THE POINT OF A RECIPE IS NOT THE RECIPE BUT THE CAKE (via Tom Corcoran):

Religion and the Founders: The Nation is out of step with the American people. (Christopher Levenick & Michael Novak, 3/07/05, National Review)

If one were looking for an example of how desperately out of touch the Left is with mainstream American culture, it would be difficult to find a better example than the February 21 issue of The Nation. That issue features an article by Brooke Allen entitled Our Godless Constitution, which attempts to prove that "[o]ur nation was founded not on Christian principles, but on Enlightenment ones." What a strange distinction! It certainly would have been foreign to the Founders, who thought the moral precepts of Christian faith indispensable to the survival of the infant republic. And it's a distinction that remains foreign to the vast majority of Americans today. [...]

Allen commits plenty of...errors in her argument, but we'll confine ourselves to looking at just a few.

She asserts that "[i]n the Declaration of Independence, [God] gets two brief nods." Not true. As every schoolboy knows, the Declaration mentions God four times: "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," "endowed by their Creator," "Supreme Judge of the world," and "divine Providence." Equally problematic is her dismissive description of these invocations as "brief nods." (In fact, if you exclude the long list of grievances against George III, the Declaration on average invokes the name of God just about once every paragraph.) More important than its frequency is the indispensability of divine sovereignty to the document's overarching natural-law argument. The source of human rights, according to the Declaration, is not located in mutual human consent but rather in the creative activity of God.

Allen declares that "in the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is only mentioned twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense)." Not true. The specific word "God" occurs twice, but neither time in Vidal's sense. In Federalist #18, Madison uses the term in reference to Apollo; in #43, he echoes the Declaration by invoking the "transcendent law of nature and of nature's God." Yet The Federalist employs other terms for God. John Jay mentions the blessings of "Providence" three times in Federalist #2. In Federalist #37, meanwhile, Madison twice takes note of the "Almighty," whose finger "has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution." Incidentally, a God who personally intervenes in the course of human affairs is not consistent with the Deist account of God. Such a God was known to the Hebrew prophets and the Christian apostles, but not to the philosophes who imagined a cold and distant watchmaker deity.

Allen claims that "our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God." Not true. The Constitution does invoke the name of the Lord in the enactment clause of Article VII: "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." Allen no doubt writes this off as a mere formality. But if we are to take seriously her claim that the "omission" of references to God in the Constitution is "too obvious to have been anything but deliberate," perhaps we need to take a second look at the text. A close reading reveals that the Constitution mentions only one other specific date. Article I, Section 9 allowed the importation of bonded slaves until "the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight" — a date that excludes the words "of our Lord." Given that she (incorrectly) thinks the "omission" of references to God was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, surely she would agree that the omission of the phrase "year of our Lord" was likewise too obvious to have been anything but deliberate. And if it was indeed deliberate, wouldn't this omission imply the ungodliness — or, to use a word not much in fashion at The Nation, the sinfulness — of chattel slavery?

Indeed, the fact that the Founders referred to God more frequently in the Declaration than in the Constitution is in itself further evidence of their belief in the compatibility of Enlightenment and Christian principles. The Founders learned from both classical statesmanship and Christian theology that the moral virtue of prudence involves first identifying the good to be achieved, and then formulating the means to achieve it. The Declaration, with its lapidary presentation of natural rights endowed by the Creator, identifies the good to be achieved. The Constitution in turn formulates the means for achieving this divinely appointed end. In this way the Founders rendered unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's.

The list of Allen's errors goes on.

Certainly the strangest ploy that secularists have to turn to in discussing the Founding is to pretend that the end of the Founders was simply to produce a government, which requires them to ignore at least the Declaration and the Preamble, not to mention history, the Founders' other writings, and logical construction of the text.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 7, 2005 9:00 AM