Michael Buckner and Jay Lucas Debate on America's Founding Documents--Part Three (Jay Lucas on Constitution)
5 July 2024
I’ve suspended Friday Freethought Perennials for a while in favor of alternating essays from two men I deeply respect. One of these, Michael E. Buckner, is my son and has been one of the two or three most important people in the world to me for over 50 years—and he’ll be presenting the side I firmly agree with. The other, Jay Lucas, is pastor of Grace Community Church in Washington Courthouse, Ohio. I not only respect Jay—I like him. Despite my strong bias in favor of Michael, I pledge even-handedness in this cordial exchange. The two will take turns presenting essays based on their opening statements in a debate back on 16 March on “America's Foundational Documents: Christian or Secular?” (see my Letter on 12 March for more detail), then at least one rebuttal each. The order will be:
MEB (Declaration)—Friday, 21 June
JL (Declaration)—last Friday, 28 June
JL (Constitution)—today, 5 July
MEB (Constitution)—12 July
MEB (Rebuttal)—19 July
JL (Rebuttal)—26 July
With more to follow (?) if both men agree more is warranted—conclusions, perhaps, or second rebuttals, or concurrences for either or both that minds have been changed.
Both understand that they can include links, footnotes, referrals to the writing of others, etc. —and that they need not adhere too closely to their actual debate remarks.
Both have agreed to this process.
Today, Jay Lucas on the US Constitution—
The US Constitution
Jay Lucas
In Michael’s book, Chapter 7 is titled “The Unchristian Nature of the Constitution.” Within that chapter Michael claims that the Constitution is a purely secular document. On page 90 he writes,
Again, the authority to form the new Constitution is said to derive from the people. Now there is no longer even a rhetorical flourish of invoking God, not even in the most vague and nonsectarian of terms. The purposes of the new Constitution are all secular.
Then on page 92 he writes, “The Constitution (including the Bill of Rights) is resolutely, breathtakingly secular.”
It might surprise you to hear me say that to some degree I agree with Michael that the Constitution is secular. I think several of the Founders who gave us the Constitution would say it is secular. However, what I mean by the word secular, and what the Founders meant by it, is very different than how it is often used today and how Michael uses it in his book. I will address this issue in our dialog time and also explain the original intent of Article VI; which forbids religious tests as a condition of holding a Federal office.
For now, let me remind you of the words of the preamble to the Constitution:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The preamble states six purposes for the Constitution. Tonight I want to focus on one of those purposes, which rightly understood in its historical context declares, in the strongest of terms, a distinctly Christian truth, one that I think undermines the entire thesis of Michael’s book. What is it? I refer to the phrase, “the blessings of liberty”. Everyone who saw that phrase when it was written in 1787 by the author of the preamble, a Christian by the name of Gouvernor Morris, knew that to call liberty a blessing, as the Constitution does, was to acknowledge God as the source of that blessing. Indeed, it is an intentional continuation of the Declaration of Independence which says, “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In other words, the Declaration says that liberty is a God-given right, and the Constitution says that its purpose is to secure the blessings of liberty for the people. One of the fundamental errors in Michael’s book is found on page 15 in the Introduction, and it undermines everything else that follows it. He writes, “The U.S. Constitution-our governing charter-nowhere even hints that our rights come from God.”
Today, many people use the term blessing, or blessed, as a way of expressing emotional happiness or enjoyment. They are not expressing thankfulness to God. It is much like what Thanksgiving Day has become for many. You hear people say the things they are thankful for, but that thankfulness is not specifically directed to God nor is there an acknowledgement that He is owed a debt of gratitude. This phenomenon holds true today when people hear the term, “the blessings of liberty.” However, when these words were used in 1787, the term “blessings of liberty” was a concise way of acknowledging that liberty is a gift from God and that it is a self-evident truth that all men are endowed by their Creator with an unalienable right to liberty.
The primary purpose of the Constitution was to create a system of government which would effectively secure and protect our God-given blessings of liberty. I could easily keep you here past midnight quoting America’s Founders who said exactly that about our Constitution. One classic example is George Washington, who served as President of the convention that wrote the Constitution. Once the Constitution was ratified in 1788, George Washington was elected as the first President. On April 30, 1789, Washington gave the very first inaugural address which was delivered to the first Congress. In his address Washington began by giving God thanks for providentially guiding the nation to ratify the Constitution. Here are his exact words:
It would be improper to omit, in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe – who presides in the councils of nations – and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States a government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes… In tendering this homage to the great author of every public and private good, I assure myself that it expresses your sentiments not less than my own, nor those of my fellow citizens… no people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men, more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.
Throughout his address, Washington referred to God’s active hand. Please listen to his final words,
Having thus imparted to you my sentiments as they have been awakened by the occasion which brings us together, I shall take my present leave, but not without resorting once more to the benign Parent of the human race, in humble supplication that, since He has been pleased to favor the American people with opportunities for deliberating… on a form of government for the security of their union and the advancement of their happiness, so His divine blessing may be equally conspicuous in the wise measures of which the success of the government must depend.
The words of Washington reflected the sentiments of the vast majority of Americans. They did not see the Constitution as godless or as an instrument to remove or deny God’s providential guidance and blessing upon America.
