Challenge: Get this in the US Constitution

This is from the 1840 Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, obviously written under the influence of New England missionaries.

I. That no law shall be enacted which is at variance with the word of the Lord Jehovah, or at variance with the general spirit of His word. All laws of the Islands shall be in consistency with the general spirit of God's law." http://www.hawaii-nation.org/constitution-1840.html

Your task is to get this provision into the US Constitution (with of course "United States" substituted for "islands"...).
 
Agree totally - anyone who would put that in the constitution in 1789 would NOT have risen up against the "divine right" of kings. The intellectual, military, and political leaders of the revolution were overwhelmingly against this sort of thing.
 
Agreed, particularly with the religious squabbling between some of the former colonies. After all the words " That no law shall be enacted which is at variance with the word of the Lord Jehovah, or at variance with the general spirit of His word. All laws of the Islands shall be in consistency with the general spirit of God's law." can mean almost anything. Which Christian church decides this? Religious wars have been fought over such things.
 
Founding fathers like Washington and Jefferson were deists. They championed absolute separation of church and state, last thing they want is a national church.
 
England sends all Puritans to America. They multiply a lot. They become the majority.

May not be all that likely. Though allowing dissidents and religious minorities to go to America arguably led to the revolution so if you enforce deportation then perhaps you get a more fundamentalist christian set of founding fathers. They would likely give you what you are after.

Not sure America would attract new colonists though as they did otl especially Catholics from Ireland etc.
 
Agree totally - anyone who would put that in the constitution in 1789 would NOT have risen up against the "divine right" of kings. The intellectual, military, and political leaders of the revolution were overwhelmingly against this sort of thing.

Umm. One of the slogans of the Revolution was "No King but Jesus".

There is no intrinsic conflict between religiosity and republicanism. It wasn't atheists who cut off King Charles' head.
 
There was at the time and to some extent still is today. Organized religion is a traditional tool of autocracies.

A totally unrelated idea is that many of the most important FFs were deists. Paine was an early proponent of atheism, and Franklin wrote this:

"As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire,I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us,the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity."
 
Umm. One of the slogans of the Revolution was "No King but Jesus".

There is no intrinsic conflict between religiosity and republicanism. It wasn't atheists who cut off King Charles' head.
Problem is, there wasn't a single dominant church establishment in colonial North America. Who's going to rule on 'God's law'? Which denominations are they drawn from? What are we going to do about the deist streak within the American elite? This is practically a blueprint for religious bloodshed.
 
Problem is, there wasn't a single dominant church establishment in colonial North America. Who's going to rule on 'God's law'? Which denominations are they drawn from? What are we going to do about the deist streak within the American elite? This is practically a blueprint for religious bloodshed.

The obvious solution is to make British North America much more religiously homogenous, like the northeast (which had established churches at the time of the Revolutionary War and for quite a while afterwards), so that there's a clear answer to this question. Since the northeastern churches were Dissenting, rather than the established Church of England, you could potentially find reasons for them to rebel, too, despite being highly religious.

How you get that to happen, I don't know...but it is the obvious solution.
 
Interestingly, the second article of the Hawai'i constitution says this:

"All men of every religion shall be protected in worshipping Jehovah, and serving Him, according to their own understanding, but no man shall ever be punished for neglect of God unless he injures his neighbor, of bring evil on the kingdom." [Emphasis mine]

Taken together, the first and second article actually are very liberal for the 1840's, except for the use of the name "Jehovah" for the supreme being - which would only refer to the Abrahamic God. The language is not specifically Christian, and the protection for non-believers is explicit, which it isn't in the US Constitution.

I think the US constitution could have had similar language, substituting "nature's god", "the creator" or some other deist language for the diety/prime mover with little change in the US concept of religious freedom.
 
Top