—because you are no doubt looking for a summer read that somehow fits in with how crazy and festive and ominous and convoluted everything has gotten, particularly in June, the folks at Canon have decided to give away a particular e-book throughout the month of June. The link is right here, and it is offered to you with no apologies whatever. I mean, if Alvin Bragg doesn’t have to apologize, then nobody has to apologize.
The book is Ride, Sally, Ride and, when you consider that it was written a few years ago by a cessationist, the whole thing strikes one as astonishingly prescient. If you have put off obtaining a copy because certain haters who hadn’t read it described it to you as raunchy, then you will be pleased to discover that it is actually . . . sweet. Think of it as a cheerful dystopia.
And now, back to our regular programming . . .
Introduction
There is now a debate raging over whether or not the Constitution is a dead document. Some say that it is and some say that it isn’t. I am, in the main (qualifications soon to follow), on the side of those who say that it is.
This round of the debate was kicked off by Nate Fischer, and then made more festive by The Wade Show, where Wade Stotts does the estimable work of translating heady works of conservative political theory into short video clips, which practice then as a consequence tends to set the paleo-conservative cat among the complacent conservative pigeons. Here is the clip in question:
If you add up all the different platforms and reposts and such, this particular bit of wisdom is northwards of half a million views now, and has gotten reactions from various conservative worthies, and so I think we can say that the general topic is now genuinely before the house. Put another way, it is time for me to chime in.
But then, after I wrote a bunch of this post already, the leprous New York justice system weighed in on the debate by delivering a guilty verdict against Trump in that misbegotten hush money trial. That trial was to due process what a Flying J hot dog is to fine cuisine, except that the hot dog is actually edible. This was the moment when the American public starting banging the parrot on the counter, saying that it had clearly joined the “choir invisible,” and Alvin Bragg, behind the counter, looked at us all with his best fat face, and said, “No, it hasn’t.”
A Slight Adjustment
At the same time, I do want to refine or adjust the question slightly. I believe it would be more accurate for us to say that the constitutional order that the Constitution represented is no more, and what I mean by that should become clearer as we go on. We still have two senators from every state, in other words, but a number of other aspects of our governance are not in the same shape at all. This may all sound pretty grim, but not for believing Christians. I say this as one who knows that we are not supposed to trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead (2 Cor. 1:9). The Constitution is dead, long live the Constitution. More on that in a bit as well.
In addition to this debate, which is of course the primary and more substantive debate, a secondary debate has started to take shape as well. Some of those conservatives who are maintaining that the Constitution is still alive and well have taken to charging those who believe it to be deceased with somehow being happy over the fact that the Constitution is no longer with us. So let us deal with that canard first, for it is, I am sad to say, a canard.
Let’s see if we can arrange for this canard to assume room temperature, just like the general welfare clause did.
Coroners and Murderers
It should be possible, or so I maintain, for a man to do his job as a coroner, and pronounce somebody to be, in fact, deceased, without finding himself charged, upon doing so, with complicity in the murder of the deceased. Saying that someone is dead is not the same thing as wanting them dead. These are two entirely different propositions. Doing one’s job as a coroner does not supply the police with a motive.
Bringing the question around to the issue at hand, a man might be someone who loved the deceased, and who is a mortal foe of the murderer, a murderer who did what he did in order to seize control of the estate, which is, as I understand it, something that has happened in history a time or two, and who is now conducting all his nefarious business in the name of the deceased, all legal and tidy-like.
Is it possible, in other words, to be an earnest advocate of the Constitution as it operated in the years after the Founding, and at the same time to be an earnest opponent of the way the Constitution is being handled and misrepresented now? The answer is obviously yes. Is it possible for a man to have a strong preference for the outlook of James Madison, chastened by the likes of Patrick Henry, over the outlook of Earl Warren, cheered on by the likes of Sonia Sotomayor? I again think yes.
Are we unpatriotic or un-American if we remember, together with Joe Sobran, that anything called a “program” is unconstitutional?
