The U.S. Constitution is deliberately Godless. Discuss.

[Liberal]

@treis

You had a convention that wrote a Constitution basically copying exactly the British government, drawing on mainy British philosophers written by people who for all intents and purposes were British why would you expect them to sign it any other way than the way than the British did?

Maybe because they had just concluded a bloody and protracted war against “a long train of abuses and usurpations”.

I don’t understand how if the date is not a reference to God then that excludes the Founders deliberately refusing to mention God.

Because it leads to a contradiction. Applying the Law of SOE to Ambushed’s characterization of the Founders, the inference is: [Wise and careful men who did nothing inadvertently] inadvertently mentioned God by a careless reference.

Now that phrase, is important unlike the date, becuase it describes the fundamental basis of the Constitution.

On the other hand, it is merely a preamble, while the ratification date is part of an Article of the Constitution itself. If you’re not careful, your examination of the Constitution will become pseudo-scientific, much like Karl Popper’s Marxist who finds support for his political theory in everything he reads. If it behooves your position that the preamble be significant while the Article be pointless, then your position needs adjustment.

[Evil_Captor]

@Liberal

On the other hand, it is merely a preamble, while the ratification date is part of an Article of the Constitution itself. If you’re not careful, your examination of the Constitution will become pseudo-scientific, much like Karl Popper’s Marxist who finds support for his political theory in everything he reads. If it behooves your position that the preamble be significant while the Article be pointless, then your position needs adjustment.

“Goodbye” is a contraction of 'God be with you." Therefore, everyone who says “goodbye” is consciously and with malice aforethought referencing God. This is, of course, a silly argument. As is Liberal’s point about the date. Give it up, Liberal, you don’t really have a point.

[tomndebb]

@Evil Captor

Give it up, Liberal, you don’t really have a point.

I would say that his point is just about as valid as ambushed’s (regarding the absolute certainty that God was “deliberately omitted,” not regarding the clearly secular nature of the document).

[Evil_Captor]

@tomndebb

I would say that his point is just about as valid as ambushed’s (regarding the absolute certainty that God was “deliberately omitted,” not regarding the clearly secular nature of the document).

I agree with you that you can’t have absolute certainty here. I agree with you that the ommission is merely a matter of being secular, not an atheist position. However, I really can’t see any reasonable alternate suggestion to the ommission of God other than its being deliberate. What other reasonable explanation could there be?

[Liberal]

@Evil Captor

“Goodbye” is a contraction of 'God be with you." Therefore, everyone who says “goodbye” is consciously and with malice aforethought referencing God. This is, of course, a silly argument.

Then I’m glad I didn’t make an argument anything like it.

As is Liberal’s point about the date. Give it up, Liberal, you don’t really have a point.

You don’t seem to understand the point.

[Liberal]

@Evil Captor

I agree with you that you can’t have absolute certainty here. I agree with you that the ommission is merely a matter of being secular, not an atheist position. However, I really can’t see any reasonable alternate suggestion to the ommission of God other than its being deliberate. What other reasonable explanation could there be?

Deliberation implies that you gave it some thought and decided against it. Did you deliberately leave out a reference to grape jelly in your post? You must have. What other reasonable explanation could there be?

[tomndebb]

@Evil Captor

However, I really can’t see any reasonable alternate suggestion to the ommission of God other than its being deliberate. What other reasonable explanation could there be?

Again, as I have pointed out both in this thread and the others, the extemely weak reference to a ceremonial deity in the Articles of Confederation only appears in a tacked on paragraph outlining how the convention was called. No similar paragraph appears in the Constitution. By simply not happening to mention that they had been sent by their respective states, the framers of the Constitution happened to remove the one place where a divinity might have happened to appear in the Constitution. That (if that is how it occurred) would have made the elimination of God merely a happenstance.

I don’t know what really occurred, but I see no argument that absolutely disproves this conjecture. In other words, it appears to me that God only showed up in the Articles by accident and only disappeared from the Constitution by accident.
(There have been several claims that God shows up in all the state constitutions, (or perhaps those of all the states except Virginia where Madison would have stomped it into dust). In fact, no one has actually demonstrated that that is true. I have only seen two of the Constitutions cited in these threads, so there are eleven more state constitutions to be examined.)

