On Religion Tea Party Rooted in Religious Fervor for Constitution By _SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/samuel_g_freedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per) Published: November 5, 2010 Late on the afternoon of Election Day, James Renwick Manship joined the assembly of _Tea Party_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tea_party_movement/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) supporters outside the Capitol. He wore a cravat, a powdered wig, a tricorn hat and a brass-buttoned coat in the blue and buff colors of the Continental Army. Such is the standard attire of his vocation portraying George Washington.
Clasping a replica of a 1775 flag, which bore the credo “Appeal to Heaven,” Mr. Manship proceeded to read aloud the Preamble of the Constitution. An ordained minister and a Navy veteran, Mr. Manship had also prepared a sort of concordance for the Preamble, connecting its language of justice, liberty, defense, tranquillity and so on to verses in _the Bible_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/b/bible/index.html?inline=nyt- classifier) . “You had divine providence, intuitive intervention, or something like that,” Mr. Manship, 57, said of the Constitution in a recent phone interview from his Northern Virginia home. “God’s words, the concept of godly government, are woven into the warp and woof of the fabric of our nation and this Constitution. It’s rightly called the ‘Miracle in Philadelphia.’ ” Mr. Manship’s own words, in turn, get at the essence of the Tea Party movement, and in particular its chosen role as protector of the Constitution. Rather than viewing the Tea Party as a political phenomenon — rather than wondering if it is populist or Republican or reactionary — one might better understand it through the prism of religion. Seen through such a frame, the Constitution is the Tea Party’s bible, and that holy book is embraced as an inerrant text. The denunciations of the Progressive movement, the New Deal and the Great Society by the Tea Party and its de facto televangelist, _Glenn Beck_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/glenn_beck/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , recall the religious battles throughout American history between literalists and interpreters of Scripture. And this conflation of civic and sacred, this expression of what scholars call “Constitution worship,” has roots that long predate the Tea Party. Some trace back to the implicit spirituality of America’s self-image as a chosen people, the image of this nation as a city on a hill. Others, paradoxically, derive from the founding fathers’ decision not to establish a state religion, which left a certain kind of belief or faith looking to attach itself to something else nationalistic. “There’s a strong strand of divine-guidance thinking, thinking about American exceptionalism,” said Mary Beth Norton, a professor of early American history at _Cornell University_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cornell_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org) . “ People have certainly seen the texts of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as the equivalent of a secular religion, with the idea then that you can’t challenge these texts.” Sanford Levinson, a professor of law at the _University of Texas_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_tex as/index.html?inline=nyt-org) , cited several other factors: “In a country as fragmented as the United States is — we don’t have a national religion, a really shared ethnicity — the kinds of emotions that would be directed at organic nationalism are displaced onto the Constitution.” To prove the point, Professor Levinson’s book “Constitutional Faith” quotes example after example of overtly religious language being invoked about the Constitution. Washington, in his farewell address, called for the Constitution to be “sacredly maintained.” James Madison wrote that the nation’s “ political scriptures” must be defended with “holy zeal.” George Sutherland, a _Supreme Court_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org) nominee in the 1920s, described the Constitution as “divinely inspired.” The constitutional lawyer Louis Marshall, drawing an analogy from his Jewish heritage, referred to the document as “our holy of holies.” As that range of preachers and preachings suggests, Constitution worship has not historically been the province of any one political faction. Despite the Constitution’s tolerance of slavery, the black abolitionist _Frederick Douglass_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/frederick_douglass/index.html?inline=nyt-per) intoned its language about equality and inalienable rights. Even as several of _Franklin D. Roosevelt_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/franklin_delano_roos evelt/index.html?inline=nyt-per) ’s New Deal programs were being struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the president was recommending in one of his fireside chats that families read the Constitution again and again, “like the Bible.” Of course, there is more than ample evidence of the deep disagreements the framers themselves had about the content and wording of the Constitution. Its acceptance of slavery and denial of female suffrage would hardly meet any contemporary American definition of an enlightened, to say nothing of divinely flawless, text. The creation of the amendment process is a fairly evident acknowledgment of the Constitution’s capacity for imperfection and anachronism. (Many of the Tea Party’s defenders of the Constitution advocate repeal of the 14th and 17th Amendments, which makes it confusing whether all or only some of the amendments fall short of inerrancy.) Yet the political debate about whether the 20th-century welfare state violates the Constitution has religious analogies going back more than a millennium. The Karaites were a Jewish sect founded in about 800 A.D. that considered only the written Torah, not the subsequent rabbinical commentaries on it, to be binding. The Protestant Reformation occurred in part as a rejection of the _Roman Catholic Church_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/roman_catholic_church/index.html?inline=nyt-org) ’ s body of clerical teaching. In contemporary America, the evangelical wing of Protestantism holds to a fundamentalist reading of Scripture while the mainline denominations espouse a doctrine that evolves. If anything, the Constitution is especially vulnerable to literalism. “ There is a major translation problem for literalism in relation to Christian doctrine,” said Jon Butler, a professor of the history of religion in America at Yale. “And there’s the matter of the age of the texts. But there is no translation issue with the Constitution, and it’s only a couple of centuries old. So that makes it so much more susceptible. There it is. You can find it on the Internet.” And from there, it is a short trip indeed to the engaged, enraged Tea Party of 2010, and a campaign that charged Democrats with a kind of Constitutional heresy. “The Constitution has always been the trump card, the ultimate political weapon,” noted David Greenberg, a professor of history and presidential biographer at _Rutgers University_ (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/rutgers_the_state_university/index.html?in line=nyt-org) . “If you don’t like what the other side is doing, you say it’s unconstitutional.” -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
