over in my head for months now, especially those critical last few lines:

One Nation, Under God

Indivisible

With Liberty and Justice for All

I’ve been thinking a lot about what those words mean now. What is it for us to be indivisible when so many forces are at play to push us toward division? What is it for me to stand up for indivisibility as an American right now? It meant something to me when I said the pledge as a boy; it means even more to me now. So how do I refuse to participate in the forces that are trying to divide us? One nation. Under God. Indivisible. 

Then, there’s that next part. It packs a wallop: 

With Liberty and Justice for All. 

Kingsville isn’t far from the border, and it was a big military town, too, when I was a kid. Probably still is. So when I would say the pledge every morning at school, I would say it in a classroom filled with kids of every skin tone and eye color and every kind of hair. My two best friends in elementary school were Amador and Adan. Amador was of Mexican heritage. Adan’s family was from the Middle East. Here I was, a Southern Baptist pastor’s son, spending my days as carefree as the clouds with a Catholic boy and a Muslim. I never thought twice about it. It never even crossed my mind. 

That’s not to say those were idyllic times; just that it seemed like we were on a better track back then. We understood that for all our differences, people are all basically the same. We all need to be loved. We all need to belong. We all ache for purpose and meaning in our lives. We all need each other. We all carry the Imago Dei. We all have a right to be here, and all deserve a place.

So what does it mean to stand up for Liberty and Justice for All as an American at a time when divisive forces are constantly gouging trenches in our soil between “us” and “them” … yelling “this is for us and not for you!” … accusing those “not-quite” people of taking our stuff. I’m exhausted just trying to keep track of all the various groups I’m being told to hate right now. All this virtue signaling. All this fear mongering. All this self-righteous rage. It’s ridiculous. 

Carl Jung wrote and taught extensively about the root causes of this sort of madness — and it is a kind of collective madness. He used terms like “mental contagion,” and “psychic epidemic” to describe how otherwise perfectly intelligent, normal citizens turn into deluded and dangerous caricatures of the people they once were. According to Jung, and other psychology experts, it happens this way:

First, a social contagion takes hold in the general population. A social contagion, by the way, is really just a form of peer or crowd influence (like a trend or craze), only it’s unconscious; it happens to us without our realizing it. So, like when the pandemic hit, and everyone rushed out to buy toilet paper, though it didn’t make any sense to do that, that’s an example of a social contagion. Another example might be when stampedes happen at big events and people get crushed, or riots happen in the city streets after a big soccer match where your team wins. People start doing things or thinking in a certain way because the people around them are, but it all happens unconsciously. You get caught up in the group vibe without realizing you’ve been infected by a social virus. 

A “psychic epidemic” is what happens when a social contagion spreads over a large population and becomes entrenched, producing a kind of group psychosis. This is a very big deal, and a very dangerous one, according to Jung. He wrote:

“The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by … psychic epidemics.” He goes on to say “… there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger.”¹

Psychic epidemics can make otherwise sane populations go absolutely nuts. They can believe, for example, that all the good women of the village are secretly witches, that the Irish are coming to burn English homes, that the French aristocracy have a plan to starve the peasants to death, or even that Jews are responsible for all the world’s ills. None of this is rational, but that’s not a criteria. It’s a virus, after all. It helps me to think of it that way. My fellow Americans aren’t irrational. They’re infected. 

Here’s the truth as I see it: 

We didn’t just have one pandemic. We had two. One was biological. It struck around 2020. The other was psychic, and took hold some time before that.

And the psychic one never left.

To me, this psychic pandemic is the real enemy facing us. I don’t believe it can be beaten out of us, or argued away. The psychic pandemic is now fully embedded; its vision is set. The more we push against it, the more it digs in. 

I don’t think we can fight something like this head on. I think the only way to beat it is to absorb it into something bigger. 

As I see it, the only thing that can disempower a fearful vision of the world is a bigger, more compelling dream. For me, that bigger dream is laid out right there in the Pledge. In those few, sparse lines, the pledge captures the dream of what America is and has always aspired to become, the dream I dreamed as a young boy, standing alongside Amador and Adan, of a just and honorable home for all the brave and the free. 

For me, that’s a vision worth standing for. I figure if enough of us hang on to it, and lift it up as our shared dream, it might just be big enough to heal the madness of these days, and bring our fellow citizens home.

#IPledgethePledge

1. Jung, Collected Works, 10, 18.