The Knights of Columbus and six individual Knights and their families have asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a decision by a federal court in Sacramento declaring the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because it contains the words “under God.”

In a brief filed on behalf of the Knights by The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C., public interest law firm, the court is asked to recognize that, “The concept of a nation ‘under God’ encapsulates the idea, longstanding in the Anglo-American legal tradition, that the power of government is limited by universal, inalienable rights.”

The Knights of Columbus, the world’s largest lay Catholic organization, led the successful campaign to persuade Congress to add the words “under God” to the Pledge in 1954.

After atheist Michael Newdow filed a federal lawsuit in Sacramento challenging the constitutionality of the Pledge in January 2005, the Knights of Columbus and the individual Knights asked the court to be allowed to join the suit as defendant-intervenors.

The lower court granted the request, and the case is now captioned Roe v. Carey, in which “Jan Roe” and her child are the only remaining plaintiffs (Newdow remains their attorney but was dismissed as a plaintiff for lack of standing, just as he had been when the Supreme Court considered his earlier lawsuit in 2004), and John Carey, one of the individual Knights, is the first on the list of remaining defendants.

Other defendants include the Rio Linda Union School District and the United States.

The brief notes that in many other cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly referred to the Pledge as “the standard for evaluating the permissibility of other government expression that employs religious imagery.” In a 1984 case, Lynch v. Donnelly, the court “described the Pledge and its recitation as one of the ‘many permissible reference[s] to our religious heritage.’”

Newdow’s suit is “a theological challenge to the political principle of limited government embodied in the phrase ‘one Nation under God’ in the Pledge,” the brief points out.

Failing to overturn the lower court’s ruling would “make it very difficult for government to proclaim the traditional American view that the people are endowed with rights by their Creator, and that the government exists to protect those rights. This sea-change in our nation’s self-understanding should not be imposed by judicial order.”

The brief invites the Court to consider that one of many indications that the founders, who wrote and interpreted the Constitution, were quite comfortable with official references to God in the tradition, begun by Chief Justice John Marshall, of opening Supreme Court sessions with the phrase “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”