Is the U.S. Constitution Godless?

May-June 1996

By Richard A. Baer, Jr.

ITHACA, New York-—Two of my colleagues here at Cornell University, Isaac Kramnick and Larry Moore, have recently published a book in which they persuasively argue that America's founding fathers designed the Constitution to be a secular document. They are correct, it seems to me, when they observe that some of the language and claims of the religious right regarding America as a Christian nation have been inaccurate and intemperate.

However, The Godless Constitution (Norton) greatly oversimplifies the issue of how religion relates to politics and how it functions in the public square. By constitutional design, to be sure, the state is not to meddle in religion, but, as the authors admit, this does not mean that it is illegitimate for religious Americans to let their beliefs and values affect their political actions. Thus, Kramnick and Moore are mistaken when they say that America's founding achieved "the privatization of religion, its removal from the public realm, and its transfer to the private world of individual freedom of conscience, belief, and practice" (84-85).

The authors approvingly quote Oliver Ellsworth, a member of the first U.S. Congress, to the effect that "civil government has no business to meddle with the private opinions of the people" (42). Similarly, they appear to agree with Joseph Priestly, one of the founders of Unitarianism, who held that the "state no longer has any positive role to educate, nurture, or provide moral standards" (81). The framers of the Constitution, they remind us, "created a secular state, where individuals pursued happiness as they personally conceived it, free of state tutelage and interference" (86).

However, Moore and Kramnick totally ignore the fact that convictions like these are far more damning to contemporary liberal commitments than they are to those of the religious right, for it is political liberals who are the chief supporters of our current system of government-sponsored education and welfare programs.

Take the case of public education. Most liberals—and indeed many conservatives—simply do not want to deal with the fact that government public schools today routinely violate the consciences and the religious freedom of millions of Americans. The Godless Constitution completely misses the fact that neither Thomas Jefferson nor Horace Mann opposed the teaching of religion in the common schools. What they opposed was the teaching of what they called "sectarian" religion, in other words, the religion of many orthodox Christians. They considered their own Unitarian-deistic theology and morality entirely appropriate, indeed essential, to the task of public education.

What has changed in our own day is that establishment educators now oppose the teaching of all religion in government public schools. Religion in toto is now considered sectarian; only what comes under the umbrella of the secular is judged to be nonsectarian. This leaves us with a troubling and unstable state of affairs, for secular beliefs and values have come to function in public education in an essentially religious fashion, directly displacing and undermining many traditional religious beliefs and values. Thus, rather than excluding religion, public schools today are utterly pervaded with religion, but of a humanistic variety that carries the misleading label "secular."

Liberals, of course, typically ridicule the claim that secular humanism is a religion (or is religious), but they overlook the fact that this claim was made originally not by fundamentalist Christians but by humanists themselves, including John Dewey. Nor do liberals want to deal with the claims of eminent scholars such as Emile Durkheim and Reinhold Niebuhr, who have argued that secular beliefs and values often function exactly like supernatural beliefs and values.

As for the religious right, they would better serve the cause of religion in America by accepting the religious neutrality of the Constitution. School prayer may have symbolic importance for many Christians, but of immeasurably greater significance would be the completion of the revolution the founders started more than 200 years ago. That means disestablishing what has become the de facto official religion in America, namely, a rampant and deeply entrenched secularism. To truly disestablish all religions—the secularist as well as traditional varieties—would be to treat the concept of a religiously neutral state with far more seriousness than Kramnick and Moore have done in The Godless Constitution.

[Dr. Baer is Professor of Environmental Ethics at Cornell University and a member of the Center for Public Justice Advisory Council.]