Introduction

In his work We the People (1991), legal and political theorist Bruce Ackerman offers a narrative approach to American constitutional history. In particular, he differentiates four constitutional moments in which the American nation underwent profound constitutional transformations. These are the Founding, the Civil War, the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement (Ackerman 1991) However, as one would expect, these events were of constitutional importance not only in the institutional but the intellectual realm. Indeed, looking through many of the defining texts of American political thought, it appears that the aforementioned moments produced far-reaching intellectual tensions between various ideas of the Constitution as enshrined in 1789, or more broadly between those of the American Founding (which, in most accounts, extends to the signing of the Declaration of the Independence in 1776 and the Bill of Rights in 1791). They brought to the surface conflicting representations by conflicting actors, encapsulating how the relationship between political discourse and the Constitution has evolved over the centuries. This paper aims to offer a short, yet concise guide to the narratives, uses and representations of the American Founding in the three ‘constitutional moments’ following the Founding itself. Thus, it shows that more than a set of documents, the American Founding represents an inherently contested symbolic field of collective and political memory.

The argument developed in this paper is that the symbolic politics of the American Founding correspond, principally, to three Judeo-Christian imageries. The first of these imageries fits the ideas of Paradise, the Holy Land, or God’s Kingdom on Earth. In this symbolic interpretation, the Founders’ Constitution is the ‘City on the Hill’, a transcendent idea; a historical event of almost biblical significance that directs the moral orientation of future generations. Should anything occur, the Constitution remains something to which to aspire and return. In other words, no matter the specific method of interpretation of the ‘Founder’s will’, the interpretation should act as a moral compass for American citizens. The second symbolic construct is close to the Puritan, neo-Calvinist focus on God as working through the believer (Weber 1987). Far from something already finished, designed or articulated, the Constitution is a work in progress, as the etymology of the word (-ion) suggests. The Constitution is the process of striving for ‘a more perfect Union’; it mirrors a Christian pathway of self-betterment and of collective creation (The Constitution of the United States, Preamble). In a spirit that is close to Ackerman’s own way of narrating American constitutional history, the Constitution is regarded as the perpetuation of the experience of the Founding; it constantly preserves and adapts itself through the deeds of the citizens and the Republic. To a great extent, this symbolic construct also corresponds to the Anglo-Saxon concept of ‘common law’ whereby the law is collectively produced, rather than declared. Finally, the Constitution may also be thought of as something to be transcended and defied; in this understanding, the Constitution is ontologically inferior to a higher principle, be that the union, the complexity of modern societies, or racial equality. According to the last principle, the racial hierarchy that defined its creation means that the Constitution may be regarded as the nation’s ‘original sin’.

First, this article will briefly elaborate upon the scholarly background of situating the American Founding within Christian symbolism. Second, it will briefly outline the three Judeo-Christian imageries drawn on during the subsequent section and explain their theological connotations. Finally, following Ackerman’s model, the paper turns to analysing representations of the Constitution as the ‘Holy Land’, followed by ‘God’s work’ and then, its inferiority to other principles, one of them – racial history – symbolised by the ‘original sin’. The paper concludes with some remarks on the ways the contested symbolic legacy of the Constitution shapes the American political landscape today. Following this, it becomes clear that in the great ‘constitutional moments’ of American history, all these conflicting constructs were utilised to narrate, justify or at all conceive of political agendas particular to their social, economic and political context. Different symbolic interpretations of the Founding were used by different actors, but in some instances by the same person across time, as will be specifically discussed in the case of Franklin Roosevelt. By the same token, in many cases the same symbol was used for deeply conflicting purposes, such as the abolition and maintenance of slavery. In this light, the Constitution represents the nature of American public discourse; it represents a collectively constructed and reconstructed field of conflict, a source of legitimacy and a quest for truth.

Placing the American Founding in the Christian universe

The term ‘civil religion’ was coined by the Swiss-French philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 work, The Social Contract. It referred to the set of symbols, beliefs and rituals accommodated within a republic with the purpose of aiding civic participation. Rousseau writes,

‘There is […] a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject. The dogmas of civil religion ought to be few, simple, and exactly worded, without explanation or commentary. The existence of a mighty, intelligent and beneficent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws: these are its positive dogmas. Its negative dogmas I confine to one, intolerance, which is a part of the cults we have rejected’ (Rousseau, 1977, 87).

