Civil Religion and the Second Amendment
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Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 5-7-2021 Civil Religion and the Second Amendment Shivaun Corry Duquesne University Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Public Policy Commons, Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons, Rhetoric Commons, Social Influence and Political Communication Commons, and the Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons Recommended Citation Corry, S. (2021). Civil Religion and the Second Amendment (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1972 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. CIVIL RELIGION AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By M. Shivaun Corry May 2021 Copyright by M. Shivaun Corry 2021 CIVIL RELIGION AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT By M. Shivaun Corry Approved Dec. 18th, 2020 ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. Erik Garrett Dr. Richard Thames Associate Professor of Communication & Associate Professor of Communication & Rhetorical Studies Rhetorical Studies (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. Garnet Butchart Associate Professor of Communication & Rhetorical Studies (Committee Member) ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. Kristine L. Blair Dr. Ronald Arnett Dean of McAnulty College and Graduate Chair, Department of Communication and School of Liberal Arts Rhetorical Studies Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Mathematics Biochemistry iii ABSTRACT CIVIL RELIGION AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT By M. Shivaun Corry May 2021 Dissertation supervised by Dr. Erik Garrett The American approach to legal hermeneutics emerged from the covenant theology of the Puritans. American civil religion understands the Constitution to be based in natural laws: a secularized conception of God-given rights. To change the text would collapse the epistemological framework of the nation. When a nation sees its constitution as a sacred text, then the answer to contemporary problems cannot be to change that text; rather, it must be to return to the text with an even more fundamentalist hermeneutic. Both gun rights advocate Charlton Heston, and gun control advocate Barack Obama, argued their cases using a fundamentalist hermeneutic, drawing on American civil religious rhetoric. Keywords: Second Amendment, Civil Religion, Hermeneutic Fundamentalism iv DEDICATION To my mother (the real philosopher of the family) and the other brilliant women whose names remain unknown because they inspired, edited, and often ghost-wrote their husbands’ books and dissertations instead of writing their own. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This dissertation was completed at Duquesne University, which is situated in Pittsburgh, the ancestral territory of the Lenni Lenape, Shawnee, and Hodinöhšönih Confederacy. This acknowledgement is an important rhetorical step in promoting indigenous visibility in what is now The United States of America, but it is only one small step towards the more concrete goal of indigenous political sovereignty and the return of land to indigenous people. I would like to acknowledge the help of Dr. Andrew Feenberg who encouraged me to pursue this topic, suggested readings in the history of civil religion from Plato to the French Revolution, and helped me understand the connection between the gun control debate and popular philosophies of technology. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ....................................................................................................................................iv Dedication ................................................................................................................................. v Acknowledgement ...................................................................................................................vi Chapter 1: Hermeneutic Fundamentalism….…………………………………………….1 Chapter 2: Civil Religion …………………………….…………………………………26 Chapter 3: The Second Amendment as Civil Religious Text……………………………67 Chapter 4: The American Covenant…………….…………………………………......103 Chapter 5: Moses of the NRA…………………….……………………………………144 Chapter 6: Obama’s Tears…...……………………………………………………….192 Chapter 7: Idols or Ideals……………………………………………………………….227 References……………………………………………………...……………………….254 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: HERMENEUTIC FUNDAMENTALISM …[A]n axiom of African American preaching is that a text without a context is a pretext. And the way the Second Amendment is most regularly cited is without context… Wilda Gafney (Brite Divinity School) and John Pahl (Berkley Law) The Black Panthers Create a White Monster On May 2nd, 1967, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense took an armed delegation to the California state legislature. Bobby Seal, then Chairman of the Black Panthers, read a press release stating that the legislature intended to take away the people’s — particularly black people’s — constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms. Up to this point, the Second Amendment had been largely ignored by lawyers, legal scholars, and the American people. Even American Rifleman, the magazine of the National Rifle Association, did not mention the Second Amendment until the late 1960s (Abumrad, 2018). Yet, in the fifty years since Bobby Seal made his statement, the Second Amendment has gone from being largely ignored to being the topic of everything from presidential debates to country western songs. The purpose of this dissertation is not to advocate for or against gun control laws. It is not even to decide whether an individualist or collectivist interpretation of the Second Amendment best matches the Framers’ original intent; rather, I seek to understand how the Second Amendment became so hallowed that even a group as radical 1 as the Black Panthers – or as liberal as the Democratic Party, or as populist as the NRA -- could appeal to it to legitimate their interests. In this dissertation, I argue that the answers to this question lie in the American impulse to what I term the fundamentalist hermeneutic: a devotion to the original text. I argue that this fundamentalist hermeneutic can be traced back to the Puritan covenant theology. This covenant theology was the theological and political philosophy of the earliest European settlers in what is now the United State of America. It remains the epistemological foundation of the nation. In this study, I review this history and demonstrate how both gun rights and gun control advocates have continually applied this fundamentalist hermeneutic and employed sacred rhetoric in their attempts to sway public opinion and mobilize individuals around the issue of gun control in the USA. The Fundamentalist Hermeneutic One cannot theorize about the meaning of a legal document -- whether it be a statute, constitution, or judicial opinion-without at least implicitly invoking a theory of interpretation, for interpretation precedes and makes possible the recognition of meaning in a written work. (Mootz, 1988, p. 526) Hermes. The messenger of the gods. With his winged sandals he moves swiftly and easily between the world of mortals and Mount Olympus, translating the words and deeds of the gods into a form that humans can understand. Hermes is the protector of not just human heralds and orators, but also of tricksters and thieves; the line between interpretation and deception is slim. We all know that it is easy to -- intentionally or unintentionally -- interpret a text in a manner that would disgust its author. As a 2 language translator myself, I have learned that when this is unintentional, it is often the result of a lack of awareness of the context of the original text, and when it is intentional, it is almost always ideological. In antiquity, Greece established practices for the interpretation of “oracles, dreams, myths, philosophical and poetical works, but also laws and contracts” (Mantzavinos, 2020). The contemporary Greek philosopher of the social science Mantzavinos argues that the most “remarkable” of these practices was allegoresis: which can be translated as meaning simply “saying something different”. As opposed to aiming for a literal interpretation, this approach to hermeneutics aimed at a “deeper meaning” of texts as diverse as the Delphic oracle’s pronouncements, to cannon law, to Homeric epics. Citing the classicist Johnathon Tate’s seminal 1934 essay “On the History of Allegorism,” Mantzavinos states that this approach was taken when authoritative texts, “contained claims and statements that seemed theologically and morally inappropriate or false”. Allegory was used as an interpretive tool when a literal interpretation went against contemporary understandings of morality and theology. Early references to this allegorical approach to hermeneutics hint at the fact that in the western tradition, hermeneutics has inextricably been tied to the occult and specifically to the interpretation of religious texts. It is not merely coincidence that Schleiermacher is considered the father of modern theology and the father of modern hermeneutics: the fields