We Held Those Truths
Progressive Sovereignty, Sacredness & the U. S. Constitution
by Alexander Riley
It is not uncommon to hear talk of the “sacredness” of the U.S. Constitution, even if such talk is not always clear as to how that descriptive is being defined. Even the opponents of such a view of the Constitution acknowledge, albeit with disapproval, how many Americans see the document in this light. As a Salon magazine writer put it in late 2020 (and one imagines while holding his nose and grimacing):
Americans view the U.S. Constitution and its framers with a reverence that is almost religious, as if it were a stone tablet delivered by Moses descending from Mt. Sinai. The Constitution’s perceived sacredness implies that it is only to be minimally and periodically amended, overseen by legal priests with exclusive knowledge of what should and should not be altered.
The way we behave around the document speaks to sacredness too, if indirectly. In the Rotunda of the National Archives, a copy of the Constitution, along with other important national documents, is sealed off in protective glass and lowered at night into a vault that secures it from theft, fire, and natural disaster. “We are enshrining these documents for future ages,” President Harry S. Truman said. “This magnificent hall has been constructed to exhibit them, and the vault beneath, that we have built to protect them, is as safe from destruction as anything that the wit of modern man can devise.” One does not generally act in such an exaggeratedly protective way with respect to merely mundane objects.
The fact that we celebrate a Constitution Day (September 17) also indicates a reverential consideration of the thing. The Department of Education’s mandate that on this day all educational institutions receiving federal funds provide information on the history and meaning of the Constitution tells us that we are to elevate this day and its object above other, unremarkable days of the year. This is what we do with holidays, a contracted form of “holy day.”
What should we make of all this? What could it mean to say with precision that a constitution is sacred or is grounded by and produced by the sacred? Is a connection with sacredness helpful for understanding the viability and legitimacy of constitutions and written codes of law? Does it help us better understand how we can endeavor to construct sturdy and resilient social and political orders?
Sacredness as a Concept
We should perhaps start with an effort to define the term “sacredness.” This is one of those ideas that people often assume they understand, but when asked for a definition, they find it hard to provide one.
The processes and practices by which groups recognize and pursue relations with entities, symbols, and ideas they take as sacred are complex and long-lived. We invent narratives and myths about those sacred things to share with one another and to pass down to subsequent generations, so that the essence of a given people and its traditions and nature can be sustained against the harshness of time and change.
The German theologian Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) described the sacred with his term “the numinous,” alluding to the mystery and awe it produces. This is a good start, but only that. A thinker who has been influential on my own work, the French social philosopher Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), in his monumental study of the origins of religion, defined the sacred as that which is necessarily set apart from the profane or mundane. It is recognized as charged up with a kind of power. This power evokes reverence, and it is seen by us as generative. It gives us life and replenishes our energy, and so we engage in repeated ritual behavior with respect to those sacred things in order to maintain our vitality.
Durkheim argued that all societies orient themselves around sacred objects and symbols. He further argued that these symbols in fact stand for the society itself. We worship ourselves, in other words, through sacred objects, though we are typically unaware that we are doing that, and we are oriented instead in our own thinking to something else.
Alexander T. Riley is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars.
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