The Godless Constitution and the Providential Nation by Steven D. Smith is timely reading for America’s 250th birthday, especially amid increasing debates over Christian Nationalism.

　　Even as American religious practice has declined over several decades, more religious voices are paradoxically clamoring to legally establish their preferred form of religion. Integralists want a Catholic confessional state. Some Calvinists who self-identify as Christian Nationalists believe civil magistrates should repress blasphemy and apostasy, among other spiritual duties.

　　Smith rightly sees this clamoring for more religion in governance as a reaction against the decline of providentialism and civil religion.

　　Smith, who teaches law at the University of San Diego, readily admits that the US Constitution, omitting any reference to deity, is at the very least semantically godless. But it and the American story are animated by a profound sense of providentialism, the spirit of which has receded. He hopes it will revive, but he does not advise how.

　　God’s role in America’s founding is long debated. Some conservative Christians have created a cottage industry of generating quotes from Founding Fathers about the importance of God and religion, specifically Christianity. Their project seems to believe that if it can be proved, with enough historical evidence, that America’s founding was Christian, then contemporary America will affirm Christianity. This expectation is naïve.

　　Such Christian endeavors of course push back against a century of secular historians minimizing religion in America’s Founding, which they claim was more strictly an Enlightenment project. In their narrative, the Founders were at best deists who offered perfunctory homage to popular piety. The Constitution’s silence about God seemingly supported their argument, as did the Declaration’s vague reference to “Nature’s God.”

　　Meanwhile, contemporary self-identified Christian nationalists insist that America is a Protestant nation and that government should enforce this identity through religious tests for public office and perhaps for voting, while also suppressing non-Christian religion, blasphemy, and apostasy. They note that the US Constitution did not forbid state religious establishments, and they insist the Founders only opposed established religion on the federal level. (They ignore or disdain Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who overthrew their own state’s religious establishment with the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.)

　　In contrast to these camps, Smith adopts a nuanced path, noting that some of the major Founders such as Franklin and Jefferson were clearly not conventional Christians. But they, like most thoughtful people of their time and place, saw America within the context of Providence. Their providential assumption, which sustained American concepts of liberty, equality, rights, and moral progress, endured through World War II. Post-war court rulings either removed religion from public spaces or reinterpreted public piety as constitutionally defensible only because it wasn’t really religion but just cultural monikers.

　　The Constitution does not require these semantic games, Smith insists. Its stance toward God was “simple,” “novel,” “elusive,” and “easy to misunderstand.” Other constitutions around the world have affirmed God or rejected Him. Some preclude religion from public life. But the US Constitution uniquely says nothing and is “demurely agnostic.”

　　Smith says this meant that individuals in politics and governments have the latitude to endorse or not endorse religion on a “nonconstitutional level.” The Constitution left both of those options open. Some contemporary critics denounced the document’s omission of God as risking divine judgment, Smith notes. But he observes:

　　From the fact that the Constitution itself lacks religious language, it does not logically follow that politics or governance generally was or is required to eschew religious language or beliefs. If the Constitution did not explicitly prescribe a religious orientation for government, neither did it disapprove or forbid such an orientation; nor did it prescribe any other worldview or normative system.

　　This “multi-level strategy in which God could be publicly acknowledged on some levels or in some ways or contexts but not in others has arguably worked tolerably well to secure the support of the citizenry,” Smith says, at least until recently.

　　Citing other scholarship, he notes that New England Puritans and Virginia rationalists, for example, both subscribed to a tradition in which everything had cosmic meaning. Providence might assign America a special mission. Or it might universally punish and reward nations for good behavior. Americans had to live virtuously to merit providential favor. Even anti-religious Tom Paine adopted this language, as did Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, despite their heterodox theology. American providentialism was “powerfully shaped” by Christianity but not confined to it.

　　American providentialists believed the republic was “foreordained for a higher or transcendent purpose or mission,” reiterated by generations of writers including John Winthrop, Sam Adams, Herman Melville, Lincoln, Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Luther King. Arguably, American providentialism peaked in 1950s America under Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency and the addition of “In God We Trust” to currency and the Pledge of Allegiance. But already secularization was corroding this providentialist confidence, as lamented by Reinhold Niebuhr himself. 

　　Civil religion is “not exactly the same thing” but is “at least in the same neighborhood as providentialism,” Smith asserts. Theoretically, religious people can believe God guides their nation without creating “quasi- sacred public texts or holidays or rituals,” as civil religion does. And a nation might celebrate the rites and rituals of civil religion without necessarily believing in God. But in America, Civil religion has been a “sort of embodied or institutionalized providentialism.” Where civil religion and providentialism overlap is their lack of dictated orthodoxy. The “inner meaning,” as described by Robert Bellah, is “left to private interpretation.”

　　Perhaps the resurrection of providentialism is chiefly the task of religious believers in civil society, not of government institutions or officials.

