The other day, Politico writer Heidi Przybyla appeared on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” to talk about the hysteria de jour, “Christian nationalism.” Donald Trump, she explained, has surrounded himself with an “extremist element of conservative Christians,” who were misrepresenting “so-called natural law” in their attempt to roll back abortion “rights” and other leftist policy preferences. What makes “Christian nationalists” different, she went on, was that they believe “our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority.”
As numerous critics have already pointed out, “Christian nationalism” sounds identical to the case for American liberty offered in the Declaration of Independence. Then again, the idea that man has inalienable, universal rights goes back to ancient Greece, at least. The entire American project is contingent on accepting the notion that the state can’t give or take our God-given freedoms.
It is the best kind of “extremism.”
None of this is to say there aren’t Christians out there who engage in an unhealthy conflation of politics and faith or harbor theocratic ideas. It is to say that the definition of “Christian nationalism” offered by the people at Politico and MSNBC comports flawlessly with the mindset that makes the United States possible.
Conservatives often chalk up this kind of ignorance about civics to a declining education system. It’s not an accident. But even if progressives were fluent in the philosophy of natural rights, one strongly suspects she, like most progressives (and other statists), would be uninterested. It’s a political imperative to be uninterested.
If natural rights are truly inalienable, how can the government create a slew of new (positive) “rights” — the right to housing or abortion or health care or free birth control? And how can we limit those who “abuse” free expression, self-defense and due process if they are up to no good? You know, as President Joe Biden likes to say — when speaking about the Second Amendment, never abortion — no right “is absolute.”
The most telling part of Przybyla’s explanation, for example, was to concede that “natural law” had on occasion actually been used for good. When natural law is used to further “social justice,” it is legitimate, but when applied to ideas the Left finds objectionable (such as protecting unborn life), it becomes “Christian nationalism.”
It’s almost as if she doesn’t comprehend the idea of a neutral principle. It’s the kind of thinking that impels the media to put skeptical quotation marks around terms like “religious liberty,” but never around “LGBT rights” or “social justice” and so on.
It’s also true that the “Christian nationalism” scare is a ginned-up partisan effort to spook non-Christian voters. And, clearly, to some secular Americans, the idea that a non-“earthly authority” can bestow rights on humans sounds nuts. As a nonbeliever myself, I’ve been asked by Christians many times how I can square my skepticism of the Almighty with a belief in natural rights.
My answer is simple: I choose to.
“This is the bind post-Christian America finds itself in,” tweeted historian Tom Holland. “It can no longer appeal to a Creator as the author of its citizens’ rights, so [he] has to pretend that these rights somehow have an inherent existence: a notion requiring no less of a leap of faith than does belief in God.”
No less but no more. Just as an atheist or agnostic or irreligious secular American accepts that it’s wrong to steal and murder and cheat, they can accept that man has an inherent right to speak freely and the right to defend himself, his family and his property. History, experience and an innate sense of the world tell me that such rights benefit individuals as well as mankind. It is rational.
The liberties borne out of thousands of years of tradition are more vital than the vagaries of democracy or the diktats of the state. That’s clear to me. We still debate the extent of rights, obviously. I don’t need a Ph.D. in philosophy, however, to understand that preserving life or expression are self-evident universal rights in a way that compelling taxpayers to pay for your “reproductive justice” is not.
John Locke, as far as I understand it, argued as much, though he believed that the decree of God made all of it binding. Which is why, even though I don’t believe my rights were handed down by a superbeing, I act like they are. It’s really the only way for the Constitution to work.
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.” His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter @davidharsanyi.
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J.B. Lightfoot stated “The spirit is the ruling faculty in man, and through which he holds communication with the unseen word, the soul is the seed of all his impulses and affections, the center of his personality, and the body that links him to the material world and is the instrument of all his outward deeds” which are the three dimensions of American man, and American previous Christian inspired success, which has now been secularly and socially reduced to a missing link regression of just a body and mind in which Biden’s case clings to the fallible lies that enslave us, instead of the infallible Creator directed truths that set us free of men, who seek power and the world, then lose their American souls in their Faustian deals with the devil, now personified in the face of a once Christian democrat party turned secular in deeds. Not a pretty sight when once sound men degrade themselves and their people for the fleeting pleasure of power, only followed by the lasting pain of government failures, where the 3 dimensional whole, should have been greater the sum of the 2 animal inspired individual parts they gave us.
Is not two greater than one? And three greater than two? Is not the soul of a collective political party just the sum total of the worth of its individual souls? How can this soulless modern day two-dimensional Democrat party of debouching body and mind manipulations prevail in the long run over WE THE PEOPLE of 3-D body mind and SPIRIT? They cannot, they will not!
1 Corinthians 6-7
“Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new (Re-newed) lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us:”
True American Christians who are left of the Democrat party take note; your secular glorying is not good! ,,for it is far past time to purge out the old worn-out Biden establishment un-leavening of Socialism, to allow what little American Christian Democratic Leaven is left to rise again in your party, that it might grow and rise again in wisdom, and bake your party back into a whole uncut arisen American loaf. First start with ridding your party of that old un-leveling, unleavened Un-American stove fallen loaf of a Joe Biden where a home in Leavenworth Prison will prove more of a just rewarded residence for his political sins, not either the Whitehouse, not some resort disguised as an old-folks home or mental sanitarium, which is what he has now turned our Whitehouse into.
The entire American project is contingent on accepting the notion that the state can’t give or take our God-given freedoms.
Governments come and go, I’ll put my trust and faith in the good Lord.
Our country’s leaders use obey and God.
Now we have treasonous, destructive, lying, unethical, immoral, woke, demonic Democrats as our Mis-leaders
COLUMBINE STUDENT’S FATHER 12 YEARS LATER.
Your laws ignore our deepest needs,
Your words are empty air.
You’ve stripped away our heritage,
You’ve outlawed simple prayer.
Now gunshots fill our classrooms,
And precious children die.
You seek for answers everywhere,
And ask the question “Why?”
You regulate restrictive laws,
Through legislative creed.
And yet you fail to understand,
That God is what we need!
“Men and women are three-part beings. We all consist of body, mind, and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our make-up, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to rush in and wreak havoc. Spiritual presences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation’s history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historical fact.
But now we have allowed the demonic Democrat Party cult to remove God from everywhere they can.
BECAUSAE They worship at the alter of GOVT..
Yes ,we are a Christian Country But why did the pilgrims come here They came here for religious freedom and freedom from religion The church of England Would not let them worship as they say felt appropriate. You have the right to worship as you feel but you can’t force that on any other person Just like the Muslims have a right to worship but they can’t push their religion off on you