[Evil_Captor]

@Liberal

Deliberation implies that you gave it some thought and decided against it. Did you deliberately leave out a reference to grape jelly in your post? You must have. What other reasonable explanation could there be?

C’mon, libertarian, to advance this line you have to ignore the fact that the US Constitution is different from a message board post, and also all the posts prior to this establishing that it was commonplace to put references to God in state constitutions and other important documents of that sort. Such as the Declaration of Independence. Ignoring these facts will not make them go away.

[Liberal]

@Evil Captor

C’mon, libertarian, to advance this line you have to ignore the fact that the US Constitution is different from a message board post, and also all the posts prior to this establishing that it was commonplace to put references to God in state constitutions and other important documents of that sort. Such as the Declaration of Independence. Ignoring these facts will not make them go away.

First of all — speaking of facts — my username is Liberal.

Second, you can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to invoke the “commonplace” argument, then you have to allow that Year of our Lord is a reference to God. But if you’re going to insist that Year of our Lord is not a reference to God (which is how I see it), then the Constitution is unremarkable with respect to this matter.

[magellan01]

It appears to me that there are two possibilities regarding the lack of God/Creator language in the Constitution:

1. It was a conscious and intentional act

2. It was accidental, as it was to be a list of laws, a practical document

#1—Pro
a) The very conscious decision to not have a religous test to hold office, as it was debated at the convention.
b) Direction: If you look at the D of I, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, the documents get more secular over time.
c) The Language in The Treaty of Tripoli shows that one or some founders, Washington and or Adams assumed that the US was a purely secular country
d) The US Constitution was most closely modeled after the Virginia Constitution, which was the most secular.
e) When the Founders had the opportunity to go back and amend the document by adding the Bill of Rights, they used the very first amendment to put limits on religion.

#1—Con
a) The fact that a specific law regarding religion was debated (the test to hold office), but the “decision” to make the document as a whole secular was NOT debated, runs counter to logic.
b) The country was a very religious place. Some states had established State Religions. The Founders themselves were, at the very least, Deists, who believed in a Creator and an afterlife.
c) The language of the Treaty of Tripoli can be explained in a practical light. Hostages were being held, ships were being pirated, and we knew we couldn’t go to war with the Muslim world.
d) The language of the Treaty of Tripoli might not have even been in the Treaty that Adams signed, but added later. See “NOTE REGARDING THE Barlow TRANSLATION” [URL=http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/barbary/bar1796n.htm#n1]
e) As Liberal has pointed out, the embrace of secularism and break with religion was not complete. There are minor instances of religiosity in the document. If it was such and intional, deliberate act, surely these would have been removed.

#2—Pro
a) The issue was not debated. In the notes taken by the seven founders who we know took notes at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, there is no evidence of the subject even being discussed.
b) The preamble, the section that the Founders historically used to invoke God is noticeably short, pointing immediatley to the body of the document, which “merely” lists laws.
c) When the Founders had the opportunity to go back and talk about the issue of religion, they simply barred the Federal Government from establishing an official religion: “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion.” Surely, they could have added more on the subject.
D) The nation was very religious. The Founders themselves were, at the very least, Deists. Such a break from their traditional beliefs surely would have merited some discussion, in their private papers talking about the decision to omit God/Religion from the Constitution the thought so important.

#2—Con
a) The fact is that the document is largely secular.
b) It was common, almost routine, for them to invoke God and Divine Providence, yet it is not in the document.
c) Many of the Founders embraced the Rationalism of the Enlightenment, which minimized the importance and role of religion.
d) The D of I and the Articles of Confederation show the direction the Founders’ thinkiing was heading: away from religion and toward secularism.

Another piece of evidence that would help us glean the intent of the founders are their general writiings. Although I am not aware of any papers or quotes (other than those seven individuals who took notes at the Convention) that point back to their intent when creating the document. There are many quotes that do not pertain to the drafting itself that might offer us the opportunity to divine what was on their minds during the time in question, but it is not proof one way or another. I resist including any quotes here, as it will simply lead to a battle of quotes, with many of them presented incomplete, incorrect, or out of context.

That said, I tried to be fair with the merits of each position. Please add to the list as you see fit. Maybe if we all worked from one master list, we’d get closer to agreement.