　　Some traditional religionists disdain such vague spirituality. They want the specifics of the Old Time Religion or nothing at all, for clarity. But Smith argues that disregarding narratives that cohere communities across generations is “reckless and irresponsible.” America’s binding narrative includes “providentialism, civil religion, and religious Nationalism” all mixed together in a “confounding condition.”

　　Twentieth-century court rulings requiring government to be “religiously neutral and to confine themselves to the domain of the secular [were] fundamentally if sub silentio at war with the providentialist position that had characterized American governments through much of the nation’s history,” Smith asserts. Providentialism had prescribed that Americans individually and collectively “acknowledge and seek the assistance of deity,” however defined.

　　Such court rulings were haphazard, inconsistent, and unpopular, establishing a “demure atheism” operating under other labels such as “religious neutrality.” School prayer and Bible readings were tossed, while other citations of deity, such as on currency, were maintained. Smith notes that providentialism and liberalism were “intimate allies” for most of American history. Humans were free and equal, per the Declaration, because of their common Creator: “This intimacy between religion and the political ideals that we describe as ‘liberal’ was a kind of unprecedented experiment, and its apparent success was an unanticipated revelation.”

　　American providentialism, by aligning with and fostering liberalism, has been relatively unique in history. Smith does not elaborate on how this happened. But the sort of Protestantism to which most colonial and early Americans subscribed was wary of centralized power and jealous of conscience rights. “The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it,” as Woodrow Wilson explained in 1912, echoing the common Whiggish view from the 1600s onward that informed the Founders.

　　But “respectable thought today” decrees that providentialism violates liberal ideals and insists on nonreligious liberalism. John Courtney Murray anticipated that belief in “the sovereignty of God over nations as well as over individual men” as expressed in the Declaration would succumb to the “incessant thieveries of forgetfulness.”

　　What will Americans do absent their providentialist self-identity? Smith warns:

　　It is imperative that they find other more reasoned grounds for their essential affirmation that they are uniquely a people, uniquely a free society. Otherwise the peril is great. The complete loss of one’s identity is, with all propriety of theological definition, hell. In diminished forms it is insanity. And it would not be well for the American giant to go lumbering about the world today, lost and mad.

　　Smith observes that providentialism’s retreat did not diminish the claims to rights but instead “proliferated” them, to the “point of being out of control.” These growing demands for a wider array of rights are more indignant and strident, and “yet it is very difficult to say just what they mean by such talk.” And if every claim and want is now a “right,” the claim to a right loses much of its meaning. 

　　Providentialism explained how people of different backgrounds and abilities were pieces of a wider whole that benefited all. But absent providentialism, these differences lack “excuse or vindication.” There is no more redemption, and the arc of the universe no longer bends towards justice. So, inequalities, divorced from Providence, become “without excuse.”

　　John Rawls described liberalism as “freestanding,” which Smith defines as “unmoored.” He opines: “Whether this unsupported and uncontained project is sustainable over the long run, or even the relatively short run, seems currently very much in doubt.” Providentialism was the foundation. Can anything replace it?

　　Smith admits providentialism can “sometimes support triumphalism and smugness, but it need not: it can also express and inspire hope and humility and a struggle for justice on behalf of the poor and oppressed.” It’s likelier to promote “humility, not hubris.” It also sustains the rule of law.

　　Smith does not counsel how providentialism can avoid “hubris.” He points to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, which suggested the Civil War was divine judgment for slavery. Unfortunately, few in public life suggest that America might face divine judgment. Providentialism, to the extent that it endures, largely celebrates and blesses America.

　　It is certainly true, as Smith asserts, that providentialism gave Americans a “sense of purpose” beyond self-interest, rooting them in a wider narrative, and elevating their political discourse and their moral aspirations. The Constitution, although “religiously agnostic” and “not mandating a providentialist public philosophy,” importantly permitted it and arguably even encouraged it.

　　Although Smith does not directly suggest it, perhaps the resurrection of providentialism is chiefly the task of religious believers in civil society, not of government institutions or officials. America of course has lots of religious people who have lots to say about politics, ostensibly from their faith perspective. But articulated providentialism, as Smith defines it, is relatively rare, even from religious people, including clergy, theologians, and other religious intellectuals. Maybe that’s the ultimate problem and the ultimate source of a solution.

　　Smith admits that religious adherence has been falling in America. And he offers no recipes for rejuvenating providentialism. Instead, he concludes by quoting Martin Heidegger: “Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god.”

　　Smith stresses providentialism’s ancient pagan and philosophical roots. But its power for America was specifically Hebraic and Christian. Even religious skeptics relied on that heritage ultimately. A recovery of providentialism requires a revival of Christianity in America. Providentialism does not require all its votaries to be Christian. But it does require that at least a part of society generate enough spiritual capital to sustain it.

　　Perhaps Divine Providence already is plotting such a revival. All wishers of the republic, religious or not, can hope so and maybe even pray. We don’t want America, as Smith warns, “to go lumbering about the world today, lost and mad.”