50 States, Under God?

One nation, under God?

A growing number of Americans no longer affirm or worship God, so the phrase “Under God” (inserted in 1954) may be anachronistic. The same may soon be true of “One Nation.” There are many people, including six who sit on the Supreme Court, who seem to prefer “Fifty States Under God.”

In their 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the Court pushed decisions about abortion, not to the parents or doctors, but to state legislatures. “Let the states decide who has rights and who does not,” the Court decreed, in effect.

This way of looking at the country—diminished national identity, increased state authority—became popular in conservative circles after the Supreme Court and Congress insisted on integrated schools, communities, and transportation. Many white people, especially in what we now call Red States, responded by starting private schools (often called segregation academies) and fleeing to the suburbs.

Some lawyer types also refurbished the old notion of States Rights as resistance to this federal intrusion into local matters. They complained about the “administrative state” and launched the Federalist Society. The six conservative justices on the Supreme Court came up through the Federalist legal culture and are poised to bring it to bear on issues like LGBTQ rights, election ballots, immigration, and regulations of all kinds.

The result of this revolution in legal rationale is a hodge-podge of regulations about abortion. Some states permit abortion, and some do not. Some states are even tying to prevent their own residents from traveling to another state to secure an abortion.

It is important to note that we tried this once before. In the decades before the Civil War. About slavery.

In the years leading up to the Civil War, some states were slave states, and some states were free states. Slaves who tried to move from a slave state to a free state to live free were considered “fugitives” and their owners were allowed to pursue them, capture them, and punish them.

Very much like it is today with abortion.

This lasted for a few years, then war broke out. And some fear we are headed in that same direction today.

The legal theory that pushes policy issues from Washington DC into state capitals sounds reasonable, practical, and even historic. It has the ring of 18^th century authenticity, what modern proponents today call Originalism: what did those original framers desire and what kind of country did they wish to create?

But that strategy (designed to protect the slave states, even during the Constitutional Convention) is destined to divide the United States in dramatic and dangerous ways.

Already, conservative people are moving into Red States, delighting in low taxes, vibrant churches, gun shows, banned books, and forced births. Liberal people are clustering into their states, with high taxes, good schools, empty churches, LGBTQ communities, and access to abortion.

Yes, both Red States and Blue States count plenty of people who vote for the minority. I am one, as I have spent most of my life in Kentucky, Missouri, and now South Carolina.  Living Red but voting Blue. But for more than a dozen years, I lived in the Purple States of Pennsylvania and Georgia, each trying to decide what it wants to be.

I can imagine a time in the very near future when Taylor Swift will perform only in Blue States and the NBA will rethink its franchises in Miami, Houston, and Oklahoma City, when the NRA and Southern Baptists will hold their annual meetings only in Red States and every gun manufacturer will relocate themselves, lock, stock, and barrel (literally) into states where their people are already organizing into militias and preparing for war.

This is a sad and dangerous trend, pushed along by a defective legal theory and its six stalwart proponents on the Supreme Court.

But it is also fed by the actions of religious groups, as we also segregate ourselves into Red Church and Blue Church. This happened, we recall, before the Civil War when denominations split over the issue of slavery. It happened with my own denomination, Southern Baptist, when some of us pulled out because of the restrictions on women in the SBC.

Now, Methodists are doing the same: splitting into pro-LGBTQ and anti-LGBTQ churches. The anti-folks are called the Global Methodist Church. Can somebody tell me where they have located their main offices? I could not find it, but I suspect when I do (and when they finally settle on a permanent site), it will be deep in the heart of Texas!