Worship as Higher Politics - Christianity Today Magazine

George W. Bush is not Lord. The Declaration of Independence is not an infallible guide to Christian faith and practice. Nor is the U.S. Constitution, nor the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights. "Original intent" of America's founders is not the hermeneutical key that will guarantee national righteousness. The American flag is not the Cross. The Pledge of Allegiance is not the Creed. "God Bless America" is not the Doxology.

Sometimes one needs to state the obvious—especially at times when it's less and less obvious.

and comments from Slactivist on the item above:

Coming from the reserved elder statesmen of CT's editorial board, that's pretty much a smackdown.

Most interesting here is their critique of the blossoming cult of "original intent" among parachurch leaders of the religious right. At the FRC's "Justice Sunday" event this spring, a bevy of clergy and religious leaders, including Perkins and Kennedy, railed against any judge who dared speak of a "living Constitution."

As an example of the kind of jurisprudence they find anathema, they held up the recent Supreme Court ruling barring the execution of the developmentally disabled. That decision was based, in part, on evolving community standards, and that idea -- the evolution, or progress, or development of moral understanding -- is what these religious leaders find dangerous and terrifying. From their perspective, community standards have been devolving ever since Mt. Sinai. The idea that the Constitution, or any revered text, might be read differently over time due to evolving community standards is the very idea these folks have been fighting against for the past century.

This is simply a continuation in a new arena of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the early 20th century. The fundamentalist "battle for the Bible" has escalated to include the battle over another sacred text: the U.S. Constitution. The terms of this battle are exactly the same. So too is the underlying motivation. It's all about control.

A "living Constitution" threatens that control as surely as the living word of the Bible. Neither text can be allowed to be "living." They must both be killed and carefully dissected to be understood properly. They must be fixed to the lepidopterist's board and carefully catalogued. A butterfly in flight -- a living creature free and wild -- cannot be pinned down, cannot be studied, cannot be understood. Cannot be controlled.