Has Every U.S. President Been Sworn in on a Bible?

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Every U.S. president-elect has uttered these 35 Constitutionally-specified words before they’ve entered the White House, from George Washington to Joe Biden.

The Oath of Office ceremony, which takes place on Inauguration Day in front of crowds gathered outside the Capitol in Washington, D.C., demonstrates the president-elect’s commitment to the principles of the Constitution and the democratic institutions it created. 

“The authority of our public officials is not arbitrary,” Denver Brunsman, a professor of history at George Washington University, told a U.S. embassy website. “These people are elected and then their authority rests with the Constitution and law.”

Typically, the president-elect has recited the Oath of Office with one hand on a Bible. But the Constitution doesn’t specify that they need to be sworn in on the Christian text—and some have forgone the ritual.  

Article II, Section I, Clause 8 of the Constitution requires the president-elect to take the Oath of Office and provides the exact words, but leaves decisions about who administers the oath and other details of the ceremony up to the people taking part in it. Traditionally, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has administered the oath, and George Washington began the habit of swearing it in public.

According to Brunsman, the practice of swearing the Oath of Office on a Bible likely came to the U.S. from the United Kingdom, where British officials have been swearing allegiance to the monarch and the Church of England on the text since the 1500s. And, coupled with the fact that all U.S. presidents have been at least nominally of a Christian faith, it shouldn’t be surprising that they have opted to swear on a Bible.

The type of Bible or biblical passage they choose to be sworn in on is left up to the president-elect’s personal discretion. Barack Obama and Donald Trump swore on the Lincoln Bible, the same one Abraham Lincoln used during his own inauguration. George W. Bush took his oath on a family Bible, which he left closed for his first inauguration in 2001, and then opened to Isaiah 40:31 (“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles …”) for his second inauguration in 2005. Richard Nixon swore on not one but two Bibles belonging to his family. 

A select number of presidents have not sworn on the Bible, which was more common in earlier chapters of American history when specific rules and traditions weren’t as entrenched as they are today. Thomas Jefferson did not use one, perhaps as a show of his commitment to the separation of church and state. John Quincy Adams swore on a book of laws.

Calvin Coolidge, Warren G. Harding’s vice president, was on vacation in Vermont when he got word that the president had died. Coolidge’s father, a notary public, swore him in without a Bible—in keeping with their Puritan ethics, which frowned on imbuing an object with honor reserved only for God, according to the New England Historical Society. “The Bible which had belonged to my mother lay on the table at my hand,” Coolidge later wrote. “It was not officially used, as it is not the practice in Vermont or Massachusetts to use a Bible in connection with the administration of an oath.”

Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley’s vice president, also took his oath without a Bible, perhaps because of similarly rushed circumstances: He was sworn in hours after McKinley’s death from an assassin’s bullet in Buffalo, New York.

Whether sworn on a Bible or not, the purpose of the Oath of Office remains unchanged: to signify that the president-elect will fulfill their duties in service of something greater than themselves. 

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