Can the US Constitution heal a fractured country?
Wheatley Fellows Justin Collings, associate dean at the BYU Law School, and Thomas Griffith, former judge on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, examine the question in their new op-ed, "A republic of neighbors: How moral agency and community can heal our divided nation".
To examine the impact of the Constitution on national unity, Collings and Griffith point to the remarks of President Dallin H. Oaks, "one of the wisest living students of the U.S. Constitution". President Oaks, who is currently serving as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is a long-time student of the Constitution with decades of legal experience. His professional accolades include being a law clerk in the US Supreme Court, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, creating the law school at Brigham Young University while serving as the college's president, and serving as a justice on the Utah Supreme Court.
"President Oaks has set forth what one sympathetic observer calls “a remarkable civic theology” — one which underscores the Constitution’s potential as a unifying force," Collings and Griffith explain. This unifying power comes from the Constitution's unique protection of two different kinds of conscience.
"Moral agency emphasizes the individual. Social bonds emphasize the communal," the two men explain. "At first blush these principles seem in tension if not in conflict. But in President Oaks’s view, they can — and they must — work in tandem to create 'a more perfect union.'".