The official presidential portrait. Photo: Courtesy The White House.
On oath: Alastair McIntosh’s Thought for the Week
‘Truth cannot have a double standard.’
Well, that’s Donald Trump sworn in as president of the USA. And, as Torcuil Crichton, the member of Parliament for the Western Isles, put it in a local paper recently, ‘Like it or not, this son of Lewis is going to feature bigly in our lives.’
Trump’s mother, Mary Anne Macleod, had emigrated from the Outer Hebrides to the USA in 1930. She was just seventeen, an economic migrant from hard times, and she married into opulent prosperity.
One of the few remaining marks of her island provenance is that, in 1955, she gave her son a Bible for his Sunday School graduation from a Presbyterian church. Trump took his first oath of office with his hand on both his mother’s and the historic Lincoln Bible. Yesterday, he swore that same oath, those Bibles stacked beside him, but held by his wife, Melania. (While it is common for incoming presidents to place their hand on a Bible while taking the oath of office, it’s not a legal requirement.)
It’s an ambiguous thing when those who profess the Christian faith swear upon the holy book. Although I’m a Quaker, I have an Isle of Lewis Presbyterian background that I also appreciate. But Quakers don’t swear oaths.
‘When in everyday conversation we slip in expressions like, “honestly”, or “to be honest”, we’re inferring that we might also field a lesser standard.’
Once, Friends would have been fined and thrown into prison for refusing to swear in courts of law. Then, in 1838, the Quakers and Moravians Act of Parliament allowed us simply to affirm the truth. Now anybody is permitted to affirm, which is a handy gift to atheists!
But why were oaths such a thing for Quakers? The answer is that they’re explicitly (and for good reason) outlawed by the very Bible on which the oath is made.
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said: ‘I say unto you: don’t swear oaths at all. Just let your yes be yes, and your no be no.’
Why so? Because truth cannot have a double standard. Even when in everyday conversation we slip in expressions like, ‘honestly’, or ‘to be honest’, we’re inferring we might also field a lesser standard.
We may not be able to influence the ethics of Donald Trump. But we can touch those around us. And we can ask ourselves: how much are we living in the truth ... if we’re honest?
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