Until recently, Rousseau’s conception of a civil religion had served as the dominant conceptual tool to make sense of religious ideas and connotations within the American body politic. Indeed, civil religion had continuously entailed the idea that the republic, in order to support its own existence and flourishing, accommodates (rather narrow) elements of divinity and belief. Nonetheless it does so only insofar as these elements themselves promote tolerance and a supra-religious, if not distinctly secular, order of life. In the Rousseauian conception, the approach of civil religion to religion proper is utilitarian at most: it involves and affirms it to the extent that it contributes to the wellbeing of the republic, even if within that domain it enforces ‘religion’ in the legal sense.

In the 1970s, a newfound interest in the religious connotations of the American republic emerged. Political scientist Sanford Kessler situated the concept of ‘civil religion’ within this Rousseauian tradition (Kessler 1977, 119-146). ‘Civil religion’, Kessler writes, ‘refers to religion which serves secular as opposed to transcendent or otherworldly ends. [It considers] the traditional Biblical faiths in the United States, and the Biblical religions themselves […] from the point of view of their political usefulness rather than their truth’ (Kessler 1977). To support his point of view, Kessler quotes numerous authors of his generation (including the ‘father’ of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol), who argued that religion supported republican flourishing. He also mentions George Washington and his famous Farewell Address, in which Washington affirmed that ‘of all the dis positions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports’ (Washington [1796] in Kessler, 1977) Across these references, the central, Rousseauian conception remains: religion is admitted into the institutions of the republic, but only as a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Both ‘Civil religion’ or ‘political religion’ are hardly straightforward concepts. There is no such thing as a pure and unbiased ‘mixture’ and ‘synthesis’ of politics and religion. In the conception of ‘civil religion’, which arguably dominated intellectual and scholarly discourse for the longest time, it was essentially the political that incorporated religious elements within its domain, not the other way around. For example, whether we speak of the American Republic or the totalitarian states of the 20th century, modern ‘secular religions’ were examined as the products of fundamentally political constructs that established quasi-religious identities within themselves. Since the publication of Kessler’s article in 1977, things have started to change. Ironically enough, next to Irving Kristol and George Washington, Kessler relies on that very Robert Bellah and that very essay of his, ‘Civil Religion in America’, that arguably inflicted a crucial blow to the Rousseauian tradition. Bellah, like Kessler, argued for the utilitarian self-relation of the American civil religion to Christianity. Nevertheless, he went in great detail elaborating the Christian symbolism of the American Founding, certainly in more detail than a purely Rousseauian conception of ‘civil religion’ would admit in light of the quote above, taken from the Social Contract. As Bellah writes: ‘It is easy to dispose of this sort of position as essentially utilitarian in relation to religion […]. But there is every reason to believe that religion, particularly the idea of God, played a constitutive role in the thought of the early American statesmen’ (Bellah 1967, 1-21; emphasis added).

Eventually, the shift of interest that occurred with reference to the two conceptual composites of ‘civil religion’ arguably happened in the particular context of the last decades of the 20th century, breaking down because of changes in the characteristics of scholarly debates and political ideologies of the time. First, the debate over American colonial history – one carried out through the antagonism of its liberal and republican framings – was coming to an end, with an imperative of nuance over dogma embraced by both of the opposing camps. The reconciliation of the two perspectives, each secular in their ideological leaning, created the room for an interest in the religious connotations of the Founding (Noll 2009). In parallel, the rise of a religious right since the late 1970s has made it clear that a vast segment of the American political landscape considered religion to be the locus of its political identity, over mere republicanism; this, in turn, has helped direct attention to the Founding as something inseparable from the religious context of its age. The resurgence of religion globally, despite the liberal pronouncement of ‘the end of history’, has only added to this shift in attention. Finally, for scholars working within the framework of that Cambridge tradition developed by Quentin Skinner in his essay ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, the question lends itself to whether we can truly consider the Deism of the Enlightenment – which had been influential among the Founders – as the tradition that informs American constitutionalism, therefore overlooking the overwhelmingly religious social context within which the Constitution was written (Skinner 1969). Notwithstanding the Deism of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others, the social context matters; it shaped the meanings attributed to the symbols of the American Founding, launching a tradition that entailed not the mere borrowing of ideas from the Christian universe but rather preserved many of its larger symbolic threads, in ways often conflicting.

