The Fight to Bear Arms: Challenging the Second Amendment and the U.S. Constitution as a Sacred Text

Abstract

This article examines the manner in which constitutional law in the United States serves to preserve, accentuate and institutionalise what Robert Bellah referred to as the ‘Civil Religion’ of the nation (1967). As the U.S. Supreme Court manages the evolution of the nation, it does so through an institutional deference to the authority of the nation’s founders. The United States is not unique in the glorification of the nation’s ‘Founding Fathers’. It does, however, stand alone in the manner it seeks to maintain a temporal connection with these iconic national figures through the law and the interpretation of that law. U.S. constitutional law seeks to reiterate and reproduce the principles of the Founding Fathers and the ideals that they espoused. This fact is explicated in this article through an examination of the case of the District of Columbia v Heller (2008). This article seeks to account for two key nationalistic phenomena in the United States relating to constitutional law and the U.S. Constitution’s infamous Second Amendment. Firstly, the profound institutional reverence for the national heroes that first begat the nation. And, secondly, a precise hermeneutical deference to those Founding Fathers - in law - that is largely unmatched in the developed world.