Did the Constitution of the Founding era contain a right to privacy that allowed for the slaughter of 60 million infants in the womb? Or did it not? Did the Constitution of the Founding allow for the solemnization of sodomy that Obergefell gave us? Did the Constitution of the Founding have an incorporation doctrine that allowed the Federal government to dictate to the states what they could and could not do? Instead of the original enumerated powers structure in which the states restrained the power of the central government? Did the Constitution of the Founding allow states to have religious tests in order to hold office? Was the Constitution of the Founding a constitution formed in a Christian social order, assuming that social order, or in a secular one?
These differences are not reducible to powdered wigs and tri-corner hats, in the one corner, and neckties and briefcases in the other. They represent two completely different social orders, but with the same constitutional flag flying over both of them. The only sensible conclusion is that the flag does not now mean what it used to mean.
At some point, the kings and queens of Charn flip in their fundamental allegiance, crossing over some basic ethical lines, but without changing the name of Charn.
Now some of the corruptions and downgrades of the original constitutional order were done legally (e.g. the direct election of senators, the franchise for women, etc.), but most of the damage was accomplished by assorted SCOTUS justices with eye patches, wooden legs, and parrots on the shoulder (e.g. Wickard v. Filburn, 1942). “Arrggh. We have so ordered.”—Justice Robert Jackson.
So it seems to me that it should be possible for someone to bring charges against the murderer of the deceased without automatically incurring the accusation that we are somehow celebrating the death. As Blackstone would have put it, were he here, “it followeth no way.”
In sum, I would invite every participant in this debate to read this, and then this, and then look us straight in the eye and try to tell us that the constitutional order of the Founding is alive and well. It is no such thing, manifestly, and certain quarters of this discussion make me feel like somebody threw me into that Monty Python sketch referenced above and screwed the lid down tight. “This parrot is dead.” “No, it isn’t.”
The Queen Mum of American Conservatives
Conservatives love the Constitution, and they really like it when she is trundled out onto the balcony to wave at the crowds. But what with the bunting and the confetti, and the music and the noise, it has been easy for them to miss the fact that the bad guys have been using a body double for some decades now.
Within limits, denial is a natural part of the grieving process. But outside those limits, such denial can really turn into a pathological sentimentalism. The Founders were functioning within a Christian social order, one in which religious differences were understood to be the disagreements between Anglicans and Presbyterians. Today the religious differences are between the old order Amish, those who fly airplanes into skyscrapers, and then groomer secularists with their full court press tranny agenda. Our social order is not the same as their social order. Their social consensus was overwhelmingly Christian. Our shambolic social consensus is a madman scribbling on the walls by this point.
Because you need to play cards with the hand that you are dealt, the task of Christians today is simultaneously to restore as much of a Christian social order as we can (preach the gospel!), while at the same time working for a constitutional and political framework that is consistent with that social order. Because we are laboring toward the same Christian end as the Founders were—form and freedom together—what we intend to accomplish will have a lot of overlap with our first Constitution (federalism, express powers, separation of powers, etc.). But because we are working to restore a constitutional order from an apostasy that is nearly complete, there will necessarily be some differences as well.
The first American settlement was built on the foundation of a millennium of Christian teaching and consensus in the West. The next American settlement will have to be building in the midst of the bombed out rubble of the last four centuries of secular Enlightenment. There will therefore be some stark differences. Those differences will not be the result of some peculiar CN ideology, but rather because of the lay of the land . . . because of what we are up against.
How Constitutions Are Formed
Written constitutions are a great idea, but like all great edifices, they need to be built on a solid foundation. That solid foundation needs to be the unwritten constitution of a people. The unwritten constitution of a people consists of their shared worldview assumptions—ranging from religious faith, on one end, to dietary habits on the other. We are talking about worship, history, laws, customs, family connections, language, mores, music, food, land use, and so on. These need not be circle on top of circle, like a stack of quarters, but the Venn diagram really does need to have a lot of overlap.
N.B. For the reading-impaired, please note that “skin tint” was not included in the foregoing American list. In Japan and Finland it would be included, but not here.
