Read the "One Nation Under God" sermon

The moment of fame for the Scottish-born pastor George Docherty occurred in 1954 with a sermon that persuaded President Dwight Eisenhower to include the words “under God” in the US Pledge of Allegiance. On February 7, 1954, with Eisenhower sitting in Abraham Lincoln’s pew in the historic Washington Presbyterian Church, a few blocks from the White House, Docherty asserted that “to omit the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is to omit the definitive factor in the American way of life”. He borrowed the phrase from the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln said: “this Nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom”.

The sermon convinced Eisenhower to raise the issue in Congress, and within four months the “under God” Act was signed into law. Docherty’s sermon resounded in the congregation and throughout Capitol Hill during the dark days when the US felt under the threat of communism.

Without mentioning the deity, Docherty said, the pledge could easily apply to the Soviet Union. “I could hear little Moscovites recite a similar pledge to their hammer-and-sickle with equal solemnity,” he said.

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Legal scholars questioned whether a reference to the deity in a patriotic pledge violated the First Amendment separation of Church and State, and there were several court challenges to the phrase. But Docherty was unmoved, saying the phrase “under God” could include “the great Jewish community and the people of the Muslim faith”.

Docherty said he was unfamiliar with the pledge until he heard it recited by his seven-year-old son. “I didn’t know what the Pledge of Allegiance was, and he recited: ‘One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’. 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.”

The day after his sermon the Republican Representative Charles Oakman introduced a Bill to add the phrase “under God” to the pledge, and Eisenhower signed the law on Flag Day later that year. The ceremony was celebrated at the US Capitol. “Everybody who was anybody was present except me,” Docherty said later. “They forgot to invite me.”

George MacPherson Docherty was born in Glasgow in 1911. He was a shipping clerk in his youth and then graduated from the University of Glasgow. After a three-year ministry in Aberdeen, he arrived in the US in 1950 and served as pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, Washington, for more than 26 years. The church was attended by Lincoln and many of his successors in the White House.

Docherty played an active role in the Civil Rights movement and led outreach efforts to feed and educate Washington’s hungry and poor. His church was often a staging point for anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and Martin Luther King preached from its pulpit. Docherty published a volume of sermons, One Way of Living (1958) and a memoir, I’ve Seen the Day (1984).

After retiring in 1976 Docherty moved back to Scotland but returned to the US a few years later to teach at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. He returned to the US for good in 1989.

His is survived by his wife of 36 years, Sue, two daughters and a son from his first marriage.

The Rev George Docherty, pastor, was born on May 9, 1911. He died on November 27, 2008, aged 97