The Freedom From Religion Foundation, for the record, is asking Donald Trump on behalf of tens of millions of nonreligious Americans to respect the U.S. Constitution and leave religion out of the Inaugural.
Since its founding, the state/church watchdog has dutifully contacted all incoming presidents, including Trump back in 2017, to remind them to honor the Constitution’s secular instructions.
“Specifically, we request that you take the secular oath of office as provided for in Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution — e.g., minus reference to a deity or swearing upon a bible — and cancel the six official prayers, an absurd number,” FFRF Co-Presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor write to the president-elect.
Trump was not elected pastor in chief, but president of all the people, FFRF reminds him. Prayer hosted by the government should not be part of taking a ceremony about pledging fealty to a secular Constitution.
“The fact that you feel it necessary to involve clergy from four different religions shows the divisiveness of religion,” FFRF writes. “And in fact those prayers will nevertheless exclude not only nonbelievers but many Americans who belong to other religions or denominations.”
The Framers of our entirely secular Constitution thought that the wording of the presidential oath was so important that they composed and included it in the Constitution itself — and the oath contains no directive to swear to a deity or to place a hand on a bible. We Americans should all take pride in the fact that we were first among nations to adopt a godless Constitution, investing sovereignty not in some deity or king, but in “We, the People,” FFRF stresses.
FFRF provides the president-elect a history lesson. George Washington did not say “so help me God” when he took the oath. Nor did any other of the first 26 presidents.The first reliable, contemporaneous account of any president saying these words along with the oath comes nearly a century after the country’s founding, at Chester Alan Arthur’s public inauguration in 1881. The explicit language of our Constitution’s presidential oath was good enough for George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and the rest of the first 26 presidents. It should be good enough for Trump as well, FFRF asserts.
“And invoking a god only some citizens worship signals exclusion of the 28 percent of adult Americans today who identify as nonreligious,” FFRF points out in its letter.
“The ‘Nones’ are the fastest-growing segment by religious identification in the United States, as Pew Research Center has well-documented. Nearly 37 percent of Americans overall are non-Christian, either practicing a minority religion, as does your daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, or no religion at all.”
In its altered, religious form, the presidential oath has become a symbol of the disregard many in our nation have shown for our secular foundational principles. Reciting the oath as provided for would be an important symbolic step toward divorcing American politics from religion, FFRF advises.
“We would respectfully suggest that instead of placing your hand on the bible while taking the oath, you place it on the U.S. Constitution, the document that unites us all under that hallowed mantle, ‘We the People,’” the letter concludes.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 40,000 members, working to promote the constitutional principle of separation of state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
