God in the Irish Constitution

Dr. David Kenny is Assistant Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin

Upon first reading, God, and some of his consistent personages, plays a striking and prominent role in the Irish Constitution. But like many things, the meaning and effect of this is not as clear and as obvious as one might think, and the real story of the God in the Irish Constitution is more complicated than one might initially assume.

A Godly Preamble

In their first week of law school, I have my Constitutional Law students read the Irish Constitution and ask for their impressions. For almost all of them, it is their first time reading the text in full. Every year, multiple students note the religiosity of the text as the most striking feature. Before even that most common invocation of popular power “We, the people,” our Constitution’s Preamble begins with a very different invocation:

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God in Secular Constitutions

Dmytro Vovk, Director of the Center for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies at Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University and co-editor of Talk About: Law and Religion

Carl Schmitt points out in Political Theology that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” Likewise, many doctrines and concepts of modern constitutionalism have theological roots and have been developed in the dialogue with religious tradition. Religion has never fully disappeared from texts of secular constitutions—it lingers in symbolic references to God, religious formulas in presidential oaths, constitutional agreements with churches of majorities, and so on.

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Quarantines, Religious Groups, and Some Questions About Equality

Christopher C. Lund is Professor of law at Wayne State University Law School

When the government imposes quarantine orders for public safety, shutting some places down and leaving other places open, how should it treat religious organizations and religious services?  A natural answer is that religious organizations should be treated equally. And that makes sense. Equality is a solid moral principle, with wide-ranging appeal and deep roots in history and in law.

But equality is not self-executing. And the deeper one goes into these quarantine orders, the more that becomes apparent.  We are trying to treat religion equally, but we don’t quite know how. I’m planning a longer piece that will go into more details. But for this blog post, let me simply try to demonstrate two things to you.  First, quarantine schemes require judgments about the value of religious exercise—which is uncomfortable in a system like ours, which tries to keep the government out of such questions.  And second, by insisting that all gatherings of all religious organizations be treated the same way, quarantine schemes become blind to genuine religious differences. We are deciding how much to restrict religious organizations in general by imagining what happens in a religious service, but our imagined religious service ends up looking a lot like a Sunday morning Christian worship service.

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