This is part of How Originalism Ate the Law, a Slate series about the legal theory that ruined everything.

One of the inescapable conclusions that came from diving deep into the allure of originalism was the profound and uniquely American connection between theories of constitutional interpretation and methodologies of religious exegesis. Professor Jamal Greene writes that “[t]he American attitude toward the Constitution is frequently described in terms of worship, reverence, and fidelity.” Greene cites Max Lerner fretting all the way back in 1937 that “the very habits of mind begotten by an authoritarian Bible and a religion of submission to a higher power have been carried over to an authoritarian Constitution and a philosophy of submission to a ‘higher law.’ ” Lerner then pointed to the paradox wherein “a country like America, in which its early tradition had prohibited a state church, ends by getting a state church after all, although in a secular form.”

It’s impossible to separate the new, conservative affinity for treating text as sacred and the Supreme Court as oracular diviners of holy meaning from statistics showing a statistically significant correlation between Americans’ approval of originalism and their belief in the literal truth of the Bible. One of my favorite thinkers on the link between originalism and religion is Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment and director of the Information Society Project at Yale, whose new book, Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional........

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