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? Continue reading

Oaths 6 – Debating the Test Oath at the Constitutional Convention

So, you might ask, “Didn’t the Constitutional Convention have a point in stating that a religious test oath wouldn’t work?” Here’s a portion of the debate on the matter.

One of the arguments at the Convention was that religious test oaths are ineffectual.

“In one of his famous letters of ‘a Landholder,’ published in December, 1787, Oliver Ellsworth, a member of the Federal Constitutional Convention and later Chief Justice of this Court, included among his strong arguments against religious test oaths the following statement:

” ‘In short, test laws are utterly ineffectual; they are no security at all, because men of loose principles will, by an external compliance, evade them. If they exclude any persons, it will be honest men, men of principle, who will rather suffer an injury than act contrary to the dictates of their consciences. . . .’ ”

But was this a logical & consistent position to take in regard to an oath? What about an oath to the Constitution? Couldn’t we, no, don’t we have people today who fraudulently take an oath to uphold the US Constitution? And don’t we want to exclude “honest men” who don’t hold to faith in the bible & Christ?
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