Of covenant and constitution: a Declaration of Dependence
Of covenant and constitution: a Declaration of Dependence
An oblique reflection on chapter 5 of Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery
“[T]here is only one nation known to me,” the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once said, “that had the same dual founding as biblical Israel, and that is the United States of America.” America, he continued, “had its social covenant in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and its social contract in the Constitution in 1787.”
Rabbi Sacks is not alone in framing America’s founding documents in biblical and near-sacred terms. Christian cultural critic Os Guinness, also of British extraction, cannot help but equate the covenant at Sinai—what he calls the “Exodus Revolution”—with the American experiment in liberty. “Historically, it was the Exodus Revolution, and not the French Revolution,” Guiness writes in Magna Carta of Humanity, “that lay behind the genius of America’s ordered freedom or covenantal and constitutional freedom” (p.4).
It’s true, of course, that one can draw a straight line from Sinai to Philadelphia. And Tom Holland (another Brit!) taps yet deeper biblical roots in his book Dominion:
That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were, owed less to philosophy than to the Bible: to the assurance … that every human being was created in God’s image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic—no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think—was the book of Genesis.
But we ought not conflate the root with its fruit. Biblical covenantalism is indeed the “seedbed” of American constitutionalism, but they are not one and the same. One is the divine original, the other a well-constructed human model. We do well to remember the difference.
Jefferson himself warned against sacralizing the present political order. In 1825, he attached a note to the portable writing desk on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence. It reads, “Politics, as well as Religion, has it’s superstitions. These, gaining strength with time, may, one day, give imaginary value to this relic, for it’s association with the birth of the Great Charter of our Independence.”
Enter, then, Hazony’s bracing critique of the U.S. Constitution. “Perhaps [its] most striking innovation,” he writes in chapter 5 of Conservatism (“The Purposes of Government”), “is the absence of any explicit mention of religion.” While most laud the omission, Hazony decries it. “[W]ith hindsight I think we can say that the failure to acknowledge God and religion was a mistake with lasting consequences,” for “[w]hatever government does not honor is weakened by this neglect” (p.249).
Rewind to 1776 for a moment. I’ve often wondered how the Declaration might have read if the drafting desk had been manned, not by an Enlightenment rationalist like Jefferson, but by a serious biblical thinker.
Someone like John Jay—an author of the Federalist Papers, the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and later president of the American Bible Society.
Or perhaps, somewhat ahistorically, John Quincy Adams—the nation’s most learned and well-read president, who held the Bible in high esteem.
Or even more ahistorically, Lincoln—the greatest exponent of an American “theology of liberty.”
How might the Declaration have read if these men been handed the pen? They may have drafted a Great Charter more firmly rooted in the Bible, one that honestly acknowledged its dependence upon biblical ideas about covenant and moral responsibility. Maybe it would have read something like this:
We hold these Truths to be revealed in Holy Scripture, accessible by reason, and confirmed in the history and traditions of our people: that all persons, male and female, are created in the Image of God; that each is endowed by Him with a dignity rooted in moral responsibility; that from this dignity flow moral and civic obligations to God, family, and community, as well as certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the freedom to pursue our individual and collective good; and that to fulfill these obligations and secure these rights, a people may covenant and combine themselves into a civil body politic, grounding the exercise of government power in the people’s consent and embodying their firm commitment to these Truths, without which their mutual covenant could not endure.