That the context within which America was founded was indeed religious stands beyond doubt. Yet the special relationship of this religiosity with the political is important to bear in mind. For a burgeoning literature, in America, it was not so much that religion made political insofar as it aided the republic. Rather, that the emergence of the republic was a religious process from the very beginning. To begin with, as often told as part of the American national narrative, the first waves of settlers arrived in America motivated by – among some other factors – their persecution in Europe. If this projected into the future a constitutional emphasis on religious tolerance, it equally suggested a religious structure and symbolism to anything political. For example, Lynn D. Wardle traces the emergence of the American tradition of constitutionalism to the Calvinist ‘covenant theology’ that entered the continent with the Puritans (Wardle 1987). Wardle also adds that this ‘covenant theology’ also played a great role in the American War of Independence, igniting society against unjust imperial rule. In more recent scholarship, Mark A. Noll describes how the War of Independence was, in much of its discourse, a war for the ‘true religion’ and its free practice against the centralising ambitions of the British court and the Church of England (Noll 2009). According to Noll, the religious discourse operating at the time was a central asset in the fight against Britain and, by extension, the foundation of the American Republic and its mythology. Despite the personal beliefs of such Deists as Jefferson or Franklin, and the reservations of Madison and Hamilton towards the role of religion in public life, the symbolic tradition of American constitutionalism cannot be told without a structural emphasis on religion proper. Language and symbols continuously create and recreate ideas even where the philosophical mind attempts to intervene in them through its own commitments, warning against their potentially corrosive effect on the body politic.

This structural emphasis on religious symbolism, however, also entails that we are looking not merely for some religious ideas independent, as it were, from larger symbolic threads. We are looking, to be precise, for religious myths with a capacity to evoke and narrate ideas of struggle and political movement across time and space. As Wardle elaborates, until the Founding, among religious myths it was the language of covenant theology that narrated and encouraged political activity through its conceptual and philosophical association with the social contract. Then, however, as this essay shows, the Founding itself became a quasi-religious symbol, contested among different political actors and causes with reference to its different meanings. The three ‘constitutional moments’ analysed by Bruce Ackerman are important for the very specific reason that it was principally during these moments that political discourse returned to its own religious core due to the passions and anxieties underlying them. Lincoln, for example, was often adored as a new Messiah who sacrificed himself (being assassinated) for the cause of restored harmony with God (Bellah 1969), while Martin Luther King, himself an ordained minister, brought a new life to the religious imagery of the covenant through his prophetic speeches.

Judeo-Christian imageries in the American Founding

This article shall focus on three distinct symbolic threads within the American founding, although it absolutely allows for the possibility of other symbolic threads to be observed in the history of American political discourse. These three particular threads, however, might be considered the most significant ones, given their centrality within Christian religion and theology. Indeed, the ‘Holy Land’, ‘God’s work’ and the ‘Original Sin’ are motifs without which the fundamental messages of Christianity can hardly be told, let alone acted upon. Accordingly, they have also endured over time in varying manifestations. Here we are going to briefly analyse them in order of their Biblical and theological interrelation, which we may conceive of as follows.

