Pledge of Allegiance

I haven't recited the pledge of allegiance for a very long time. The last time I can remember doing this would be 3rd or 4th grade. I can remember many times just mechanically repeating the pledge with no thought about what I was saying. Children often repeat things from memory without considering what they are speaking.

Let's look at the pledge for a moment and see what these words actually mean. "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."

This pledge is short yet there is a great deal of meaning here. Let me make a point before I get involved with analyzing the pledge. There are times in life when we must make a choice between one loyalty, person, or thing. As a Christian, my first allegiance is to Christ. Nothing or no one is supposed to come between Him and me. If I were to describe this format as a level of allegiances then Christ would be first, family would be second, friends would be third, every other person would be fourth and country would be last on the hierarchy. This may anger some people. Undoubtedly it will make some people very upset.

Consider this concept as I try to share the logic and thought behind this belief. For those who are Christians and have placed their faith in Christ as their Savior, there is no person or entity who deserves our allegiance more than Him. We will be challenged in life to make choices to show our devotion to Him and we must decide then who we will obey. We owe our very lives and eternal souls to Him and no one has the power to take us away from Christ.

Family is second most important on the hierarchy of allegiance. As such, it behooves us to put our families welfare, safety, and overall well-being above friends, other people, and our nation. This may cause some people to wonder if we are putting individuals and others first, how is it possible to have allegiance to a nation? The key concept to remember is that individual people are more important than any ideology, political platform, or nation. The family is the unit that constitutes society, individual sovereign states, and finally a nation. Since family makes up all of these groups, and remains a separate entity; family can exist without a community or state or nation. None of the latter can exist without some family unit or part thereof. 


Friends are the next important entity on the hierarchy of allegiance. After God and family, we should be concerned about our friends. It should not need to be explained that family must be more important than friends but in this age of the loss of familial ties and allegiances, it behooves me to talk about this aspect of the hierarchy. The family is more important than friends simply because we are brought into this world into a family. Though no family is perfect, it is the means by which God chose to organize humanity. You could say that the family is the building block of every other group in the world. A community, a state, a nation is built upon the families which exist within its boundaries. We cannot choose which family we are born into, yet we can make the most of the family into which we are born. 


The fourth level of the hierarchy of allegiance consists of people who are not our family or our friends. This would be acquaintances as well as people we do not know at all. We owe an allegiance to all of mankind that supersedes the allegiance to any government, state or nation. 


The final level of the hierarchy of allegiance is the state and the nation. Most people would believe we owe our allegiance to the state before our family, friends or others. It is thinking like this that has spawned the atrocities of the Russian purges, the Nazi concentration camps, and many similar events in history. 


To sum up this article, there is a hierarchy of allegiance that begins with God and the family continues through friends and acquaintances, and finally ends with a community, state, and nation. It is important that we understand that if we put our allegiances in the proper order, many of the disagreements, problems. and ills of society can be resolved much faster and with less time and trouble.

I will continue the exposition of the Pledge of Allegiance in the next installment of this blog.