How “So help me God” Is Becoming Constitutional

It is by subscribing to the inaugural oath, as set out in the Constitution, that the US president elect becomes the US president. It reads: "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." Article II, Sec. 1.

 

Stage 1:  Washington

No “So help me God.”

George Washington almost certainly did not add “So help me God” to either his first or second inaugural oaths, and there is no respectable evidence of that phrase being uttered at the subsequent inaugurations of John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, or Wilson.

Through Garfield on this list I rely upon, Peter Henriques  (History News Network,  http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/59548 “[There is] absolutely no extant contemporary evidence,” supporting the oft repeated story that George Washington added “So help me God” to the presidential oath of office at his first inauguration. The story first appeared in 1854, when Rufus Griswold’s book titled The Republican Court, Griswold relying upon statements of Washington Irving. Irving was 6 years old and 200 feet away when he witnessed the inauguration (and elsewhere Washington is reported to have spoken softly, sometimes inaudibly.) “[T]he first clearly documented case of a President adding the words, “So help me God,” was recorded — when Chester A. Arthur took the oath in 1881.” For inaugurations after Garfield, I have done some checking on my own. Reports of most of the later inaugurations in this list mention Bible kissing, but no God language.

That Hoover did not mention God is certain, as you can hear. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN10dd8q2TQ&t=190s  3:22.)  

Stage 2: Arthur-Coolidge

Added by president in assent to the oath.

 The 1881 occasion cited by Henriques was Arthur’s otiose re-swearing of the oath in Washington: “I will, so help me God.”  This administration of the oath presumably followed the inquiry style apparently dominant throughout the 19^th century. In it the administrator would replace the first person pronouns of the oath with “you.” In his actual swearing in two days earlier Arthur had repeated the oath apparently as written, with first person pronouns. It was administered by a New York State trial judge who had the text before him, but was likely unaware of the prevailing inquiry style.  (The reason for the redo was reported to be concern that this oath might be challenged as legally ineffective for want of a federal official. However, this was ill founded as no such requirement is in the Constitution, and Washington’s first oath was administered by a New York State judge.)

Coolidge in his first inauguration in 1923 followed the Arthur redo pattern as did Franklin Roosevelt in his inaugurations of 1933 and perhaps 1937. No one present at these inaugurations of Arthur, Coolidge, or Roosevelt would have gotten the impression that “I will, so help me God” or “So help me God” was part of the constitutionally mandated presidential oath.

We might wonder whether the first public act of the chief magistrate should be a tacit endorsement of theism in a nation in which not everyone shares that belief, but in this form it had little risk of causing any confusion about the content of the Constitution.

 

Stage 3:   Roosevelt 1941

Oath repeated as written, then “So help you God?”

Repetition form is used and the administrator asks the question immediately after the president finishes reciting. The pronoun switch from first person to second person, together with some rising inflection are signs from which the sophisticated and observant listener might conclude this is not part of the constitutional oath itself.

This pattern was used by F Roosevelt 1941, 1945; Truman 1949; Johnson 1963 (Probably; the “me” is hard to hear), Reagan 1981; Obama 2009, 2^nd 2009 (to correct the bungle by Roberts further bungled by Obama), and 2013; and by Biden in 2021.

 

Stage 4:  Truman 1949

Second person pronouns substituted into oath, followed by “So help you God.”

 This odd variation uses the pronouns of the inquiry style while having the president elect repeat but changing the pronouns to first person. At this stage the grammatical difference between the oath and the theistic addendum has entirely disappeared. If one doesn’t know in advance the actual text of the oath, the natural inference is that “So help me God" is part of the oath.

 This pattern was used by Eisenhower 1953, 1957; Kennedy 1961; Johnson 1965.  

Stage 5: Harding 1921

Actual oath (first person pronouns) read by administrator and repeated by president elect immediately followed by “So help me God,” by one, then the other.

