…Docherty, then pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, just blocks from the White House, gave a sermon in 1952 saying the pledge should acknowledge God.
He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and was unfamiliar with the pledge until he heard it recited by his 7-year-old son, Garth.
“I didn’t know that 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.”