We are witnessing the gradual death of another Christian family value that is still influential, though waning: homophobic discrimination. Nationally, there are as many as 2.4 million homeless American youth, 20 to 40 percent of whom are LGBTQ, despite comprising only 3 to 5 percent of the total youth population.35 The two most common reasons for homelessness in LGBTQ youth are: (1) family rejection on the basis of sexual orientation and gender, and (2) being evicted from family homes as a result of coming out.36 In these situations the family either rejects the child, making it unbearable for them to stay, or deliberately disowns the child, kicking them out. LGBTQ youth who are rejected by their families are eight times more likely to attempt suicide than those who are accepted.37 Ann Coulter, a mouthpiece for Christian nationalism, approves these Christian family values: “Last Thursday was national ‘coming out’ day. This Monday is national ‘disown your son’ day,” she wrote.38 Religion perverts love.
Without doubt, there are plenty of Christians who exercise positive family values such as understanding, acceptance, and love, but they are not acting like Christians. For instance, Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) consistently opposed gay rights and even sponsored the hateful Defense of Marriage Act. His son came out as a homosexual in 2011. In 2013, Portman announced his support for marriage equality. Portman tried to ground his turnaround on the bible.39 But his new position conflicts with biblical values. He placed his family above the bible and Jesus’s words. Christians do this all the time. But they are not acting like Christians. They are exercising their own moral judgment and coming to better, more ethical conclusions than their savior.
Herein lies a major problem with the Judeo-Christian principles argument. Society has traditionally labeled anything good, virtuous, or kind as “Christian.” When people are misbehaving, a father disowning his gay daughter for instance, people may say, “That’s not very Christian.” But it is very Christian—it’s just that the tenets of Christianity are immoral. Ann Coulter’s horrible comment is perfectly Christian, and also immoral. Choosing to follow the teachings of the Hebrew bible (and remember, Jesus came to fulfill the law of the Hebrew bible) over loving your family is precisely what Jesus commanded. What would Jesus do with a gay son? At the very least, kick him out of his house. Parents who do so are exercising Christian values—they’re just bad values. They are doing what Jesus would do, what Jesus commanded they do: choosing him over their family. Judeo-Christianity is anti-family.
RELIGION IS NOT MORALITY. Of course, religion will reflect the morality of the time and place of its origin. Such morality is often archaic, as the Ten Commandments illustrate. The Ten Commandments and the rest of the mosaic laws are not a moral code—they are a religious code. They enforce religious conformity, not morality. The most important question for determining whether a commandment has been broken is: do you believe in the right god? If so, you can get away with murder, so long as the victim believes in the wrong god. These commandments are so fundamentally at odds with our laws, with our morality, with our principles that one is almost forced to choose: are you a Christian or an American? Your answer to that question, which, if incorrect, the biblical god punishes with death, is protected under our Constitution. The separation of state and church and our First Amendment protect your right to be an American Christian. Christians can choose to personally follow the Ten Commandments’ totalitarian tendencies because their rights are protected by the Constitution. The Constitution puts checks and limits on what would otherwise be unbridled, tyrannical power, while the Ten Commandments demand worship and obedience of just such a power. The Constitution protects us by limiting power and defining our rights. God’s commandments limit our rights and impose power on us. The Ten Commandments punish crimes against an all-powerful god. The Constitution proclaims that our rights cannot be infringed, no matter how powerful the ruler.
The Ten Commandments did not positively influence the foundations of the United States. America would survive without them—indeed, it survives in spite of them—because the United States is founded on ideals that are far more important, impressive, and timeless than anything Judeo-Christianity can offer.
PART IV
AMERICAN VERBIAGE
“In civilized society most educated people are not even aware of the extent to which these relics of savage ignorance survive at their doors.”
— Sir James Frazer, Psyche’s Task: A Discourse Concerning the Influence of Superstition on the Growth of Institutions, 19131
23
Argument by Idiom
“It is much easier to alarm people than to inform them.”
— William R. Davie, delegate to the Constitutional Convention, in a letter to James Iredell, during the run-up to North Carolina’s ratifying convention, 17882
George Washington stood tall, his six-plus feet impressive as he recited the presidential oath on April 30, 1789, in New York City, concluding with a promise that he would, to the best of his ability, “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” Period. The oath and Washington’s recitation both end there. The words “so help me God” do not appear in the oath prescribed in Article 2, §1 of the Constitution. Our godless Constitution does not ask presidents to seek a god’s help or call down a god’s wrath on oath breakers. There is no evidence that even hints at Washington adding these words, nor is such an addition in keeping with his character.
