So Help Me God
March 2, 2023 § 1 Comment
Oaths offer Friends and other faithful Christian communities a point of leverage by which we may be able to move some elected officials who assault the truth in the service of their white Christian nationalist god of violence and untruth. These officials have sworn oaths, and they are breaking their oaths with their words and actions. These oaths end with the phrase “so help me God”. Former Vice President Michael Pence might be especially open to this kind of appeal, since he is so self-avowedly Christian in his private and public life; he’s even used the phrase as the title of he newly-published book.
This is obviously somewhat ironic in the case of Quakers, since we traditionally forswear the taking of oaths (if you will forgive the pun).
Oaths are a covenantal form of speech. They connect all three of the points in the covenantal triad: one’s self, the community, and God.
Oaths are a magico-religious form of speech. They invoke the attention, judgment, and sentencing action of God as the guaranteeing authority behind the substance of the promise.
In their fullest form, oaths have the following formal structure:
- Formal naming of one’s self as the oath-taker; “I, [Michael Pence], do solemnly swear . . .” Note that the word “solemn” means “marked by the invocation of a religious sanction.”
- Formal stipulation of the promised actions; “. . . that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: . . . “
- Formal invocation of the (divine) authority, including, in some cases, stipulation of the punishment for breaking the oath, though not in this case; “So help me God.”
The oath for federal office-holders is a bit wishy-washy in it’s divine invocation and completely unclear about the punishment for violating the oath. By contrast, the oath that all kids are familiar with is: “Cross my heart and hope to die.” That is, if I’m lying, I’ll suffer a heart attack.
In order to hold Michael Pence, Mitchell McConnell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and their co-conspiring oath-breakers prophetically accountable for breach of their covenantal oaths, we have to unpack this divine invocation a bit.
So. “So” in their oaths seems to me to be a conjunction with several semantic possibilities. My dictionary gives the following: “provided that” God helps me, or “therefore” God help me. But it might be an adverb: “most certainly” [will] God help me. I’m going with “provided that” because of the next word in the phrase.
Help. If the “so” means “provided that”, as I propose, then “help” asks God to help the oath taker to be “faithful” in their discharge of its promises. It makes the oath a prayer. And the whole tone of the oath-prayer suggests that certainly God will help the oath taker, or at least would presumably want to. It assumes that God exists and is paying attention, that God has a stake in the discharge of the oath’s promises, and therefore, that God will act if the oath taker breaks the covenant.
God. What action will God take against an oath breaker? To answer this question, we have to ask, who is God? Whose God is being invoked by these people, and what do we know about that God’s character and intentions? To truly answer these questions, we would have to ask the oath taker.
THIS IS THE FIRST CHALLENGE OUR WITNESS SHOULD TAKE:
Who is your God and what does your God do to oath-breakers?
We could also ask what the Founding Fathers who wrote this oath had in mind, to use the “originalist” jurisprudential “philosophy” so popular now with white Christian conservative lawyers, judges, and Supreme Court justices. Sussing out the details of such an answer runs down the rabbit hole that originalist thinking always opens up. But we know the basics: God is the Christian God, and that Christian God is a lawmaker and a judge; [he] IS paying attention, he DOES care what we do, and he has a punishment waiting for those who break his law.
Moreover, it’s worth mentioning that breaking any oath is also a violation of the eighth commandment—thou shalt not bear false witness; you shall not swear falsely. Or else.
Punishment. So what is the punishment waiting for Mitchell McConnell for failing to give Merrick Garland a hearing as a nominee for the Supreme Court, which the Constitution expressly commands and which he had sworn to do? What will God do to him for breaking his oath? And for breaking the eighth commandment?
I’m not talking about the voters. God will not ensure that the voters vote him out of office, which would be appropriate and commensurate with the violation. No, God has presumably a personal stake in his breach of covenant and therefore, [he] must have something else in mind. Or so he and Marjorie Taylor Greene presumably believe.
We do have a benchmark. Her/their God stipulates twelve curses that will fall on covenant breakers in Deuteronomy 27; specifically, verse 26 reads: “Cursed be anyone who does not uphold the words of this law by observing them.” Chapter 28 gets specific about what those curses are, and it’s pretty bad. Especially pertinent: “The Lord will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds . . . “ (Deuteronomy 28:20) The chapter goes on to include pestilence, military defeat, boils, madness . . . lots of bad stuff.
But that’s the Old Testament, you say (though you presumably lean toward the literalist reading of scripture and assign it ultimate religious authority). Okay, Jesus then. In Matthew 23, Jesus pronounces prophetic oracles of woe against scribes and Pharisees for crimes that are roughly commensurate to oath breaking, and he specifies the judgment in verse 33: “You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”
The sentence is hell. There it is. The conservative Christian answer to the question of the judgment sentence for violating God’s law is, and always has been, hell. Mitchell McConnell is going to hell. Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to hell. That’s what they themselves believe—presumably.
Unless they repent, of course.
THIS IS OUR SECOND CHALLENGE AS WITNESSES TO TRUTH: REPENT!
OR GO TO HELL.
At least that’s what you say you believe. We Quakers don’t necessarily believe that. But you do, or so we must assume. And if you say you believe you’re going to hell if you break the eighth commandment and don’t repent, but don’t actually believe it, then you’re breaking God’s law AGAIN. You hypocrites! as Jesus would say.
Our case. Here’s our case against these oath breakers:
We should ask who their God is and what he wants from them, whether they believe that he is watching what they do, whether he cares what they do, and what their God does to those who swear falsely.
We should indict these politicians for breaking their oaths of office, in direct affront to the God they invoke for help. Our own prophetic oracles in this regard should cite their crimes—“whereas, you, Mitchell McConnell, have failed to give a legitimate nominee for Supreme Court justice a hearing in the US Senate, as required by the Constitution to which you have sworn allegiance . . . “
We should indict these politicians for breaking the eighth commandment. “Whereas, you also have sworn falsely, and therefore have broken one of God’s ten primary commandments . . . “
We should demand that they repent, that they turn around and faithfully discharge their obligations to the Constitution to which they’ve sworn allegiance, so help them God. “Therefore, we the people for whom the Constitution was written, do demand that you repent of your oath-breaking and that you hold a hearing for the nominee Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court of the Untied States as soon as is practicable, in faithful discharge of your obligation under your oath . . . “
And we should tell them to go to hell if they don’t, as they themselves presumably believe. “Failing your repentance and some attempt at restoration and redemption, and having rejected the help of your God, we ask, “how can you escape being sentenced to hell?”
Through the Flaming Sword 
And of course there’s the irony of the group who invaded the capitol – Oath Keepers.