According to Genesis, God created a world that was inherently and intrinsically ‘good’ (Scofield 2002). This inherent goodness echoes in the Old Testament conception of Canaan as a ‘Holy Land’. Similarly, in symbolic memory, the Founding would appear to many actors shaping American political discourse as some kind of divine revelation, a perfect moment of truth, to which every human being and the nation itself should aspire. Often in the language of American politics and in its history, we see references to the ‘Founder’s will’ and how the Founders actually wanted their polity to look like: indeed, they established certain universal expectations usually not met by the present political moment. This tension is the source of the rhetorical and ideological efficacy of the Founding as God’s ‘Holy Land’: it spontaneously contrasts that which is lacking and immanent with that which is perfect and transcendent. To make note of the fact that the legal-constitutional doctrine of ‘originalism’, which Earl Maltz (2005, 773) defines as ‘the theory that in constitutional adjudication judges should be guided by the intent of the Framers’ draws on similar ideas should be confusing. This is because historically, as we will see, the political struggles conceptualised through the idea of the ‘Holy Land’ were not exclusively of a conservative or reactionary mindset. On the contrary, whether the emancipation of enslaved people, the New Deal or the passing of the Civil Rights Act, the ‘progressive’ side of each constitutional moment substantially drew on the Founding as a quasi-religious model of inspiration and aspiration, as well as on the Constitution as God’s word. This again hints towards the understanding that American constitutionalism has a separate, symbolic and sacred dimension, one to be examined in its own right, rather than as a political construct.

Against this picture of revelation, leaving aside the theological problem of Evil and its cosmic relationship with God’s Creation, what generally holds across the different confessional and intellectual traditions is that man revolted against this inherently good order of things, thus committing the ‘original sin.’ If the symbolic construct of the ‘Holy Land’ marked the Founding as the highest order of political life, the ‘Original Sin’ approach identifies it as the lowest one, or at any rate, an enduring burden which prevents man – as sin does – from ever leading a life in complete harmony with God. In both of these versions, the notion of ‘Original Sin’ was frequently evoked in American political history, given its special flexibility in the critical scenarios that the individual constitutional moments of Ackerman represented.In these cases, actors constructing narrative accounts of the Founding and Constitution considered it to be an instance where the domain of the past held back progress; it was necessary to be overcome in its most optimistic characterisation, and more pessimistically as an event that would haunt the nation for eternity. This latter characterisation of the Founding was articulated with particular reference to slavery and its impact on American racial history. It is in this historical and discursive domain where the idea of the ‘Original Sin’ is most apparent, compared with other eras (such as the Great Depression) which certainly prompted contemporaries to reconsider the sacred identity of the American Founding, yet did not lead them to treat it as an absolute negative in the nation’ history.

After man’s fall from grace, God comes down onto the Earth in the image of Jesus Christ to save man from the original sin, and grant him eternal life if he chooses to believe in Him and follow Him. Rejecting the principal evil, privation, man – similar to how the ideal citizen relates to the Republic – may choose, to paraphrase a title by Cambridge theologian Andrew Davison, to participate in God, thus furthering his Creation (Davison 2020). Participation in God, or the idea of God working through the believer became one of the leading religious motifs in American symbolic politics. It was arguably already present with the Puritans, to whom none other than Max Weber attributes special importance in the ideational organisation of modern capitalism on the basis of their ascetic calling to work for the benefit of their brethren and their small social circles (Weber 1987). It was also written into the preamble of the United States Constitution itself: the Founders’ act ‘to form a more perfect union’ may be understood as the recurrent experience within American constitutional symbolism in the pursuit of a more and more harmonious social compact.

The ‘Holy Land’

During the successive ‘constitutional moments’ of American history, the narrative of the Founding as a ‘Holy Land’ was of eminent importance. This is arguably due to its great rhetorical efficacy: as the Constitution and the Founding represents the birth of America, evoking its ‘spirit’ appeals to sentiments of patriotism, civic duty and self-correction. Furthermore, this evocation can equally appeal to conservatives and progressives (if both terms are taken in their ordinary senses i.e., those who would wish things to remain the way they are and those who would see things develop for the better), with the Constitution serving as guidance for what that abstract term, ‘better’, really is. For this reason, the first great ‘constitutional moment’ of American history, as much as the successive ones, saw the Canaan-like representation of the American Founding used by both, more or less coherent ‘sides’ of the conflict. For some, there was an evident lack of harmony between the order of the day and the Founders’ provisions for human freedom and dignity. Indeed, despite the racial connotations of the American Founding, many abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner saw the ‘Founder’s will’ as a platform to demonstrate the unjust and unconstitutional nature of slavery, and the ‘unanswerable, irresistible truth, that the Constitution of the United States nowhere recognises property in man’ (Sumner 1863). However, anti-abolitionists such as Jefferson Davis used the Constitution for the very opposite reason. In a speech signalling his last departure from Congress, Davis evoked the infamous ‘three-fifths’ compromise, recorded in the Constitution, as a ‘representation’ that the Founders regarded African-Americans as a ‘lower caste’ (Davis 1860). This would ultimately prove to be a legitimation of his resigning as a federal senator, and, another symbolic layer, the Secession itself.

