Oath of Allegiance (United States)

[1] According to U.S. Congress, if the prospective citizen is unable or unwilling to promise to bear arms or perform noncombatant military service because of "religious training and belief", he or she may request to leave out those clauses.

The requirement to take and subscribe to the Oath of Allegiance of the United States is waived for children under 14 years of age at the time of naturalization.

During the Revolutionary War, oaths of allegiance were administered to officers of the Continental Army, pursuant to a Congressional resolution of February 3, 1778.

The Naturalization Act of 1906 added the section of the oath requiring new citizens to defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; and bear true faith and allegiance to the same.

[12] With intercontinental travel being limited at the time, along with the United States being a relatively young country, the list of incoming nationalities was very short.

The applicant, Hungarian-born female suffragist Rosika Schwimmer, had written that she was an "uncompromising pacifist" with "no sense of nationalism, only a cosmic consciousness of belonging to the human family".

The Court found that persons holding such views were "liable to be incapable of the attachment for and devotion to the principles of our Constitution" that are required for naturalization.

[21] English writer Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, applied for U.S. citizenship in 1953 after having lived in the United States for fourteen years.

When asked if he would bear arms and perform noncombatant military service as required by the Oath, Huxley answered in the negative and was summoned before a judge.

The court, finding that her stance was "based on a personal moral code and not on religious training and belief" and that she did not recognize anything "tantamount to a God or a Supreme Being", denied her petition.

In Welsh v. United States (1970),[24] the Supreme Court, having noted the case factually similar and controlled by United States v. Seeger, determined in respect to the provision in the Universal Military Training and Service Act that exempts from military service persons who by reason of "religious training and belief" are conscientiously opposed to war, that the Act: contravenes the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by exempting those whose conscientious objection claims are founded on a theistic belief, while not exempting those whose claims are based on a secular belief.

To comport with that clause, an exemption must be "neutral" and include those whose belief emanates from a purely moral, ethical, or philosophical source.This judgement was used in 2013 to reverse a denial of citizenship to Margaret Doughty, a 65-year-old British atheist who had lived in the United States for 30 years, unless she could show proof of membership in a church with pacifist beliefs to support her claim that she was a conscientious objector entitled to omit the Oath's clause about bearing arms.