My opinion, based on the facts as I see them, is to now stand more strongly behind my original theory: that the document was intended to be as purely practical as possible. I think this is best supported by: a very short preamble, the legal tenor of the body of the document, and—most powerfully—the complete lack of any discussion regarding the degree to which the Constitution should be secular or religious during the debate process.

Barring the discovery of additional notes taken at the Convention or letters discussing it after the fact (by the Founders), I do not think that either position can be proven one way or another. It does seem perfectly clear, however, that the OP’s original claim that the omission of God/Creator/Religion was deliberate because the Founders “fought over it tooth and nail” has no basis in fact.

[Voyager]

How about this. It was not accidental, it did not involve a violent debate (and thanks for the extracts) but the absence of god reflected the writers political philosophy, and so was deliberate in a sense.

Many people at the time derived the legitimacy of the state from God. Jefferson in the declaration derived basic rights from nature’s god. I think it is fair to say that those wanting to show that the US is a Christian nation are doing so to attempt to show that the legitimacy of our government is linked to their god.

The few relevant references to God and religion in the quotes indicate a suspicion of religion and the realization that there was a diversity of religion in the United States. There appears to be no reaction to these statements. This means that either there were no strong supporters of religion in the Convention, that they were sleeping during the statements, that even believers bought into the secular nature of the Constitution, or that the issue had been settled outside of the formal sessions. It sounds to me like there was a consensus that God was not required, and should play no role in justification of the new government structure or rights.

If I’m right, I think the fact that there was such a consensus that the government did not need to be God-based is more significant than it winning by a close vote.

This also explains the date. The consensus did not include foolish exclusion of god, since they was no consensus about god existing or not (actually there probably was that some god existed) but rather that god had no place in government. Use of God in a date had no relevance to this, and so was not an issue.

[Evil_Captor]

@Liberal

First of all — speaking of facts — my username is Liberal.

Second, you can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to invoke the “commonplace” argument, then you have to allow that Year of our Lord is a reference to God. But if you’re going to insist that Year of our Lord is not a reference to God (which is how I see it), then the Constitution is unremarkable with respect to this matter.

Goodbye.

[treis]

@Liberal

Maybe because they had just concluded a bloody and protracted war against “a long train of abuses and usurpations”.

Right, but they were still basically British and they were writting a Constitution modelled on the British government.

@Liberal

Because it leads to a contradiction. Applying the Law of SOE to Ambushed’s characterization of the Founders, the inference is: [Wise and careful men who did nothing inadvertently] inadvertently mentioned God by a careless reference.

But if the date isn’t a reference to God then there was no careless reference to God.

@Liberal

On the other hand, it is merely a preamble, while the ratification date is part of an Article of the Constitution itself. If you’re not careful, your examination of the Constitution will become pseudo-scientific, much like Karl Popper’s Marxist who finds support for his political theory in everything he reads. If it behooves your position that the preamble be significant while the Article be pointless, then your position needs adjustment.

You’re joking right? You are argument is resting on how they wrote the friggen date and you have the audacity to call the preamble insignificant? Either way, with all the appeals to higher ideals in the preamble do you not agree a mention of God is glaringly absent?

[tomndebb]

with all the appeals to higher ideals in the preamble do you not agree a mention of God is glaringly absent?

It might be, if we get copies of every one of the other states’ constitutions and find God prominently featured.

If some constitutions other than that of Virginia omit God (or have extremely weak deist references) or if we find other public documents of the period with extremely weak references (Articles of Confederation), I am not sure how “glaring” the absence would be in the Constitution.

[Voyager]

@tomndebb

It might be, if we get copies of every one of the other states’ constitutions and find God prominently featured.

If some constitutions other than that of Virginia omit God (or have extremely weak deist references) or if we find other public documents of the period with extremely weak references (Articles of Confederation), I am not sure how “glaring” the absence would be in the Constitution.

Would the religious tests for office in several of them be good enough?

In any case, I think the point in is the distinction between the Constitution and the current attempts to portray the founding fathers as highly religious - not the distinction between the writers of the US constitution and the state constitutions. If everyone in the US in 1787 were flaming atheists, and so the matter never even came up, the point would be the same. The argument is not the founders were not religious, but that they believed that government should be secular. Some of the states, like Virginia, did also, but that supports and does not weaken the case. The appeal to state constitutions is to show that the issue was not so trivial as to ignored by all. The religious tests both in the state constitutions and the banning of them in the US Constitution shows that well enough. The presence of the word God in even one state constitution (and remember that several states had estabilished religions) is enough to provide good evidence that the exclusion of God in the Constitution was not accidental.