The idea that secularists have is that all such distinguishing markers are trivial or incidental. All cultures are actually religions externalized, but secularists believe that religions are quaint airy-fairy things, and cultures consequently amount to nothing more than whether you like your foods spicy or plain. For the secularist, all the different cultures of the world are like a United Colors of Bennetton ad, where all the people are different colors, but think exactly in the same way. They could all swap colors if they wanted. Or outfits if they wanted. Shoot, they could swap genders if they wanted. But they all obtained their pureed worldview assumptions from the same monochrome educational system—that secular blender—set on high.
For the secularist, all religions are just superstitions, and to the extent that cultures are outgrowths of religion, they are therefore trivial. The secularist thinks that cultural differences are nothing more than decorations. But for the believer, the religious question goes down to the root of all our realities, and so our cultural presuppositions, built on our religious commitments, are consequently one of the most ineradicable aspects of our being.
This is why it is not possible to take a Third World nation at random, plonk a Jeffersonian constitutional order on them, even with help from the U.S. Marines, and have it amount to anything much. This is why our exercises in nation-building have been such a disaster so many times.
The unwritten constitution of a people is their cultural face. The written constitution is like putting make-up on that face. This is why Adams famously said that our Constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people, and that it was wholly unfit to govern any other. This is screamingly obvious, and because we are no longer a moral and a religious people, it follows that the Constitution is unfit for governing a people such as we have become. And this is not a criticism of the Constitution.
If I might repurpose a little something from the book of Hebrews . . .
“For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second. For finding fault with them, he saith . . .”Hebrews 8:7–8 (KJV)
If you, my friend, are wanting a massive crowd of porn-addled, pot-smoking, libertarian lotus-eaters to build you some alabaster cities, and then to harvest all those amber waves of grain, you are looking for something that “ain’t gonna happen.” As the beautiful girl said to the autistic chap at the bus stop that one time.
Which Is Why Parts of the Constitution Are Still Alive . . .
Having said all this, I do believe that parts of the Constitution really are still alive, but they are only alive because of their robust presence in America’s ongoing and unwritten constitution. They have gotten down into our cultural bones.
A good example of this would be the Second Amendment. Our court system would be more than willing to take all our guns away, and they have the legal theory to do it too. They would need to say something like, “The right to keep and bear arms actually means that you don’t have the right to keep and bear arms. So let it be written, so let it be done.” They are brazen enough to do something like that to the written Constitution, and so the only reason they haven’t is that they know how embedded the whole thing now is in our unwritten constitution. It is widely known that we have a lot of guns—about 120 of them for every 100 Americans. So, as it turns out, the almost 400 million guns we have are not the constituent part of any living document.
Another way of saying this is that parts of the Constitution are still alive but only because they are alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. We still have the right to keep and bear arms because so many millions of Americans still think that we do.
The same goes for parts of the First Amendment, with a lot of us still thinking that we have the right to speak our minds. I think that, for example, and so I type on, head bent over the keyboard, with smoke coming from my ears.
But the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, however, are as dead as Tutankhamen.
Where does this leave Americans who have taken an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, whether foreign or domestic? As we are clearly in a time of transition, I believe such individuals should defend every aspect of the Constitution that is still alive in an unwritten form, and pray that God would give us an opportunity to restore those parts of it that have become a dead letter. This fulfills the spirit of the thing, I think.
The Constitution is Dead. Long Live the Constitution.
When I tweeted the above a week or so ago, some took it as a cryptic form of Zen Presbyterianism. Which is it, oh, oblique one?
Although my outlook is generally optimistic, for reasons shortly to be stated, I also believe that every Christian, optimistic or not, needs to budget for the judgments of God. In other words, if Jehovah God were to destroy the United States of America tomorrow with an asteroid shower, there would be no injustice in it. Apart from whether or not our constitutional order is dead, it certainly deserves to be dead. We dismembered far too many babies in the name of that Constitution to be able to hold our head up if a holy judgment were to come after us. We deserve a fierce judgment for the constitutional theory we have tolerated.
We have offed, in the name of the Constitution under discussion, ten times more human beings who bore the image of God than Hitler ever did. And on top of that we have the hypocritical effrontery to try to score political points against those Christian who object to this mayhem with Hitler memes aimed at them. Their CN proposals, ahem, might lead to tyranny and bloodshed. To which I can only reply, “where have you been, friend?”
