The Constitution and the Candidates: Race, Religion, Romney, and Ryan

The four men facing off in the presidential election could only be there today because of how our Constitution has allowed America to evolve. Professor Akhil Reed Amar on what our constitution really says about religion and race.

by Akhil Reed Amar  | August 19, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

When the Philadelphia framers unveiled their proposed Constitution 225 years ago—September 17 will mark the official anniversary—most Americans were white Protestants. Anti-Catholicism ran deep, no Jews held high office, most blacks were enslaved, and the Church of Latter Day Saints did not even exist. Today, while America remains predominantly white and protestant, no white Protestant sits on the Supreme Court, which consists of five white Catholics, three white Jews, and one black Catholic. Among the four leading men now in the presidential/vice presidential spotlight, the only mainstream Protestant is black; two of the remaining three contenders are Catholic and one is Mormon. For this extraordinary evolution, credit the Constitution.

Antenna / Getty Images

The place where the Constitution meets religion and race remains a treacherous cultural battleground. This spring, the conservative political operative and self-styled historian David Barton hit the bestseller list with an audacious new book on Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of church, state, and race.  Last week, Barton’s publisher unceremoniously withdrew this publication from store shelves, as scholarly evidence mounted that the book is bunk.

Barton’s fall is a cautionary tale about the perils of oversimplification. That said, here are three simple principles to remember regarding race, religion, and the Constitution.

Principle One: The Constitution is Not a Religious Document

Consider first what the Constitution’s pointedly does not say. Although the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and several Revolution-era state constitutions had explicitly and prominently invoked God in their opening and/or closing passages, the federal Constitution conspicuously said nothing of the sort. Thus, neither the Preamble nor any other constitutional clause explicitly mentioned the “Creator” or “Nature’s God” or “the Supreme Judge of the World,” as had the Declaration of Independence and the New York Constitution of 1777 (which incorporated the Declaration); or “the Great Governor of the World,” as had the Articles of Confederation; or the “Great Governor of the Universe,” as had the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776; or “the Great Legislator of the Universe, ... the Supreme Being, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe,” as had the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.  The South Carolina Constitution of 1778 used the word “God” nine times—a word that explicitly appeared in every revolution-era state constitution save Virginia’s. But this word appeared nowhere in the federal Constitution—a pointed omission if ever there was one.

Consider next what the Constitution does explicitly say: “No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” As of 1787, almost every state did in fact use religious tests. Nine states incorporated these tests into the very texts of their written constitutions. So the Framers’ emphatic rejection of religious tests for federal office-holders was not business as usual. It was big news—a truly revolutionary New World idea whose reverberations powerfully resounded last weekend, with a Mormon and Catholic clasping hands as thousands of onlookers—mostly mainstream Protestants—clapped and cheered.

Consider, finally, one additional patch of constitutional text, specifically focused on the presidency. While most Founding-era state constitutions expressly included the phrase “so help me God” or some analogous reference to “God” in their obligatory oaths, the Article II presidential oath omitted all mention of God. This omission was surely pointed and purposeful, with the result that no duly selected president could be obliged to utter the word “God” or profess his belief in any supreme being.

A religiously neutral Constitution should not be confused with an anti-religious or anti-Christian Constitution.

True, the Constitution does specially privilege “Sundays” in a clause governing the ten-day window for presidential vetoes, but this provision was not expressly theological; and common days of rest can be justified on wholly secular grounds.

One textual arrow might seem to point in a different direction. Immediately preceding the thirty-nine famous signatures at the bottom of the 1787 parchment, we find the following words:  “done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth. In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names.” [Emphasis added.]

At first blush, these words might seem to contradict the central meaning of the religious test clause and the presidential oath clause. After all, the Constitution requires federal officials to take an oath to the Constitution itself. If that document really does proclaim that Jesus Christ is “our Lord,” then isn’t this oath-taking itself an improper religious test?

As it turns out—though this fact has until now not been widely understood—the “our Lord” clause is not part of the official legal Constitution. The official Constitution’s text ends just before these extra words of attestation—extra words that in fact were not ratified by various state conventions in 1787-88.

