OSV STORY FOR NOV. 10

A godless Constitution?

Did the founders write God out of the Constitution? How a new book gets it all wrong

By Michael Scaperlanda

Jesus tells the Pharisees to render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. In ancient Israel, these two lines of authority were clear. Jesus taught His followers to seek first the kingdom of God, but He also taught them to obey the laws of the civil government, even those laws forced on them by the hostile occupying forces of the Roman Empire.

Neither the Jews nor the emerging Christian communities had any responsibility for shaping the political community.

Even if they had wanted to shape the civil laws, the Romans would have forbid it. Instead, the early Christians focused solely on forming their growing Christian communities while awaiting the Second Coming of the Messiah.

In 20th-century America, the lines are not so neatly drawn. The primary focus for Christians, now as then, is the city of God, as we continue to build our communities of faith.

But, in stark contrast to the early Church, we are also Caesar; our representative democracy compels us to participate in civil government, helping to shape the broader social order.

Should our faith in God and our hope for His eternal city influence our political judgments, or should we leave our faith outside the voting booth?

Some would argue that ours is a secular nation where religion and its morality will be tolerated, but only if it is kept out of the public sphere. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore take up this banner of secularism in their new book, aptly titled, "The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness" (W.W. Norton, $13).

Flimsy evidence

Kramnick and Moore's indefensible thesis, developed through an often incoherent argument, is that the framers of the Constitution deliberately created a "godless constitution" to structure a "godless politics."

Their evidence is threefold: the Constitution does not affirmatively recognize God the way the Declaration of Independence does; the Constitution prohibits any religious qualifications for holding office; and the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from establishing a national religion.

This is pretty thin evidence. The framers chose not to exclude Catholics, Jews or even atheists from participating in the work of government. And, although many states established churches well into the 19th century, the framers rejected a sectarian national religion.

And they left open the possibility that a thoroughly secular society might one day inherit their constitutional traditions. But they firmly believed that their experiment in self-governance would not long endure in a society that rejects transcendent and eternal truth.

George Washington, in a letter to John Adams, reflected the prevailing thought of the day: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people."

Failing to grasp Washington's insight, Kramnick and Moore believe that "a religious body in America is not different from the American Civil Liberties Union." To them, religion and General Motors are fungible organizations.

Maybe to Kramnick and Moore the ACLU provides transcendent truth, providing, in words used by Hillary Clinton, "a politics of meaning."

But for the rest of us -- polls consistently show that more than 90 percent of Americans profess a belief in God -- truth is found elsewhere.

In reality, the framers created neither a godless Constitution nor a godly Constitution, and the Constitution, in turn, creates neither a godless civil government nor a godly civil government.

These questions were left for each successive generation to work out for themselves.

To be sure, the framers assumed that religiously based morality would inform our politics, but they didn't mandate it.

Kramnick and Moore are simply wrong in their assertion that the framers created an ungodly Constitution for an ungodly political sphere.

They present absolutely no evidence supporting their thesis that God was to be banned from politics. In fact, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the authors waffle.

Attempting humor, the authors offer "a constitutional amendment to shore up national morality," an amendment that would allow the impeachment of any elected official who hinted that he or she was attempting to do God's will.

Impeach Abraham Lincoln? After all, he ended his second inaugural address by saying, "With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in."

Without explanation, Kramnick and Moore back away from their draconian proposition three pages later, agreeing "with Stephen Carter that it is wrong to ridicule persons who professes [sic] to hold a political position because it is required by their understanding of God's will."

If God's will, or our tentative understanding of that will, is allowed in political arguments, as the authors seem to suggest here, then their whole thesis of a godless Constitution collapses into one incoherent heap.

Why have Kramnick and Moore written a book arguing for a position that they themselves do not fully endorse?

My best guess is that they want to confuse their readers about the role of religion and politics, because they are offended by the morality of the Christian Coalition and others on the religious right who exert a powerful political influence today.

