“I…state your name…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.” Had you been elected to office in Delaware in the late 1700’s, the state constitution required you to take that oath before assuming office. So-called “religious test oaths” were also required in Georgia, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee.
So it’s significant, though scarcely remembered, that yesterday, August 30th in 1787, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina introduced an amendment to Article VI of the proposed federal constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” It passed and is now part of our United States Constitution.
We easily forget the extent of the blessings handed down by our founding fathers. I write this because there are some in the media who are suggesting that the religious beliefs of some candidates for president should effectively disqualify them from office. James Madison wrote, “We cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us.” (in John Witte, Jr., “Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment,” pp. 46-47).