What, then, are we to make of these words? Just this: The words “our Lord” are much like the words “so help me God” in presidential inaugurations. No president can be obliged to utter these words in his inauguration ceremony, but presidents may choose to add them, if they wish. Over the course of American history, many presidents (and most modern presidents) have in fact chosen to add these words. Similarly, the Constitution nowhere requires a president to swear his oath of office on a Bible, but a president can choose to do so—and almost all presidents, beginning with George Washington, have in fact done so. Similarly, the thirty-nine framers at Philadelphia were allowed to profess their faith even in the public square. Some signers with quill in hand likely gave no thought to the “Year of our Lord” language and its theological overtones. But other signers may well have mused on things eternal, and on their personal relationships to God, at the precise instant when they added their names to a plan that they hoped would sharply bend the arc of human history toward justice. All of which leads us to our next general principle:

Principle Two: The Constitution is Not an Anti-Religious Document

A religiously neutral Constitution should not be confused with an anti-religious or anti-Christian Constitution. Just as no unbeliever may be barred from federal service for his atheism, no true believer may be excluded for his abiding faith.

Many of those responsible for America’s Constitution were folk of deep faith. Bracket, for a moment, the Founding generation. Whether or not Barton and his fellow travelers succeed in establishing that the leading framers wore religion on their sleeves, surely the generation of reformers who arose to stamp out slavery and its vestiges brought their faith dramatically into the public square. First and foremost, abolitionists believed that slavery was ungodly—and eventually they succeeded in inscribing their abiding moral principles in the Constitution itself, in a trio of Reconstruction Amendments adopted after the Civil War. Long before Barton, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell, and others made clear the clout of America’s religious right, America’s religious left—the abolitionist generation—gave us the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the crown jewels of our Constitution.

And with these amendments in view, we see our final general principle:

Principle Three: The Constitution Includes More Than the Founding

Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, slavery, race discrimination, and/or religious tests prevailed in most states. Today, all races and religions stand equal before the law, and do so not because activist federal judges have plucked liberal constitutional principles out of thin air, but because We, the People of the United States, amended our Constitution after the Civil War to hold state governments to much higher standards of religious and racial equality. None of the four men who now stand atop the political pyramid could have scaled these heights had the rules of 1787, grand as they were for their time, remained unchanged. As America celebrates the Constitution’s 225th birthday, let’s give credit not just to the Founders but also to those later generations who, thank God, made amends for some of the sins of our fathers. 

Portions of this article are based on Akhil Reed Amar's forthcoming book, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By.

Editor's note: The original version of this article stated that most presidents chose to omit "so help me God" from the presidential inauguration. It should be most modern presidents.

©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

My preaching and writing about the U.S. Constitution has not been about exposing the Constitution so much as it has been about promoting Yahweh’s law and advancing His kingdom. Following salvation and personal discipleship, these two issues should be paramount in everything we do as Christians. 

We have been called to be ambassadors of Yahweh and His kingdom (2 Corinthians 5:20). Consequently, we need to move beyond merely the understanding that Yahweh’s kingdom and laws are integral to the New Covenant (Colossians 1:12-13, Hebrews 8:8-10). We need to move into action and start taking some ground on behalf of our King. 

Would YOU want to have been found standing around the golden calf when Moses came down off the mountain?  Or would you want to be out of that line of fire?

How about today?

Imagine this authoritative loud voice coming down at you from above:

"WARNING WARNING: STEP AWAY FROM THE GOLDEN CALF!"

is that not the warning we are almost literally getting today?   -dwaine

Consider this as well:  When we learned the story of the Exodus and the golden calf in the Bible as sunday school students, etc, many of us were curious as to why folks of the past would simply worship a cow or calf, right?  I mean, my thoughts as a child had been...  "Wow.  Its just a cow.  Who would be dumb enough to worship a stupid cow?"  and yet, knowing that I perhaps didn't yet fully understand what was going on in that story, I nonetheless let it rest in my mind, figuring that someday I might understand their motives with greater wisdom when I grew up.  Well, that long-awaited day is coming around as we are learning that the Egyptian system of society was not that much unlike how today we have half the American nation worshiping a donkey, and the other half worshiping an elephant.  Now that we not only know how to read their hyrogliphics but also know about the secret society underpinnings that today still follow this interesting golden calf nature to some extent, it seems their golden calf was what represented their pagan societal religious/law system, of which over time the ancient Israelites had gotten very accustomed to living under during their captivity.  Do we in America really "worship" the donkey and elephant  ...or do we say that they are just the symbols of the system by which we have been so successfully conditioned to trust in?  I would posit that because the entire system is built upon man-made laws, acts and legislated edicts that are also clearly based on humanism and pluralism, etc, that such edicts are without question in opposition to the Father's laws ("thou shalt not kill" vs. abortion, etc) whereupon the Father has all unequivocal justification to also classify our own donkey and elephant as being "worshiped" by those who today "dance around" these animals in support.   It is an idolatrous system, be these animals mere symbols in their eyes or not.

