{"id":10445,"date":"2021-01-19T16:52:30","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T16:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=151950"},"modified":"2021-01-19T16:52:30","modified_gmt":"2021-01-19T16:52:30","slug":"leave-god-out-of-the-presidential-oath-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/01\/19\/leave-god-out-of-the-presidential-oath-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Leave God Out of the Presidential Oath"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Constitution is often deliberately vague and open to interpretation. But in the case of the presidential oath, it is explicit. <\/p>\n

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Washington did not say \u201cso help me God\u201d when he took the oath. Nor did any other of the first twenty-six Presidents. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The President-elect, it says, \u201cshall take the following oath or affirmation: \u2018I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Period. That\u2019s it. The popular addition \u201cso help me God\u201d is not there. It never was. And the nation\u2019s first twenty-six Presidents did not say it. <\/p>\n

Neither should Joe Biden when he takes the oath of office on January 20.<\/p>\n

In other contexts, adding words to the Constitution is considered an amendment. So why, after promising to preserve the Constitution, have so many Presidents immediately added words that are not part of the oath? Where did this presidential tradition come from? <\/p>\n

In my recent book, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American<\/em>,<\/a> I set out to answer these questions. <\/p>\n

Omitting God from the oath, it turns out, was no accident. The Founders deliberated this language at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a deliberation that is mirrored in the first bill Congress passed under the Constitution and the first bill President George Washington signed into law. <\/p>\n

As originally drafted, that law proposed Congressional oaths with clauses reading \u201cin the presence of Almighty God\u201d and \u201cSo help me GOD.\u201d Both were edited<\/a> out by the lawmakers. <\/p>\n

The spoken words have been as deliberate as the written words. We know that Washington didn\u2019t add the words to the oath. Edward Lengel, former editor-in-chief of the Papers of George Washington<\/a> project, concluded<\/a>, \u201cany attempt to prove that Washington added the words \u2018so help me God\u2019 requires mental gymnastics of the sort that would do credit to the finest artist of the flying trapeze.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like so much U.S. mythology, including Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman, we owe this Washingtonian myth to Washington Irving.<\/p>\n

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In his book The Republican Court<\/em>, Rufus Wilmot Griswold tells how Irving recalled<\/a> watching Washington\u2019s Inauguration as a six-year-old \u201cfrom the corner of New Street and Wall Street.\u201d You can stand on the corner of New and Wall streets today, as I did while writing The Founding Myth<\/em>. The experiment is not perfect, since the current Federal Hall, with its iconic steps, was built in 1842. <\/p>\n

Washington took his oath on a balcony with no access from the street. But stand on that corner and peer through the streams of pedestrians to the tourists taking photos on the steps of Federal Hall. Try to hear what they are saying. Now imagine you\u2019re a six-year-old swamped, waist high, in an \u201cinnumerable throng\u201d straining to hear a notoriously soft-spoken man whisper those words, \u201cso help me God,\u201d and accurately recalling those words fifty years later. The claim is not much more believable than The Legend of Sleepy Hollow<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Washington did not say \u201cso help me God\u201d when he took the oath. Nor did any other of the first twenty-six Presidents. <\/p>\n

The first reliable, contemporaneous account of any President saying these words along with the oath comes nearly a century after the country\u2019s founding, at Chester A. Arthur\u2019s public Inauguration in 1881. Arthur was actually already President. He had taken the oath immediately after learning that President James Garfield had finally succumbed to an assassin\u2019s bullet, following a lingering ten-week-long infection. <\/p>\n

For the second, public oath, Chief Justice Morrison Waite read the oath and Arthur didn\u2019t repeat it verbatim, instead replying<\/a> simply, \u201cI will, so help me God.\u201d We wouldn\u2019t hear those words in a presidential oath for another twenty-eight years.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until 1909, 130 years after the nation\u2019s founding, that these words were added to the oath. Chief Justice Melville Fuller added the phrase and William Howard Taft repeated it.<\/p>\n

And it was not until 1917, with the United States on the brink of entering World War I, that the tradition really took hold. Like Arthur, Woodrow Wilson took two oaths, adding \u201cso help me God\u201d to the second, superfluous oath. He had taken the presidential oath the day before in a somewhat private ceremony and did not add the phrase, though he did add<\/a> it in the public ceremony the next day. <\/p>\n

Up through Wilson\u2019s private 1917 oath, the phrase was used twice in forty oaths. Beginning with Wilson\u2019s public 1917 oath, it has been used in twenty-nine of the next thirty oaths. (Circumstances often force presidents to take the oath more than once.) In his poorly regarded biography of Washington in 1896, Wilson wrote<\/a> that Washington \u201csaid \u2018So help me God!\u2019 in tones no man could mistake.\u201d <\/p>\n

Every subsequent oath has been highly public. Even those sworn privately or without the pomp of a full Inauguration ceremony were recorded<\/a>. Not coincidentally, every oath since, save Herbert Hoover\u2019s in 1929, included the request for divine assistance. The public nature of the supplement suggests a desire to appear pious rather than actual piety.<\/p>\n

The explicit language of our Constitution\u2019s presidential oath was good enough for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln\u2014the oath that made every one of the first twenty-six men into Presidents. President-elect Joe Biden ought to heed the call<\/a> from the Freedom From Religion Foundation to return to our secular roots and the oath as it is written.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Constitution is often deliberately vague and open to interpretation. But in the case of the presidential oath, it is explicit.\u00a0 Washington did not say \u201cso help me\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1048"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10446,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10445\/revisions\/10446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}