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God Isn’t in the U. S. Constitution. Does That Matter?
In his 1978 commencement address at Harvard, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn referred to the West as a “perishing society.” He diagnosed the problem as “the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him,” which resulted in “total emancipation . . . from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.”
This emancipation is complicated, however. As Tom Holland has persuasively argued, “to live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions,” such as human rights and the rule of law. Christianity is part of the air we breathe in the West, whether we realize it or not.
Yet like churches that have been turned into bars, restaurants, and hotels, these Christian concepts and assumptions retain their outer form and appearance but no longer serve their original function. They’ve been unbaptized, so to speak, losing their Christian conceptual identity as they’ve been redefined in secular terms.
In The Godless Constitution and the Providential Republic, Steven D. Smith, Warren distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego, argues that abandoning the “[providentialist] foundations of our community is reckless and irresponsible” (202). Why? Because philosophically and historically, American values and institutions are demonstrably grounded in God and in what Smith calls a “providentialist perspective” (53).
Lost Providentialism
By providentialism, Smith means a supreme, moral intelligence governs and guides the events of history, including the destiny of nations. American providentialism refers to the belief, which Smith claims was central to America’s early development, that America is a “divinely ordained entity with a providential role in the history of the world” (57).
Presently, however, America by and large believes it dances to the tune of chance and choice, not divine providence. As a nation, especially in official and public contexts, America has “God washed” itself, attempting to erase or minimize God’s role in American history and governance. At least publicly, Nietzsche’s madman’s prophecy has come true: We have “killed” God, presuming to take his role in public life for ourselves.
America, by and large, believes it dances to the tune of chance and choice, not divine providence.
Of course, America was never officially a Christian nation. The founders didn’t establish a national church, and while the separation of church and state doesn’t preclude the government from declaring itself constitutionally subservient to God, America didn’t do that either.
The topic is hotly contested, but America was originally a Christian nation in at least two senses. First, our founding generation’s social imaginary was Christian. Their default conceptual architecture was broadly Christian. Second, America’s governmental systems and ideals were predominantly (not exclusively) derived from the raw materials of Christianity. Even the deists among the founding fathers worked from a basically Christian framework for public morality, which enabled social cohesion for more than a century.
Growing Secularism
Smith argues that many American ideals—like freedom, equality, human rights, and the rule of law—aren’t sustainable in historically recognizable forms without belief in a supreme deity. He rightly points out the dangers of removing the divine from the national equation. Abandoning a shared source of morality helps explain our increased national division.
The naturalistic assumptions straining our nation’s fabric are relatively recent developments. According to Smith, it wasn’t until “the latter half of the twentieth century, [that] the Supreme Court and the legal profession implemented a fundamental makeover of the Constitution, interpreting it to require government to be ‘neutral’ toward religion and to confine itself to the domain of the secular” (xii). This change resulted from the court exchanging an “original intent” reading of the establishment clause in the First Amendment for an “underlying principle” reading. Therefore, it prohibited not merely a national church but even the informal adoption of any religious preferences, practices, or framework by the government.
Smith’s core response is that while “the Constitution did not explicitly prescribe a religious orientation for government, neither did it disapprove or forbid such an orientation; nor did it prescribe any other worldview or normative system” (5). The idea that the founders intended for America to be an atheistic state contradicts a century and a half of counterexamples. For instance, in the same period that the First Amendment was penned, Congress “appointed chaplains to begin sessions with prayer” (35). As late as 1952, the Supreme Court said, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.”
Placebo Providence
While Smith grants that Christianity often provided the form and content of this providentialism, he argues that American providentialism was and is not dependent on Christianity. Borrowing from the work of philosopher Genevieve Lloyd, Smith contends that “providentialism is not the same thing as Christianity, and it is not even the same thing as religion” (53). Instead, “The Western providentialist tradition . . . [goes] from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Descartes and Spinoza” (53).
The abandonment of a shared source of morality helps explain our increased national division.
I can understand why Smith, a Mormon, might want America to adopt a more pluralistic providentialism and why he prefers a reading of American history that credits other providentialist sources. But America took Genesis, not the Timaeus, as its starting point. For instance, Plato didn’t believe that “all men are created equal.” As Smith acknowledges, the idea of human equality was drawn from Genesis 1:26–27. Religious freedom, likewise, was grounded in biblical principles. America’s founding documents and values reflect a worldview whose components can’t be found apart from Christianity.
It’s tempting to cheer when Smith ends by suggesting that “if there actually is a God,” then only God can save us (213). But if there is a God, it also matters that we “fervently pray” to the real one. Only he would be capable of providing for us. A bare providentialism seems more a cause of our secular drift than a solution to it.
Like Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City, this book is a valuable addition to discussions about religion’s role in history and governance. However, it seems Smith’s proposal leads to a similar problem: a providentialism “having a form of godliness but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5, NIV). The Godless Constitution and the Providential Republic is especially helpful for Christians arguing against the secular constitution thesis that tries to exclude religious reasoning from the public square.
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