When I homeschooled my kids in the 1980s-2000s, homeschool curriculum publishers, politicians, and popular speakers talked a lot about the US Constitution. In those days, many (or maybe, most) homeschoolers were politically conservative and we listened to politicians and speakers who were conservative. The textbooks we used with our homeschoolers leaned conservative.

So, when all these folks talked about interpreting and understanding the US Constitution, they talked about the conservatives’ way of thinking about interpreting it: the founding fathers’ “original intent”.

Original intent is a way of interpreting the Constitution.

Original intent says that decisions should be made by trying to discern what the founding fathers meant and wanted when creating the Constitution.

People who believed in original intent took the opposite stance from those who interpreted the Constitution as “a living document”.

Those who took the “living document” stance felt that the founding fathers could not have known what life would be like in the future, so they left some flexibility in Constitutional interpretation.

This played out in the court system; for example, Roe vs. Wade. Original intent folks said that the Constitution protects life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They stated that abortion ends a life, thus is unconstitutional. Living document folks stated that the founding fathers had not included women in the original “general Welfare” doctrine of the Preamble. However, today the 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote, implying that their general welfare mattered- and welfare included their right to make their own health decisions.

Original intent versus living document has been one of the foundational arguments between American ideologies for decades.

Now suddenly the story has changed. With the Dodd decision in 2022, pro-life Christians got what they wanted. With this decision, abortion laws were handed back to the states. At least 14 states have passed strict abortion regulations.

Christians got a taste of power and wanted more. Recently, I heard a popular television preacher who was celebrating Dodd exclaim, “President Trump is giving the nation back to us!” Drunk on the power they are feeling because of a president that gave them a Supreme Court that gave them Dodd, this branch of Christianity is thrilling over other changes. They want their hero president to place LBTQ folks under restrictions and get rid of DEI, among other things. They believe that the current president is the nation’s and their political savior.

So my Christian friends are willing to ignore power grabs by the president, unconstitutional power grabs. And the only way they can turn their backs on the Constitutionally-mandated separation of powers and checks and balances, is to pretend they do not remember “original intent” of these. But that appears to be okay because their hero-president has given them a new idea: we are suddenly, thanks to his leadership, in a “post-Constitutional” era.

You read that right: because the current president wants authoritarian-level power, what I am hearing these days from many of my Christian friends is that they are now, “post Constitutionalist”.

They say, “we don’t need a Constitution anymore, we need a powerful man who will give us the America WE want”. They don’t want the separation of powers with its checks and balances that are guaranteed by the Constitution. They want a powerful hero who gives my friends and these television preachers the America they want. SO, they do need to toss the Constitution.

I hope some of them will remember the way this works in history.

Give all the power to a strong man, he establishes his regime, and then all his supporters and underlings are pushed aside, imprisoned, forgotten, or worse. These dictators “use them and then abuse them”. Think: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Il-Sung.

Remember with me, Christian friends, that Scripture has guidelines to help us figure how to save our country:

First, test the spirit of leaders, if they are not showing fruit of the Spirit by their words and actions, then they may be tricking you:

James 3: ⁹ With our tongue we give thanks to our Father in heaven. And with our tongue we speak bad words against men who are made like God. ¹⁰ Giving thanks and speaking bad words come from the same mouth. My Christian brothers, this is not right! ¹¹ Does a well of water give good water and bad water from the same place? ¹² Can a fig tree give olives or can a grape-vine give figs? A well does not give both good water and bad water. (Biblegateway.com NLV)

Then remember that there’s good news! We don’t need to have a “savior” in the form of a dictator. We, the believing people, have God’s instruction on how to save a nation. If we truly believe, it’s up to us to follow the instructions:

II Chronicles 7:14:

“If MY people who are called by my name will HUMBLE THEMSELVES and PRAY, and seek my face and TURN FROM THEIR WICKED WAYS, then will I hear from heaven and forgive their sins and heal their land.”

That’s right, we humble ourselves, we pray, we seek God’s face, we turn from our own wicked ways. Then God will hear and forgive…and heal our land!

The guardrails

In the meantime, we have the guardrails: our contract between “We the People” and our government. This contract lasts till “our posterity”, so as long as there are posterity, the Constitution is still in force. It is the supreme law of the land that any would-be dictator must submit to.

In other words, you can’t simply wish away the Constitution by inventing “post-Constitutionalism”.

I suggest we believers return to Original Intent.

What did our founding fathers intend about the Constitution? That it would last, that it would be the supreme law of the land (Article 6, section 2), and that the powers of the government are equally balanced between executive, legislative, judicial, and we the people.

We the people need to walk within that contract!