©2002 Ed Buckner, Council for Secular Humanism, www.secularhumanism.org
In the uproar over the ruling regarding “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, several demagogic politicians have alluded to the Mayflower Compact as evidence of our sworn allegiance to the “Almighty.” The Mayflower Compact was signed by forty-one men aboard the Mayflower on 11 November 1620, and it is an interesting and important historical document. (It was important in terms of setting a precedent as a mutually-agreed-on self-governing charter.) But the document remained in force only until 1691, when the Plymouth colony became part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It had not had any legal force for nearly a hundred years when the current governing charter of the U.S., the Constitution, was approved.
Further, if the heavily Christian language from that charter “proves” we’re a religious nation, then we must also still be loyal subjects of the Crown of England. The Mayflower Compact signers began and ended their document with declarations of loyalty both to God and to their “dread sovereign lord, King James . . . .”
The fundamental problem with the question is a thorough misunderstanding of just how revolutionary and unprecedented it was for the framers to write and get approved a godless Constitution for the United States in 1787-1789. For the text of the Mayflower Compact or for more information on it, see Mortimer J. Adler, Editor-in-Chief, The Annals of America, Volume 1, 1493-1754, Discovering a New World, Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968, p. 64.
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