You don’t need evidence of fistfights in Philadelphia to demonstrate this.

[tomndebb]

Would the religious tests for office in several of them be good enough?

The “no religious tests” clause has been a red herring throughout these three threads. The point of the “no religious tests” clause was to prevent the Congregationalists (descended from Puritans) in New England and the Episcopalians in Virginia and the Carolinas from preventing Baptists and Quakers and assorted “lesser” Christians from being excluded from government. (And if the occasional papist or Jew got in through that clause, they figured the Republic would survive, there being so few of those groups.)

It had nothing to do with any declarations about or recognitions regarding God.

[BrainGlutton]

From “Our Godless Constitution,” by Brooke Allen, in The Nation, 2/21/05 – http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050221/allen:

Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton’s flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of “foreign aid”; according to another, he simply said “we forgot.” But as Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the “only Heaven knows” sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” and the famous line about men being “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: “In God We Trust” did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, “The Battle Over the Pledge,” April 5, 2004].

In 1797 our government concluded a “Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary,” now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:

As the Government of the United States…is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion–as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen–and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate’s history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.

The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a wall of separation between church and state.” John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans–the fundamentalists of their day–would “whip and crop, and pillory and roast.” The historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers,” as Jefferson wrote, “civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.”

And here is a pretty good refutation (by conservative Catholic intellectual John J. Reilly), of the thesis of Marvin Olasky’s 1995 book Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America – http://www.johnreilly.info/fflav.htm:

It is simply false to say that the Revolution constituted a “culture war” between England and the United States. The leaders of both sides were a mixture of deists, agnostics, libertines and Christians of ordinary piety. The populations they led were not so different from their leaders. The British government, unlike the liberal establishment of today, had no new morality of their own devising which they hoped to impose on the colonies. The British leadership seems not to have had any ideological policy at all, beyond the maintenance of parliamentary supremacy throughout the Empire. The “culture war” of the Enlightenment started when the Revolution in France sought the end of class distinctions, traditional morality, and the expurgation of Christianity. In that war, Britain and the young United States were pretty much on the same side. (The United States also had its Jacobin “Left,” of course, which agitated for direct support of revolutionary France.) Though the culture war that began with the French Revolution has suffered various mutations, that is the conflict which continues to this day.

Eighteenth century Americans were certainly amenable to the idea that the British Empire was a hopelessly corrupt institution on its way to a resounding collapse. When Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” began to appear in 1776 (the whole work was published over a period of about ten years), it soon became part of the favorite reading of America’s leaders. It was cited as a mirror of the contemporary condition of Great Britain, and, at the Constitutional Convention, as a prophecy of what could happen to the United States if the participants did not do a good job. While its application as prophecy remains to be seen, as a diagnosis of Britain it was clearly wide of the mark. The British polity in the second half of the eighteenth century was a society striving to get a grip on itself. This, really, was what started the American Revolution. Parliament was trying to introduce some rudimentary fiscal and regulatory order into its haphazard Empire. The problem in America was that these reforms ran afoul of well-established traditions of self-government, with what results we know. However, in the decades immediately following the loss of the American colonies, decadent Britain went on to defeat Napoleon, reform its domestic life in the reign of a queen whose name became a byword for pious rectitude, and create the largest empire in the history of the world. Eighteenth century Britain was a disordered society. However, its disorder did not spring from moral exhaustion.

<snip>

This brings us to the question of the merit, and even the legitimacy, of the current United States Constitution. There is a long tradition in American historiography, most famously propounded by the Marxist historian Charles Beard, which holds that the Revolution itself was a popular rebellion, but the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was a sort of counter- revolution, an anti-democratic cabal of Masons and proto-capitalists intent on wresting power from the populist state governments. Olasky is of similar mind, with the addition that the Convention retreated not just from the principles of small government, but from the desire for holy government. A powerful central government, it seems, is an occasion of sin.

This assessment of the origins of the Constitution is counterfactual. If anything, it was the Continental Congress that smacked of conspiracy. It was composed, after all, of the representatives of provisional revolutionary governments, themselves with shaky legality and questionable popular support, who met to declare themselves the effective government of the continent. The Declaration it issued looked for its ultimate ratification not in ratifying assemblies, but on the battlefield. The Constitutional Convention of 1787, in contrast, was composed of the representatives of legal states. They assembled simply to draft a document, a constitution they claimed no power or right to impose themselves.

