The way that some people read the Bible affects how they read the Constitution—and how they want Supreme Court justices to read it, too. The United States has the oldest active codified constitution in the world, and yet it also remains one of the most unchanged—a fact that is sometimes attributed to the influence of evangelicals’ insistence on scriptural “inerrancy” that has come to inflect our founding documents. “One of the most malevolent characteristics of racist thought,” Toni Morrison wrote, “is that it seems never to produce new knowledge.”*
