Faith & Spirit Quote by James L. Buckley

Buckley is trying to restore the moral voltage of a public ritual that, in his view, has been reduced to pageantry or legal boilerplate. The sentence is built like a warning disguised as a lament: "Unfortunately" cues decline, "today's world" paints a culture that has drifted, and "have to be reminded" implies a collective amnesia that is as much willful as it is forgetful. He is not merely praising oaths; he is indicting a modern sensibility that treats words as disposable and accountability as negotiable.

The subtext is unmistakably theological and, by extension, political. Buckley anchors legitimacy in a vertical relationship: the oath matters because a higher authority is invoked as witness and judge. That framing does two things at once. It elevates personal responsibility beyond courts and constitutions, and it critiques a secular order that relies on procedural enforcement rather than internal restraint. "Implicit expectation" is the quiet dagger: if you do not expect God to "hold us accountable", the oath becomes a performance, not a bond.

Context matters. Coming from a conservative Catholic-leaning politician shaped by mid-century Cold War rhetoric, Buckley is defending a civic culture where religious language functioned as a shared grammar for trust. The line also reads as a rebuttal to the era's fights over public prayer, church-state boundaries, and the credibility crisis of institutions. He is arguing that democracy doesn't only run on laws; it runs on people who fear, in the old sense, that promises have metaphysical consequences.