The Rights Granted by America's Enlightenment Creator

A few weeks ago the Christian and Right-wing media-spheres blew up over comments made by Politico's Heidi Przybyla in which she seemed to suggest that Christian Nationalists are those who believe rights are derived from God as opposed to the state.

She had to walk back these comments as she seemed to impugn a fundamental assumption being made in the Declaration of Independence regarding unalienable rights endowed by the Creator.

For Christians, there are many problems here not just with the notions being put forward by Jefferson, but with the internal contradictions within his and the Founders thinking in general - and most important, whether or not any of this is Biblical.

For Jefferson, the Creator is not the God of Scripture and the source of these 'rights' are not found by means of Scriptural exegesis. They are the fruit of Enlightenment discourse, philosophical inference and deduction, and are rooted within a larger Deistic framework - one that most of the Founders subscribed to.

Few of these men qualified as historic Protestants in any sense of the word, and even fewer would qualify as belonging to either the sphere of Calvinist thought or the theological or ethical system of contemporary Right-wing Evangelicalism. Those who read back their contemporary assumptions into the past and impose them on the likes of Jefferson are just as dishonest as the progressives they so despise who take nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century concepts and argue that they are expressions or legitimate outworkings of the Founder's thinking.

Further, the Founders (and Jefferson in particular) advocate what is commonly referred to as the Social Contract - that the ruler's authority is granted by the consent of the governed. Many contemporary Evangelicals have wrongly argued that this is a reiteration of the Magisterial Reformation's concepts surrounding rebellion and the Lesser Magistrate. They are actually not the same at all and derive their authority from completely different sources. Many on this point have been fooled or misled by Jefferson's appeal to the Creator - which again is not the God of Scripture.

Consent of the governed is not a Biblical concept, in fact it is a rejection of Paul's teaching in Romans 13. It is a rejection of the idea that Providence determines and ordains the powers that be. It may be (as in the case of the 1776 Rebellion) that Providence determined that the American rebels would defeat the armies of George III and set up a new nation and empire - but this is not to sanction their deeds any more than the Old Testament sanctioned the conquests of Assyria and Babylon - or the New Testament with regard to Rome.

Christians should have no part in such, and those who (both past and present) muddy these waters and encourage Christians to take up arms against the state - or to embrace false philosophical arguments leading to a contravention of Christian ethics are (according to Romans 13) under Judgment - and make no mistake the American Church and American Evangelicalism are under judgment and have been since Day One. Concepts like reprobation come to mind especially when one weighs the degenerate and compromised record of this post-World War II movement. The fact that in many cases these sinful narratives have been wed to a heretical mythology surrounding 'Christian' America and God's 'special plan' for the nation just adds to the opprobrium and magnifies the nature of the heresy. And such lies have been used to justify and whitewash a multitude of horrific sins.

On the one hand Jefferson speaks of rights from the Creator but on the other hand (as we might expect) it's all about man, his judgments, needs, and wants. George III (who was certainly no Nero) upset these Founding men - men who could justly be described as slaveholders who didn't want to pay their taxes. And so they took up arms and shed blood. And as is the case with every war men fight for different reasons. Many did not share the views or values of the Founders.

Contrary to the myth-narratives of today's Evangelicals, the rebellion had nothing to do with religious liberty. Such liberty was already found in the colonies, in select locales. Many of the colonies rejected it - and we needn't limit this to the Anglican dominated sectors.

The rights Jefferson speaks of are not found in Scripture - the New Testament knows nothing of civil rights and in fact there is significant evidence that demonstrates Paul would have rejected the concept and its assumptions. They are completely humanistic, determined by natural reason and governed by Enlightenment concepts and categories of natural law. It's nice to live under a regime with free speech and the like but don't confuse these things with Christian values - the very thing that has happened.

So are the rights really from God or are they determined by man and governed by context? Jefferson effectively argues it both ways and yet it is the latter that dominates his thought and the godless assumptions of the US Constitution ratified eleven years later.

Heidi Przybyla was not entirely wrong or speaking out of turn when she suggests (poorly) that rights are derived from a consensus that finds its voice in the representative body of the state.. It's an unresolved contradiction within American ideology - she merely expressed one side of it emphatically. But when Evangelicals do this, how rarely are they called out. And besides they (like Jefferson) dance around these issues in a completely self-serving manner.

The problem here isn't really Heidi Przybyla's misreading of the Declaration or the Founders. The problem is the system itself is something of a disaster and has (unbeknownst to most Americans) been recast and effectively reinvented on multiple occasions in order to survive. Less than a century after its founding, the system imploded and a new country (and a significantly modified Constitution) emerged from the Civil War. America was recast once more with the rise of American trans-continental imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the aftermath of World War II, and again after 9/11. Each episode brought changes to jurisprudence and conflicts over the question of rights. From the Espionage Act to McCarthyism and the Unitary Executive theory, to the Patriot Act, the Constitution and the nature of the social consensus keeps changing.

For students of the New Testament, the real problem is the fact that Christians have embraced such godless thought and the contradictions and dissonance of lost men from generations ago that rose up against their king. I care nothing for the Founders or George III. It happened - so what? I had family on both sides of the conflict and others who weren't even in North America at the time. I cannot change the past but I'm not going to be captive to it either and limit my thinking to the errors and erroneous categories of men who not only rebelled against a king but against the God of Scripture.

Heidi Przybyla was wrong but not nearly as wrong as some seem to think.

I consider it tragic that the internal contradictions within the US system and US Christian thinking are being exported to all the world and used to justify all manner of evil.

One need not be limited to the political binary. As Bereans we should step back and view all these questions from a completely different Kingdom vantage point. The comments of Heidi Przybyla should not offend or alarm us as the Christian Nationalists of our day do in fact represent a sharp departure from Jefferson's thought. But more importantly they represent a departure from the thought of Christ, Paul, and the other apostles as well.