‘We recur to the combat which binds us together; we recur to the principle which our Government was founded; and when you deny them, and when you deny us the right to withdraw from a Government which thus perverted threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence, and take the hazard’ (Charles 1863).

That is, according to Davis, the federal government has exceeded its limits designed by Natural Law and the Constitution under the social contract, thus it becomes a legitimate act to secede, like the Founders themselves seceded from the English Crown. In the discourse of the Secession, as much as in the discourse of abolitionism, the Founding became a source of legitimacy, a point of orientation, and a moral compass for responsible civic behaviour.

In a similar spirit to the Secession, the New Deal as a ‘constitutional moment’ produced conflicting uses of the ‘Holy Land’ narrative. That is to say, while the New Deal era saw the rise of federal power as a response to economic uncertainty, both the agenda to increase that power, and the one to keep that power under control, were justified on the grounds of the Founding as the source of all moral and political wisdom. On the one hand, federal expansion in response to the Great Depression activated conservative concerns that situated limited government among the Founders’ principal intentions (Lloyd & Davenport 2013). For example, during the 1932 campaign, Herbert Hoover promised in a campaign speech in Indianapolis to – contrary to the incumbent president Frederick Delano Roosevelt’s ‘intentions’ for the Supreme Court – ‘build upon the foundations which our fathers have laid over this last 150 years’ (Hoover 1932). In turn, the progressive side of the debate on the New Deal was wary of the potentially disruptive impact of federal expansion on a political culture socialised along the ideas of limited government, and sought to appropriate the mythology of the ‘Holy Land’ for its own uses. As such, in one of his famous public radio talks called ‘Fireside Chats’, Roosevelt justified the reorganisation of the judiciary by virtue of what he ‘honestly believed to be’ the ‘clear and underlying purpose of the patriots who wrote the Federal Constitution to create a National Government with national power’ (Roosevelt 1937).

The turbulent decades of the Civil Right movement also saw conflicting representations of the Founding as a ‘Holy Land’. As a culmination of the 1963 ‘March on Washington’, in a nothing but close to messianic speech, Martin Luther King declared to the crowds that the Founders ‘[signed] a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir’ (King 1963, 183). Again, the Framers’ will is represented as something complete, and the Constitution as a moral compass that every generation of Americans inherits on their way to ‘God’s kingdom’. However, while the Civil Rights movement reached considerable success with the 1964 Civil Rights Act pushed through by the Johnson administration, the constitutional discourse evoking the Founding as a moral compass was embraced by none other as Johnson’s opponents – not altogether appealing to the African-American vote. Arguably, the political domination of the ‘constitutional moment’ by Johnson and the Democratic Party through their platforms of civic justice and the welfare state led to Republican attempts to reinvent the Grand Old Party through a growing emphasis on constitutionalist and libertarian discourse. Soon enough, the rising generation of fusionist conservatives began to appropriate and inhabit the ‘Holy Land’. For the founder of the Young Americans for Freedom movement, William F. Buckley, the American Constitution was ‘the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfil its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power’ (Buckley 1960). For Johnson’s Republican opponent in the 1964 presidential campaign, ‘differences of opinion’ were tolerable until ‘they are not inconsistent with the pledges we have given to each other in and through our Constitution’ (Goldwater 1964). In the 1960s too, the ‘Holy Land’ was a contested and dynamic land.

