The fatal flaw of the Founding, redux

Bob S. writes:

Thank you for your speech, “A Real Islam Policy for a Real America.” At the time of the American Founding, it was presupposed that any religion would be at least nominally Christian; which is to say it is highly doubtful that there was any intention to extend First Amendment protection to jihad, sharia, honor killings, polygamy and female mutilation. Some of this we have already been through with the Mormon church and polygamy, but the lessons of history are not today’s lessons, which is why we are still flunking today.

LA replies:

We’re still flunking today because we are caught in a typically American pattern of thought started by the Founders, which was that they tended to express themselves in uplifting, noble, abstract, universal terms that ignored particulars. They ASSUMED certain particulars (e.g., they assumed that the religions they were protecting under the First Amendment were Christian, or at least Biblical), but they didn’t STATE those particulars. What they STATED was only an abstract universal, “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion,” meaning literally ANY religion, even though they weren’t thinking ANY religion, they were assuming Christian (and Jewish) religion.

And this by the way is a good example of a point I’ve made many times: that when it comes to political speech, it doesn’t matter what one’s subjective intention is; what matters is what one actually says. If makers of a Constitution articulate a universal abstract principle that gives absolute protection to the free exercise of “religion,” then that is what they are going to get, even though their intention was not to protect all religions, their intention was to protect only Western religions. Indeed, they themselves are going to end up believing in the universal abstraction that they explicitly stated, not in the particularistic understanding that they were implicitly assuming.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 02, 2009 08:09 AM | Send