The “Under God” spray-painted by vandals onto an atheist billboard on Billy Graham Parkway over the weekend won’t be gone until just before July 4, a spokesman for Charlotte Atheists & Agnostics said today.That’s how long it will take the billboard company to restore the sign, which featured an American flag background and quoted the original phrase from the Pledge of Allegiance – “One Nation indivisible” – before “under God” was inserted after “one nation” in 1954.
“They have to print an entirely new vinyl and then schedule a crane,” said William Warren. He added that his group has reported the vandalism to Charlotte police and spoken with a nearby Shell station about letting investigators inspect video from security cameras in hopes of identifying those who defaced the billboard.
The sign, which went up a week ago, was controversial for its message and for its location along a road named for Graham, a Charlotte-born evangelist who preached to hundreds of millions worldwide.
A state coalition of atheist, agnostic and free thinker groups is putting up the same billboard in five other cities in North Carolina. None of them had been defaced as of Monday morning, Warren said.
“A concerned citizen,” Warren said, emailed the group Saturday to report that the sign had been vandalized.
To spray-paint graffiti onto the billboard, the vandals had to get up and then climb a ladder that didn’t reach to the ground.
“Either it was two very tall people or they had a ladder to get to the ladder,” Warren said. “It looks like you’d have to do gymnastics to get up there.”
He said his group considered the vandalism an isolated act and not indicative of Charlotte’s religious community.
“It was done by one or two people off on their own who decided their only recourse was vandalism rather than having a conversation.” Warren said. “It does show how needed our message is. As atheists, we want to let people know we exist and that there’s a community here.”
Other than the vandalism, Warren said his group has received “mostly positive” responses to its billboard, including from some self-described Christians.
Plus, he credited publicity surrounding the sign with uptick in membership: “We have 58 new members.”
The Pledge of Allegiance, long recited by schoolchildren in their classrooms, was written in 1892 by a Baptist minister. But it included no religious language until “under God” was inserted by an act of Congress at the height of the Cold War. The addition was meant to distinguish the United States from the Soviet Union, which officially embraced atheism.