‘The Original Sin’

The representation of the Constitution as inferior to a higher principle is the final feature of political discourse analysed here. Arguably, this tool was used whenever the Constitution, in a certain moral, social or strategic context, proved inapplicable. Hence, it could be used frequently during ‘constitutional moments’, periods of time when the Constitution as a consensus was broken. The most evident context is the Secession and the Civil War, a time when America lived through its most profound constitutional crisis. To many, the Founding easily appeared as a historical event. Unlike Frederick Douglass who located the injustice of slavery as enshrined in the Constitution, William Lloyd Garrison considered the Constitution to be a ‘covenant with death’ and an ‘agreement with hell’ (Finkleman 2000). In other words, he saw the racial hierarchy within which the Founding was carried out as an ‘original sin’ that deprived the Constitution of legitimacy. In another context, Abraham Lincoln subordinated the binding power of the Constitution through referring to the higher value of the Union. Arguably, Lincoln’s 1861 Inaugural Address could be seen as an attempt to persuade the Southern States to recognise the non-necessity of secession. According to this address, the Constitution is a device that holds the Union together by virtue of its abstract nature. No political question, such as the fate of slavery, is clarified by the Constitution, therefore both positions – the abolitionist and the anti-abolitionist ones – are legitimate under the Union. In other words, it is the Union that matters more than the Constitution and not the other way around – secession, and not the maintenance of slavery, is an illegitimate act. In this (unsuccessful) rhetorical tool to prevent secession, the Constitution as the chief binding nexus of American states is devalued in comparison with the Union. Consequently, the symbolic unity of the Founding as consisting of the twin births of the Constitution and the Union was questioned.

As implied before, many political actors of the New Deal era subordinated the Constitution not to the principle of the ‘Original Sin’ or that of the Union, but to the principle of planning and economic regulation. In the context of the New Deal era, the Constitution and the associated mythology of the Founding seemed more and more to be obstacles on the road to progress. Rexford G. Tugwell, adviser to the Roosevelt administration, theorised about the necessity to bring an end to obsolete constitutional limitations created during the 18th and 19th centuries:

‘The first series of changes will have to do with statues, with constitutions, and with government. [… If we begin to plan, we shall be changing once for all […], doubtless calling on an enlarged and nationalised police power for enforcement. We shall also have to give up a distinction of great consequence, and very dear to many a legalistic heart, but economically quite absurd, between private and public or quasi-public employments. […] Furthermore we shall have to progress sufficiently far in elementary realism to recognise that only the federal area, and often not even that, is large enough to be coextensive with modern industry, and that consequently the states are wholly ineffective instruments for control’ (Tugwell 1932).’

Tugwell, accordingly, dismisses the ‘legalistic’ provisions of ‘constitutions’ by virtue of their economic irrationality. In the progressive discourse surrounding New Deal legislation, ‘modernity’ became a catchword for every social change that decision-makers desired. In turn, the constitution became a mere immanence in history, a relic to be overcome if progress was to be attained. Its ability to link together American history as some kind of transcendent object was heavily weakened.

During the heated, racialised ‘constitutional movement’ of the Civil Rights movement, the narrative of the ‘Original Sin’ became prevalent again. Like the Civil War era, the Civil Rights movement confronted American society with the central question at hand: namely, whether there was such a thing as the American nation, or it was from the very beginning irreversibly pervaded by the racial (and class) divisions of the Founding era. These questions came to the forefront of American political discourse especially through the work of Malcolm X. As his undelivered speech, the Ballot or the Bullet, testifies, he regarded American democracy as a ‘disguised hypocrisy’ and himself as a victim of violent Americanism rather than an American himself. More precisely, it is the original design of the ‘American system’ – otherwise, the constitution – that made X and all the other ‘22 million black people’ a victim (Malcolm X 1964). In this sense, the American Founding becomes again an obstacle of social justice; it is something to transcend rather than something to be guided by or contribute to.

‘God’s work’

Representing the constitution as a collective work and a learning process has been, in American political thought, another influential method to conquer the symbolic space opened up by the Founding. Arguably, its rhetorical power lies in its ability to flexibly incorporate the changing experiences of American society amid changing particularities. As such, it is possible to make the case that it could be more frequently used by those favouring social progress. However, it is not only progressives who have used it. For example, the secessionist Calhoun theorised about the necessity to ‘aid and perfect’ the ‘right of suffrage’, and thereby the constitution (Calhoun 1850). For Calhoun, the great, divisive questions experienced by society should not be solved by mere majoritarian decision-making; rather, ‘concurrent majorities’ have to be organised that look after the ‘organic’ working of society – no organ, no locality is excluded from the working of the whole (Calhoun 1850). This anti-majoritarian suggestion, to some extent already present in the constitution, should of course be viewed in the political context of the growing tension between North and South regarding questions of slavery and political economy. In this light, Calhoun’s suggestion to enhance the anti-majoritarian features of the constitution can be understood to hijack political efforts to abolish slavery or Southern free trade – as well as to correct the original creation of the Framers.

