Playing at Being Gods

The Religion of the Constitution_ Chapter_One, 2023

A bookshop in London used an eye/brain catchy headline to define the political scenario that the U.S. was facing after the presidential election of Donald Trump and signifying the political and legal troubles that the U.K. was facing to enforce the BREXIT: "Post-Apocalyptic Literature has been moved to our current affair section". This headline can perfectly be a motto of the present book. What are the purposes of portraying the constitution and constitutionalism as a secular religion? First, to analyse the process of transposition that helps to identify principles, narratives, and techniques that, through mystification, aim to provide undisputed legitimacy and idolatry to constitutions. Second, to

Miss. CL rev., 2007

Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, 2019

This article explores the idea that recognizing God in the Constitution of a modern liberal democracy benefits both religious and non-religious citizens through symbolizing transcendent meaning and facilitating political solidarity. It first argues that pure autonomous reason is not sufficient to support these benefits and any attempt to ‘translate’ the religious principles into secular ones will diminish the benefits for religious citizens. Second, recognizing God in a Constitution does not necessarily impose a religious character, belief, or practice which is detrimental to non-religious citizens. Rather, recognition alludes to a shared heritage and tradition and acknowledges that religious individuals and groups are legitimately part of and interact with the modern democratic state. Finally, and most importantly, recognition of God as a broader symbolic recognition of religion can enhance the democratic process by motivating virtuous conduct and opening up the political space to higher levels of meaning and the good.

1995

People who study American constitutionalism refer often to religion as an analogy, or treat constitutionalism as a form of civil religion.

This article seeks to study the eternal protection of the principle of secularism in national constitutions. It examines actual existing constitutional arrangement which prima facie provide secularism an absolute protection from change in the constitution, in an attempt to identify and explain the character of these existing constitutional arrangements. Part I of this Article discusses Secularism as an Eternal Constitutional Principle. It reviews various constitutions which entrench secularism as an implicit or explicit principle. Part II explains why constitutional eternity should not be regarded as if the protected constitutional principles are non-negotiable. This is demonstrated through three case studies which focus on Turkey, Tajikistan, Mali. Against the backdrop of these case studies, I argue that eternal principles should be regarded as negotiable on three main grounds. First, as long as eternity clauses are not self-entrenched, they can be formal amended. Second, what is protected by the eternity clauses is a constitutional principle – secularism rather than a rule. In light of it elastic meaning, the principle of secularism can therefore be reshaped and reinterpreted with time. Third, when the values protected by constitutional unamendability conflict with the community spirit or the Volksgeist, even the mechanism of constitutional eternity would not be able to hinder the true forces in society which demand change. Part III addresses what I term “the Circle of Eternity”. It demonstrates the central place of eternity in religious laws and natural law, an element which distinguishes them from secular law. It then describes the secular developments in the age of rationalization, in order to finally reveal the paradox of modern constitutional eternity; on the one hand, the basic fundamentals of modern constitutionalism are secular, from the standing point of popular sovereignty and people’s rational ability to decide their faith, destiny and consequently, to design their constitutional order. Yet, at the same time, this very presupposition rests as an unalterable pillar – an absolute truth which the constitutional eternity.

Loyola University (Chicago) Law Journal, 2013

The presumption that God is omnibenevolent — inherently just, wise, kind, and merciful — is so pervasive as to be almost a tautology. Were God not just, God would not be God. And the United States Constitution, often analogized to a religious document, has regularly been spoken of in the same way. While we accept that the Constitution can tolerate injustice, we are highly resistant to the notion that it can actively command it. When that appears to occur, we are torn between our intuition that the Constitution must allow for justice, and our instinct that our sense of justice cannot deviate from the dictates of the Constitution. We reject either that the contested point is the true command of the Constitution, or the true requirement of justice. Moreover, because Western political thought predicates the legitimacy of constitutional law on its consistency with prefigured conceptions of justice, if we cannot adopt either of these apologias, the only remaining move seems to be rejection of the Constitution itself. In this review of Robert A. Burt’s book "In the Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict," I address this tension both in terms of theology and legal philosophy. Borrowing from the literature on "protest theology", I argue that neither our faith in the Constitution nor our faith in God is or can be predicated on the idea that these sovereigns are always behaving in a perfectly just manner. But I also reject the notion that injustice is an inherent part of these entities or that our relationship with them is unrelated to our desire for them to help instantiate justice. Our commitment to God and the Constitution is not dependent on their supposed perfection. It exists because it is a relationship we find meaningful even in spite of continual, mutual failings. It persists in spite of those shortcomings not because either God or the Constitution is "truly" or "essentially" just, but because we think it is a relationship worth preserving, and that each can at least be appealed to in the language in justice.

Zimmermann a God Locke and Montesquieu some Thoughts Concerning the Religious Foundations of Modern Constitutionalism the Western Australian Jurist 1 Pp 1 13, 2010

Christianity has played an enormously important role in the origins and development of modern constitutionalism. Indeed, Christian principles are enshrined in the most significant documents in Western legal history, including the English Bill of Rights (1689) and the American Declaration of Independence (1776). First, this paper analyses the profound impact of Christian philosophy on the development of modern constitutionalism. Secondly, this paper discusses the ongoing marginalisation of Christianity in Western societies, explaining how the secular intolerance of our day could constitute a threat to our fundamental rights and freedoms.

The author analyzes the relationship between religion and constitutionalism. The time seems propitious for an examination of the relationships in the West between Church/es, the State, and the general principles of "constitutionalism," a definition which cannot be separated from the analysis of its historical and secular roots.

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2017