Exploring Faith and Early American Politics: Vermont’s Constitution

What if nurturing your soul could transform your entire life? Embark on a heartfelt journey with us in this episode of the American Soul Podcast, where we express our deep gratitude to our loyal listeners and marvel at the magnificence of nature. We share a powerful prayer for guidance and protection, explore the transformative power of daily Bible reading and prayer, and stress the importance of showing genuine love to your spouse, embodying Christ-like compassion even in tough times. 

We dive into the historical depths of the 1777 Constitution of Vermont, examining the oaths of fidelity and the era's religious prerequisites for public officials. Discover the founding fathers' vision of a Christian nation, their efforts to prevent religious persecution, and the contemporary relevance of these historical documents to the debate on the separation of church and state. Concluding with blessings for families, marriages, and the nation, we underscore faith's critical role in public life. Join us for this enlightening episode that intertwines faith, history, and the essence of nurturing relationships.

Chapters

• 0:03 American Soul Podcast
• 8:10 Oaths of Fidelity and Allegiance
• 20:19 Religious Influence in State Constitutions

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Hey folks, this is Jesse Cope, back with another episode of the American Soul Podcast. Hope y'all are doing well, wherever y'all are and whatever part of the day you're in. Sure do appreciate y'all joining me and giving me a little bit of your time and energy, effort, a little piece of your day. For those of y'all that continue to share the podcast and tell others about it, thank you so much. I'm very grateful. For those of y'all that continue to leave comments online or in person and encourage me, thank you so much. And for those of y'all that continue to pray for the podcast and for me, thank you Very, very grateful.

Speaker 1: 0:56

Try and use your time wisely. Got a little rain, which is nice. Brought the temperature down just a little bit. Clouds in the sky made for some pretty spectacular sunrises and sunsets the last few days.

Speaker 1: 1:20

Father, thank you for today. Thank you for you, father, and your Son, jesus Christ, and your Holy Spirit. Thank you for your love, mercy, grace, forgiveness. Thank you for all your many blessings on each of us individually and as a nation. Forgive us for our lack of gratitude, for our greed, our selfishness, for our greed, our selfishness. Forgive us for treasuring things here in this earth over things in heaven and eternity with you. Help us. Help us to get our hearts in the right place, father, to treasure life with you in eternity, instead of the not even shadows of what the earth offers. Be with those who are alone, those who are hurting. Be with those who have doubts, father. Help us to overcome them. As the Father cried out to your Son, we do believe. Help us to overcome our unbelief. Guide our steps. Be with our leaders. Be with those in our military and our law enforcement. Be with them and their families. Be with Israel. Comfort them in the loss of their brothers and sisters. Be with our brothers and sisters in Christ across the world that are suffering for you, father, and your Son, jesus Christ. And be with those in our own communities and schools who need our help states. Help us to truly help them. All these things, father, and guide my words to your place and watch over those who listen. Be with them. Be with their families, guide them, bless them, protect them, father, please, from evil of any kind. In your Son's name, we pray Amen.

Speaker 1: 3:27

Have you read your Bible today? Have you made time for God? Have you prayed? And, if you're not comfortable praying folks, if you haven't done it in a long time or ever, you don't really know. Just start real simple. Tell God thank you for a couple things that you're grateful for. Ask him to help you overcome a couple of your sins. Pray for those around you and pray for yourself a little bit. Make a habit of it each day, just for a few minutes. Be amazed at what a few minutes reading your Bible and a few minutes praying each day can do for your health, your mental well-being.

Speaker 1: 4:19

I'm not preaching the health and wealth gospel, folks, where you come to Christ and you immediately get healed of all your sicknesses and ills and injuries and are immediately rich. In my experience, that's rarely the case, but there is joy. Well, it's really kind of what we prayed about today, about where your heart is. Is it focused on the things of this world or on the things that are going to last for eternity with God and Jesus Christ in heaven? And if you're married folks, have you made time for your spouse? Is what is important to them important to you, or are you just being selfish and lazy? You know, I hear a lot about what a burden it is to love our spouse each day and I admit my first thought isn't very Christian. My first thought is generally well, why in the world did you get married in the first place? Then you should have never gotten married. If loving your spouse each day was such a burden and so oppressive, because obviously they don't mean much to you. And if they're okay with it because that's what I get sometimes that probably means you don't mean a lot to them either. There's obviously exceptions that prove the rule. But the other thing I get often is well, I would if they actually, you know, if they were doing their part, if they were loving me. Folks, especially as a Christian, that dog won't hunt. That just doesn't work. It doesn't hold water.

