The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Punishing crimes against the regime more harshly than crimes against other people is typical in totalitarian systems. But are we sure that blasphemy is really the issue here? For a god, Yahweh’s legislation is remarkably imprecise. “Misusing” or “taking a name in vain” is so vague as to mean nothing yet somehow prohibits everything. In the United States, sloppy legal drafting is grounds for declaring a law unconstitutional. If citizens cannot know what is prohibited by a law, they cannot be expected to obey the law, and it can be struck down as too vague. Then again, vague laws that permit many interpretations are also typical in totalitarian regimes. This is actually one reason the founders carefully defined treason as a crime within the Constitution itself. “If the description of treason be vague and indeterminate under any government; this alone will be a sufficient cause why that government should degenerate into tyranny,” James Wilson explained to a grand jury in 1791.9 Treason, or any other crime, if poorly defined, “furnishes an opportunity to unprincipled courtiers, and to demagogues equally unprincipled, to harass the independent citizen, and the faithful subject, by treasons, and by prosecutions for treasons, constructive, capricious, and oppressive,” added Wilson in a law lecture that same year. 10