Like Lepore’s The White’s of Their Eyes Kramnick’s and Moore’s book is a mixture of empirical history and rational empirically grounded polemic. In The Godless Constitution Cornell professors Kramnick and Moore attempt to correct the historical misreadings of the US Constitution just as Lepore attempted to correct the historical misreadings of the right wing American Tea Party, if in a more conventional narrative way. Where Lepore attempted to correct misreadings of the US Revolution by the American right, Kramnick and Moore attempt to correct the historical misreadings by many on the intellectual and populist right, the latter generally mimicking what the former mouth with a little bit of help from their right wing friends in the demagogic and sensationalist red faced and fear mongering media, of the US Constitution.
Right wing mythhistory, like that which Lepore, Kramnick, and Moore attempt to correct, of course, has a long history as the parodic and satirical National Lampoon 1964 high school yearbook published in 1973 with its parodic and satirical excerpts of a high school history text points up, a long history that stretches back to the beginnings of the nation itself, actually even before there was a nation called the United States of America. So, it should be no surprise to people in the historical know, save for those wedded to an Enlightenment perception that education has or will put such mythic rabble into the rubbish bin of history once and for all, that mythhistory is still alive and well and living in intellectual secular right and intellectual religious right American minds today.
Kramnick and Moore do an excellent job of exploring the real as opposed to the mythhistorical origins of the US Constitution. They note right off the bat that the US Constitution does not mention god once and mentions religion only once in order to mandate that no religious test for office be mandated in the new United States in its original form. In its expanded form, of course, thanks to the addition of the Bill of Rights, something that was added to the Constitution to assure its passage, religion is mentioned only, as Kramnick and Moore note, in order to mandate that there be no theocracy in the United States, something that on one side of the coin separates religion and the American state and on the other separates the American state from religion. The founding fathers, after all, knew the dangers of theocracy not only because of its long European history—Christianity as a state religion in what became Europe goes back to the Roman Empire—and reality but because many of the American colonies were theocracies as well, theocracies where, for example, Quakers, were murdered because they were not “orthodox” Puritans.
Kramnick and Moore are also very good at exploring the ideologies of American’s founding fathers in relation to religion. They note rightly that founding fathers like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, who many on the right have turned into secular "orthodox” Christian saints, were not the nationalist Christians who are so prominent in America and American politics today. Many of the founding fathers, in fact, were Deists, those who denied the Trinity, the Christian notion that god has three faces, god, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. They note that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers and writer of the early drafts of the American Declaration of Independence, made his own version of the New Testament, the Christian Bible which was added to the Jewish Tanakh, in which the miracles and other supernatural elements were removed, in order to produce a Jesus who Jefferson thought was more real, a Jesus who was a kind of an Enlightenment figure before the Enlightenment (akin to how Joseph Smith made Jesus a Mormon before Mormonism in the Book of Mormon). They note that James Madison, the author of the US Constitution, played a significant role in helping pass Jefferson’s Virginia's Statute of Religious Freedom, a statute written in 1777 and passed in 1786, which mandated religious freedom in once theocratic Virginia (Anglicanism was the colonial state religion in Virginia) thanks to his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, which, in turn, argues for religious liberty and against theocracy, documents that made religion in the US a private not a public or state matter.
Where Kramnick and Moore are wanting is their failure to explore how this secular constitution written by Enlightenment philosophes who, while using a language about god that was very similar to those who regarded themselves as “orthodox” Christians, gave different meanings, more deistic meanings or twists, to that language, something those wedded to a literalist and fundamentalist reading of language often fail to get or refuse to get (thanks to political and ideological correctness). They fail to explore the fact that one variant of American Protestant Christianity became the unofficial state religion of the United States beginning with the second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, an unofficial theocracy that lasted well into the twentieth century, and an unofficial theocracy that many on the right point to as evidence that the US was and always has been a Christian nation.
Another thing wanting in Kramnick and Moore is a reflection on who this book is meant for. If it is meant for those already convinced of the fact that the US is a secular nation then it is simply made to order for an already present echo chamber. If it is aimed, at least in part, to those on the right who misread the empirical facts about the secular American Constitution it is doubtful that many on the right, particularly the Christian nationalist right, will read it in the first place and it is likely that if they do they will do what often times happens when cognitive dissonance occurs, should cognitive dissonance even occur in the first place, they will simply become even more convinced that the US was a Christian nation. After all, for far too many on the mythhistorical right ideology creates reality rather than the other way around, something proven yet again by the malreview of the book by one Dan Crawford on Amazon, a Pontius Pilate like corporation that refuses to weed out politically and ideologically correct reviews from fact based reviews. Crawford accuses, Kramnick and Moore of being "atheists", offering no evidence whatsoever for this claim, and maintains, despite empirical evidence to the contrary (see page 96 chosen at random, for example), that the authors do not quote the words of the founding fathers. It should also be noted that Crawford blissfully ignores the bibliography at the end of the book while making the claim that Kramnick and Moore offer no sources for their arguments. And so political and ideological correctness goes.
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