Blinded by ideology

The authors praise the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a "religious prophet who calls upon an unjust society to transcend itself," and in this I agree.

In contrast, they refer to those religious leaders who speak against radical individualism and its cultural by-products that are currently destroying our country -- abortion, assisted suicide, family breakdown -- as "sour voices" who use religion to divide and stigmatize people.

Blinded by their political ideology, Kramnick and Moore cannot see that all prophets are viewed as "sour voices" bent on upsetting the comfortable status quo. Mr. King's voice, no less than that of the U.S. bishops, was certainly sour to many as he worked tirelessly to separate out, stigmatize and call the racist to repentance.

Kramnick and Moore fail to make their case for a godless Constitution. Their argument is important, nonetheless, because at least one court believes we have a godless Constitution.

Earlier this year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in creating a "right" to assisted suicide, said that Christians and other people of faith had no right to impose "their religious convictions or their philosophies on all the other members of a democratic society."

If we take this court at face value, then we no longer have an effective voice in governing our society.

Serious Christians -- as well as Jews and Muslims -- cannot separate their morality from their knowledge that God created, designed and ordered the world for His purpose.

Therefore, our views on slavery, abortion, capital punishment, war, nuclear arms, immigration, assisted suicide, race relations, welfare and a host of other issues, grounded as they are in our limited understanding of God's purposes, would be barred from the public debate.

Like the early Christians, we would still give to Caesar what is his, but we would no longer have a say in shaping Caesar. We would, in effect, be governed by the small minority of the population who profess no religiously based philosophy of life.

I'm not willing to give up so easily. First of all, the government envisioned by the 9th Circuit is illegitimate, at least so long as we continue to call our government a representative democracy.

Second, we are a nation consisting primarily of self-identified Christians. I am not suggesting, as some might, that we are the New Jerusalem, I am simply stating a fact.

And to the extent that our governing laws embody moral value judgments, which they inevitably will, why not our moral value judgments?

In flexing our political muscle, we

must be ever mindful of the two sides

of St. Peter. Yes, Peter is the rock upon which the Church is built, and the Church, with its members, has an important role of proclaiming truth in our society and any society.

As members of the political community, we should follow the long tradition, carried on by the abolitionists in their day and Martin Luther King Jr. in his, and call our governing institutions to embody the truth as we understand it.

When segments of our culture attempt to implement a culture of death, we must counter with the Gospel of life.

We must also ever be mindful of Peter's human and sinful side. Like Peter, who denied Jesus to save his own hide, we must constantly discern our motives. And, like Peter, who was rebuked when Jesus said, "Get behind me, Satan" (Mt 16:23), we often don't understand God's ways.

But Peter's sinfulness and lack of insight did not paralyze him. And it should not paralyze us, although it should call us to the prayerful realization that we can and will err as we attempt tentatively and provisionally

to create a more just city of man as we wait in joyful hope of the coming of the city of God.

In the end, if our faith-based morality is ignored in creating public policy, we will have abdicated the position reserved for us by the founders of this country, and we as a society will, to borrow the title of Robert Bork's new book, continue slouching toward Gomorrah.

Scaperlanda teaches constitutional law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law

Our founders and our Father

"It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in [the creation of the Constitution] a finger of that Almighty hand which has been so frequently and singularly extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution."

-- James Madison

"No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency. We ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which heaven itself has ordained."

-- George Washington

"The safety and prosperity of nations ultimately and essentially depend on the protection and the blessing of Almighty God, and the national acknowledgment of this truth is not only an indispensable duty which the people owe to Him, but a duty whose natural influence is favorable to the promotion of that morality and piety without which social happiness can not exist, nor the blessings of a free government be enjoyed."

-- John Adams

"I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life."

-- Thomas Jefferson

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The lost Catholic novelist

Lots of saints on the shelves

The diary that saved a man's soul

Apocalyptic Catholics

An authority figure

What does it take to make a college Catholic?