Swear Not at All

The instruction not to swear at all comes from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his hearers to let their word be a simple yes or no, since anything said beyond that comes from evil rather than from good faith. The Anabaptist movement that emerged in sixteenth century Switzerland read the passage as a direct, binding prohibition rather than merely as counsel against excessive or careless swearing in everyday speech, and the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, one of the movement's founding statements of belief, made refusal of the oath its seventh and final article, placed there as a deliberate capstone alongside the confession's teaching on nonresistance to violence and separation from worldly government entirely. The Dordrecht Confession, adopted by Dutch Mennonites in 1632 and still in use by many Mennonite and Amish communities today, repeats the same prohibition word for word a century later, keeping it a live and continuing marker of Anabaptist identity across the centuries rather than a position confined only to the movement's very earliest generation of believers. The prohibition sits alongside two other well known Anabaptist commitments, nonresistance to violence and refusal of infant baptism in favor of baptism upon adult confession of faith, as one of the three practices that most reliably distinguished Anabaptist communities from their state church neighbors across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.