The idea of the constitution as constantly adapting to the peculiarities of time and space rose to prominence during the progressive era, culminating in speeches and writings of FDR during the ‘constitutional moment’ of the New Deal. At this time, progressive leaders such as Wilson and the two Roosevelts required legitimations for enlarging the scope of federal authority. For example, in a spirit similar to Wilson’s concept of a ‘living constitution’, Roosevelt evokes the meaning of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ as a social contract whereby citizens consented to governmental power in exchange for ‘certain rights’, adding that ‘the task of statesmanship has always been the redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order’ (Roosevelt 1932). Unlike figures like Tugwell, for Roosevelt modernity and the rise of complexity here does not neutralise the Founding, but it transforms its rigid, fixed meaning, into a more flexible concept. The Founding in this understanding represents certain abstract principles rather than articulate, mechanical institutional structures; and it depends upon the requirements of the age in what solid form these principles should appear.

The ‘constitutional movement’ of the Civil Rights movement saw theories of comparable attitudes to the Founding and the constitution. Arguably, the most influential among these was Hannah Arendt’s writing on civil disobedience. Inspired by the protest waves of the Civil Rights movement, Arendt argued that among all the nations (and languages) over the world, it is the United States that can give a constitutional form for this disruptive political activity, civil disobedience (Arendt 1972). Invoking Montesquieu and Tocqueville, Arendt sees ‘consent’ as the ‘spirit’ of American law, and thereby sees political and associative struggles for consent as compatible with the American Constitution (Arendt 1972). Once again, the Constitution is represented as a work in progress, something that does not have fixed horizons and is constantly built by public action. Crucially, the fact that Arendt’s reflections were written at the same time as those of Malcom X, and alongside the many voices who questioned Black Americans’ and other minorities’ membership within the American Constitution, might enable us to inquire more into the very nature of her approach – and that of the ‘God’s work’ motif – as an intermediary between the ‘Holy Land’ and the ‘Original Sin’: as an option which did not dismiss frustrations over a lack of constitutional membership but proposed a radically ambitious and reconciliatory plan to extend the constitutional community, hitherto discriminative. If the Montesquieuan ‘spirit’ of the American Founding can be renewed and reshaped every day, Black Americans and the other minorities do not necessarily have to feel excluded due to their absence in the original founding moment.

Conclusion: The Founding and The U.S. Today

In the 21st century, American symbolic politics has arguably entered yet another period of intense and wide-ranging evocations of the Founding. With the financial crisis of 2008-9 and the rise of identitarian discourse on both Left and Right, this is far from surprising, as anxieties and tensions are again venturing outside the linguistic framework of day-to-day procedural politics. Of the three religious constructs analysed here – the ‘Holy Land’, ‘God’s Work’ and the ‘Original Sin’ – it is the first of these that has been particularly prevalent. During their presidencies both Barack Obama and Joe Biden have directed this motif into a characteristically contemporary territory of meaning, by reframing the Founding along the slogans of diversity and equality (Obama 2008) . In contrast, their Republican opponents have employed the rhetorical power of the ‘Holy Land’ in order to oppose the regulatory provisions of the ‘Affordable Care Act’, also named as Obamacare, or to take a stand in cultural and social issues such as same-sax marriage, abortion or gun control. Further, the social and political movement represented by the Tea Party, articulating around such libertarian conservatives as Congressman Ron Paul or his son, Senator Rand Paul, instrumentalised the ‘Founder’s intentions’ effectively in organising discontent against some measures of the Obama administration (Paul 2016). To this day, such prominent Republicans as Florida governor Ron DeSantis are using the ‘Holy Land’ motif as their central rhetorical tool in an escalating culture warfare (DeSantis 2022). At the same time, constitutional dilemmas, particularly those pertaining to the Second Amendment, have become deeply polarising issues that encapsulate the tension between the ‘Holy Land’ and the ‘God’s Work’ constructs. To illustrate, a YouTuber with a subscriber base of six million has caricatured arguments opposing the 2nd Amendment on the grounds that it is obsolete in the context of contemporary military technology (such as nuclear weapons) as standing in opposition to the idea of the musket-bearing Americans of the Founding era. (Crowder 2015) .

