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I swear on ….
Franklin Delano Roosevelt used his family’s Bible, written in Dutch and printed in 1686.
John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic elected to the White House, chose a Douay Bible.
And when his second inauguration fell on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President Obama chose to lay his hand upon a book of Holy Scripture that belonged to the civil rights leader.
On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced his choices: a Bible his mother gifted him in 1955 when he graduated from Presbyterian Sunday school and the one President Abraham Lincoln used at his inauguration.
The last, and only other president since Lincoln, to use the Lincoln Bible was Obama, both in 2009 and 2013, a choice the 44th president said was meant to emphasize Lincoln’s call for “national unity” during his first inaugural address. Others speculated that Obama’s selection evoked even deeper symbolism — the first black president taking the oath on the Bible of the Great Emancipator.
Being religious, or using a Bible to swear the oath of office, isn’t required of American presidents.
Most do, but some haven’t, including John Quincy Adams, who took the oath on a law book. This may have been common practice at the time; there is no concrete evidence that any president from John Adams to John Tyler used a Bible to swear the oath upon.
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