Speaker 1: 6:08

Jesus Christ didn't say love your neighbor as yourself, as long as they're loving you. And trust me I'm talking to myself here as much as any of y'all, because I'm horrible at it. I'm like well, if they would just do what they were supposed to, then I would do what I'm supposed to. God, I don't know why you're sitting here. I'm not your son, I'm not perfect. I don't know why you're asking me to love these people that obviously are unlovable and don't love me in return.

Speaker 1: 6:39

It doesn't work that way, especially with our spouse folks of all people the closest neighbor that we're ever going to have in this life or ever should have. They ought to get our best every day and we're not going to always do it. Folks, we're human. We're fallible. There's going to be days when we're off, but good grief, those days ought to be pretty few and far between.

Speaker 1: 7:08

And if you have a spouse that's not interested in God and Jesus Christ or not interested in you, then you do the best you can to make yourself as close to Christ as you can. It doesn't mean you have to set yourself up for heartache every single day. There's no command in there that I've ever seen that says that you have to keep going back for more and more and more. And those of y'all that are thinking about when you get struck on one cheek turn the other, yeah, in the moment. But he doesn't say we have to go looking for heartache. Forgive, yes, but you just do the best you can to draw close to Christ and set the best example you can for your spouse, your kids, those around you. You know it's like John Adams said duty is ours, results are God's All. Right, vermont, we're going to get back in.

Speaker 1: 8:10

This is out of the Constitution of Vermont, july 8, 1777. They passed another one in 1786, I believe I've got a copy of it but I don't have it in front of me. I scanned through it the parts that I was reading. They're pretty similar. I think there were some small changes but they're pretty similar overall. But they're pretty similar overall. So we're going to go to section nine and this is under chapter two, plan or frame of government, and this is section nine.

Speaker 1: 8:52

A quorum of the House of Representatives shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of members elected and, having met and chosen their speaker, shall each of them, before they proceed to business, take and subscribe as well the oath of fidelity and allegiance herein, after directed as the following oath or affirmation I state your name, do solemnly swear by the ever-living God, or I do solemnly affirm in the presence of Almighty God that, as a member of this assembly, I will not propose or assent to any bill, vote or resolution, or assent to any bill, vote or resolution which shall appear to me injurious to the people, nor do or consent to any act or thing whatever that shall have a tendency to lessen or abridge their rights and privileges as declared in the Constitution of this State, but will in all things conduct myself as a faithful, honest representative and guardian of the people, according to the best of my judgment and abilities, and each member, before he takes his seat, shall make and subscribe the following declaration I state your name, do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration, and own and profess the Protestant religion, and no further or other religious test shall ever hereafter be required of any civil officer or magistrate in this state. So in Vermont, you had to believe in God, you had to believe that he was going to reward the good and punish the wicked. You had to believe in the Old and the New Testament and that they were divinely inspired, and you had to own and profess the Protestant religion of some denomination Couldn't be Catholic, whether we like to acknowledge that pilgrims, founders, fled the tyranny of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Now, before I get people there bound of shape, I'm not in any way saying that there aren't true Christians that are Catholics or Orthodox at all. You see, that's the point. That are Catholics or Orthodox at all. You see. That's the point. The point is that anybody can come to faith in Jesus Christ and to gain eternal life through Jesus Christ. You don't have to belong to any particular denomination.

