“[Supreme Court Judge] Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

I should hasten to add that the author uses this to tease out the place of supplements to the text, much as Catholics have tradition and even the Protestants who were more strict textualists often didn’t want to lose the Catholic traditions. But there’s also the very Mormon idea that “revelation is neither the written scripture nor the oral traditions; both scripture and tradition are only human accounts of the true revelation, which is the ‘christ-event,’ the ‘Word made flesh.” Thus scripture becomes words of finite men responding to the manifestation of God. It becomes metaphor to say what can’t be said literally.

Of course I suspect most Mormons, who are apt to take up the types of originalism or textualism popularized in conservative thought since Reagan. might have some discomfort with this. And of course perhaps that approach to scriptural exegesis as well. Yet in an other sense how we read scripture (and constitution) are socially structured by our social traditions. However from the very beginning of the Republic there was a measure of constitution worship. Rather than have a king, we have law as our king with the constitution as its ultimate symbol. As the article notes:

(a) judicial review requires that judges enforce the Constitution; (b) the Constitution stands for the American essence; therefore, (c) judicial review requires judges o discern and enforce the American essence.

The problem is obvious for Mormons, what is the hidden essence of the Constitution to which we’re to be truer than the words trying to represent it? And is that valid since of course untempered it allows any level of judicial activism.

But all throughout American history there have been significant, powerful movements—from Know Nothing anti-Catholicism to those today who think Latinos and Muslims, because of the political cultures of their countries of origin, will corrupt democracy—that interpret the Constitution’s provisions as racially and religiously grounded to the exclusion of the non-white (whatever that means at any given moment) and the non-Protestant.

An alternative way of looking at this, then: because of the universalistic language of the Constitution, American political religion is relatively easily co-optable. “New, culturally different immigrants” could wield the ideals of the Constitution and other founding documents to push for equal voice and treatment, despite their exclusion from the groups the Constitution (in context) originally protected. Mormons co-opted Americanism in a unique way.