The Godless Constitution.

• Author: Kalir, Erez

In an infamous address at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Pat Buchanan declared that "`[t]here is a religious war going on ... for the soul of America.'"(1) Maintaining that the United States is "`a nation that we still call God's,'" he exhorted supporters to "`take back our culture, and take back our country.'"(2) Buchanan's speech, with its clarion call for a religious restoration, tacitly cast American history in terms of a story of the fall: The nation's origins, his rhetoric implied, lay in an Edenic Christianity from which God-fearing Americans have been rudely expelled due to the sins of secular infidels who would deny the nation's fundamentally Christian identity. Buchanan's words garnered immense publicity because they were nationally televised during prime time;(3) the "fall" story underlying his address, however, is one commonly told by the Religious Right.(4)

In The Godless Constitution, Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore set out to explode the legitimacy of what they call "religious correctness" - the claim that "the United States was established as a Christian nation by Christian people, with the Christian religion assigned a central place in guiding the nation's destiny" (p. 13). To correct the purveyors of religious correctness, the authors pursue a twofold thesis. First, they argue that as a matter of history, the nation's Founders (as well as their philosophical progenitors in England and their immediate political descendants in America) believed that government should be a secular enterprise uninfluenced by, and indifferent to, religious concerns; this belief, according to the authors, is inscribed in the Constitution. Second, they posit that as a normative matter, the Founders' faith in a secular state should be heeded by the modem American polity, and that failure to ward off religious influences on American politics (particularly those of the Religious Right) will simultaneously betray constitutional values and exacerbate the nation's moral decline.

Kramnick and Moore deserve plaudits for seriously engaging the historical and constitutional rhetoric of the Religious Right and systematically demolishing its intellectual credibility. No one can finish their book and still make a reasonable case that the Constitution was conceived as a blueprint for a uniformly "Christian nation" (p. 13). The authors also deliver a valuable remonstrance against those who peddle intolerance while wrapped in the mantles of the Bible and the Constitution. Unfortunately, however, Kramnick and Moore's advocacy of "godless Constitution[alism]" (p. 12) occasionally veers beyond rebuttal of the Christian nation theory and toward a defense of an affirmatively secular state that largely excludes religion from the public sphere. At such junctures, the authors render their historical and prescriptive arguments vulnerable to some of the very criticisms they level at the acolytes of "religious correctness" (p. 13).

Kramnick and Moore present their historical evidence through a series of vignettes.(5) They begin, for instance, with a lively chapter on the Constitution's framing and ratification, in which they argue that the text's drafters deliberately designed it to be "an instrument with which to structure the secular politics of individual interest and happiness" (p. 27). As proof, they point to the absence of any express mention of "God" or "Christianity" in the Constitution itself and to the inclusion of the No Religious Test Clause in Article VI.(6) Concluding that "[t]he advocates of a secular state won" at the Founding (p. 28), Kramnick and Moore proceed to examine two other key historical episodes: the Sunday Mail Controversy of 1820 to" 1830 (pp. 132-43) and the "Christian amendment" movement of the post-Civil War era (pp.

144-48).(7) In both instances, religious zealots sought to transform the nation into "a Christian commonwealth where the state and...