Sovereignty Made Present: A Political Theology Of Canadian Constitutional Originalism

Abstract

This thesis develops an analogy between Canadian expressions of constitutional originalism, on the one hand, and American evangelical practices of interpreting the Bible as their holy scripture, on the other. It does so in defence of a comparative claim: there is something substantively similar about the way originalists read the Canadian Constitution and the way American evangelicals read the Protestant Bible in that they both do so theologically. Drawing on the political theology literature, this thesis develops that claim with sustained reference to originalist and evangelical interpretive methods and motives. At the level of method, constitutional originalism represents a reconstructive effort to identify and operationalize the historical decisions through which the Constitution’s drafters formulated its final wording; and, at the level of motive, to an assertive effort to identify on that basis the Canadian citizenry’s “sovereign self,” of which the originalist interpreter is one part, as the Constitution’s ultimate author.