Morning Constitutional

Two observations to pass on (meaning to disseminate, not forego) today, the first a product of a scholar’s lucubration:

Perhaps beginning with Roe v. Wade (1973), the decision that announced a constitutional right to abortion, there has occurred a “Third Disestablishment” [of religion in the United States, the first being in the First Amendment to its Constitution, prohibiting government establishment of religion], which is the separation of law from traditional moral principles, a result that perhaps flowed inevitably from the Second Disestablishment [the de facto abandonment of the moral authority of Christianity], since moral principles once thought of as common to all are now seen as merely “sectarian.” Liberal Protestantism, which in the nineteenth century sought to replace piety by morality, by the 1960s found that there was no longer an accepted moral consensus. Like religion, morality had come to be regarded as essentially irrational.

On this basis the social influence of conservative churches can be restricted, in part because there is to be no right to inhibit, on religious grounds, whatever subjective conceptions of the good life individuals might have. Official government neutrality in practice becomes an “ideology of nonorthodoxy,” and churches that advocate absolute moral standards are considered dangerous, religion not considered to have any role in maintaining personal liberty.

—James Hitchcock, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, Vol. II: From “Higher Law” to “Sectarian Scruples” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 137.

The second is a thought from a novel that gave me pause:

One great benefit of a religious vocation is that it helps you concentrate.

—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. Fararr, Straus, and Giroux, 2004, p. 7.

What I find interesting about this sentence is the use of “concentrate” rather than “think.” There are a great many in religious vocation who don’t think much, but are of value to the world simply because they are forced by their work to concentrate upon things that everyone should, but don’t. Some are saved by concentration who might be damned by thought.

(Thanks to Lee Podles for sending the book my way.)