On Constitution Day, a Reminder That We Need Each Other
The United States Constitution was signed in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. We mark that anniversary today as both Constitution Day and Citizenship Day.
On Wednesday evening, an Episcopal bishop, a Jewish religious-freedom advocate, a constitutional scholar, a democracy expert and the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered inside Washington National Cathedral to consider what that old document asks of us now.
The program, “Faith, Freedom and the Common Good,” was part of the cathedral’s “A Better Way” series, an effort to help Americans find common ground during a deeply polarized time.
Following the keynote address, constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen moderated a discussion featuring the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington; Melody Barnes, executive director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia; and Rabbi David Saperstein, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.
The gathering itself demonstrated its message: People with different backgrounds, beliefs and responsibilities sitting in the same room to consider what Americans owe one another.
Dallin H. Oaks delivered the evening’s keynote address. Oaks has spent much of his life studying the Constitution. Before becoming a senior religious leader, he clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court, taught law at the University of Chicago and served as a justice on the Utah Supreme Court.
His central idea was timely: The Constitution was not created for people who always agree. It was created to help people who disagree continue living—and governing—together.
“The Constitution compels a divided people to build coalitions,” he said.
The Constitution does not promise that Americans will arrive at the same conclusions. Instead, it divides governmental power, establishes rules for resolving disputes and requires competing interests to work through a common process. No person, party, branch of government or temporary majority is supposed to possess all the power.
That arrangement can be slow. It can be maddening. But the slowness is partly the point.
Oaks did not argue that compromise requires abandoning deeply held beliefs. He argued that people can protect their essential convictions while still listening, negotiating and recognizing the rights of others.
He pointed to Utah’s 2015 legislation balancing new protections against housing and employment discrimination with protections for religious organizations. Neither side received everything it wanted. Both sides obtained protections they considered important.
That, he suggested, is constitutional peacemaking—not the absence of disagreement, but the willingness to search for a fair way forward.
The message also carried a warning. Citizens should be careful about seeking complete victory for their own side. In a country made up of many religions, cultures and political traditions, attempts at total dominance leave little room for anyone else.
America’s original constitutional order was not perfect. Slavery remained. Women could not vote. Generations of Americans had to use constitutional processes, amendments, legislation and civic action to extend the country’s promises more fully.
The Constitution’s strength, then, is not that it removed conflict from American life. Its strength is that it gave Americans a structure within which conflict could be confronted, debated and corrected without surrendering the country to force.
The evening’s simplest sentence may also have been its most important: We are “fellow citizens who need each other.”
That idea is easy to forget when nearly every public question is presented as a battle between enemies. Yet our neighbors remain our neighbors after the election, the court decision, the city council meeting and the argument on social media.
Citizenship asks more of us than winning.
It asks us to listen carefully, defend liberty for people unlike ourselves, accept lawful outcomes we may dislike and keep working to improve the laws through constitutional means. It asks us to see disagreement as a problem to work through—not permission to hate one another.
The evening closed with a prayer that Americans would seek to become peacemakers.
On Constitution Day, that seems like a worthy civic assignment for all of us.
Photo courtesy of the Church Newsroom