So Help Me God

Those four words tend to cause quite a bit of controversy in this country, particularly when Government forces them to be uttered.

In the latest case to come to my attention, the Marietta City Council is being asked to look at the oath they make their police officers swear to when being sworn in, which ends with the infamous four words “So Help Me God”.

According to the Marietta Daily Journal,

In reviewing the oath, Pearlberg noticed how it ended with the statement, “So help me God.”

“It’s a diverse population and a lot of people have diverse beliefs, and as a result I would not want to lose a potential officer as a result of that,” [City Councilman Van] Pearlberg said.

Mayor Bill Dunaway said in his eight years of administering the oath to police officers, the phrase has never caused a problem. But Councilman Philip Goldstein said just because no one has objected is not a sufficient reason to leave it unchanged.

Goldstein said city attorney Doug Haynie could come up with language to allow the police officer to say something else in the event the person didn’t want to swear to God.

There are a variety of reasons for objecting to swearing on a Bible or to God.

Contrary to what some think, many of the most ardent opponents of these oaths are actually conservative Christians. They believe that they are not to swear under any circumstances, hence the reason most courts now use the phrase “Do you swear or affirm” rather than “Do you swear” when administering the traditional oath of witnesses. These and others sometimes also believe that the name of God is too holy to speak, and therefore they cannot speak it – or even write it, often using “G-d” instead. Thus, even within the Christian community, you have a diverse range of thought on this issue.

Then, of course, you get into the diversity points Pearlberg noted. Not only do people have various beliefs on the existence of God, they also have various beliefs on exactly who or what God is.

For the person who doesn’t believe in God or who believes God created the world but then left Creation to its own devices, does it really make any sense to have them ask for the assistance of something they believe will never be of assistance?

For the person – and this can be of ANY religion – that believes their God commands them to commit acts of violence, do we REALLY want their God to help them?

And of course you have Old Reliable, the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, which ensures strict neutrality on the issue of religion by government.

To me, there are two simple remedies here where everyone’s rights and consciousnesses can be respected:

1) Make the change from “swear” to “swear or affirm”. I see absolutely no reason to object to this change, and to me objecting to that one exposes you as a theocrat only interested in forcing your own religious beliefs on others.

2) Strike “So Help Me God” from the official oat – but allow people to add it voluntarily, if they so wish. With NO prompting from ANYONE. A historical fact that many “Christians” seem to forget: “So Help Me God” is NOT in the US Constitution as part of the Presidential Oath. Indeed, Article 2, Section 1 states that the Presidential Oath is as follows:

I 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.

BTW: Here is a scanned copy of from the US Archives that clearly shows the “(or affirm)” line in the original.

But to my point of the historical fact: the “So Help Me God” at the end of that particular oath was added on the fly by George Washington the very first time he took it. Since that point, it has become tradition – not law – that Presidents utter it.

There is NO Constitutional basis for it.