Campaign encourages display of national motto
The Carson City council chambers, with the national motto displayed
There have been battles waged in the United States by special interest groups in recent years in their attempts to remove "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance and to have the Christian cross at the Mt. Soledad veterans memorial torn down. There's also been, more or less, a constant barrage of attacks on the national motto, "In God We Trust."
But there's also been a group of volunteers working quietly and efficiently to promote recognition of the motto, and their success is evidenced by the several dozen municipalities that already have adopted formal and permanent acknowledgments of that motto.
"Just today I received a message from a veteran back in Indianapolis, delighted with what we're doing, and wanting to be the key person [for this program] in his part of the country," Jacquie Sullivan, chief of the In God We Trust-America campaign, said.
It already has resulted in a long list of California municipalities specifically adopting the national motto as their own, and proudly posting it in their city council chambers. 
"The United States of America has much to celebrate," a letter distributed to mayors and council members says. "The freedoms we prize were won through enormous pain and sacrifice and are perpetuated through tremendous courage and vision. Now to help preserve and protect the best of all that America stands for, a volunteer organization, In God We Trust-America, Inc., has been organized… Our mission is to encourage each city in our nation to join in prominently and permanently displaying our national motto, 'In God We Trust,' in every city hall throughout our great state and across America."
Sullivan told WND the volunteers see an importance in promoting patriotism "for the sake of our future generations."
"I think this is also a way of getting back some of what we've lost over the last 50 years," she said. "Love of God and love of country. That's very important. I've been very concerned about those who are wanting and trying to remove God from everything. That is not what our country is about."
Sullivan, a councilwoman in Bakersfield, Calif., started with her own city, and has been working out from there ever since. Nearly 30 California cities now display the motto in their city hall, council chamber or some other prominent location. Westminster, in Orange County, put up the words just last month.
There are opponents, of course. "The role for the government is to be benignly neutral," Peter Eliasberg, of the ACLU, told the Los Angeles Times. "It's not their job to be atheist, but also not to support religion…"
But Sullivan said her campaign isn't tied to a single religion, and Bakersfield's Muslims and Sikhs mostly support her plan too.
"These cases show a lot about the encouragement of cultural literacy and the origins of the American law and public and what the founders valued," Mike Johnson, of the Alliance Defense Fund, told the newspaper. "There's some kind of education purpose to it, a recognition of our history and heritage that transcends a religious purpose."
The organization has a legal opinion from The Pacific Justice Institute, whose chief, Brad Dacus, notes, the "United States Supreme Court has never indicated that governmental expression must be sanitized of all religious symbolism or references.
"To the contrary, the Court has acknowledged that phrases such as 'In God We Trust' serve the legitimate secular purposes of 'solemnizing public occasions, expressing confidence in the future, and encouraging the recognition of what is worthy of appreciation in society,'" he said.
The volunteers noted that Francis Scott Key wrote the words, "and this be our Motto, in God be our Trust," in 1814 during the British bombardment of Fort McHenry, and in 1861, the Supreme Court chief justice noted in a letter to the director of the U.S. Mint that, "The trust of our people in God should be declared on our national coins."
That was started just five years later, and in 1956, Congress voted to declare "In God We Trust" the national motto.
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