As Trump takes the oath of office, remember its most famous phrase has roots in Christian nationalism
‘So help me God’ may sound innocuous — yet the history of the plea’s insertion in the oath is anything but
President-elect Donald Trump, left, takes the oath of office at his first inauguration, in 2017. Photo by Jim Bourg/Pool via Bloomberg/Getty Images
The swearing-in of a new president is one of the most treasured rituals in American politics. And it’s one that, a little-known history shows, has been meaningfully shaped by Christian nationalism — and with it, covert antisemitism.
Everyone knows the presidential oath of office ends with the phrase “so help me God,” theoretically because George Washington ad libbed it during the very first inauguration in American history. But as I wrote recently in a piece for The Conversation, there’s no contemporary evidence that Washington said any such thing. Claims that he did first emerged in the 1850s, a time of surging social pressures to reshape the United States as an explicitly Christian country.
As we prepare for Monday’s inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, a modern iteration of that Christian nationalism, closely allied with Trump, is once more ascendant. When Trump becomes president with the words “so help me God” next week, he will be invoking a past era’s intense belief that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and should remain (or return to being) one — and ushering that belief into new prominence on the national stage, with troubling implications for Jews, Muslims and other religious minorities.
In the 1850s, when the literary critic Rufus Griswold recorded the first story of Washington saying “so help me God,” there was no movement known as “Christian nationalism.” But a crowd of increasingly powerful voices were proclaiming that the United States should emphasize Christian values and insist on Christian leadership. Such an idea had been developing since the early 19th century; Rev. Ezra Stiles Ely, a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia, told his congregation in 1827 that “every ruler should be an avowed and sincere friend of Christianity. He should know and believe the doctrines of our holy religion.”
That idea developed further through the 1860s, amid the tumult of the Civil War. A group of Protestant ministers, concerned that the Constitution did not mention God, pushed for the adoption of an amendment that would change the Constitution’s preamble to acknowledge “Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land.” (The addition to the preamble would also have changed the Constitution’s stated intention: It would serve not just “in order to form a more perfect union,” but also “in order to constitute a Christian government.”)
Not all of these early Christian nationalists were as explicit as David Caldwell, a North Carolina minister who said that a godless Constitution was “an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us,” but the antisemitic implication was there.
This was the context for Griswold’s story that Washington added “so help me God” as he took the oath of office. And it helps explain why that story won immediate and widespread acceptance. Of course people primed to seek a more Christian government embraced the idea that Washington had said “so help me God”; it fit perfectly.
The only problem: It turns out that Washington, far from being a good role model for Christian nationalists, was actually a determined supporter of religious liberty.
Yes, a fresco painting of Washington ascending to heaven adorns the dome of the rotunda in the U.S. Capitol — about as determined a bit of Christian imagery as anyone could imagine. But while we cannot know his private beliefs, we know that in his public life, he was not a very active Christian.
He was a member of the Anglican Church, after the Revolution known as the American Episcopal Church, but he refused to participate in confirmation, the sacramental rite that involves a public confession of faith. He also avoided Holy Communion, the Christian rite in which bread and wine are consecrated and consumed in remembrance of Jesus’ crucifixion. And we know that the images of him praying at Valley Forge were based on a false story.
We also know that, in summer 1790, Washington and some of his advisers visited Rhode Island, which had finally ratified the U.S. Constitution and thereby formally joined the United States, and met with Moses Seixas, warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, who delivered a letter welcoming the president. In a response to the letter, Washington wrote that “the Government of the United States … gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution, no assistance,” and he noted that everyone, including “the Children of the Stock of Abraham” — language Seixas himself had used to refer to Jews — “shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” That last line, from the Hebrew Scriptures, was one of Washington’s favorites; he used it nearly 50 times in his correspondence.
But Christian nationalism has rarely been interested in the true facts of the nation’s founding, as the astonishing success of Griswold’s apparently apocryphal story shows. Instead, it is a reactionary movement, one that tends to reflect insecurities about the direction of the world — and the role of the U.S. within it.
The power of Christian nationalism, like that of other cultural and political trends, has waxed and waned through American history. It was popular just after World War II, as tensions increased between the U.S. and the “godless communists” of the Soviet Union, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy said that “the fate of the world rests with the clash between the atheism of Moscow and the Christian spirit throughout other parts of the world.” To beef up our credentials as a Christian nation during the Cold War, in the 1950s we added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and made “In God we trust” our national motto.
At that time, there was also a renewed push for a Christian amendment to the Constitution. One proposal from 1954 would have added this clause: “This nation devoutly recognizes the authority and law of Jesus Christ, Savior and Ruler of nations, through whom are bestowed the blessings of Almighty God.”
And now, Christian nationalism is back again, bigger and louder than ever. “I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists,” said the Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022. Rep. Lauren Boebert, her fellow Republican, agreed: “The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not supposed to direct the church,” Boebert said that same year. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”
The implications of this resurgence of Christian nationalism for religious minorities, and particularly Jews, were made painfully apparent during Trump’s first term in office. In 2017, following a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, instead of denouncing the antisemitic marchers who carried torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Trump noted that there were “very fine people on both sides.” He has since hosted Holocaust deniers for meals, and refused to denounce the QAnon conspiracy, which has proliferated anti-Jewish rhetoric.
On Jan. 20, Trump will again take the presidential oath of office, ending with “so help me God.” When he does so, let it remind us of George Washington — but not as the founder of a Christian nation. Let it remind us instead of Washington’s assurance, to a Jewish leader, that the U.S. was established to “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Let it remind us that Christian nationalism is by definition intertwined with antisemitism. Let us imagine a nation where all can sit under their own vines and fig trees, and not be afraid.
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