The Berks Barrister Summer 2017 - 26

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Book Review

Continued from page 25

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26 | Berks Barrister

ancient Romans who advocated a return to "traditional morality,"
and the poets who argued that monogamous marriage and fidelity
could save the culture. In other words, it was not only matronly
Christians who were startled at the "flood of dissipation" occurring
in late Rome-this view was shared by many observers.
No better as a theologian than he is as a historian-but give
him credit for going big rather than home-Stone determines that
all the theologians and scholars of Christendom and Judaism have
been sadly misled. The Bible doesn't prohibit extra-marital sex,
he confidently avers, without engaging the passages traditionally
used to support this assuredly biblical doctrine. One wonders why
an author committed to a thesis about the dangerous impact of
conservative pastors on American courts would waste his time also
attempting to prove that the pastors are wrong about a religion he
doesn't follow and a book he hasn't read.
This attempt at detaching the underlying text from its most
authoritative interpreters continues, however, when he reaches the
Constitution's drafting. Averring that the Constitution was drafted
to reflect enlightenment values, Stone argues that the founding
fathers rejected Christian views on law and morality. Oceans of
ink have been spilled on the topic of the founders' religious views
(or lack thereof ), and Stone adds nothing new to the discussion.
It is at this critical juncture of the book that he exposes his own
insecurities about his thesis, though, protesting against the actual
words of the founders, and picking them apart in great detail in an
effort to show that they didn't necessarily mean what they actually
said. In addition, he invests three-fourths of his time in this section
on three men-Jefferson, Adams and Thomas Payne-who were
not present at, and had no appreciable influence on the drafting of
the Constitution. Simply put, the mountains of praise heaped on
the Bible and traditional Christian morality by our least religious
founding fathers and early thinkers are difficult to square with the
religious animus Stone asks us to find in the Constitution.
What makes all this weak scholarship so disappointing is that
Stone finally finds some interesting ideas to present very late in
the book. One of the better passages comes when Stone turns to
the question of what rights should be considered "fundamental."
Reviewing the reasoning from the Poe v. Ullman dissents and the
Griswold v. Connecticut majority, Stone asks what other rights
might be included in the "penumbras" of our bill of rights. Stone's
analysis here raises questions unresolved in constitutional litigation
and frames a debate too often ignored in academic circles about
the Bill of Rights' check on government power. Even conservatives
will find something alluring in the constitutional restraints on
government power that Stone proposes.
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