New members of New Jersey’s state Assembly were sworn in yesterday at the Trenton War Memorial.
These ceremonies are, I think, a Good Thing. It’s good for democracy and life together to have a little ritual to celebrate and sacralize the peaceful transition of government.
It’s also the law, right there in Article VI of the Constitution:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The 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.
If you read those two paragraphs then you’re a step ahead of millions of your fellow Americans who seem convinced that taking this oath of office somehow requires one to place one hand on a Bible.
As you can see above, it does not require that.
And as you can see above it expressly and unambiguously forbids anyone to require that. The “no religious Test” clause of the Constitution is in the same section — the same sentence — as the requirement to support the Constitution “by Oath or Affirmation.”
And yet, despite that explicit language forbidding any religious test and despite the absence of any reference to anyone placing their hand on anything, the unconstitutional and anti-constitutional folklore persists that the oath of office is somehow only legitimate if it is taken by someone placing their [white] hand on a Bible.
This leads to white Christian nationalist freak-outs every January.
We saw this earlier this month when Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim elected mayor of New York City, used the Quran at his swearing-in ceremony. Hemant Mehta wrote about that White Christian Right’s flaccid firestorm over that, bringing back this delightful clip from Alabama Republican Ted Crockett’s disastrous interview on CNN. Crockett. a spokesman for Neo-Confederate White Nationalist Alabama judge (and small-town Jeffrey Epstein) Roy Moore, appeared utterly gobsmacked to learn that the folklore of religious chauvinism he was sure must be American law is actually forbidden by the Constitution:
That was 9 years ago, but watching the befuddled Crockett wordlessly blink seven times in total confusion is still very, very funny.
Crockett’s humiliation is part of why the white-right freakout over Mamdani’s use of the Quran was relatively subdued compared to the weeks-long panic the same folks tried to create when Keith Ellison was sworn in using Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Quran after he became the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006. Dennis Prager — the YouTuber whose videos Republicans are trying to use in place of textbooks in public schools — embarrassed himself even worse than Crockett did, slowly blinking in incomprehension for months, before he finally, reluctantly, begrudgingly accepted what the actual Constitution actually says and requires and forbids.
Over the years, many legislators and presidents and members of Congress have taken their oaths of office using many texts other than Bibles. It’s interesting to consider which of those have produced attempted white Christian nationalist freak-outs and which have not. I don’t recall any such attempts to orchestrate a panic over the late Sen. Harry Reid’s custom of using the Book of Mormon for his oath of office. Nor was there even an attempted backlash after Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice using a Bible that included that LDS scripture. (Sotomayor is not Mormon, but that particular volume is meaningful to her. It’s kind of a beautiful story.)
We should note here that, in addition to the prohibition on “religious tests,” the text of Article VI above also affirms religious liberty — and the freedom from religious establishment — in its language about “Oath or Affirmation.”
The option of “Affirmation” is affirmed there in recognition that many Americans at the time refused to swear oaths due to their religious convictions. These were primarily adherents of an obscure sect called “Christianity” — people who subscribed to the teachings of an arcane ancient text they call the “New Testament,” a text that explicitly and unambiguously forbids the swearing of oaths.
And even more than the actual black-letter law of the Constitution that so bewildered poor Ted Crockett, that is what is so hilariously dumb about the white Christian nationalist folklore that thinks “swearing on the Bible” is necessary or even acceptable.
If you swear an oath while placing your hand on the Bible, you’re swearing an oath on a book that forbids you to do that.
And that is, on a very basic level, silly and laughable and dumb.
This prohibition is not ambiguous or unclear or negotiable. Here is what it says in Matthew 5:
“Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you: Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. 36 And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”
That’s Jesus talking. Red letter stuff.
Granted, this passage is part of the Sermon on the Mount and for nearly 2,000 years we Christians have had our most skilled lawyers hard at work finding and creating loopholes in everything Jesus says there. But still, “Do not swear at all. … Let your word be ‘Yes’ or ‘No;’ anything more is evil” isn’t complicated or confusing or debatable.
If you’re going to swear an oath while placing your hand on a Bible that contains Matthew 5 then you might as well cross your fingers behind your back while winking sarcastically. That’s what this blasphemously absurd ritual conveys — not reverence, but contempt or, at best, a staggering incomprehension.
I suppose swearing on a Bible could also be something like that “Leviticus 19:28” tattoo I’ve joked about getting — an act of multilayered irony intended to deconstruct the meaning and interpretation of texts like Russell’s paradox of the barber. Or something.
But no, it’s mostly just dumb. You’re swearing an oath on a text you say you revere even though that same text tells you not to swear oaths.
Dumb. Really, really, indefensibly dumb.
Which is why I appreciate what newly elected N.J. Assemblywoman Katie Brennan did yesterday. Brennan brought along a bound copy of the voter rolls for Jersey City and Hoboken, a listing of the names of the people she was elected to represent. That was the sacred text she placed her hand on as she swore an oath to support and uphold the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
Bravo. That’s much better than the extravagant hypocrisy of swearing an oath using a book that says swearing an oath is evil.
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