Faith & Spirit Quote by Jay Alan Sekulow

Sekulow’s line is doing constitutional judo: it takes a familiar civic ritual and flips it into a theological claim with legal teeth. By insisting the Pledge “clearly acknowledges” that freedom comes “from God, not government,” he’s not just praising patriotism; he’s trying to relocate the source of American legitimacy. If rights originate in God, then the state is cast as a mere steward, not an author. That framing conveniently shrinks the moral authority of courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies when they clash with religious conservatives’ preferred outcomes.

The word “clearly” is the tell. The Pledge doesn’t actually mention God until the 1954 Cold War-era addition “under God,” a political retrofit sold as anti-communist branding. Sekulow’s certainty is rhetorical force, not textual accuracy: he’s preempting debate by treating interpretation as obvious, turning dissent into willful blindness or hostility to faith.

Subtextually, this is a culture-war argument smuggled in as civic common sense. It asserts a hierarchy of belonging: the “real” America is the America that publicly affirms God, and public institutions should reflect that. It also signals a particular legal strategy associated with Sekulow’s career in religious-liberty litigation: defend government-sponsored religious language not as coercive doctrine, but as harmless heritage that allegedly enshrines rights beyond government’s reach.

Context matters because “freedoms come from God” is a powerful American idiom (think Jefferson’s “Creator”), but in modern court fights it becomes a tool to justify state-sanctioned religious expression while resisting secular interpretations of neutrality. The move is less about the Pledge itself than about who gets to define the nation’s moral baseline.