The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all the executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
Article VI, Clause 3, U.S. Constitution
A New Covenant Oath
We can see from the above Article of the Constitution that taking a religious oath as a requirement for holding federal office was ruled out. This is not one of the better known sections of the Constitution. It is seldom discussed by historians. Everyone today assumes automatically that no religious test should be administered as a requirement for holding public office. Everyone also assumes that office-holders should swear allegiance to the Constitution.
Yet in 1787, the re- verse was true. There was considerable debate at the Constitutional Convention regarding the wisdom of requiring state office-holders to swear allegiance to the Constitution. Furthermore, the states already had religious tests for office holders. For example consider Delaware’s required oath: “Every person who shall be chosen a member of either house, or appointed to any office or place of trust…shall take the following oath…..I ______ do profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed for evermore; and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.” After a similar oath, the state of Vermont also added this: “And no further or other religious test shall ever, hereafter, be required of any civil officer or magistrate in this state.” Notice the language: no further or other religious test shall ever be required. There could be only one kind of oath: to the Trinitarian God of the Bible. This made Trinitarianism the permanent judicial foundation of the state. In order to break this Trinitarian monopoly, the Framers of the Constitution had to undermine the states’ oaths.
A great reversal in the legal structure of the nation took place when the Constitution was ratified, and this is revealed by the alteration of the oaths required (or not required, as in the case of the religious test) to hold representative office. A great change in public thinking also took place subsequent to ratification.
Article VI, Clause 3, established the third covenantal pillar of what is one of the three keys to a proper understanding of the nature of the Constitutional covenant. The first pillar is the locus of authorizing sovereignty: the People. This is the designated creator of the covenant. This appears as the Constitution’s Preamble. The second pillar is the nature of political participation: the authorizing electorate. Who is a citizen? This establishes the nature of, and legal access to, formal acts of covenant renewal in a republican system of government. This was definitively settled until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. The third pillar is the nature of public oaths by federal officers. This is the authorized representative’s act of formal covenant affirmation of, and subordination to, the terms of the covenant.
In the minds of the many honest Deists and Unitarians active in the days when the constitution was written, the requirement of a Christian religious test oath would have barred them from serving as covenantal. agents of the ultimate sovereign, the God of the Bible. By removing the requirement of the oath, the Convention’s delegates were in fact opening the door to federal office-holding that would otherwise be closed to honest non- Christians, a point observed by some of the defenders of the removal of the religious test. It would also open up offices of authority to men who had taken other binding oaths that were hostile to Christianity – men who had taken these rival oaths in good faith. That possibility was never openly discussed, but it was a possibility which lay silently in the background of the closed Convention in Philadelphia.
Those who were in favor of keeping the religious test (hostile to Article VI, Clause 3) suspected what might happen in the future: if there be no religious test required, pagans, deists, Masons, unitarians, even Muslims might obtain offices among us, and that Senators and representatives might all be pagans.” A prophetic voice indeed. Sadly it was not heeded. Today the U.S. government is filled with atheists, socialists, pagans and sexual perverts of every stripe. No wonder, for when you closely examine Article VI, Clause 3, comparing it with the already existing oaths held by individual states, it becomes unarguably clear that the Constitution was intentionally designed to NOT be a Christian document, regardless of what modern day “Christian” patriots believe. Anyone who puts their hope in the Constitution as being the redeeming force that will help bring “America back to God” is sadly deceived. The only thing that will bring America, or any nation, back to God is the PERSONAL REPENTANCE of its people.