"Saying the pledge now isn't capitulation. It's repossession."

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For 15 years, Corey stood during the Pledge of Allegiance without putting his hand on his heart or saying the words. It wasn't apathy, and it wasn't a performance. It was a conviction, rooted in Scripture and a genuine question: is this a pledge I can actually make? Then something shifted. In this solo episode, Corey traces the journey from that first awkward moment of awareness at a local business meeting, through the Book of Daniel, to a spring morning in 2026 — and explains why starting to say the pledge again isn't a concession to anyone. It's a reclamation.

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Key Takeaways

Ritual deserves examination. Standing and reciting from muscle memory is different from making a conscious pledge. The distinction matters.

The flag and the republic are not the same thing. One can be weaponized; the other is the idea worth pledging to. Corey's return to the pledge came from finally separating the two.

January 6th is not an abstraction. Men with the flag draped across their backs as a cape, the pole weaponized against police officers — those are photographs of specific people committing a specific desecration. That image clarified something.

Reclamation, not capitulation. Words like conservative, Christian, liberty, and freedom have been sloganized and shouted as weapons. They belong to a tradition, not to the people who've hijacked them. Same goes for the pledge.

The grammar of the pledge matters. Read without the unwritten, hypnotic pauses, the pledge isn't to a flag. It's to the republic for which the flag stands. That's a pledge worth making.

Thanks to our Sponsors and Partners

Thanks to Pew Research Center (pewresearch.org) for making today’s conversation possible.
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