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The definition of exegesis is Bible leaning and thus is not a word many outside of the church are familiar with. And yet people can understand the idea of trying to interpret a text as the author or authors meant it to be understood. This applies to the US Constitution.
Is there a familiar word that is used by secular society that means to understand what the authors meant when they wrote a text?
(This answer was given and accepted while it was still in the Christianity.SE site. High Performance Mark's more recent answer is much more deserving of the check-mark.)
The word might be "originalism":
Whereas textualist approaches to constitutional interpretation focus solely on the text of the document, originalist approaches consider the meaning of the Constitution as understood by at least some segment of the populace at the time of the Founding. Though this method has generally been called "originalism", constitutional scholars have not reached a consensus on what it means for a judge to adopt this methodology for construing the Constitution’s text. Disagreements primarily concern which sources scholars should consult when determining the fixed meaning of the Constitution. Originalists, however, generally agree that the Constitution’s text had an "objectively identifiable" or public meaning at the time of the Founding that has not changed over time, and the task of judges and Justices (and other responsible interpreters) is to construct this original meaning.
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I, armed with the following from the OED, dispute the assertion that exegesis means Bible learning. OED tells me the word means
An explanation or interpretation of a text, esp. of scripture or a scriptural passage. Also more generally: a critical discourse or commentary.
so the word is especially but not exclusively applied to the study of scripture.
(I also dispute that many outside the church are unfamiliar with the word.)
So exegesis is available to be used when making a critical reading of a text, religious or otherwise. And in this degraded age, when so few are concerned with the study of scriptures, I don't see why we secularists oughtn't to say
Hang on a minute, that's a useful word, we'll have that back from the believers. Why, I might call my next PhD thesis The Exegesis of Elon Musk's Twitterings.
And, while I'm in the mood for an argument, I'll take a wee swipe at originalism and textualism as replacements for exegesis. They are, rather, approaches to exegesis.
This is a question for literary theory, which is a field that is much more general than the theory of Biblical interpretation (Biblical hermeneutics) which in turn underwrites the many methods of Christian exegesis. The term you're looking for is authorial intent:
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work. Authorial intentionalism is the view that an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted.[1] Opponents, who undermined its hermeneutical importance, have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies.
I think HPF has the correct answer, that you've misunderstood the meaning of the word.
However, it does indeed often imply application to The Bible in particular. If you want a term for doing the same thing without that implication, the process in general is called textual criticism, or more generally source criticism. This is what we say we are employing when we use similar analysis techniques on other works, like perhaps the Iliad. The process of trying to gather history from ancient sources through methods like this is called The Historical Method (meant to imply similarity as much as feasible to The Scientific Method)
Note that "a text as the author or authors meant it to be understood" can itself be problematic for anything that was primarily hand-copied throughout its early history. Any such work of any size will have changes/errors in every copy made. Figuring out what was likely the original text (if there even was one) of such a work can be quite a challenge, and that's a challenge that we simply do not have with works from the mass-printed era, such as the US Constitution. This is probably the main distinction between textual criticism and source criticism.
