I have great respect for freshman Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison for taking the oath of office Jan. 4 on a Koran. Ellison, who was elected to represent Minnesota's 5th District on Nov. 7, is the first Muslim representative in American history. It's about time. There are more than 5,000,000 Muslims in the United States.

And not just any Koran. In his private swearing-in ceremony, Ellison had the honor of placing his hand on a copy of the Islamic sacred text owned by Thomas Jefferson, America's greatest advocate of religious liberty. "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man," Jefferson wrote in 1800, after an election in which his own religious views were the subject of intense national debate. Jefferson was constantly accused of being an atheist. He was in fact a deist and a Unitarian. And he believed that it's none of your business.

There was a double solemnity to Ellison's oath-taking. Not only has he sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution on the book that matters most to his soul, but he has done so on a copy of that book owned by one of America's greatest individuals, the philosopher of the American dream, the religious thinker who gave us the phrase "wall of separation between church and state."

The Koran was loaned to Ellison by the Library of Congress, which took delivery of Jefferson's immense private library (6,487 volumes) in 1815. Most of Jefferson's collection was burned in a Library of Congress fire in 1851. His Koran, fortunately, survived to play an important role in the ongoing debate about the place of religion in American public life.

Using Jefferson's Koran in his private congressional swearing-in ceremony was an act of real insight by Ellison, not to mention political shrewdness. In placing his hand on Jefferson's Koran, Ellison showed that he has a greater understanding of the fundamental values of the American tradition than do his critics, like Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode and talk show browbeater Sean Hannity, who argued that if you can take the oath on the Koran, how long will it be before someone wants to take the oath on "Mein Kampf." It's only a matter of time, Sean!

Jefferson believed that religion is a purely private matter and that a person is entitled to believe anything she or he wishes if it does not lead to illegal activity. "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg," Jefferson wrote.

Led by Los Angeles talk show host Dennis Prager, some American conservatives argued that if Ellison wouldn't take the oath on the Bible, he didn't deserve to be a United States representative. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Prager declared, "Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible," he wrote. "If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress."

I'm glad Ellison didn't cave in to the demands of the narrow-minded. The whole controversy merely proves the poverty of evangelical conservatism. Ellison had the right to take the oath on any book he might choose: the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, "Black Elk Speaks," the "Book of Mormon," or for that matter Ron Hubbard's scientological text "Dianetics." No American law requires that the oath of office involve a book of any sort, much less the Bible.

The Constitution of the United States is quite clear on this question. It requires the incoming president to swear or affirm an oath of allegiance. Article II, Section 1 says, in its entirety, "Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation, 'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'" Nothing more. No book specified.

The Constitution also says (Article VI), "Senators and Representatives … and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

Three things are immediately clear. First, the founding charter of the United States makes no reference to God anywhere in its text - no mention of providence, deity, the Judeo-Christian tradition, Jesus or the Bible. Second, the Constitution does not require that these oaths or affirmations involve a book of any sort. Third, insisting that Rep. Ellison take his oath on a Bible would constitute a "religious test," and that is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution.

Constitutional niceties aside, it might be useful to examine the idea of oaths from a purely rational point of view. If oaths have any actual value beyond ceremony, they are meant to bind an individual to a responsible course of action. If I - a Congregationalist - swore an oath on a sacred book that was not sacred to me (the Koran, for example), it's not clear how that text, which I neither know nor regard as authoritative, could shape my behavior.

Ellison's sacred book is the Koran. Which text is more likely to inspire Ellison to be a congressman of integrity: the Judeo-Christian Bible, which is a book about a religion that he does not subscribe to, or the Koran, which articulates his God's expectations for humankind? If you don't believe the book has divine energy in and about it, you may as well be taking your oath on a novel or a phone book. In other words, the very logic of swearing an oath on a book would seem to link Ellison with the Koran, not the Bible.

I think it's wonderful that Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Koran. How many of us do? Like his hero Francis Bacon, Jefferson took "all knowledge to be my province." It's not clear when Jefferson purchased the book or precisely why. Jefferson's copy is an English translation by the orientalist George Sale printed in 1764. He may have purchased it as part of his study of international law. He may have acquired it in the name of his occasional study of comparative religion.

We do know that the Enlightenment had a kind crush on Islam. Surveying mankind from China to Peru (as Dr. Johnson put it), the thinkers and reformers of the Enlightenment became fascinated by the different ways different peoples went about the business of life, from economics to constitutional settlements to religion. Scientific freethinkers like Jefferson, Madison, David Hume and Voltaire were frankly embarrassed by some of the Bible, by some parts of Christian doctrine, and by much of Christian history. Because the idea of the Trinity (three is one, one is three) particularly offended the Unitarian sensibilities of the rationalists of the Enlightenment, they turned with coy respect to Islam, which is more rigorously monotheistic. There was a kind of Islamic chic during the eighteenth century.

In his monumental "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Edward Gibbon wrote an appreciative chapter on Mohammed and the religion he helped to found. Jefferson would have been alienated by the militarism and imperialism omnipresent in the Koran and the history of Islam, but he was, to put it in simplest terms, fascinated by the idea that tens of millions of people could see the world in a way very different from his own.

And unlike today's nervous Nellies, who think that western civilization is so fragile that it has to be defended from all sorts of lovely variety and individual freedom, Jefferson kept his mind open to the idea that other traditions have a core of wisdom, just like ours.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State College. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@;aol.com.)