The Bible, The Quran, and The Congress

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, staging individual swearing-in ceremonies for newly-elected members of the House of Representatives, with their hands held piously atop favorite family Bibles. After all, why should the President get all the photo-ops? When you are finally elected to Congress, why should all your religious supporters back home settle merely for your standing on the House floor alongside everybody else getting into the place for the first time, with nary a Bible or any other Good Book in sight? No matter that this has always been the only installation ceremony that really counts.

An in-House ceremony, though, lumping all the new kids on the aisles together, is still the one that makes the most sense, Constitution-wise. Article Six, which contains the original document’s only explicit reference to religion at all --- we had to wait for the First Amendment for the all-important principle of religious freedom to be laid down --- prohibits making any “religious Test” a requirement for public office anywhere in the country. Running to grab your Bible before you get sworn in to any position of “public Trust” looks an awful lot like submitting to at least some sort of a test, even if you go out of your way to tell your constituents and your critics that it isn’t.

A case in point is the controversy generated by one newly elected Congressman who announced that he would take his oath of office not on the Bible, but on the Quran. He seemed to have a pretty good reason for wanting to do it this way: he is a practicing Muslim. Apparently, this was not a good enough reason for a number of influential, this-land-is-Christian-land-only types. To them, not using the Bible as an outward sign of loyalty to the country in the name of all that is holy amounts to an unprecedented break with tradition all the way back to George Washington and to a frightening harbinger of what our country will come to if good Christians don’t stand up and fight. The fight they envision is to get a law passed requiring that the Bible be the one and only book used in swearing-in ceremonies of Representatives and Senators.

There are at least four things wrong with this would-be clarion call to Christian conscience. The first is that it falsely depicts the American “tradition” of swearings-in to public office. In point of fact, some have been without the presence of a Bible at all, and others have substituted the Jewish Bible for a Christian one. The second is that an even more frightening harbinger of what our country may be coming to is the very fact of anti-minority sentiment itself in the religious sphere. Ironically, not even in Iran are members of religious minorities required to swear oaths on scriptures not of their own faith. Third, any attempt to purge non-Biblical books from swearing-in ceremonies would seem to be (obviously, only the Courts can finally decide this) as blatant a violation of Article Six of the Constitution as we are likely to come up with, at least in the next few days or so.

Finally, the pick-up-either-your Bible-or-your plane-ticket-home approach to religion in government reflects a profoundly disturbing misunderstanding of everything that really is sacrosanct about the First Amendment to the Constitution, the freedom of every citizen, in Congress and everywhere else, to follow the dictates of his and her conscience in all matters having to do with religion. Insisting that a representative of the people and the public good be forced to participate in a religious ritual inimical to his or her own deepest religious convictions, such as swearing an oath on the sacred writings of a faith not one’s own, would be just the kind of coercive act that the Founding Fathers were especially passionate about preventing.

Taking an oath of office on the Quran is hardly going to be what some fellow bloggers are calling “the first step toward the Islamization of America.” It is another kind of step altogether, merely the latest taken on the long, winding, and admittedly risky pathway toward building a human community capable of embracing and becoming enriched by the great diversities that human beings exhibit across the globe. Muhammad called that community ummah. Jesus named it the Kingdom of God. By either name, it is what the creator of all humankind has obviously been envisioning from heaven for a very long time.