Constitutional Faith

275 Pages·2011·20.07 MB·English

by  Sanford Levinson

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Sanford Levinson
afterword by the author
CONSTITUTIONAL FAITH

S ANF ORD
LEVI NSON
Constitutional
Faith
With a new afterword by the author
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 1988 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
First printing, 1988
First paperback printing, 1990
Paperback reissue, with a new afterword, 2011
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011925345
ISBN: 978-0-691-15240-0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Linotron Caledonia
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
Illustrations by Zevi Blum
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To Cynthia,
for everything (1987)
To Cynthia, for so much more
than I ever imagined (2011)
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C O N T E N T S
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS IX
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER ONE
The “Constitution” in American Civil Religion 9
CHAPTER TWO
The Moral Dimension of Constitutional Faith 54
CHAPTER THREE
Loyalty Oaths: The Creedal Affirmations of
Constitutional Faith 90
CHAPTER FOUR
Constitutional “Attachment”: Identifying the Content
of One’s Commitment 122
CHAPTER FIVE
The Law School, the Faith Community, and the
Professing of Law 155
CHAPTER six
Conclusion: Adding One’s Signature to the Constitution 180
NOTES 195
AFTERWORD TO THE 2011 EDITION 245
INDEX 257
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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Over the many years during which this book was gestating, one of
the incentives for its completion was the opportunity I would then
have to write an acknowledgments page that would convey my thanks
for help to an ever-increasing number of friends and associates. Now
the time has come, and I want to take full advantage of that opportu­
nity. With completion has come as well chastening knowledge of the
reality undergirding what had, as I read other writers' acknowledg­
ments, always seemed to me the cliche that those acknowledged were
not responsible for any remaining weaknesses. Along with advice
gratefully accepted there remain other suggestions that were un­
wisely rejected. (The problem, of course, is that I am not wise enough
to know which of the rejected suggestions are in that category.) In any
event, I am immensely grateful both for the opportunity to work with
these many individuals and to the institutions that provided the set­
ting for collaboration.
I begin with the institution that most directly contributed to my
completing this work, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
New Jersey, which honored me with membership, half of which was
funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, during 1986-
87. The remaining funding came from the University Research Insti­
tute of the University of Texas. Without denigrating the importance
of the funding, I want to register special gratitude for the almost lit­
erally incredible work environment provided at the Institute for Ad­
vanced Study; it made the writing of this manuscript a joy. In addition
to the institution, I am grateful to several of its members, including
Elizabeth Hill Boone, William Connolly, Clifford Geertz, Albert
Hirschman, Joan Scott, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, all of whom
read drafts of chapters and discussed them with me. Encouraging
words from Carl Schorske and Barbara and Dennis Tedlock early in
the year were much appreciated.
One member of the Institute, Michael Walzer, deserves separate
mention. He could be listed under almost all of the institutional ref­
erences to follow: I first met him at Harvard; it was as a teaching
fellow in his course at Harvard that I first became obsessed by the
problem of pluralism, which in this book is the focus of Chapter
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