By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer

The man credited with pushing Congress to insert the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, has died at the age of 97.

The Rev. George M. Docherty, a Scottish immigrant, first heard the pledge of allegiance in 1952 when his seven year-old son recited it for him.
 
“I didn’t know what the Pledge of Allegiance was, and he recited it, ‘one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,'” he recalled in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004. “I came from Scotland, where we said ‘God save our gracious queen,’ ‘God save our gracious king.’ Here was the Pledge of Allegiance, and God wasn’t in it at all.”

At the time, he was serving as pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, only blocks away from the White House, and decided to give a sermon about why the pledge should acknowledge God. 

Two years later, on Feb. 7, 1954, he gave the same sermon when President Dwight Eisenhower was in attendance. 

From the pulpit that morning, Mr. Docherty said the pledge was missing “the characteristic and definitive factor in the American way of life. Indeed, apart from the mention of the phrase ‘the United States of America,’ it could be the pledge of any republic. In fact, I could hear little Muscovites repeat a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle flag in Moscow with equal solemnity.”

The sermon made an impact. The next day, Rep. Charles G. Oakman, R-Mich., introduced a bill to add the phrase “under God” to the pledge, and a companion bill was introduced in the Senate. Eisenhower signed the bill into law on Flag Day the same  year.

Mr. Docherty died in his home in central Pennsylvania on Thanksgiving Day after a lengthy illness.

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