Contemporary accounts of the inauguration don’t mention the phrase. The French foreign minister, the Comte de Moustier, contemporaneously recorded the ceremony as he stood next to George Washington.3 De Moustier’s account does not include the godly language, a moment that surely would have been remarkable because the phrase is not in the Constitution. Tobias Lear was Washington’s personal secretary for his final fifteen years. Lear’s detailed diary entry does not shy away from mentioning the religious aspects of the day, but fails to mention any religious appendage to the oath:
He immediately descended from his seat, and advanced through the middle door of the Hall to the balcony. The others passed through the doors on each side. The oath was administered in public by Chancellor Livingston; and, the moment the chancellor proclaimed him President of the United States, the air was rent by repeated shouts and huzzas,—‘God bless our Washington! Long live our beloved President!’4
Senator William Maclay’s firsthand account mentions the oath, but makes no mention of adding a phrase.5 Nor does the Senate Journal.6 No newspaper accounts of the day mention the words “so help me God.” Yet many assume and assert that Washington added the appeal for divine assistance.
The misconception has even snared experts like editors for the US Senate Historical Office. One editor mistakenly claimed that presidents dating back to Washington’s inauguration had said “so help me God.”7 Now she agrees that Chester A. Arthur was first to alter the oath: “When I made the video, it was common wisdom that [Washington] said it and I did not check it. After investigating this, I would say there is no eyewitness documentation that he did—or did not—say this.”8
Most serious historians now agree that the addition of “so help me God” did not begin with Washington. Peter R. Henriques, George Mason University professor of history emeritus and author of Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington, has written extensively on this subject, concluding: “There is absolutely no extant contemporary evidence that President Washington altered the language of the oath.”9 Nobody knows Washington’s words better than Edward G. Lengel, editor of the George Washington papers and of over sixty volumes of Washington’s documents. Lengel concluded that “any attempt to prove that Washington added the words ‘so help me God’ requires mental gymnastics of the sort that would do credit to the finest artist of the flying trapeze.”10
Not only is there no evidence that Washington said the phrase, but other evidence refutes the claim. First, when Washington spoke of a god, he did not typically use the word “god.” In his inauguration speech, given just after his oath, he used phrases
like “Almighty Being who rules the Universe,” “Great Author,” “benign parent,” and “invisible hand,” making it unlikely he used “so help me God” over more characteristic language. (See also pages 27–30.)
Second, Washington followed etiquette scrupulously. He compiled 110 rules on the subject in his Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. Washington presided over the debates at the Constitutional Convention for four long months and followed the ratification debate in Virginia closely from Mount Vernon. He knew perfectly well the precise wording of the oath that was laid out in Article II, Section 1 and that the Constitution prohibited religious tests for public office in Article VI, Section 3. Vice President–elect John Adams and the Senate spent that entire morning debating the protocol of the inauguration ceremony, down to the minutiae. “Gentlemen, I wish for the direction of the Senate. The President will, I suppose, wish to address Congress,” said Adams, who then kicked off the hairsplitting by asking, “How shall I behave? How shall I receive it? Shall I be standing or sitting?”11 It may seem absurd, but these were actually important questions for a newly formed republican nation, one that had just thrown off a monarch, to consider. Settling on etiquette that was suitably republican for federal ceremonies was a point of national honor and would help forge a national identity.
Washington meticulously followed this protocol during every aspect of the inauguration. It’s impossible to think that, in the very act of promising to uphold the Constitution whose shaping he had overseen, word by word, he would then violate its terms by amending the carefully chosen language in the oath—especially when the document lays out procedures for amendments in Article V. Rule #82 in his Rules of Civility reads, “Undertake not what you cannot perform but be careful to keep your promise.”12 Washington’s word was important; he wouldn’t swear to “preserve, protect, and defend” a document only to amend and thereby contravene it moments later.
Third, though some oaths of the era included the phrase “so help me God,” secular oaths were very much in en vogue at that moment. Three days before Washington’s inauguration, on April 27, 1789, the House of Representatives passed their first bill, a godless oath of office.13 The Senate passed its version, also godless, five days after the inaugural, on May 5.14 (see page 89.)
Thus, not only is there a total absence of evidence suggesting that Washington did use the words, but his own actions and character suggest that he would not have used the words. So where did this myth come from? Apparently, we have Washington Irving, the creator of so much early American folklore, including The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, to thank for this myth too. The earliest claims appear nearly seventy years after the event, in Rufus Griswold’s The Republican Court; or, American Society in the Days of Washington (1856) and in Washington Irving’s Life of Washington (1857). Both accounts rely on Washington Irving’s childhood recollection—he was six years old at the time—as their source.15 According to Griswold, the six-year-old Irving viewed the balcony inauguration “from the corner of New street and Wall street.”16
That a short child could hear and remember for half a century the final words of this oath—which no present and much closer adults recording the moment did—through an “innumerable throng” of adults, over a distance of more than 200 feet, uttered by a notoriously soft-spoken man, without the aid of modern technology, is simply not to be believed. You can stand on the corner of New and Wall Streets today, as I did while writing this chapter. The experiment is not perfect because the current Federal Hall, with its iconic steps, was built in 1842. (The original Federal Hall building, where the inauguration took place, was razed in 1812.) Washington took his oath on a balcony with no access from the street. But stand on that corner and try to peer through the streams of pedestrians to the tourists taking photos on the steps of Federal Hall. Try to hear what they are saying. Now imagine that you’re a six-year-old swamped in a massive throng in which you stand, at best, waist high, trying to hear Washington’s murmured words, and then trying to accurately recall the words you could not hear fifty years later. The claim is simply absurd.