It will not have escaped the reader that the first instance of what I am calling the Stage 5 pattern is temporally prior to the first instances of Stages 3 and 4. I class the Harding pattern as Stage 5 because it represents the extreme of the twentieth and twenty first century trend. It is the pattern best calculated to mislead citizens as to the constitutional oath requirement. If one remembers that the constitutional language of the provision is in the first person or knows that oaths typically are so written, one will be especially easily seduced into thinking that the whole recitation is of genuine text. Moreover, the Harding pattern is hardly antiquated, having been adopted for every Republican inauguration since Nixon’s second, save Reagan’s first, as well as those of Carter and Clinton.

To focus on recent history, after reciting the oath and addendum in the Stage 3, Roosevelt 1941, form for both Obama inaugurations, Chief Justice Roberts switched to the Harding pattern for Trump. In 2021 he was back to the modestly less misleading Roosevelt pattern, presumably at Biden’s direction.

 

Conclusion

The text of the Constitution, of course, cannot be changed without going through the demanding process of amendment. As a practical matter, however, change has pretty well been accomplished here. What people think the Constitution says is important, even when they are wrong. There may be some who think that “the wall of separation” is in the Constitution. Prominent in the lobby of the NRA headquarters is the Second Amendment, but it is the Second Amendment with the omission of, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” 

Without, admittedly, the benefit of any data, I speculate that if a forced choice poll were taken asking which is the constitutional presidential oath, the actual text or a version with “So help me God” appended, over 50% would select wrongly. Some number of these respondents might in fact suspect that  reference to God was not in the oath, but still answer that it was out of the desire to “trigger the libs.” This pathology almost certainly infects polling e.g. on such questions as whether the 2020 election was fraudulent and Biden an illegitimate president. Still, a substantial number of people really do believe that the oath concludes, “So help me God.”

Can you imagine the outcry that would arise if the next president inaugurated, ended her oath recitation with, “and defend the Constitution of the United States”?  Surely we would hear that her omission of “So help me God” was a violation of the American constitutional tradition. No president had dared begin his term without calling on divine assistance since that arch-liberal, Herbert Hoover! 

When it is a political agenda that lies behind efforts that result in misleading citizens about the language of the Constitution, then that is potentially a matter of concern. The presidential oath, the only oath whose exact wording is proscribed by the Constitution, does not require either direct or indirect reference to God. In the 1780s almost all office holders, witnesses and jurors were qualified by swearing oaths, then universally understood as invoking the potential punishment of God for oath breaking. It is significant that one could become president of the United States by affirming, universally understood as not invoking God.

There is an affirmation alternative in all four constitutionally mandated oaths. Article VI, Clause 3: “Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Article I, Section 3, Clause 6: “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. . . .” Fourth Amendment “. . . no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation . . .”

The affirmation options were certainly not inserted out of consideration for atheists, uncloseted atheists then being roughly zero in number. Neither was it for the benefit of the deists, who were a surprisingly large minority among the framers, but who, apparently, had no reluctance to swearing oaths. Instead, the affirmation alternative was almost certainly a concession to the Society of Friends, most members of which did object to giving oath. The option has been of little practical importance as only Franklin Pierce, a practicing Episcopalian, has exercised it. It is speculated that his decision to affirm may trace to his being religiously troubled after the death of his only surviving son before his very eyes in a railway accident just days before the inauguration. Our two nominally Quaker presidents, Hoover and Nixon, were both sworn in.

As a matter of constitutional theory and interpretation, however, the affirmation options are important as is the “no religious test clause” of the Article VI provision. It would have been flatly inconsistent for the presidential oath to have concluded with the words “So help me God.”  It is the essence of an affirmation that it does not call upon God, and to require a president to do so would constitute a religious test.

The framers went to then unprecedented lengths to avoid any endorsement of religious doctrine in the Constitution, even such then uncontroversial doctrine as the existence of a single God. In this they showed more wisdom than they did in many other weighty matters. Those who would prefer it otherwise should be required to try their luck with the amendment process rather than seeking, in effect, to add to the constitutional text while no one is looking.