A Divinely Expired Constitution*
The Constitution, which lots of people say god had a hand in drafting, appears to have an expiration date. It’s coming right up. Self-government, at least the one their god helped design, lasted about 250 years
“Self-government,” through an imperfect union with built-in mechanisms to advance the promise of a “more perfect union,” sounded nice and it largely was for the straight white folk: the power originating in the people; the people delegating that power, through the franchise, to a government separated into co-equal branches; those branches exerting independent checks on the others to make sure they behave; religiously neutral laws to protect the right of free exercise; people retaining the right to speak and associate freely, to worship or not as they choose, to be safe and secure in their homes and property, to challenge before a neutral magistrate government efforts to take away their lives, liberty, or property; the ability to trust in the rule of law and its equal application; the freedom to delegate the power away from those who misuse or abuse it to someone else.
God’s plan, according to some religions — maybe the same ones preaching the Constitution is divinely inspired — was for people to have free will, not for someone to devilishly make choices for them. It makes sense that a constitution that god designed would assure free will in citizens to decide for themselves to whom they will delegate the power that originates in them, and the least intrusion into citizens’ independence and agency to make decisions including, importantly, those “involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy.”[i]
Or maybe god’s design didn’t have a built-in expiration but was simply flawed. Maybe she didn’t foresee this future and close the loopholes. Maybe god didn’t think through the ways the falsely pious and pharisaic, demonstrably evil political leaders, bible selling and thumping hypocrites, money ministers, wolves in sheep’s clothing, frauds who carry around pocket-size copies of the Constitution as props, false prophets, egomaniacs, charlatans, pathological liars, could abuse that power by banding together to erase the lines between the branches of government, to achieve the very antithesis of the Constitution’s so-called divinely inspired design.
A constitution stripped of that god’s divine handiwork might continue to exist but only on paper: “Elections [still] take place, but they’re no longer truly fair or free — the party in power controls the electoral machinery, and if the results aren’t desirable, they’ll be challenged and likely overturned. To keep their jobs, civil servants have to prove not their competence but their personal loyalty to the leader. Independent government officers — prosecutors, inspectors general, federal commissioners, central bankers — are fired and their positions handed to flunkies. The legislature, in the hands of the ruling party, becomes a rubber stamp for the executive. Courts still hear cases, but judges are appointed for their political views, not their expertise, and their opinions, cloaked in neutral-sounding legal terms, predictably give the leader what he wants, endorsing his most illiberal policies and immunizing him from accountability. The rule of law amounts to favors for friends and persecution for enemies. The separation of powers turns out to be a paper-thin gentleman’s agreement. There are no meaningful checks on the leader’s power.”[ii]
When I cast my vote, which I always have and will continue doing as long as I’m allowed, I felt a sense of hope and patriotism that the people to whom I wished to delegate my power were stewards, trustworthy public servants who, beyond every other responsibility, would fulfill their oaths of loyalty to the Constitution and rule of law and not to a person or political party, that they would serve honorably in the capacity entrusted to them.
Utah’s congressional delegation — most if not all of whom profess to believe the Constitution was divinely inspired and that God’s plan was for people to have free will — have set about to erase their god’s handiwork from the Constitution, to make it an empty shell where power isn’t in the people but in a tyrant to whom they have pledged their true loyalty by, among other things, rubber stamping or refusing to serve as a check on his wholesale destruction of the constitutional republic they swore to protect and defend.
As Rachel Maddow reminds, “watch what they do, not what they say.”
Maybe god’s mistake was designing a form of government that depended on the trust, the morality, the honor, the integrity of those to whom the people delegate their power, that they would keep their oaths to defend and protect the Constitution above all else, and the thought of stealing that power from the people and maintaining it in themselves and their band of Gadianton robbers[iii] never entered their minds.
Some god she was.
*Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, the talented fiction writer and novelist, is my brother. He deserves considerable credit for offering substantive and technical suggestions to my blog. His second novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. It is a literary masterpiece.
[i] Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (Justice Antony Kennedy).
[ii] America’s Zombie Democracy (George Packer, The Atlantic, September 24, 2025).
[iii] According to Mormon lore as interpreted by AI, the Gadianton robbers were a large-scale secret criminal organization described in the Book of Mormon that operated in ancient America, known for their secret oaths, murder, and plunder to gain power and control. Their secret combinations and wicked practices eventually contributed to the destruction of the Nephite civilization. They were similar to ancient, organized crime syndicates or rogue nations, and their activities are presented as a significant moral and political threat to the societies they infiltrated.