Air Force Honor Oath Makes “So Help Me God” Optional

On October 25th, 2013, the Associated Press (AP) issued the following release about a change to the United States Air Force Academy’s “Honor Oath”:

Air Force Academy cadets are no longer required to say “so help me God” at the end of the Honor Oath, school officials said Friday. The decision came after a complaint from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group, that the words violated the constitutional concept of religious freedom. The oath states: “We will not lie, steal or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does. Furthermore, I resolve to do my duty and to live honorably, so help me God.” Cadets must take the oath once, when they formally enter the school as freshmen after boot camp, an academy spokesman said.

Shortly thereafter, I requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) all records that pertain to this change, correspondence relating to the words “so help me God” being removed, etc.

Continue scrolling for more...

It took over a year, but hundreds of pages were released in response to my FOIA request.  Below, you will find the archive of documents, with some highlights.

 Documents Relating to the Air Force Academy’s removal of “So Help Me God” from the Honor Oath, Released November of 2014 [ 335 Pages, 49.64MB ]

 

Follow The Black Vault on Social Media:

This post was published on February 23, 2015 11:01 pm

John Greenewald

Recent Posts

Manta Ray UUV Prototype Completes In-Water Testing

DARPA program exhibits modular, first-of-kind capabilities The following article is archived from a press release…

May 1, 2024

NSA Denies Release of Intellipedia Policy Changes Citing Security Risks

For more than a decade, the NSA released information from the Intellipedia system. Hundreds of…

May 1, 2024

AARO Releases Final Report on “Eglin UAP” Incident

Today, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) of the U.S. Department of Defense provided their…

April 24, 2024

AATIP and the Pentagon: The Struggle Over UFO Program Records

Since October 2017, The Black Vault has investigated the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP),…

April 23, 2024

FOIA Documents Reveal AARO’s Authorized and Repeated Attempts to Engage with David Grusch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GNITLBj0hM The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), tasked to investigate Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), made…

April 18, 2024

DoD Releases “KONA BLUE” Documents

The following was the description by the DoD about KONA BLUE. It is reproduced here,…

April 16, 2024