Formal Oaths

Today formal swearing is generally required of citizens only on special occasions, such as taking the oath in court or taking an oath of office. The form of words makes the point with simple clarity: “I swear by Almighty God that I shall tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The tag phrase “So help me God” (“May God help me to do this”) is generally optional. Marriage also involves making a formal pledge, although the archaic wording used in some services obscures the point. Thus “I plight thee my troth” means “I pledge my word of honor to you”; the root term of both wedding and wedlock is Anglo-Saxon wedd , meaning “a pledge.”

In the past, when European society was more hierarchical, the bonds between master and subject were established by means of personal oaths of allegiance , the original meaning being “the tie or obligation of a subject to his lord or sovereign.” The liege-lord provided protection, while the bond-man provided service. These oaths were the foundation of the powerful interpersonal relations in Anglo-Saxon society and later in the feudal system. A curious survival of this ritual occurred on July 1, 1969, when Prince Charles was invested with the title of Prince of Wales. During the ceremony he knelt before the queen and made his oath to her in this archaic wording: “I am your liege man in life and limb.”

During the political and religious conflicts of the Reformation, all English citizens were required to make public oaths of allegiance to the monarch. However, these oaths were often framed in politico-religious terms deriving from crises of authority. In perhaps the most famous rejection of this requirement, Sir Thomas More, a devout Catholic, refused to take the oath endorsing the Act of Supremacy (1534) whereby Henry VIII proclaimed himself Supreme Head of the Church in England, thus supplanting the Pope. For his continued defiance More was accused of high treason and beheaded in 1535.

Despite increasing religious freedom, positions in the government and the universities in the United Kingdom remained dependent on applicants taking an oath specifying belief in certain tenets of the Christian faith. This requirement, formalized under the Test Act of 1673, effectively excluded Jews, Catholics, Methodists, and others from such positions. It gave a special and enduring meaning to the term test , meaning that the test of a person’s loyalty or fidelity to the nation’s religion lay in the oath. In the past the Oath of Allegiance was as much concerned with refuting the authority of the Pope and preventing assistance to foreign powers as it was with pledging loyalty to the monarch, reflecting the political and religious power struggles stemming from the Reformation.

Furthermore, a member of the British Parliament has traditionally been required to take the oath “on the true faith of a Christian.” Members of other faiths in the past found themselves unable to take such an oath and were therefore barred from taking their seats. This led to concessions in the form of the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829), the Quakers and Moravians Act (1833), the Jews Relief Act (1858), and the Parliamentary Oaths Act (1866), all of which reduced the direct religious content of the oath. Today the standard oath is: “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.” The alternatives are “I swear that I will be faithful …” etc., or “I solemnly, sincerely and truly affirm …” etc.

There are still problems for members who question the authority of the monarch. One such, Mr. Tony Benn, prefaced the oath with these remarks “As a committed republican, under protest, I take the oath required of me by law.” A deeper and unresolved crisis arose in 1997 when two elected members of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, refused to take the oath and so were not allowed to take their seats. Appeals to higher courts failed.

From the beginning, America set out to be a society free of religious authority. Yet technically the Declaration of Independence (1776) is in the form of an oath by the signatories, since it ends with the words: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Significantly, the Declaration does not use the word “God” in the traditional fashion, preferring “Creator” at the outset and “Divine Providence” at the conclusion, although there is the curious phrase “Nature and Nature’s God” near the beginning. Thus in the United States, formal oaths were and are completely secularized, omitting any reference to the Divine, as can be seen from the Presidential Oath of Office: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) … etc.” As Harold M. Hyman has observed in an analysis of the Oath of Office:

Framers of the Federal Constitution of 1787 and members of the first Congress held under its provision decided that officeholders … should be bound neither by religious tests nor by elaborate loyalty oaths. Instead they believed that a simple oath of office was adequate.

This decision ran counter to the practice of almost every other government in the world at the time.

(1966, 432)

Furthermore, the Constitution of the United States (1789) derives its authority, not from any religious entity, but from the democratic formula “We the People.” The First Amendment pointedly stipulates that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” while Article VI specifies: “that the Senators and Representatives … shall be bound by an Oath or Affirmation, to support this constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office.”

However, as Hyman notes, the critical divisive pressures of the Civil War led to modifications of the wording, producing “the so-called ‘iron-clad’ test oath” of 1868, referring to “all enemies, foreign and domestic” and specifying that the oath is taken “freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” (1966, 434). The anxieties and paranoia of the Cold War also led to attempts to modify loyalty oaths in certain states. As Hyman concludes: “Our jurists have not yet found a clear formula by which government may secure itself against disloyalty, through oaths or otherwise, while simultaneously holding to the uncertain but inspiring set in the Bill of Rights” (1966, 436).

The Pledge of Allegiance, originally instituted in 1892, currently runs:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. (36 U.S.C. 172)

Since there is no verb governed by “pledge,” as there is in most formal oaths, there is no strict grammatical or syntactical link between the first phrase and the section after “stands,” even though it expresses important ideals. The words “under God” (an echo of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) were not part of the original pledge, being added on June 14, 1954. Their function can be interpreted various ways, but their addition has occasioned a number of legal challenges, most recently Newdow v. United States Congress 2002 .

The problem with any formal oath is the degree to which the oath taker regards it as binding on his or her conscience. In an increasingly secularized society with a generally cynical view of politics and the exercise of power, this “binding” quality is clearly not of the same order. It is further weakened in the case of an oath not taken voluntarily, but as a bureaucratic requirement. As George Washington poignantly asked in his Farewell Address in 1796: “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?” (1966, 202).