The Senators’ Oath of Impartial Justice
January 17, 2020 § 1 Comment
I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, president of the United States, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help you god (sic)?
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
Our president took an oath several years ago. Ninety-nine of our U.S. senators took an oath yesterday. (One was absent due to illness and will take the oath soon.)
Oaths. Taking an oath casts a magico-religious spell. In this, it is like a sacrament: perform an outward ritual, effect an invisible but real spiritual outcome; take holy communion, receive God’s grace. An oath binds our words and actions and fates to a covenant of truth, a three-way agreement between the oath-taker, the witnesses, and a Power as the guarantor of the pledge.
Full-blown oaths have three components and three magico-religious aspects. The three components are verbal, somatic, and material. The aspects are: invoke a Power, declare the promise, submit to the Power’s punishment upon breaking the promise.
The simple oath we used to take as kids was stripped down to some essentials: Cross my heart and hope to die. This just has the verbal component, the speaking of the oath, and the somatic component of making the sign of a cross over the heart. The promise: I’m telling the truth. The punishment, death, heart failure, presumably.
The vow of marriage involves the verbal, somatic, and material components of vows, standing before the officiator, and rings, plus a kiss for sealing the promise. The promise: fidelity. The punishment: violation of the vow is breach of one of the ten commandments (two, actually) and cause for dissolution of the covenant—divorce.
The senators’ oath to “do impartial justice” in the impeachment of Donald Trump
Components.
Verbal. The verbal component of the senators’ oath is the oath itself, of course. It’s worth noting that “solemnly” here does not denote a mood but rather the religious character of the oath; for “solemn” my Webster’s 7th Collegiate Dictionary reads: “1 : marked by the invocation of a religious sanction 2 : marked by the observance of established form or ceremony; specif : celebrated with full liturgical ceremony 3 a: awe-inspiring : sublime b : highly serious c : somber, gloomy.” Note that the religious meaning is the first one.
Somatic. The somatic components were: standing before the seat of judgment, raising the right hand, placing the left hand upon a Bible, and signing a book or record.
Material. The material component is the signature in the book of record.
Aspects
Invocation. The Power invoked as the guarantor of the oath in the senators’ oath is the God of the Bible—“so help you God”, they solemnly swear.
Promise. The promise they made, the general terms of the covenant, are obvious in the phrasing: “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws”. Adjudication of the specifics of a breach—whether the oath has been broken or not—rests with the Power invoked and with the Power’s human agents at the judgment bench. His (sic) representative at the swearing was Chief Justice Roberts. His representatives at a trial of the senators for breach of oath would be the rest of the senators.
Punishment. The punishment for violating these oaths is not explicitly specified, but the punishment under human agency, for the president, is impeachment; for the senators, it is expulsion from the Senate and presumably, rescinding of the title. This leaves the huge question of what punishment the president and the senators will suffer at the right hand of the Power invoked if they break their oaths. That Power is God (the Christian, or at least, the biblical God). What will God do to a senator who fails to “do impartial justice”?
He (sic) has explicitly promised not to hold him or her guiltless, so they are not getting off. In the biblical context, oathbreakers are cast out of the divine covenant. Deuteronomy (the version of the commandment I’ve quoted is in Deuteronomy 5) lays out an extensive list of blessings for faithfulness to the covenant and curses for unfaithfulness. But that covenant binds Israel as a people to their god and presumably, Christian senators don’t fear those particular curses, which are specific to a people and a time and place and cultural context they do not share.
But there’s no doubt that, in theory, breaking their oath is a sin for which God will hold them accountable. This reveals the weakness of the sin-salvation paradigm of traditional Christianity: what is there to fear? Some vague threat of suffering in the afterlife? Is God really going to send them to hell if they break their oath? For those handful of senators who truly are devout Christians, this might have some weight—but all you need is a confession to get clear. If you’re Catholic or high-church Protestant, confession and the eucharist. The threat of divine spiritual punishment is a threat without teeth.
And why the Bible, anyway? Well, we know why—America in its mythical rhetoric thinks of itself as a Christian nation, never mind all the citizens who are not Christians and the guarantee of the First Amendment that the nation does not actually have an official state religion. And, anyway, how many of these senators are religious in the first place? Are any of them avowed atheists? Are any Jewish or Muslim or something besides Christian in their religious profession?
All of these arguments are part of why Quakers don’t take oaths—or didn’t. (I wonder how many of us do these days, how many of us take this particular testimony very seriously.) But we should remember that the primary reason Friends don’t—or didn’t—take oaths is that Jesus expressly told us not to in Matthew 5:33–37. “Swear not at all. . . . Simply let your yea be yea and your nay be nay; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” Wow—straight from Satan. Did you hear that, Mitch McConnell?
Meanwhile, all these factors help to explain why some senators have already declared their intention to break their oath. I hope they suffer some kind of spiritual curse if they do break their oath. Nothing so bad as hell; but something. And I hope they repent before they do, not after.
Through the Flaming Sword 
You wrote: “But there’s no doubt that, in theory, breaking their oath is a sin for which God will hold them accountable. This reveals the weakness of the sin-salvation paradigm of traditional Christianity: what is there to fear? Some vague threat of suffering in the afterlife? Is God really going to send them to hell if they break their oath?” And I’d like to answer that the sin-salvation paradigm, rightly understood, is not weak but sound; that New Testament threats of suffering are not vague, particularly those attributed to Jesus; and that, according to John 3:19-20, those who take the oath hypocritically and then break it, being haters of the light that would expose the evil of their hypocrisy, will predictably flee from that light into what Jesus (in Matthew) calls the “outer darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” I read that as indicating that all damnation is self-damnation. God, who “has no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezek 33:11), “will have all men to be saved,” 1 Tim 2:4 AV. Whether, and how, God will later reach into that outer darkness and save the self-damned (“Had enough yet, Adolf?”), I can’t say without a special revelation. I hope so. In the meantime I must pray for the repentance of
any and all who are now sealing themselves into a self-made hell by taking false oaths. I myself have been a liar and a promise-breaker and the inhabiter of a self-made hell. It is indeed hellish. Here on earth, in the flesh, there are distractions from it. After the death of the body there may no longer be any.