In having done more research on the ancient Egyptian society and Scripture, I am going to step out on a limb here and say that the Israelites at the foot of Mount Sinai (who had then themselves just been learning that they had been misled and were being called by Father's mercies to come out of their enslavement as we are today) were likely a lot like how Americans of today have become, which is that we in America have been learning that we too have been foolishly following a symbol (either a donkey or elephant in our case) that stands for a now fascist/socialist-type of society that we really should have never adopted in this so-called "biblical" nation either.  The 'golden calf' of Egypt had therefore simply represented their time's early societal equivalent to today's communist type socialism, being that time's tyrannical Egyptian system of "sharing the wealth" (with the greater wealth at the very top of course) where the now murmering slaves (in their minds) at least had a consistent promise of a bite of bread and a roof over their heads each day for their labors.  In the long trek of the Israelites travelling in the wilderness, the transition to what might have been complete freedom of providing for ones' self was likely too much for most of the then "conditioned slaves" to handle, and in knowing no other way, they began to yearn to go back to the less worrysome routines of their "golden calf-conditioned" consistent lifestyles, not yet having understood the Father's better system of law and justice at that point.  

There were probably minor skirmishes and abrasive issues for these travelers after leaving Egypt where a problem resolving golden calf system might have been little more in their minds than a near instinctive reaction to these issues, and I would think it to be especially true in trying to find peace between clashes of naturally occurring groups like perhaps for example those of the more productive Israelites vs. the less resourceful or less-productive Israelites.  As they travelled across the wilderness, and before reaching Sinai, they had little if any idea of the law system of their forefathers from the times prior to the captivity in Egypt, and thus the multitides of the less fortunate perhaps wanted some fairness or (as they were likely used to viewing it) governmental "law and justice" in their midst, looking to the only system of such fairness that they knew at the time, "the golden calf system".   

This inanimate image of a cow would have been somewhat like our modern donkey or elephant. 

They had then essentially thereby created an opposing system, a "second choice" "party" if you will, opposite the God/Moses party ticket.  We could then see our own party division in America and imagine (and just for the sake of illustration, mind you...) the more productive and conservative of the Israelites at the foot of mount Sinai would have likely sided with Moses and the Levites, while the multitudes of those who were used to the constant provisions of the past slave masters (and perhaps those not as inventive, resourceful or motivated), likely at times yearned to be back in their previous slave like system due to the fact that their modest provisions would come every day without them being expected to try and find new ways to attain food as this new life in the wilderness was now challenging every individual with.

Today's similarly conditioned Americans can't stop dancing around their donkey or elephant in a similar fashion (can't let go of all of their own various benefits in today's top-down [criminal] "socialist-security" provisional "bread and circus" system), and as perfectly conditioned republicans, democrats or even "paper calf" (independent) "partakers" of our own overall 'golden calf' criminal system ...they simply keep blaming one or the other (as they've been trained to do by the elite) for all of the chaos and turmoil that is now taking place as a result of this now-imploding system.  The already alert of us are instead trying to beat the coming chaos to the gate and wake as many remaining people as possible to the fact that the entire system of satanic enslavement and its willing partakers is the problem, not just one party of it or the other.  Perhaps we can wake enough of them before famines or shooting wars begin.  The results of properly "preaching the kingdom of God" as Yeshua Himself called us to do, is to successfully educate and rally our time's Scripturally-ignorant people around the concept of that "Book of the Law" again, in an embracing of the Father's true law and justice system, hoping to bring about a peaceful, wholesome, free lifestyle under YHWH once and for all.

But they have to first "come out from among" satan's entire false system just as the Israelites had to "choose sides" in Exodus chapter 32, "shaking loose their bonds", denying themselves of all the obvious benefits of the beast's criminal enticements of both state and church.  Those who are still dancing around their state/church system will not be spared the Father's anger in any way [ 2016 UPDATE NOTE: just as the Israelites who rebelled against YHWH's law over their forty year wandering period had to all die off (were "consumed" KJV) before the true remnant nation would cross the Jordan into the land of milk and honey; see Joshua 5:6]. Remember that it is for this very reason of our unfaithfulness to Father's system that we are being sent this wrath in the first place.  Let me elaborate:

-dwaine

"...Repent: for the kingdom (government) of heaven is at hand."

-Yeshua in Matthew 4:17

The unstudied Christian on his way to praise the Constitution at his local town hall (without the Father's blessings), and wondering why he's not able to save the country after so many years of trying to do it this way.

(click on image for animation)

They refuse to believe that their man-made document is a part of the problem.

The Father is offering us again here lately, more wonderful advice and information to prove what I have increasingly been trying to say for a few years now, but rather than "having a love for the truth" (2 Thessalonians 2:8-12) where folks might have eagerly wanted to look into what we have found and what the Bible might have to say about this, they simply repeat blanket statements that they were successfully conditioned to say by the powers to be, thereby automatically and sadly defending their (make-believe) two (or three) party servant system. The same system that the servants laugh at anymore, etc, and they therefore do not see the real spiritual war behind all of this. 

