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> that the country has values

As I've never said "The Pledge of Allegiance", this seems to be the original one, I'm guessing there might be some other modern variation schools use today, but anyways:

> I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I wouldn't be surprised that most people see it as a joke today, given the "with liberty and justice for all" is far from reality today, and it's very obvious to anyone.

> I don't know if other countries have pledges like this but on the surface it seems OK to me

Generally not, AFAIK. On the surface it seems like blatant propaganda to me, and kind of extremist, something you'd see not in a modern country typically.

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Today it includes "under God" in the text.

There are really two values expressed in the pledge. "Liberty and justice for all" and "the nation is below God." I'm happy saying that the former is a national value, though it is rarely achieved in practice. The latter... oof.

It is definitely propagandistic. Even if we ignore the religious component, it more expresses an idea that "liberty and justice for all" is already achieved rather than being a goal to strive for.

I think "liberty and justice for all" is actually the norm in the US, at least within fairly ordinary bounds. We can only have liberty up to a point being under a government. A human living in the wilderness, in anarchy, would also have liberty limited by other humans.

You can say "oof" to "under God" but most of the founders believed in the divine and cited it as a reason for granting "god-given" rights to the people. I am an atheist and I kinda don't like the religious aspect of the pledge, but I'm not so upset about it either. Most people believe in a deity, even in 2026, and on the whole I've been treated better by those people than by fellow atheists. Regardless of whether God exists, Christian moral standards are mostly beneficial and too often abandoned when people give up religion. It represents hard-won cultural knowledge and survival strategies for civilization.

"Justice for all" is demystified by spending any amount of time looking at the criminal justice system, which regularly abuses people in about a thousand different ways. The fact that the courts depend on the bulk of defendants taking plea deals to function at all is sick.

That one was modified some 75 years ago. Nowadays it's worse:

> I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The flag is no longer yours. The Christian god, despite supposedly being a secular nation of differing religions, is the leading principle.

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