Motus Mentis

There’s been an interesting discussion over at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website about the Constitution’s prohibition, in Article VI, of a “religious test” for public office. The discussion, with an anonymous Canadian philosopher (although, as was said once of Newton, “we recognize the lion by his claw”), spans several posts.

In the first post in the series, Bill declares his opinion that the prohibition should not apply to religions that are also political ideologies whose tenets are in direct opposition to the political principles of the Constitution itself. (For example, a coherent interpretation of Islam favors the imposition of sharia law, which would be in direct controversion of the Establishment Clause.)

Bill writes:

It is important to realize that Islam is as much an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion. Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices.

Many assume that no restriction may be placed on admissible religions for the purposes of the implementation of Article VI. I deny it. A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the “no religious Test” provision. One could argue that on a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.

While I sympathize with Bill’s take on both Islam and his view of what the Constitution ought to be, I think it’s clear that this is hardly a mainstream interpretation, to put it mildly.

Enter the Canadian, to whom Bill responds in the second post. C. writes:

I’m almost convinced the correct response is that, unfortunately, if the Constitution is interpreted correctly then fundamentalist Muslims do indeed have the right to hold public office–given the most natural and reasonable interpretation of word meanings and even taking into account the likely intentions of the founding fathers, the history of legal interpretation, etc. It’s very hard to get around this.

Bill acknowledges that a plain reading of the Constitution would seem to bar a religious test for Muslims seeking office. But then he asks:

[T]he question I would put to my fellow citizens is: Are you comfortable with an interpretation of the Constitution that allows for its elimination and the values and principles it enshrines?

I am not.

There are those who will say: let anyone immigrate from anywhere and then let the people who have immigrated decide what they want. They call that democracy, and they are all for it. The people are the residents within certain geographical borders, and residency constitutes citizenship. If the residents want blasphemy laws, then we shall have blasphemy laws.

Well, right. That’s how popular government works! This sort of thing is a big part of why we neoreactionary lepers are so leery of multiculturalism, and indeed of democracy itself.

The Canadian rightly points out that there is little room for “interpretation” here while maintaining any sort of fidelity to the text:

You point out that Islam is not just a religion but also a political ideology. But does that really help? It still is a religion, and if the Constitution forbids any “religious test”, without ever saying anything about the scope of “religion”, the most natural interpretation is that even religions that double as political ideologies–most religions, really–are subject to the “no religious test” rule. You say that we could declare Islam an inadmissible religion, but then wouldn’t effectively mean that the Constitution is self-contradictory? On the one hand, there is to be freedom of religion and no religious test–the subject here being surely just religion in general. On the other hand, only some religions are protected by the “no religious test” rule, and for other religions there can be a religious test after all. That seems incoherent, no?

It seems incoherent indeed, if you ask me. But Bill replies:

There is no contradiction or incoherence such as you imagine. I take it you find no incoherence in what the logic books call exceptive propositions. For example, “All citizens of the United States are guaranteed freedom of religion except those whose religions are incompatible with the values and principles of the American founding.” The following propositions are logically consistent. (1) The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and disallows religious tests. (2) The Constitution guarantees these things subject to the proviso that the religion in question is compatible with the principles of the American founding.

Now the Constitution does not contain these formulations. But we will agree that the document is subject to interpretation. My claim is that it is most reasonable interpreted along the lines I have suggested.

I agree that this would be a salutary amendment, but it isn’t what the Constitution says. Bill’s response continues:

As for incoherence, I should think that your account is more justly charged with it. A constitution that allows for its own subversion is incoherent if not strictly self-contradictory in the logical sense. The provisions of such a constitution do not cohere with its own continued existence.

This may be so, but this is, in my opinion, a flaw in the Constitution itself, and not the sort of thing that is remediable by interpretation. The reason is that once we unmoor ourselves from the clear meaning of the text, then we are free-floating in a realm of competing goals and principles. In light of what, exactly, do we place limits on such interpretations? Who decides what’s a justifiable interpretation and what isn’t?

In the third post, the Canadian raises exactly this question:

What are the criteria for a reasonable interpretation? On the one hand, a reasonable interpretation might be one that results in a constitution that reasonable people could accept. Naturally, if this is the criterion, no reasonable interpretation can produce a constitution that, in practice, would create a society where that same constitution would be destroyed. On the other hand, it might simply be one that’s adequately supported by the textual evidence (and other evidence, e.g., reasonably hypotheses about the authors’ intentions).