Therefore this will play out just as the Bible had warned for those who are too wise and too busy for Father's ways, where just as the Bible says, they are "willfully ignorant" (intentionally avoiding what the Father is saying about such things).

In having received a growing number of emails of despair and doom and gloom from folks all over the nation who's plans are failing and who (at the same time) don't want to stop idolizing their man-made (and thereby contradictory law system and humanist solutions) please note that I am not "chastening" you here, but would only suggest to you then, that you are only causing me to feel sorry for you when you send me those messages of despair, even if you are just perhaps speaking out loud to me in hopes that I will agree with your sorrow, as you continue wondering why your unbiblical plans are not working in your corner of the world. But this does nothing but make me realize that whatever little love you may have for YHWH is perhaps only lip service for my sake at best (again, perhaps). 

One had written me claiming that "the Bible is about good and evil", but yet that same soul holds an immovable stance on America's man-made document of "good v. evil" laws instead of stopping to consider Father's document of good v. evil Laws whereby they might actually then compare the two to see who they actually honor. Those who are (just like Acts 19:28) crying out, "Great is the Constitution of the Americans" are doing just what the writers of that document wanted their slaves to do all along, where they are thereby living in their double-think world of believing that Christ can be your savior, but "man's legislation and politics is your ( - ahem - ) more reliable savior". Have they not even seen by their servants arrogance that their man made laws don't even have any "power" behind them anymore?

Those folks are missing the "higher power" picture of that "good and evil" that they say the Bible speaks of, that warns us in dozens of places against putting our trust in "man's solutions" as if man and his law-repairing skills are somehow going to be one's salvation.

The Constitution in not just unbiblical, it supports another religion altogether (and this even bolstered by a supreme court ruling from 1961). 

But if folks don't want to hear about this, then that is their choice, as their man-made documents are doing exactly as they were designed to do—trick them into subconsciously thinking man knows better than YHWH when it comes to "good and evil".

Consider this passage:
"Because they had not executed MY judgments, but had DESPISED MY statutes ... wherefore I gave them also statutes that were NOT GOOD, and judgments whereby they SHOULD NOT LIVE." (Ezekiel 20:24,25, emphasis mine, simply put: those who do not get back to YHWH's laws will not live through the judgment that is coming.)

We, on the other hand, are getting very excited about what we see on the horizon. But if its that much of an annoyance to the rest of you to serve YHWH with all eagerness of heart, then you are only making the Father even angrier at you guys.

-dwaine  aug 24, 2012

Simply put:

We now know that the U.S.Constitution was written so that the satanic elite could be evil to us.

Today, that same Constitution is being ignored and tossed aside by that same family of satanists because it doesn't allow them to be evil ENOUGH to us now.

It is therefore time to re-establish the seriousness of the Puritan values and the Law system we now again recognize as having more power than their god's system... 

...and endorse and implement that system...

YHWH's Bible.

-dwaine  aug 27, 2012

Now that we know what we know about the Constitution and the intention of it’s Masonic framers, and… now that we see them ignoring every viable and reasonable court proceeding we have ever learned, perhaps now the naysayers that have been opposing me for lo these many years will finally begin to admit that its not the politicians and the law experts that are going to stop this, but He that still sits on the throne as judge over all the universe, …YHWH!!! (perhaps that fanatic Dwaine wasn’t so stupid after all!)

And… Now that we know they could care less about our knowledge and accurate court proceedings and now that we also know that they seem to be banking on the “power” of their system, and even though I have personally spoken to Ron Paul and the others I will mention and feel that they even seem to be sincere in their beliefs in many ways, are guys like Rod Class or Gordon Hall going to be able to save us? How about Ron Paul, the occupy movement, or Edwin Viera? …are they going to save us? No. They don't have the enforcement power that my YHWH does my friends!

In the Movie, “A Lamp in the Dark” please note the way that the Jesuits are always angrily trying to squash and destroy the Bible, even banging their fists down on it in one scene. Why do they not do this to the Constitution if it is so much against their plans as the powers-to-be say it is, hmmm? I’ll tell you why, because the Constitution is one of their documents!!! That’s why! It’s so unbiblical that it can’t be blessed and enforced by YHWH upon anyone who admires or worships it, or even just counts on it to be their salvation!

-dwaine  sep 8, 2012

 

Sadly, many American idolators would rather fall on their swords, than fall on their Bibles.

-dwaine  sep 20, 2012