Dershowitz is most urgently concerned to reclaim his cherished
Declaration from the Christian Right, whose suggestion that
America is a Christian nation inspires him to fiery sermons that
consume about a third of his book. But ultimately—and he is not
shy about saying so—he would reclaim the Declaration from Thomas
Jefferson, himself, and from the revolutionaries of 1776. Words,
as you may have read in any one of a million sacred academic
texts, and as you will read again on every fourth or fifth page
of Dershowitz's non-academic book, have "different meanings" for
different people in different times and places. The most famous
and distinctive words of the Declaration, according to
Dershowitz, have fundamentally different meanings (they bear
different ideas and principles) for us in "the twenty-first-
century world" than they had for Jefferson and the
revolutionaries who proclaimed them 200-some years ago. To
explain this miracle of the lost meanings, Dershowitz invokes a
hodgepodge of academic articles of fai