Board of distinguished achievers. Also in 2010, she was awarded The Richard Dawkins Award by Atheist Alliance International. Ideas Jacoby has spoken about the important role secularism played in the development of political and social events in the history of the United States, and she has argued that this fact is often written out of American history by the religious right. One of the most important events in which Jacoby believes secularism played an enormous part was the writing of the United States Constitution. She has explained that it is a false claim that the founders of the United States intended the government to be religious. She believes instead that they were strongly in favor of the separation of Church and State, and that they purposely omitted the word God from the Constitution, partly influenced by the horrors that occurred in places such as France under non-secular rule, as well as inspired by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. The idea that a secular government is, in fact, necessary for the existence of religious liberty, has also been defended by Susan Jacoby. She has suggested that the religiosity of the American people, as well as the proliferation of different religious denominations in the United States, are examples of situations that have occurred precisely thanks to the existence of a secular system. Jacoby has said that the separation of church and state offered people the possibility to disagree with their church without having to oppose the established political order, which would have been impossible under a system where church and state were united. Jacoby has pointed out that the presence of some religious elements in the governmental scene of the United States is a matter of customs and not of laws, and that many of those elements are more recent than people tend to believe. She has cited as an example the pledge of allegiance, only written in 1892 and which did not include the expression 'Under God' until 1954. These words were added with the sole purpose of distinguishing the American government from the Soviet one, which was considered atheist. The influence of secularism in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States is another important subject for Jacoby. She believes that accepting the importance of secularism in the civil rights movement does not deny the role religion played in it, and while she has admitted that "the driving