What Is a Vow? A Promise Made to Something Larger Than the Parties

An ordinary promise creates an obligation to the person it is made to, who can release the promisor by choosing to. A vow adds a third party, whether a deity, a community, an institution or an abstraction, and that changes the structure in several ways. It cannot be dissolved bilaterally, since the party who was invoked has an interest, which is why annulment, dispensation and release procedures exist in traditions that permit them at all. It is generally made in prescribed words before witnesses, because the public character is part of what makes it binding. It frequently involves a conditional structure, promising something in return for something, which is the classic form of a vow made in danger and is documented across a great many traditions. And it attaches consequences beyond the disappointment of the other party, ranging from divine displeasure to loss of standing to formal legal effects, which is what gives it force where an ordinary promise has only the relationship at stake.

Traditions use the form for a limited set of purposes and the categories recur:

• •Marriage vows, which in many traditions constitute the marriage rather than merely accompanying it, so the words spoken are the legal and religious act
• •Monastic and religious vows, typically of poverty, chastity and obedience in western traditions, taken after a probationary period and admitting a person to a community
• •Vows of pilgrimage, fasting, abstinence or donation, undertaken temporarily and frequently in thanksgiving or petition
• •Conditional vows made in extremity, promising an offering or an action if a danger is survived, which appear in classical, biblical, Hindu and many other sources
• •Oaths of office and of allegiance, which are structurally similar and invoke a state or a constitution rather than a deity
• •Secular commitments including professional undertakings and personal pledges, which borrow the form without the third party, and which correspondingly rely on social rather than institutional enforcement

Because vows cannot be dissolved by the parties alone, traditions that use them extensively have developed procedures for release, and those procedures are revealing. Catholic canon law provides for dispensation from vows by competent authority, and for laicisation of clergy and release from religious vows through a formal process, which acknowledges that circumstances change and that holding somebody to an unsustainable commitment serves nobody. Jewish practice includes a formal annulment of vows, and the Kol Nidre prayer at the opening of the Day of Atonement addresses vows made to God, which has a complicated history including its misrepresentation by hostile outsiders as licence for dishonesty when it concerns only that specific category. Islamic jurisprudence provides for expiation where a vow cannot be fulfilled. Marriage presents the hardest case and the range of positions, from indissolubility through annulment on specified grounds to permissible divorce, is among the clearest markers distinguishing traditions from one another.

Vows appear in secular contexts that have no theological framework, which suggests the structure is doing something independent of belief. Public commitment before witnesses is known to increase follow-through, which is a documented effect in behavioural research and is exploited deliberately in commitment devices. Prescribed words remove ambiguity about what was undertaken and make later disputes about intention harder. A third party, even an abstract one, converts a private arrangement into something with external standing. And the ritual context marks the moment, which makes it memorable and treats the commitment as a change of status rather than as a statement. Modern secular weddings retain vows almost universally, professional bodies administer undertakings, and personal commitment ceremonies have been invented for circumstances where no tradition supplies one. What is generally lost in the secular versions is the release procedure, which means the commitment is easier to make and considerably less clear about what happens when it cannot be kept.

Invoking a third party means the two people involved cannot simply release each other, which is why traditions using vows have formal dispensation and annulment procedures. Prescribed words before witnesses are part of what binds. Conditional vows made in danger recur across many traditions. Secular versions keep the public ceremony and the fixed words and generally drop the procedure for release.