...one of the most disturbing and, frankly, dangerous things I've ever seen in a political conversation...
Those who lose touch with their Christian roots often display ignorance of what has made Western civilisation so magnificent. The latest gaffe was performed in a panel discussion on MSNBC which featured Heidi Przybyla, a Politico journalist. She showed some acquaintance with the concept of Natural Law, but could not identify it as the anchor of her own American heritage. Here, from the Declaration of Independence:
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.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
A retort to the Przybyla barbarism came courtesy of Robert Barron, Catholic bishop of Winona–Rochester, Minnesota. Bishop Barron says on an video on X:
On a clip that came out last night Heidi Prsybyla from Politico was on MSNBC. It was one of the most disturbing and, frankly, dangerous things I've ever seen in a political conversation.
She's going after what she calls Christian nationalism but what she said was there are these Christian nationalists out there who are claiming that our rights don't come from any human authority, they come from God, and she specified that they're claiming, these weirdos, that [human rights are] coming not from the Supreme Court or from Congress.
Well, first of all, it was Thomas Jefferson who made that claim “we hold these truths to be self-evident that we're endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights”.
May I say, everybody, it is exceptionally dangerous when we forget the principle that our rights come from God and not from a government because the basic problem is if they come from the government or Congress or the Supreme Court, they can be taken away by those same people. This is opening the door to totalitarianism.
This is not some kind of religious nationalism or sectarianism; it's one of the sanest principles of our democratic governance, that our rights come from God.
Yes, government exists to secure these rights, the Declaration says, not to produce them. It is exceptionally dangerous to go down this road because we lose our groundedness in something transcendent and become, therefore, by that very move, victims of a potentially totalitarian state that can take away the same rights that they gave us in the first place.
So can I just say that in their enthusiasm I suppose to go against so-called Christian nationalism they're actually going against the foundations of our democracy. And it's further evidence of this extreme hostility of the left now toward religion.
No, no, precisely as an American I want to hold that my rights come not from something as vacillating and unreliable as Congress or the Supreme Court. They come from God.
Outside the Bible, the concept of Natural Law has its origins in ancient Greece (Aristotle) and Rome (Cicero) and provided the Apostle Paul with the platform to teach his non-Jew audiences that God speaks to all human beings through the law of conscience; the authentic virtues and the interior resistances of the Gentiles to what is evil bear witness to this fact ‒ "that the requirements of the Law are inscribed in their hearts; and their own conscience will also bear witness for them, since their conflicting thoughts will accuse or even defend them" (Romans 2:12).
The only proven reliable human system
The left has been infested with this atheistic secular moral philosophy that claims values and rights are man-made. What Przybyla is saying is in fact exactly what the left believes.Christians believe in an objective moral law that we are subject to and cannot change. It’s like gravity. If you abide by and align yourself properly with the law of gravity you will live and thrive. If you ignore, or misalign yourself with the law of gravity you will get hurt or die. All human beings are subject to the law of gravity and all human beings are subject to the moral law.Many have died for this truth that our rights come from God because men cannot be trusted with the rights of other men. If you don’t think this is true, you know nothing about history... and that is extremely dangerous. The only proven reliable human system is one that is properly subject to God. We must remain one nation under God for a reason, otherwise we will be a nation gone under, [succumbing to] relativist chaos.
That chaos is already apparent in Western nations as traditional norms are abandoned under the influence of the leadership class, which is largely captured by the fashionable ideology of self-will and self-invention, itself the child of warped parentage, namely marxism and the sexual revolution.
Solzhenitsyn with some plain speaking
In that connection, graduates at Harvard's commencement in 1978 were enriched with insight on post-Christian society from the "outsider" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. . . .
Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature. The world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems, which must be corrected. . . .
But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?. . .
[The mistaken logic of today’s Western thinking comes from a view that] was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him.
It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists. . . . This new [autonomous materialistic] way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. . . .
Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?
If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. . . . This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but—upward.
Can anyone doubt that Solzhenitsyn’s appraisal of the future of culture without religion and moral norms is coming to an unmitigated fruition? If we are to escape the clutches of what he rightfully acknowledges as the “forces of evil”, we will have to “ascend upward”, which means rediscovering the religious and moral components of human nature, and bringing them to the forefront of our culture and society.
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