There's an interesting article that appears on the U.K. based 'Theos' website with the title, So Help Me God: Faith, Politics, Integrity and an Inauguration.
A taste:
After all, this [the 'so help me God' tagline] is an explicitly religious exhortation which is markedly absent from the version of the Oath prescribed by the Constitution itself, but which has traditionally been included in practice – in the first instance, as a nod to George Washington, who (legend has it) spontaneously included it as he swore his own Oath to become the first American President in 1789. This would have been all the more notable given Washington’s role in presiding over the Constitutional Convention.
In this sense, ‘the faith bit’ is at once constitutionally excluded and culturally obliged – which is, of course, how much of the relationship between faith and politics in America has proceeded since the nation was born.
Potential reasons for leaving it out to start with only serve to bolster this image. Obviously, its exclusion enables the non–religious to swear the full Oath in good faith – and so to take the highest public office in the nation. This fulfils Article Six of the Constitution against religious tests for public office. Yet, unsurprisingly for America, some have also suggested a religious motivation for the omission: that it was intended to appease the significant Quaker population of nascent America, given that Quakers refuse oath–taking on principle (taking Matthew 5.33–37 in its literal sense). In the words of the Quaker William Penn: “It is vain and insolent, to think that a man, when he pleaseth, can make the great God of heaven a witness or judge in any matter … to help or forsake him, as the truth or falseness of his oath requires, when he saith ‘So help me God.’”
Simply let your yes be yes, and your no be no.
To be clear, this is speculation – just as the tales of Washington’s impromptu show of piety are themselves historically dubious. But the cultural layering associated with the phrase remains either way – and serves to remind us just how far America’s theoretical secularism has been entangled with religious principle from the start.
1 comment:
GWash liked oaths. From his 1796 Farewell Address.
Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?
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