Sacred, Mundane, Profane

Book excerpt: The ideal of religious liberty enshrined in the Constitution of the United States stands in vivid contrast to today’s idea of a living constitution. Here the author compares the two. In the book’s centerpiece he points out the religious decisions and policies incorporated by the American founders into the text of 1787, and into subsequent Amendments. The Constitution is examined as a secular scripture, so to speak: as an expression of its framers’ convictions about the sacred and the profane — and, about the various topics of public policy which straddle that spiritual dichotomy, or perhaps escape it. The entire discussion is framed and illustrated by analyses of selected Supreme Court decisions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Justices of the Supreme Court necessarily appear in this context as the principal constitutional actors: a role not intended for them, a judicial role not even envisioned by the Constitution-makers of the late eighteenth century. For nearly a century now the Justices have been dismantling — sometime piecemeal, sometimes wholesale — the religious policies prescribed for the nation by its founding statesmen. Their ambitions now seem so vast, and their jurisdiction so comprehensive, that the appointment of each new Justice is an occasion for nationwide alarm and struggle. What is going on when the Court issues constitutional decisions not plausibly grounded in any provision of the constitutional text? Decisions which frequently ignore limitations plainly expressed in other provisions of that text? What are the presuppositions and biases implicit in the Justices’ lawyerly rhetoric? When are those presuppositions and biases fairly said to be religious in character? The reader will find these fundamental and controversial questions addressed in an original manner. The author brought to his legal career a background in mathematics and logical studies. Those studies have given him an unusual perspective on the vitally important topic of religious liberty.