The U.S. Constitution is, by all appearances, a secular document. It prohibits the use of religious tests for federal officeholders. It guarantees the right to practice the faith of one's choice. It bars the state and federal governments from establishing an official religion. Some of its original provisions, including the fugitive slave clause, are so odious that is difficult to believe that any religious person could have agreed to them.
It should come as no surprise, then, that early American evangelicals found much to dislike in the new Constitution. During the ratification debate, Anti-Federalists warned that the ban on religious test oaths for federal officeholders might one day facilitate a Catholic takeover of the government. No self-respecting Protestant, they reasoned, could favor ratification of such a "Godless" document.
In the 1840s, the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, disgusted by the framers' compromise with slavery, declared the Constitution a "covenant with death and an agreement with Hell." To drive home the point, he publicly burned the copies of the document.
A few decades later, the leaders of the prohibition movement - nearly all of them evangelicals - denounced the Constitution as "the great legal fortress of intemperance." The problem, in this case, was that the Constitution's due process and commerce clauses protected property rights in liquor. In order to transform America into a dry utopia, the prohibitionists concluded, a constitutional amendment would be necessary.
Some of the causes championed by early American evangelicals were laudable. Others now seem misguided, or even downright pernicious. But it is hard not to admire the honesty with which these reformers pursued their policy aims. When the will of God (as they saw it) was at odds with the principles of the framers, they frankly admitted as much.
How the times have changed. When it comes to the Constitution, most of the self-proclaimed evangelicals in the current presidential field want to have it both ways. They pledge fidelity to the principles of the framers, yet their religiously inspired policies are often at odds with any plausible reading of the Constitution's text.
Ben Carson, arguably the most visible evangelical in the field, recently published a book in which he pledges to return the nation to the "sacred principles" of the Founding. Strangely, Carson has also suggested that Muslim Americans should be ineligible to serve as President, at least if they do not "reject sharia and all the portions of it that are talked about in the Quran." He may be unaware the Constitution explicitly bans religious test oaths.
On his campaign website, Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, promises to return the nation to its constitutional roots. But his interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is curious, to say the least. He believes that fetuses should be classified as "persons" who may not be deprived of life without due process. Meanwhile, he would revoke the long-settled Fourteenth Amendment principle that all persons born on U.S. soil are entitled to citizenship. (Huckabee, along with Cruz and Jeb Bush, would also impose a religious test on refugees fleeing violence in Syria.)
Ted Cruz, another devout Southern Baptist, boasts that "he has spent a lifetime fighting to defend the Constitution." Yet he - along with most of the Republican field - has enthusiastically championed the cause of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The idea that the Constitution might require Christians serving in government to refrain from discriminating against gays and lesbians is, according to Cruz, a form of religious "persecution" against Christians. (Not surprisingly, he seems less concerned about the "persecution" that, by his own logic, must result from requiring Muslim American bureaucrats to check their beliefs at the office door.)
Not content to claim divine backing for their preferred policies, these candidates want to claim the support of the framers as well. It is enough to make one long for a time when evangelicals saw the Constitution for what it is: an essentially secular document, for better or worse.