No evidence suggests that any early president—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams—added pious words to the oath. The first reliable, contemporaneous account of a president adding these words comes nearly a century after the founding, at Chester A. Arthur’s public inauguration in 1881.17 Arthur was assuming what had become a dangerous office, taking the oath after James Garfield was assassinated, the second president gunned down in sixteen years. This public oath was actually Arthur’s second presidential oath. He had already taken the official oath and assumed the office of president two days earlier, immediately on Garfield’s death. In that private ceremony, he did not edit the oath. The second oath, the one with the religious language, was a public reenactment done for show.18 It was more strategic piety.
Like Arthur, Woodrow Wilson took two oaths: a private oath on March 4, 1917, and a public oath the next day. “Private” may be the wrong word to describe the first oath. Wilson took that first oath in the Capitol at noon, and it was private only in the sense that is was not open to the public, though some government officials and legislators attended. This was the last truly nonpublic oath; every subsequent oath taken without the pomp of a full inauguration ceremony was recorded. All the evidence suggests that Wilson did not add the phrase to the oath in the private ceremony, though he did add it in the public ceremony.19
The inflection point for presidents adding the words seems to have been the United States teetering on the brink of the First World War. In fact, up through Wilson’s private 1917 oath, the phrase was used in, at most, only two of forty oaths, about 5 percent of the time.20 Beginning with Wilson’s public 1917 oath, it was used in thirty-four of thirty-five oaths, about 97 percent of the time.21 Of the first three times the words were added, the president had already assumed office in two (Arthur 1881, Wilson 1917), and the oath to which they added the words was purely ceremonial.
Wilson’s motivations for deviating from constitutionally prescribed language during that second, public oath are not entirely clear, but he may have been relying on Washington Irving’s tale about George Washington’s oath. He was certainly familiar with the tale. Wilson wasn’t always a politician. He was an academic first, and in 1896, he authored a poorly regarded biography of Washington. A historian, professor, and Wilson biographer has criticized the short work as “rest[ing] on slender research,” using a “saccharine, flowery style” atypical of Wilson’s writing, and being generally of a “low caliber.”22 In that romanticized biography, Wilson wrote that, at the conclusion of his oath, Washington “said ‘So help me God!’ in tones no man could mistake.”23 Thus, the modern tradition of presidents adding a god to the oath can be tied directly to the Washington Irving myth about George Washington through Woodrow Wilson, the president largely responsible for that modern trend. Myths are powerful, regardless of their truth.
Before the “so help me God” fad took hold of presidential oaths, Wilson’s 1917 inauguration was one of the few wartime inaugurations up to that point in US history, along with Madison’s in 1813 and Lincoln’s in 1865. Rather like the early 1860s and 1950s, this was a time of national fear and strife. A similar fear existed when Chester Arthur took his public oath in 1881, though it may have been stronger in the run-up to America entering World War I. Less than five weeks after Wilson took this pair of oaths, the US would join World War I. On the very day he took the first oath, senators had been filibustering to prevent conferring additional war powers on Wilson. Two months earlier, Germany had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, and the US responded by severing diplomatic relations.24 Just days before the oaths were uttered, the Zimmerman telegram, in which Germany proposed a military alliance with Mexico that would allow Mexico to reconquer Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, came to light and was confirmed as genuine by Germany.25
It is easy to characterize both Arthur�
�s and Wilson’s godly addition to the oath as turning to religion at times of personal fear and stress, especially given that Wilson was the son of a reverend, and so pious—he frowned on dancing and found the idea of balls frivolous—that he canceled all the inaugural balls in 1913. But that claim is undercut because both men did not turn to a deity for assistance when taking the private oath—the oath that actually made them president. Instead, they snuck religion into the secular oath only in the public ceremony.
The “turning to religion” argument is even harder to make for America’s three other holy epigrams. To a greater extent than “so help me God,” these appear to have been foisted on Americans at times of national peril when their attention was turned toward more important matters, when dissent was dangerous, and when religion was a convenient political distraction.
AT THE FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION OFFICES, we often get phone calls from upset individuals wishing to register their intense disapproval of our fight to uphold the Constitution. As you would expect from someone who takes the time to call an organization with which they disagree, these individuals are less than polite. Words my publisher won’t print are constantly hurled at our wonderful staff, along with the occasional argument. Almost without fail, that argument takes one of three forms. First, “we’re America, in God we trust!” Second, “we’re one nation under God,” often followed by a less-than-cordial invitation to move to Iran. Finally, if they wish to disguise their passive-aggressiveness as taking the high road, they either say they are praying for us (managing to make it sound as though they are spitting on us instead) or they get presidential and say, “God bless America.”
The Founding Myth Page 29