Simple question: is same sex mirage a constitutional right? If it is, then doesn’t that make the Constitution wicked? And if it is not a constitutional right, then doesn’t that prove that some significant dirty deeds are currently being done in the name of this Constitution? And that there is nothing much we can do about it? It should be noted that the “Constitution is alive and well” contingent is no more able to stop this foolishness than the most ardent Christian Nationalist is able to. But at least we among the CNs want to. Why are the CNs being upbraided because we are acting like we would like to stop it?
Which would be better? To keep the external form of our constitutional order and also to keep same-sex mirage, or to outlaw same-sex mirage under a reformed constitutional order? Which should we prefer?
But although we don’t deserve mercy . . . I also believe that God is merciful to the wretched and ungrateful, including those who have pulled down the accumulated years of constitutional imbecility on their own heads. However, if we are spared, it will be nothing but exorbitant mercy, undeserved mercy, oceanic mercy. Please remember that part.
This chaos of our own manufacture is what we have now done to ourselves, and I believe we are currently in the middle of a Fourth Turning. The kind of chaotic frenzy we see around us, as the lefties like to say, is “not sustainable.” It is going to end one way or another. It may end with a loss of our freedoms, or it may end with our freedoms restored. But one thing this tumult will not do is continue on indefinitely. These are birth pangs, and it will either be a restored Christian order or it will be some rough beast, that beast who has been slouching towards Bethlehem. That’s right, you heard it here. Stupidity is not sustainable. Trying to change the weather by bringing in communism is not sustainable. Trying to pretend that men can become women by making them eunuchs is not sustainable. Trying to govern ourselves without reference to the God of heaven is not sustainable. In the long run, organized stupidity is not a plan.
The Constitution is dead, but so are the pretenses of secularism. This means that our choice will be between Christ and some form of naked idolatry. Christ or chaos. Christ or the green cult. Christ or a global state. Christ or total sexual license. Christ or some earthly incarnation of the outer darkness.
Oceanic Mercy
I cannot leave this subject without reminding everyone, yet again, that if we are to be delivered, it can only be through our sins being honestly repented and truly forgiven. All of Judea has to go down to the Jordan to listen to John the Baptist. And if we turn to God in honest confession, we will see that there is no other remedy than the one that God has offered to us through the penal and substitutionary death of Christ on the cross.
The serpent is a liar and the father of all liars. He has ensnared us here in America with all of his bright and shining lies. “You shall not die. You shall be as God. Your nation will not disintegrate. You can be autonomous. Secularism is the radiant future, and will bring us all to a glorious end of history, with liberal democracy laid out before us like a shining path. Promise.” But there was venom hidden in his lies and we now know there were poisonous toxins in his bite.
The children of Israel were once in this same position, being bitten by venomous flying snakes, and so Moses was instructed to make a bronze image of one of them, and to erect it on a pole. Anyone who looked at this impaled image was promised healing from the affliction of that bite. And centuries later, Christ, in one of His most mysterious sayings, said that when He was lifted up on the cross, He was going to complete His mission in the place of that bronze serpent (John 3:14).
So if you look to Christ on the cross in faith, what should you see there? You should see all of your sins fixed in place, nailed to the wood. You should see all your vaunted secular autonomy, bleeding out. You should all see your lusts—lust for power, lust for women, lust for boys, lust for autonomy, lust for godlike standing—writhing because of the spear rammed clean through all of them. That is what you should see.
And so the serpent dies. When you rub your eyes and look again, what you see there is Jesus of Nazareth again, bloodied and dead. The moment when He had no form or comeliness is now past, and He is the beloved master and teacher again. He truly died, but there was some sort of a staggering transaction that happened just moments before. He who knew no sin became sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). Not only did He die, but so did all of our spiritual stupidity, all of our insolence, all of our hubris. That died too. And the serpent’s tongue was crucified as well. So stop believing him.
What remains is to wait for the day of triumph, the day of resurrection, the day when all forgiven sinners come out of the tomb together with Him. Will this generation of Americans be among them? That depends. Have they heard? Have they repented? Have they believed?