In any case, I think that for your argument you need the first notion of reasonable interpretation. But then there’s a problem: Leftists, whose ideas about reasonable political principles are very different from ours, can now argue on a similar basis that we should just ignore the seemingly plain meaning of the Constitution in cases where it conflicts with their values. For instance, they can argue that since it’s just not reasonable to let citizens buy AR-15s, the 2nd Amendment must be interpreted in such a way that citizens don’t have that right. That seems worrisome. If there isn’t even a generally agreed meaning for the constitution, the only way to politically resolve such disagreements is by some kind of debate over ultimate aims or values; but I know you agree with me that that isn’t likely to happen either. So it seems wise to insist that the constitution’s meaning is the meaning of the text, not the meaning that we think it would have or should have in order to be most reasonable. But then we’re back to the problem that the text just doesn’t seem to exclude Islamic freedom of religion, or to allow for a “religious test” in that case–or even to exclude the possibility that the Constitution is just internally inconsistent in some respects…

Bill sticks to his guns:

It seems to me that the Constitution cannot be interpreted so as to allow the emergence of the following logical contradiction:

a) Under no circumstances shall (i) the freedom to practice the religion of one’s choice (or to refrain from the practice of any religion) be prohibited by the government, or (ii) the freedom to express one’s view publicly be abridged.

b) Under some circumstances (e.g., when enough Muslim fundamentalists gain power) the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech many be prohibited and abridged.

Note that the (a)-(b) dyad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot both be true. What we have here is a strict logical contradiction.

But to embrace a logical contradiction is the height of unreasonableness. I conclude that to interpret the Constitution in such a way that it allows for the emergence of the above contradiction is unreasonable.

Is this in fact a logical contradiction? Not if you consider that the Constitution itself contains a mechanism for its own modification. The process would be a simple one: 1) the demographics of the nation change; 2) Muslims are admitted in growing numbers to national office, thanks to the No Religious Test Clause; 3) once Islam has consolidated its power, the Constitution is amended to abolish the Establishment Clause (and perhaps also even the No Religious Test Clause itself).

There’s nothing incoherent about any of this; it is simply the way a democratic popular government evolves in response to demographic and cultural change. If you are going to vest sovereignty in the people, as the West seems to have a fetish for, then to change the people is to usurp the sovereign. In other words: this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It is inherent in the nature of democratic popular government that it is dangerously sensitive to the moods and passions of the people. The Founders were acutely aware of this liability, and so they did their best to safeguard against it. But to imagine, as the leaders of the modern West seem to, that you can swap out the people and somehow preserve the nation — based simply on abstract political principles held in common by the founding population, but not by their replacements — is a suicidal error. The problem, then, is not with the Constitution, which rightly contains provisions for its own modification, but with the inherent liabilities of democracy itself, and the unique peril that democratic nations face from multiculturalism and mass alien immigration.

The Canadian understands this:

We might be back to a recurring deeper disagreement here. I don’t think that any system of abstract principles and values is enough to provide a framework for a workable society. I think some kind of pre-rational or pre-conceptual horizon of meaning and practice and natural community is the basis; explicit principles and values have a role, but only when they’re understood by everyone to operate within that specific cultural world. The principles of “no religious test” or “freedom of religion” were just fine when they were only being applied to a fairly small range of fairly similar religions, practiced by relatively similar people. (And, sure, there were always some who were not so similar–Africans, Amerindians–but they were small in number and had no real influence.) Once every religion on earth was included in American society, that was bound to create insoluble problems. Of course, one option is to simply say that there will be freedom of religion for a specific list of religions, and only those ones. But that seems contrary to other traditional American principles. I suspect that the very idea of “religion” that we in the west tend to take for granted is really an artefact of our specific religious and cultural heritage. There is probably no useful general account of “religion” across all human cultures. So it would be unwise to propose any kind of freedom for that kind of thing.

Finally, Bill must know that there is simply no possibility of any actually existing Court interpreting the Constitution in the way he would like; it simply isn’t going to happen. A religious test that bans Muslims from political office? Not a chance.

The only rational answer to the problem Bill perceives is this: to understand, and act upon, what I have called the Obvious Thing:

Allowing mass Muslim immigration is the stupidest and most irreversibly self-destructive thing that any Western nation can do.

Go read the whole series. The four parts are here, here, here, and here.