Politics & Power Quote by Randy Neugebauer

Neugebauer’s line is less a history lesson than a boundary marker: it frames national belonging as something validated by theistic “faith,” then retrofits that claim with the prestige of the Founding. The Pledge becomes a cultural receipt, proof that “real” America has always been God-inflected, and that dissent from that framing is a departure from the country’s original terms.

The rhetoric works by collapsing two very different ideas into one reassuring story. “Reflects the truth” is a power phrase: it doesn’t argue, it certifies. And “since the days of the founding” invokes an almost sacred origin point, a move that sidesteps the messy record of early American religious pluralism and the Constitution’s deliberate refusal to establish a national religion. The statement doesn’t need to prove a continuous theological throughline; it only needs to make that continuity feel natural, inherited, uncontroversial.

The subtext is modern: battles over “under God,” church-state separation, and who gets to define patriotism. Historically, the Pledge was written in 1892 without “under God”; those words were added in 1954 in the Cold War, explicitly to distinguish the U.S. from “godless” communism. Neugebauer’s phrasing smooths that fact into the Founding itself, laundering a mid-20th-century political addition as timeless tradition.

It’s a classic political move: use the Pledge as a moral litmus test, and reframe a contested civic ritual as a settled national essence. The payoff is clear - opponents aren’t just disagreeing; they’re resisting “truth” and the nation’s supposedly original identity.