Speaker 1: 12:10

The problem is that a couple of the denominations, and those used to be Catholicism and Orthodoxy, among others, would tell you that if you didn't belong to their church, if you didn't belong to their particular man-made club, you couldn't get into heaven, that there was no such thing as a universal church outside of their particular man-made denomination. And they would torture and imprison and burn at the stake and confiscate the property of individuals that acknowledged the truth of the Bible over the commands of men. And our founders didn't want that. That was the whole point of the First Amendment of religious freedom. It wasn't so that you could go off and be a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu or an atheist. That came along with the territory. But what they really wanted is they wanted a Christian nation run by the principles of Christ, where individual citizens could belong to whatever denomination they wanted to, as long as they professed God and Jesus Christ in some manner. Well, the leaders at least and were particularly in this case in Vermont of the Protestant persuasion. Remember that next time somebody tells you that our founders never wanted a religious test of Christian faith or that they wanted Christianity completely out of our public life. So as you keep looking at this, you can think this is the same.

Speaker 1: 14:14

Yeah, section 36, oath or Affirmation of Allegiance. I state your name, do solemnly swear by the ever-living God or affirm in the presence of Almighty God that I will be true and faithful to the state of Vermont and that I will not, directly or indirectly, do any act or thing prejudicial or injurious to the constitution or government thereof, as established by convention. And these are oaths for every officer, whether judicial, executive, military and authority under the state. I state your name, do solemnly swear by the ever-living God or affirm in the presence of Almighty God that I will faithfully execute the office of for whatever it is, and will do equal right and justice to all men, to the best of my judgment and abilities, according to law. I think we had one more in here, section I don't know 42. I don't know 42. It's XLI. One of y'all that's better with Roman numerals is going to have to figure that out for me.

Speaker 1: 15:50

Laws for the encouragement of virtue and prevention of vice and immorality shall be made for their due execution, and all religious societies or bodies of men that have or may be hereafter united and incorporated for the advancement of religion and learning or for other pious and charitable purposes, shall be encouraged and protected in the enjoyment of the privileges, immunities and estates which they, in justice, ought to enjoy under such regulations as the General Assembly of this state shall direct Justice. Joseph Story talked about that in his commentaries on the Constitution, particularly his commentaries on the First Amendment, and he was a lot closer to the Constitution and a lot more knowledgeable on it than the vast majority of people that talk today and tell us otherwise. And he said that the overwhelming sentiment in that founding generation was that Christianity ought to be encouraged by the state as much as possible, as long as it didn't infringe on the individual religious liberty. That goes back to the argument that we have so often on this podcast about education. There's nothing about having a biblically centered, christ centered, publicly funded education that infringes on the individual religious liberty at home, and you don't have a right to come into or be born into a country founded on the principles of Christ and then decide.

Speaker 1: 17:51

Well, you know what. I don't like that personally. So the whole country has to change. For me, and that's really what we've done the LGBTQ lifestyle is a great example of that. It's not whether they can have those relationships, immoral as they are, in the privacy of their own home, although we actually used to have laws against those folks, and you can see why. Look at what's happened today. Look at what feminism, which led to homosexuality being accepted, homosexuality being accepted, which has led to all the other alphabet soup and transgenderism being accepted, and look at what has happened to our children, and you can easily see the need for sodomite laws. But even if you want to ignore the evidence there, just because you want to go and act a certain way in your home doesn't mean that you ought to be able to change the entire makeup laws, foundation of the nation. And of course, the problem is folks that this is easy to see and easy to solve when you have a religious and moral people, like John Adams talked about.

Speaker 1: 19:35

Constitution was made only for moral and religious people. We don't have that anymore, and so then this becomes really problematic because now you have a large chunk of people that don't want anything to do with Jesus Christ, but they want the benefits that come from living in America, living under that system, but they don't want to honor God. And of course we're all guilty of it. The difference is that some of us recognize that we're guilty of it and we need forgiveness for it and we work to correct those mistakes as much as we can, while others pretend that they're not sins to begin with. And that's the major divide.

Speaker 1: 20:19

But you look at this Constitution again here from Vermont right 1777. And this last little section that we read and it's saying religious societies and they're talking about Christianity, folks, not random deism or Islam, buddhism, hinduism, anything to do that furthers virtue and morality, faith in Christ should be encouraged by the state. Just remember that next time somebody tries to talk to you about the modern interpretation of separation of church and state. God bless y'all. God bless your families, your marriages. God bless America. We'll talk to y'all again real soon. Folks Looking forward to it.