In further contrast to the Congress of 1776, the Convention discussed in detail all those issues of religious establishment and freedom of conscience which so deeply troubled pious Americans of the time. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution does not mention God. On the other hand, it actually does make some provision for liberty of conscience by forbidding the imposition of a religious test for public office. (It also allows for “affirmations” rather “oaths,” in deference to Quaker sensibility.) The Bill of Rights, soon to be promulgated by the First Congress, would provide more protections. It is doubtless true, as Olasky suggests, that the Supreme Court today has radically misinterpreted the First Amendment as a protection from religion, rather than as a prohibition of a state church. However, the flaw there is not the Constitution, but the prejudices of the modern judiciary.

What makes Olasky’s argument somewhat grotesque is the assumption that small government and holy government normally go together. If by “small government” you mean low tax, low service states with lengthy constitutions that make it almost impossible for the state to do anything at all, then there has been no lack of such regimes throughout American history, particularly in the Deep South. They have been notable chiefly for the corruption of their public officials and the poverty of their people. They have also been fantastically anti-democratic. Their relative isolation from federal oversight until the desegregation era permitted many a governor or party leader to entrench his squalid little tyranny with small danger of ever having to face a fair election. Much the same thing happened in the cities of the Northeast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taxes were higher, perhaps, but the urban Democratic political machines were as “close to the people” as any post-Revolutionary anti-federalist might have wished. Probably rather more so.

The Founding Fathers, who for all their faults set a standard of intelligent civic virtue unique in human history, discussed the merits of large and small government at length in the Constitutional Convention. They concluded, correctly, that small states were at least as prone to tyranny and corruption as large ones. They also saw that the attempt to turn the question of the powers of the federal government (indeed, the question of whether there should be a United States at all) into a choice of “big government, small government” was a red-herring. The real danger was anarchy and civil war, with tyranny to follow. This is one parallel with the past that today’s cultural conservatives would do well to remember.

[Voyager]

@tomndebb

The “no religious tests” clause has been a red herring throughout these three threads. The point of the “no religious tests” clause was to prevent the Congregationalists (descended from Puritans) in New England and the Episcopalians in Virginia and the Carolinas from preventing Baptists and Quakers and assorted “lesser” Christians from being excluded from government. (And if the occasional papist or Jew got in through that clause, they figured the Republic would survive, there being so few of those groups.)

It had nothing to do with any declarations about or recognitions regarding God.

Jacoby quotes Madison (I’ll see if I can find the quote) as specifically saying the no religious tests clause was to cover all people - not just Protestants. I don’t recall her mentioning that existing tests excluded any Protestants - the New York one excluded Catholics and not Jews. I think the Massachusetts test excluded both.

While religious tests are not a mention of god, they do show that the Convention was thinking about the need for a secular government, which makes the chance of an accidental exclusion of the term god less.

[Liberal]

@treis

Right, but they were still basically British and they were writting a Constitution modelled on the British government.

Huh? Other than Britain having a (more or less) bicameral legislature, where was there anything other than a trivial similarity?

But if the date isn’t a reference to God then there was no careless reference to God.

You’ve got that backwards. The implication is not biconditional. It is not a reference to God if indeed it was careless. If the Founders had been careful and deliberate, then they would have used just the year alone as they did elsewhere.

You’re joking right? You are argument is resting on how they wrote the friggen date and you have the audacity to call the preamble insignificant? Either way, with all the appeals to higher ideals in the preamble do you not agree a mention of God is glaringly absent?

You’re still not representing my argument correctly despite that it is quite simple. From what I can tell, you seem to have it exactly backwards. But I’ve repeated it sufficient times that, at this point, I’ll merely ask you to review.

[treis]

@Liberal

Huh? Other than Britain having a (more or less) bicameral legislature, where was there anything other than a trivial similarity?

Yes, The House was given basically the same powers as the house of Commons, the Judiciary had much the same role and the President had much of the same powers that the King did at the time.

As to the rest of your post I guess I just don’t feel like going over and over the same argument again. If you want to continue believing that the date constitutes a mentioning of God by all means continue.