There are some in America who believe that our Constitution is in fact divinely ordained. I assume these people are all or overwhelmingly evangelical Christians.
–To what extent to these people believe in the divine provenance of the Constitution? Is it the literal word of God, as some suppose the Bible to be? Or something inspired by and consistent with Christian principles? Is there a range of opinion?
–What evidence do they cite (if any)? I’m not interested in debating the merits of that evidence, just interested in knowing what these believers say.
–How do they square the divine constitution with slavery?
NOT interested in debating whether the Constitution is or isn’t divinely inspired, only in understanding the beliefs around it. Thanks all.
I knew a mormom who seemed to believe the founding ‘fathers’ and the constitution were divinely inspired, when I asked about the teensy slavery thing he started raging incoherently.
The Constitution was not thought to be divinely inspired by the people who wrote it. In fact, they declined to even so much as hold prayers while drafting the document. I know a story has been going around claiming otherwise but it is false. I’m going to go take a nap now but I will return later and post primary sources conclusively demonstrating this, if you desire them. The slavery thing was a necessary compromise. Many of our founding fathers thought it was wrong and had qualms about it.
I didn’t say you couldn’t but so can I… Note that I mentioned a false story going around claiming the convention felt a religious blessing was necessary. This story has been going around since like the 1820s and is probably part of the “evidence” cited by those who believe it is divine.
Here’s a sample based on a very fast Google search. I tried to read it and got bored and confused. It seems to mostly assume the answer. That’s why I was hoping others could explain without the blah-blah.
“Those people” are annoyingly easy to find. Some of them even have some influence on our government at the federal, state, and local levels. The Americans United for Separation of Church and State keeps an eye on them and their revisionist history. AU battles them in the courts when they can. Here’s a link to an index of organizations of the Religious Right and the people that run them.
There are even some people who make a comfortable living writing books about the BS notion that the US was founded on Christian principles and needs to be returned to its fictitious Godly roots.
bibliophage, thanks for those links. It looks like the LDS view is that it is inspired but not perfect, which is how they deal with the slavery thing.
I looked a little more at the site I linked to above. I can’t tell whether it is LDS in any way but I would guess not; seems they explicitly deny the need to change anything about the constitution, contra the LDS view.
It’s a little comparable to the belief that the King James Version of the Bible is “divinely appointed” as the best, infallible translation.
It’s also somewhat related to the “Visible Elect” notion of some forms of Calvinism.
The idea would be, roughly, that the religious Pilgrims and Puritans who founded America bestowed upon the continent a kind of divine favor, which can be seen clearly in the success of the colonies. The “Visible Elect” notion is that, if God favors you in your business, health, and personal wealth, then God also favors you in your theological values.
Few people follow this idea today. We know that really rotten people can still be wealthy, successful, and physically healthy. The success in trade and expansion of the colonies is not, by and large, taken, today, as a sign that God loved the colonists particularly above others. But some people still have this belief.
I’ve never heard the Constitution was divinely inspired, but the phrase is an easy out for just about anything. I could claim a piece of libel I wrote was “divinely inspired.”
if ‘gods’ hand is in everything and has a ‘plan’ - and everything is part of this ‘plan’ - and nothing comes to pass that is not part of this ‘plan’ - then everything - and I mean EVERYTHING is ‘divinely inspired’ - which makes the term divinely meaningless.
Well, no. The motivation for the non-establishment clause was not to protect the state from being controlled by churches; it was to protect churches from being controlled by the state. And you could easily persuade yourself that this is What God Wants.
Look, we can quibble about what it means to be divinely inspired all day, and what that meant to pilgrims, and so on, but the fact is that there are people out there today–perhaps many, I don’t know–who believe that the US Constitution is divinely inspired. It seems this may include all Mormons, a not insignificant number, and I hope a LDS member or someone with knowledge will weigh in further on this. That is interesting to me, but what inspired my post was the memory of running across references to this idea in the last year or so, and it seems like an idea that is current in a segment of the evangelical Christian community. I provided a link above. Looking forward to hearing more from folks with knowledge and insight, including any believers.
of the constitution?