BLACKWOOD, N.J. — When an atheist association challenged the Pledge of Allegiance’s place in public school over the words “under God,” New Jersey high-school student Samantha Jones decided with her family to step forward and defend it.

After nearly a year of court battles, with support from the Knights of Columbus and the American Legion, Jones’ attorneys told her family that the struggle finally paid off.

“I cried,” Jones told the Register about when she first heard the news over family dinner that the American Humanist Association (AHA) had decided not to appeal the court decision upholding the pledge.

The AHA had sued the Matawan-Aberdeen School Board on behalf of an anonymous atheist student and his parents, arguing that reciting the pledge in the district’s public schools was unconstitutional in New Jersey because it had the words “under God.”

Jones, a senior at Highland Regional High School in Blackwood, N.J., said her parents asked her and the rest of the family if they would like to intervene in the case and defend the pledge back in August 2014.

“We were all raised to stand up for what we believed in,” explained Jones. “And I personally felt a huge pull to defend this. … I said ‘Yes’ as soon as my dad said it, and I do not regret that at all.”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty argued the case in state trial court that year on behalf of Jones, who was joined by the Knights of Columbus and the American Legion. The court sided with Jones in a Feb. 4 decision and rejected the case, a ruling the AHA has now decided not to challenge.

“Every case that has been brought on these issues has lost so far,” said Becket Fund attorney Diana Verm, who argued the case in November 2014. “Courts understand that it is not an establishment of religion to use religious imagery sometimes.”

Verm said the battle over the Pledge of Allegiance is being fought now in state courts, since atheist activists have lost at the federal level.

“The state cases are a real last-ditch effort, it seems,” she said.

 

Series of Victories

The Becket Fund said in a media release the case marked its fifth consecutive victory in defending the pledge’s words of “one nation under God” and its second state victory in two years against the AHA over the pledge.

The Becket Fund said AHA’s first state-level suit raised “identical claims” in Massachusetts, but the state’s high court unanimously ruled against them last year.

The Register reached out to the AHA for comment, but received none by publication time.

The AHA decided not to challenge the ruling from Monmouth County superior court Judge David Bauman that threw out the case they brought on behalf of an anonymous atheist student in public school and his parents. According to court documents, the AHA argued that the pledge violated the atheist student’s constitutional rights to equal protection under the New Jersey Constitution. 

Judge Bauman, ruling in favor of the request by Jones, the Knights and American Legion to dismiss the case, noted that the New Jersey Constitution has included references to “Almighty God” in every variation from 1776 to the present day.

“Under plaintiffs’ reasoning, the very constitution under which plaintiffs seek redress for perceived atheistic marginalization could itself be deemed unconstitutional, an absurd proposition which plaintiffs do not and cannot advance here.”

The judge stated the pledge’s historical context shows it is “not to be viewed, and has never been viewed, as a religious exercise,” but is instead a “vehicle to transmit” to successive public-school boys and girls “those core values of duty, honor, pride and fidelity to country on which the social contract between the United States and its citizens is ultimately based.”

“[T]his court finds that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance is a secular, not a religious, activity and, thus, a constitutionally protected activity. No case stands for the contrary.”

Judge Bauman noted that reciting the pledge “is entirely voluntary” and that children are free to abstain from saying it “for any reason,” religious, political, moral or otherwise.

 

The Knights of Columbus

The Knights of Columbus welcomed the AHA’s decision not to appeal Judge Bauman’s ruling. A statement provided to the Register noted that the Knights spearheaded the successful effort to have the words “under God” included in the pledge during the 1950s.

“We understand that these words continue to have great importance for our country today,” the Knights stated. “The reasons that this concept is so important have been understood since the Declaration of Independence and were perhaps best expressed by President John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address, when he noted that ‘the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.’"

Diana Verm said the endurance of U.S. rights and freedoms depends on the willingness of people like Jones and her family to come forward and make a stand for them.

“I’m hopeful that this case will prevent other lawsuits like this one, but there are always going to be challenges to religion in the public square.”

Jones said she was thankful to have the opportunity to stand up for her beliefs in the public forum and hoped the experience would encourage others to follow that example.

“I want people to truly believe that they have power in their opinions and power in their voices. I never thought that I could be heard, but I was heard, and I could not be more thankful for that.”