Politico Reporter Heidi Przybyla recently appeared on MSNBC to attack an “extremist element” in the Republican Party that she refers to as “Christian nationalism.” As Przybyla explained, “The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists … is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.”
This is not only an unfair attack on people of faith, it also gets wrong the entire foundation of our country’s beginning and constitutional order. Our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence itself, cites “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in its central assertion, which lays the groundwork for our entire experiment in self-government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Our Constitution was written to give a guiding structure to effectuate the principles of the Declaration of Independence and create a government to protect and preserve these God-given rights. That’s why the very first amendment to the Constitution protects the right to the free exercise of religion — because our nation was founded on the idea that our rights come from God. All our subsequent constitutional principles flow from that natural order.
If, as Przybyla says, Christian nationalists are defined as people who believe that our rights come from God rather than government, then every single American founder — and indeed, almost every American president — would qualify as an unabashed Christian nationalist. With her attacks on “Christian nationalism,” Przybyla flips this concept on its face. If our rights don’t come from God, they must come from the government — and if the government can give us our rights, then the government can just as quickly take those rights away. Przybyla tried to walk back what she said, but her cards were already on the table.
Looking around at our country today, as the left tries to strip us of our rights to participate in free and fair elections, raise our children with our values, worship God genuinely and faithfully, speak freely in the online public square, and more, maybe it is unsurprising that they are also trying to shift our understanding of rights as a gift from God to a gift from government.
The Left’s Projection
But in this case, the radical left also engages in something they do often: projection. Everything they are guilty of doing, they accuse conservatives of doing first. Such is the case here, with the ridiculous hysteria over so-called “Christian nationalism.”
In reality, the left is attempting to replace Christianity with a religious movement of their own. Their political ideology has replaced religion. Unlike the truth of Christianity, which is founded on the promise of salvation through the redemptive love of Jesus Christ, their new faith is based on anger and resentment, and it offers nothing but division, misery, and desolation.
Freedom and God-Given Rights
It was that belief that our rights are a gift bestowed on us by our Creator that led to the founding of our very nation. This belief freed the slaves, inspired the civil rights movement, and gave us the courage to liberate millions upon millions from the grip of authoritarianism in two world wars. Indeed, the idea that human beings are not endowed with rights by God is the foundation of every tyranny in history, which has stripped its citizens of their dignity, their rights, and their liberty.
Our American founding, premised on the idea that our rights come from our shared Creator, is a bulwark against that sort of tyranny that springs up all too frequently in other countries. If that is what we are calling Christian nationalism these days, then count me in.
Dr. Ben Carson is the founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute.
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