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Oaths 7 – A Change in Faith

The decision to switch from a Trinitarian oath to an oath to the Constitution must have been based on a fundamental change in beliefs. The colonies had recognized that a Christian oath is essential to a Christian republic. Unless the authors of the Constitution didn’t really understand the importance of the oaths, why would they have inserted them into their founding documents? If they were committed to a Christian form of government before the debates at the Constitutional Convention, then something must have changed at some point. How did it happen? What fundamental change had occurred in their thinking, their faith, their philosophy?

Ellsworth’s opinion (see Oaths 3) seems to represent the naive view that one can reconcile radical rationalism and faith in the authoritative word of God. In other words, we can keep our Christian morals and culture, even if it means use of the civil power to enforce such, but we need not require that those using the civil power be actual confessors of the Christian faith and a biblical system of law and justice. Such a viewpoint is absurd on its face.

One has to consider history. The founders of our country had a heritage of tremendous political and religious upheaval during the previous two and a half centuries. On October 31, 1517, the Monk Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg Church door in Germany. Considering the work of John Hus and John Wycliffe, this act was not the first salvo of the Reformation, but it is a critical date used to measure what would soon after become a mass movement across Europe. For a century, different governing powers would square off on the side of the established Church, the Roman Catholic Church, or side with the Reformers, like Luther and John Calvin.

The debates, scriptural arguments, persecutions, and military conflicts resulted in a realignment of power. One of the first powers to be questioned was that of the Roman Catholic Pope. If, as the Reformers asserted, the Pope had accumulated unscriptural and illegal power, then what about civil rulers? It was only a matter of time that civil government would come to its “judgment” also, for if there was a limit to the Pope’s power and authority, why wouldn’t there be limits to the power of civil rulers? If the power of a Church leader was in question, why would civil rulers be immune from questioning? The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, ostensibly based upon the bible, had propped up many a civil ruler for centuries. Now that anyone could read the bible, many began questioning that doctrine, one of them being Samuel Rutherford, who wrote “Lex Rex” to detail the biblical argument against that doctrine.

Different parts of Europe became Protestant, while others remained Roman Catholic. Nations, regions of nations, and even cities divided against each other on religious and political grounds. The Roman Catholic areas tended to remain in favor of monarchy, while the Protestant areas favored a change toward more democratic civil government. Great Britain, from whence most founders drew their heritage, as well as their understanding of political theory. Before America’s foray into the political maelstrom of the time, England was the forerunner of economic and political liberty in the West. From the time of the Magna Carta in 1215, England was proud of its belief in rights and liberty in the face of tyrannical overreach.

Therefore, it was no surprise that in England occurred the political victory of those who argued in favor of lawful limits to a king’s authority. That political battle resulted in the execution of a king by Parliament and the deposing of another in the 1600’s. But that victory of Parliament came with a terrible price – civil warfare, illegitimate prosecutions for heresy against the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrines, and all the upheaval that comes with such. By the end of the Seventeenth century, Parliament had cut the power of the king down to a manageable size, but only to gradually accumulate too much power to itself.

Apparently, the Parliament thought that the votes of the people were sufficient to grant it absolute sovereignty over Englishmen, whether living in England proper or in the American colonies. The American colonies developed a different view. The fact that an ocean separated the colonies from the mother country immunized the colonies for a time from the upheavals in England. But the prosperity of the colonies gained the attention of Parliament in the Eighteenth century. And being ignored by the mother country was no longer sufficient to protect the colonies from the envious eye of the Parliament, who could raise taxes on the Americans’ prosperity and experience no negative consequences at the ballot box. The temptation for the politician to profit off that imbalance was too great to resist.

But America had yet to develop an adequate answer to the Parliament’s aggrandizing actions. See Bernard Bailyn’s book, “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). American lawyers, speakers, representatives hammered out an answer and a defense for their resistance to Parliament’s efforts to take from the colonists the lawful rights of Englishmen, a status in which the colonists still lived and breathed. They were Englishmen, entitled to the same fundamental, God-given rights as Englishmen living on the Isle of Great Britain. The Americans searched high and low through the political writings of thinkers of the past, and the wrote their own polemical works. By far, the most referenced work was the bible, for the colonists were governed in their thinking by a Christian perspective. And while there were many Roman Catholics in the colonies, the vast majority were Protestant in their thinking if not in their actual church membership.

One of the key impediments to the colonists in their argument for liberty was a “sovereignty” concept governing the thinking of Parliament. The English king’s power had been preserved because of this concept, which was that there could be only one source of sovereignty in a nation. That source prior to the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century was the king, as God’s delegated representative. Once the king lost absolute power, the Parliament took up the mantle – “Parliamentary Sovereignty.” It was this concept, far more powerful in the 1700’s than the Divine Right of the British monarch, against which the colonists had to argue and ultimately fight.

During the ratification debates, when the thirteen States were debating ratifying the Constitution, there was concern among certain sects in the country that a religious test oath could be used to exclude those of a certain belief. Such oaths had been used that way in the past. One could argue that the exclusion of certain Christian sects from participation in the civil sphere had created a fear of a religious test oath. However, that was the colonists’ experience in Europe. The religious test oaths of the American Colonies were not that type of oath. See Blog Post, “Oaths 1.” The American oaths might exclude non-Christians and certain heretical Christian sects but not the majority of Christians.