In Forbes, George Leef reviews (favorably) The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution (Harvard Univ. Press 2014) by John W. Compton (Chapman Political Science). From the introduction to the review:
The “living Constitution” theory amounts to saying that Supreme Court justices should be allowed to rewrite the foundation of our government as they see fit, sometimes adding ideas that weren’t included, sometimes ignoring ideas that were.
…
Where did this ruinous idea come from? When and how did it arise? My supposition had always been that it was a creation of the “progressives” in our legal system early in the last century, exemplified by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and liberal intellectuals who favored FDR’s vast expansion of federal authority.
That view is not exactly right, argues John Compton, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Chapman University, in his new book The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution. Compton contends that the “living Constitution” idea arose much earlier in our history, an outgrowth the moral reform movement that swept across the United States from the 1820s until the early decades of the 20th century.
And here is the book description (from Harvard Univ. Press):
The New Deal is often said to represent a sea change in American constitutional history, overturning a century of precedent to permit an expanded federal government, increased regulation of the economy, and eroded property protections. John Compton offers a surprising revision of this familiar narrative, showing that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants, not New Deal reformers, paved the way for the most important constitutional developments of the twentieth century.
Following the great religious revivals of the early 1800s, American evangelicals embarked on a crusade to eradicate immorality from national life by destroying the property that made it possible. Their cause represented a direct challenge to founding-era legal protections of sinful practices such as slavery, lottery gambling, and buying and selling liquor. Although evangelicals urged the judiciary to bend the rules of constitutional adjudication on behalf of moral reform, antebellum judges usually resisted their overtures. But after the Civil War, American jurists increasingly acquiesced in the destruction of property on moral grounds.
In the early twentieth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other critics of laissez-faire constitutionalism used the judiciary’s acceptance of evangelical moral values to demonstrate that conceptions of property rights and federalism were fluid, socially constructed, and subject to modification by democratic majorities. The result was a progressive constitutional regime—rooted in evangelical Protestantism—that would hold sway for the rest of the twentieth century.
Posted at 6:12 AM