Godless and Providential?

The Godless Constitution and the Providential Nation by Steven D. Smith is timely reading for America’s 250th birthday, especially amid increasing debates over Christian Nationalism.

Even as American religious practice has declined over several decades, more religious voices are paradoxically clamoring to legally establish their preferred form of religion. Integralists want a Catholic confessional state. Some Calvinists who self-identify as Christian Nationalists believe civil magistrates should repress blasphemy and apostasy, among other spiritual duties.
Smith rightly sees this clamoring for more religion in governance as a reaction against the decline of providentialism and civil religion.

Smith, who teaches law at the University of San Diego, readily admits that the US Constitution, omitting any reference to deity, is at the very least semantically godless. But it and the American story are animated by a profound sense of providentialism, the spirit of which has receded. He hopes it will revive, but he does not advise how.

God’s role in America’s founding is long debated. Some conservative Christians have created a cottage industry of generating quotes from Founding Fathers about the importance of God and religion, specifically Christianity. Their project seems to believe that if it can be proved, with enough historical evidence, that America’s founding was Christian, then contemporary America will affirm Christianity. This expectation is naïve.

Such Christian endeavors of course push back against a century of secular historians minimizing religion in America’s Founding, which they claim was more strictly an Enlightenment project. In their narrative, the Founders were at best deists who offered perfunctory homage to popular piety. The Constitution’s silence about God seemingly supported their argument, as did the Declaration’s vague reference to “Nature’s God.”

Meanwhile, contemporary self-identified Christian nationalists insist that America is a Protestant nation and that government should enforce this identity through religious tests for public office and perhaps for voting, while also suppressing non-Christian religion, blasphemy, and apostasy. They note that the US Constitution did not forbid state religious establishments, and they insist the Founders only opposed established religion on the federal level. (They ignore or disdain Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who overthrew their own state’s religious establishment with the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.)

In contrast to these camps, Smith adopts a nuanced path, noting that some of the major Founders such as Franklin and Jefferson were clearly not conventional Christians. But they, like most thoughtful people of their time and place, saw America within the context of Providence. Their providential assumption, which sustained American concepts of liberty, equality, rights, and moral progress, endured through World War II. Post-war court rulings either removed religion from public spaces or reinterpreted public piety as constitutionally defensible only because it wasn’t really religion but just cultural monikers.

Continue reading at Law & Liberty here.

Mark Tooley is the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence.

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