Ignoring grammar makes it easier to weaponize the Constitution

Grammar is boring. When you hear about a clause, it’s tempting to think less about English lessons and more about Santa.

Unfortunately you’ll have to get over that boredom if we want to slow our country’s seemingly inexorable march toward Christian fascism.

Because if Congresswoman Lauren Boebert is focused on clauses vs. phrases, and which one appears where, we’d better be too.

The hyperconservative firebrand, who handily won last week’s Republican primary in Colorado, just a few days earlier told a church congregation, “I’m tired of this ‘separation of church and state’ junk,” adding, “It was not in the Constitution, it was in a stinking letter and it means nothing like what they say it does.”

She’s right about that phrase not appearing in the Constitution. Part of the problem is that the establishment clause — the part of the Bill of Rights that actually does separate church and state — is referred to as such: a clause, a nerdy grammatical term that causes many to tune out of the conversation. To make things harder, our understanding of establishment has changed in the last 250 years, making the establishment clause more inscrutable than it needs to be.

And difficult-to-understand things are much easier to misinterpret and weaponize.

“Difficult-to-understand things are much easier to misinterpret and weaponize.”

The clause in question reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — and then it goes on about some other assorted freedoms (press, speech, assembly) that, if the justices of the Supreme Court haven’t dismantled them by the time you read this, don’t worry; they’re working on it.

Clauses contain both a subject and a predicate; phrases don’t. In this case, the phrase separation of church and state — which dates to an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson — is clearer and more direct than the full establishment clause. It’s telling that, more than a decade after the Bill of Rights’ 1791 ratification, then-President Jefferson still felt a need to explain what the establishment clause meant. Because clause is a technical term that’s under-understood, referring to the establishment clause bores people and causes them to tune out, making them less likely to understand what the words say and how they say it.

Moreover, the word establishment was understood very differently by Jefferson’s contemporaries than it is today.

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In the second half of the 18th century, the word was very much on the rise, with its prevalence in English increasing fivefold from 1740 to 1800. Several of the most common definitions used at the time pertained to religion or state churches, including, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “the ‘establishing’ by law (a church, religion, form of worship),” “the granting of legal status to (other religious bodies than that connected with the state),” and “the conferring on a particular religious body the position of a state church.”

But times have changed. Establishment’s usage fell off during the 19th century. Today we think of “the establishment” as what the OED calls “a social group exercising power … and having as a general interest the maintenance of the status quo,” but that definition is distinctly 20th century, with its usage taking off in the late 1950s and ’60s.

Since we’ve lost that 18th-century religious sense of establishment, the term establishment clause feels less essential, less relevant to our 21st-century lives. It’s necessary to understand those historical definitions and to resist the impending boredom that technical terms like clause can provoke.

Otherwise, manipulative politicians like Boebert will come up with their own constitutional interpretations that are just as imaginary as Santa Claus.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and phrasemongery to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.