One Nation, under Secularism? 

Everybody’s getting religion these days. By everybody, I mean of course all the presidential candidates, especially Democrats concerned with outreach to voters far from Vermont.

Responding to this trend, Susan Jacoby, writing in the New York Times, notes regretfully that “secularism has become a dirty word.” In an essay titled “One Nation, under Secularism,” she argues that the Framers of the Constitution were driven by “secular convictions” when they wrote “the nation’s founding document.” She wants us to appreciate “the nation’s secular heritage.” She deplores “the misconception, promulgated by the Christian right, that the American government was founded on divine authority.”

She makes some good points, but she fails to define secularism. This makes her whole argument somewhat vague. What exactly is a “secular conviction”?

True enough, many Christians have misconceptions about the Framers. We all tend to forget that their general language made some very concrete presuppositions. By now we all know that when they said that “all Men are created equal,” they were thinking chiefly of men like themselves, not necessarily black or red men. We should also be aware that when they spoke of “religion,” they were thinking chiefly of non-Roman Christianity, not necessarily Buddhism, Hinduism, or New Age possibilities.

And the Framers wouldn’t have agreed that they were “founding a nation.” The nation already existed. They were doing the narrower job of working out a “compact,” as they called it, among the states. A new “federal” government would have no power to impose a single religion on the states, most of which already had their own official religions — all of them versions of Christianity. The primacy or sovereignty of the states was the key principle. That’s what federalism meant.

Becoming aware of our own unconscious presuppositions is a task for liberals as well as conservatives. Someone has pointed out that Islam presupposes sunset: the holy month of Ramadan, which gradually shifts from season to season (presupposing a lunar calendar), requires believers to fast until nightfall. But how would this apply to, say, Lapps and Eskimos, who would starve during the endless days of midsummer? The Prophet lived in a clime and a time in which the far North was still unknown and unimagined.

You see the problem. We all assume things we don’t even know we’re assuming, including some that time may someday refute or relativize. “What goes up must come down”: that once sounded like an absolute truth, and in our practical experience it’s still pretty reliable, but rocket science gets around it now.

How general are our “universal truths,” really? When I was growing up in Michigan, we drank in Lincoln’s “truths” with our mothers’ milk (or was it baby formula? Things do change!). Later, living in Virginia, I learned to my amazement that Jefferson Davis made a lot more sense than Lincoln on what the U.S. Constitution means.

No “new nation” was “brought forth” in 1776 (Lincoln) or 1787 (Jacoby). Nor did the Constitution establish “the nation’s secular heritage.” It merely defined, and limited, the loose union of the states. That union would have no power to tamper with “religion.” How to deal with religion was, and remained, the business of the states.

Many modern assumptions can be disproved not by waiting for the future to call them in question, but simply by checking the past. Just as many Christians want to believe that the Constitution was specifically Christian, so many non-Christians want to believe that it was specifically something else — “secularist.”

Both sides are making dubious — all right, historically false — presuppositions in keeping with their preferences. Each sees that the other’s presupposition is wrong, without doubting its own.

So both sides want to make the Constitution say things it doesn’t say and do things it simply isn’t designed to do. I’m not talking about what is sometimes called “original intent,” which gets us into confusing, irresolvable, and irrelevant arguments about what Madison or Hamilton was “really thinking.” I’m merely talking about the words of the document, as they were commonly understood by those who wrote and heard them — without most of our current presuppositions, liberal, conservative, Christian, or secularist.

Miss Jacoby generalizes about our “heritage” as recklessly as the Christian right she deprecates. This is only human. We all want to claim a distinguished pedigree for our political convictions.

But history can be shocking. In tracing the ancestry of my own convictions, I had to endure the humiliation of learning how many of them weren’t descended from the Founding Fathers at all, but were only Lincoln’s bastards.

Joseph Sobran