Nonetheless, the argument that this linguistic proliferation signals an emergence of a new ‘constitutional moment’, in Ackerman’s sense, does not seem to hold. While the influence of social media and growing identitarian battlegrounds appears to show the proliferation of language-related to the Founding with political aims in mind, there seems to be no central constitutional issue at hand upon which emergent constitutional ‘identities’ – enacted above and outside of party boundaries – could be built. In this regard, we seem to be confronted with a situation we may consider an ‘inflation of language’, where discourse increasingly seems to discharge from political language-objects and accelerate spontaneously, thus losing its ability to accommodate the concerns and viewpoints of the electorate. The problem is rendered even more severe by the fact that religious identities in American society are increasingly becoming political identities themselves,resulting in the supra-political realm – religious symbolism – gradually eroding from public life. Since the rise of the religious right since the late 1970s, religiosity as such has become an increasingly reliant predictor for party preferences, with 67% of citizens attending services monthly or more frequently voting Republican in the 2022 elections (Pew Research Center 2023) Though a ‘secular turn’ may be impacting on American culture, at the same time another axis of polarisation articulates itself in American society (Campbell 2020). Religion (and religiosity) increasingly loses its traditional role as the basis of consent and as a source of symbolic imagination with regard to the particularities of the age. If constitutional symbolism gradually loses its chief source of inspiration, namely religion, how could the American body politic be renewed?

Perhaps the area in which the competing representations of the Founding are the most manifest in today’s political discourse is American history itself, particularly its racial dimension. In a way that is, again, responsive to the particularities of time such as the death of George Floyd in 2020, concerns and frustrations over African Americans’ and other ethnic minorities’ lack of ‘constitutional membership’ are on the rise. This is not altogether unjustified, considering President Trump’s ‘Mount Rushmore’ speech that used the constitutional narrative of the ‘Holy Land’ in a way that tacitly questioned America’s responsibility for slavery and human suffering. Importantly, not only did he associate the eventual abolition of slavery with the Founder’s intention, but also moved the focus away from America and her responsibility to world history and the ‘universal’ feature of slavery:

‘They would tear down the principles that propelled the abolition of slavery in America and, ultimately, around the world, ending an evil institution that had plagued humanity for thousands and thousands of years’ (The White House 2020).

Crucially, the other side of the debate over slavery is dominated by the ‘original sin’ approach. In recent years, the New York Times has carried out an extensive mission to educate the American public on what it considers to be the true origin story of the American nation. As the website for The 1619 Project tells the reader, ‘it aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative’ (The New York Times Magazine 2019). In this regard, the historical and symbolic primacy of the American Founding is negated in favour of a larger story it is represented as but one chapter in: the story of slavery and of racial segregation.

How among such conditions a newfound national unity could be found – which by all means could be the real task of an emergent ‘constitutional moment’ – is an important but challenging question; it is not in the scope of this paper to attempt to answer it sufficiently. Possibly, the most fruitful approach lies in returning to the ‘God’s work’ construct, an intermediary motif which accommodates minority concerns yet maintains their symbolic relationship with the larger republic. The specific issues it should tie into, however, are yet to be articulated, and will likely not manifest lest a more public experience of constitutional crisis takes hold. Considering the polarised stage of recent American elections, the likelihood of such a crisis taking place appears to increasingly encroach on the horizon of possibility.

Author’s note: This paper originated as a coursework essay for a class I attended as a student at Sciences Po, entitled ‘American Political Thought from the Colonial Era to the Present’ and taught by Albert Castle. I owe to him much of the inspiration and intellectual immersion necessary for composing this paper.