But Not on the Sinkhole

John Adams once said that our Constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people. It is wholly unfit, he said, for any other. Now how can this help us sort out our discussions of Rick Santorum and Ron Paul?

Let us set aside (for a moment) what I think folks in our circles would agree to be lapses in judgment on the part of both men. Rick Santorum shouldn’t have voted for No Child Left Behind, team or no team, and Ron Paul shouldn’t have supported the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell for the American military. Let’s deal with these men at their best, as representatives of two different tactical approaches to fixing the mess that America has gotten into.

Using the terms in a similar way that they were used in the debates about ratifying the Constitution in the first place, let’s call them the federalist and anti-federalist approaches. The anti-federalists were suspicious of centralization, and it was their pressure that caused the Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution.

Anybody who has followed this blog for any length of time knows that when it comes to questions of constitutional process, I am an anti-federalist to the back teeth, as is Ron Paul. Rick Santorum, not so much. So why, then, am I as sympathetic to Santorum as I have been, and as semi-critical of Paul as I have been? What’s with that, hey?

It has to do with the fact that, according to John Adams (who expresses my sentiments at this point very well), the Constitution is “wholly unfit” for the American people as we currently are. Wholly unfit is a pretty damning indictment.

In order to return to the Constitution rightly, we would have to begin with repentance. In repenting, we have to distinguish repenting of our sins against God’s law, and repenting of our “sins” against constitutional law. We have been guilty of both, but Moses outranks Madison. I am not opposing these men one to another — I like Moses, and I like Madison. I believe we should repent of both kinds of sins. I happen to believe that our constitutional sins have been, within their genre, egregious.

But if we, in our current immoral and irreligous condition, return to a strict constitutional process, then we are asking the Constitution to do something it was never intended to do, and which it cannot do. It is a government for Christians, not libertines. We cannot ask the Constitution to be an adequate framework for men who frame iniquity with a law (Ps. 94:20). We cannot allow the Tenth Amendment to serve as a legitimate cover for murder and sodomy. It was never intended to created cities of refuge for wickedness. When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do (Ps. 11:3)?

There was a reason why Utah couldn’t be allowed into the Union before they did something about that polygamy issue. This was because the Constitution presupposed a moral and a religious people.
This is also why the Constitution doesn’t have a process for kicking a state out. The constitutional framers did not at all envision the kind of dreadful circumstances that we are up against now. They were presupposing a moral and a religious people. But now? Seven states have given their blessing to homosexual marriage. All fifty allow citizens of their respective states, conceived in liberty, to be dedicated on the bloody altars of federal tyranny and personal convenience, in that order. All fifty states have let that go on for pushing half a century now. A moral and religious people?

Constitutional law is a stately mansion, fashioned out of colonial brick. It was heavy, and presupposed a solid foundation in the character of the people, a foundation which initially held it well, and kept the lines straight for some years. But that foundational character has now been eroded, and we have ourselves a dismal sinkhole. I have no objections whatever to a project of rebuilding that constitutional mansion. I am all for it. I do object to rebuilding it on the sinkhole.