Professors Isaac Kramnick, right, and R. Laurence Moore pose this past summer on the Arts Quad.
By Jill Goetz
The next time members of the Christian Coalition invoke the Bible or their Republican allies invoke the Contract with America in debating President Bill Clinton on divisive social issues, he can respond with a little "good book" of his own -- written by two Cornell professors.
The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness, by political scientist Isaac Kramnick and his torian R. Laurence Moore, is a short, easy-to-read refutation of the religious right's claim that the Founders envisioned a Christian nation and Constitution.
Because of the book's importance and its potential impli cations for future legislation, W.W. Norton & Co., the book's publisher, has delivered special Washington, D.C., editions to every member of Congress, Supreme Court justice and leading member of the executive branch -- including the president, vice president and attorney general -- almost a week before the book's official release on Jan. 29.
Kramnick and Moore wrote the book to fulfill a mission of their own: to set the record straight.
"[The religious right's] crusade is to refound the nation, as they insist the men at the Constitutional Convention had intended, as a Christian state charged to carry out God's work on earth," they write. "It is a challenge based on
historical nonsense and one that dangerously misrepresents the American political tradition."
"More people need to realize that the history they're being fed by the religious right is wrong," said Kramnick, the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell and editor of the Penguin Classics' The Federalist Papers and Tom
Paine Reader. So he and Moore, an American history profes sor, wrote The Godless Constitution the way they did -- free of footnotes but packed with arguments drawn from seminal sources -- and when they did -- before the 1996 presidential election -- for the greatest possible effect.
The Godless Constitution contends that the framers in tended the Constitution to be godless because they believed church-state separation was the best guarantee of liberty. Their critics bitterly denounced them for taking that posi tion. Thomas Jefferson, the source of the concept of a "wall of separation" between church and state, was routinely labeled an "infidel" and "atheist" by his adversaries. What roiled the Constitution's detractors the most was its Article 6, which reads, in part, "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
"The debate over the 'no religious tests' clause in Article 6 has not been widely addressed by historians," Kramnick said. "But Article 6 was one of the most controversial elements of the Constitution when it was drafted."
Opponents worked relentlessly to reword the "no reli gious tests" clause, or drop it altogether, first at the Consti tutional Convention in 1787 and a year later at the states' ratifying conventions. In theory, they lost that battle: no
religious tests are required of political leaders today. But in practice, the religious right has undermined Article 6, Moore said.
"In a sense, the 'no religious tests' clause is the most violated provision of the Constitution," he said. "Can you imagine an avowed atheist in the White House? Only Christians need apply."
Kramnick first expounded the main points of the book in an Aug. 29, 1994, New York Times essay titled "Jefferson vs. the Religious Right," which he was inspired to write after hearing the president (William Jefferson Clinton, he points out) chastised on a radio talk show for his "anti-Christian" stance.
"I received an incredible number of phone calls and mail about that op-ed piece," he said, "not from angry members of the Christian right, but from liberals who were being attacked by them -- who found in the article a wonderful set of arguments to use in response. I felt that with all the books I had edited or written, I had never done as much good, had as much of an impact, as I had with that one little op-ed piece."
He thought a book might have an even greater impact; but to write it, he needed the help of someone with a solid background in American religious history. So after one of their regular racquetball games at the Young Men's Christian Association, Kramnick said, he made Moore, whose last book was Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture, an offer "he couldn't refuse."
According to its authors, what makes The Godless Constitution different from other recent books about the religious right is that it is sympathetic to religion and its role in American society. "Our intention is not to marginalize religion," they write. "If anything, it is to warn against the ways that some aggressive proponents of religious correctness are doing exactly that in their political battles."
"You can be very religious and still take the Founders' political view," Moore said. "It's not just liberals who are worried about the Christian Coalition. Many members of the clergy are also concerned about the way that religion is being cynically employed to serve a narrowly defined, partisan agenda."
In the book's final chapter, Kramnick and Moore argue that advocates of religious cor rectness, such as Ralph Reed ("What Christians have got to do is take back this country ... make it a country once again governed by Christians") and Pat Robertson ("Separation of church and state is a lie of the left"), are engaging in revisionism of their own.
For example, House Speaker Newt Gingrich often cites the quotation, engraved on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial, "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" as proof that Jefferson thought religion belonged in politics. But the context of that quote shows Jefferson intended the reverse, according to Kramnick and Moore: In a letter to physician Ben jamin Rush during the 1800 presidential campaign, Jefferson was really writing about members of the clergy urging people to vote against him.
In "In Godless We Trust: Why the Founding Fathers Created a Religion-Free Politi cal Order, and Why We Shouldn't Change It," an adaptation of their book that ap peared in the Washington Post on Jan. 14, Kramnick and Moore write, "Too bad, Mr. Speaker, but Jefferson was, in fact, referring to clerical tyranny in that magnificent sum mary of American values. He had the last word in his war with the Christian right, who opposed his secular vision of government, and it is carved in stone."
Crossing Cornell's Arts Quad one recent Sunday over winter break, Kramnick re flected on the irony that a message being read that very day by Washington newspa per readers, and soon to land on the desks of a contentious Capitol Hill, had been formu lated amid the relative tranquillity of the ivory tower. But then, perhaps it is fitting that The Godless Constitution originated at Cornell. After all, like Jefferson and his University of Virginia, Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White also was chastised for creating a secular, "godless" university all those years ago.