Michael writes in his book that, “the authority to form the new Constitution is said to derive from the people. There is no longer even a rhetorical flourish of invoking God, not even in the most vague and sectarian of terms.” I must respectfully disagree. The Constitution was created and ratified in a culture deeply committed to God. Perhaps you remember from your high school history class hearing about the Federalist Papers. These were a series of essays written by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton to explain and defend the Constitution to the people who were being asked to ratify it. In Federalist Paper 43, Madison explained by what authority the Constitutional Convention had set aside the Articles of Confederation which had been ratified in 1781. Madison called replacing the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution an act of self-preservation and invoked the right to do that with these words, “… to the transcendental law of nature and nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which political institutions aim.” In other words, Madison said that the very right to create the Constitution came from God.
Once again we see that the Constitution is a continuation of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration directly invoked God four times and stated that fundamental human rights come from God and not from government. The blessings of liberty come from God, the duty of man is to construct a government that secures the blessings of God-given liberty. That is why the Constitution was written. The Constitution did not need to invoke the name of God because it wasn’t attempting to justify the founding of a new nation. The Declaration had already done that eleven years earlier.
Michael has made reference to the first three words of the Constitution; “We the people.” He interprets this as an effort to exclude God from the Constitution and make man, or “we the people,” the authority. What he fails to recognize is that the concept of we the people had been preached in American pulpits for many years prior to the Constitution. The pastors who preached these sermons believed that God allowed the people of a society to form any system of government they wanted as long as it was consistent with the laws of nature’s God.
For example, here are the words preached by Reverend Ebenezer Bridge of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, in an election day sermon in 1767, a full twenty years before the Constitutional Convention:
The form of civil government is not of divine appointment; this is left by God very much to the will and determination of men, and depends upon a people’s temper, genius, situation and advantages and disadvantages of various kinds.
Notice that this Christian pastor, twenty years before the Constitution, said that the form of government is left, by God’s purpose, to “we the people.” For the Constitution to say “we the people” is not a rejection of God nor is it an endorsement of some kind of secular humanism. The thoughts expressed in Reverend Bridge’s sermon could be heard in hundreds of churches in that day.
The appearance of “we the people” in the Constitution is a reminder that the Declaration of Independence said this about the people: “… that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights… and to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to establish new government.”
I don’t know how much more clear it could be. The Declaration calls it “the consent of governed” and “the right of the people” and so eleven years later the Constitution begins with the words “We the people.” It was understood by those who wrote the Declaration and the Constitution, and by the American people who ratified the Constitution, that this entire process is authorized by the God who endows men with these unalienable rights.
I think that much of the confusion that exists today about the nature of the Constitution comes from a misunderstanding of the First Amendment. You might recall that the first ten amendments, called the Bill of Rights, were approved by Congress in 1789 and ratified by the states in 1791. The first Amendment begins with these famous words;
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…
From this amendment comes the concept of the separation of church and state. It was also the culmination of 150 years of work by devout Christian pastors such as Roger Williams, Isaac Backus, and John Leland. The initial development of the separation of church and state doctrine in America began in 1631 with the founder of Rhode Island, the Reverend Roger Williams. Unfortunately, the biblical concept of the separation of church and state that gave us the First Amendment has, in our day, been rejected and replaced with a false interpretation that ignores the historical record in order to drive Christianity out of the public civil arena and limit it to the private realm of individual believers or to be kept confined to church buildings.
The actual purpose of the First Amendment was to prevent the establishment of an official national church such as the Church of England which was led by the King of England, or as existed on the state level at that time in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Georgia, and South Carolina. The move to prohibit a national church was essential for safeguarding religious liberty and the freedom of conscience for every citizen. There was never an intent to keep Christian ideas out of political discourse and legislative deliberations.
I will explore this further in my dialog with Michael, but in my last few minutes I want to acquaint you with Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. He is considered to be one of the fathers of American jurisprudence, and he wrote one of the earliest histories of the Constitution. He was appointed to the Supreme Court by James Madison in 1811. The following excerpt comes from his book A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States and is his explanation of the First Amendment. I think many of you will be surprised by what he wrote:
Now there will probably be found few persons in this, or any other Christian country, who would deliberately contend, that it was unreasonable, or unjust to foster and encourage the Christian religion generally, as a matter of sound policy as well as of revealed truth.
He goes on to say this about the First Amendment:
Probably at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, and of the amendment to it now under consideration, the general, if not universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapproval, if not universal indignation.
Justice Story said that the First Amendment was written to prohibit a national church and to leave religious matters to the individual states. By the way, do you know how many of the 50 state constitutions still directly acknowledge God? If you said 50 out of 50 you would be correct.
Thank-you.
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Sorry, Mr. Lucas, but even a relatively conservative approach to constitutional interpretation like liberal originalism would note that, in the prologue, "we the people" are invoked, nobody else, and they're the ones who are proposed as securing the blessings of liberty.
Next, and while unsure of Morris' background, one would take note that Washington, the first president and president of the Constitutional Convention, was a Deist and not a Trinitarian Christian. So, even if god was being, subtly, invoked as the source of the blessings of liberty, it wasn't necessarily the god in which Mr. Lucas believes.
Sidebar on church-state intersection: Ed, I just got done with Tim Alberta's book on evangelicals and politics: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6642065312