God In The Oval Office

Last updated on: October 10, 2014 at 10:51 pm by Guest Contributor

God In The Oval Office 2014-10-10T22:51:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

These words have for over two centuries bound any man undertaking the office of the President of the United States to the faithful execution of his office. In context, they form the most integral part of an oath, sworn with dignity and reverence for the indomitable, ever-shifting moral code of one’s country.

And yet, every president-elect who has ever spoken the words, Theodore Roosevelt and John Quincy Adams excluded, has done it in nearly identical fashion—not with his hand on the Constitution has he sworn to uphold or on any legally binding contract, but on a 2000-year-old book, rife with contradiction, fragmentation, and fabrication, held sacred by only 32 percent of the rest of the world.

There is no mention in the oath of any Judeo-Christian God. The president-elect, therefore, is under no obligation to swear this oath to anyone or anything. Enumerated explicitly in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, it would seem that the phrasing of this oath is the product of a careful group of men dedicated to the production of a unique document—the basis for a secular republic, founded upon and governed by nonreligious moral principles, which would themselves be subject to change by learned discourse and democratic processes at any time.

The words “so help me God” would have been a simple alteration, and one that we can say with near certainty would have been made if our founding fathers had deemed the addition necessary. This final clause remains part of a similar oath—one not prescribed explicitly in the Constitution—taken by the vice president and members of Congress to this day. Yet, the phrase is absent from the oath that binds our commander-in-chief.

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