US Senator Rejects the Judeo-Christian Foundation of America

This week, a U.S. senator from Virginia flatly rejected the central principle of the Declaration of Independence.

“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes,” Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat who ran for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton, said during a confirmation hearing Wednesday. “It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’is, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe they understand what natural rights are from their creator.”

“The notion that our rights do not come from our laws or our government should make people very, very nervous,” Kaine said.

He said Americans should worry about someone who believes rights come from God “because people of any religious tradition or none are entitled to the equal protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment. It shouldn’t matter what their religious background is, what they think about God or the Creator, what their church affiliation is.”

Kaine accused Riley M. Barnes, President Donald Trump’s nominee for assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, of attempting to “demean” laws and governments by saying that they are not the source of our rights.

Notice the sleight of hand: Kaine suggests that if we ground natural rights in the Creator rather than government, then we will deny natural rights to people who don’t believe in God.

Yet the esteemed senator, whom I am ashamed to say ostensibly represents me in the upper legislative chamber, gets the problem exactly backward.

The Foundation of Our Rights

We cannot deny rights to people based on what they believe exactly because we believe rights come from God, not from government. The very notion of religious freedom comes from the belief that it is our duty as human beings to honor God, that he wants us to do so voluntarily, and that duty comes before the duty to government. Therefore, government cannot compel us to adopt one religion or another—that would be abusing its limited role established by God.

If we dig up the divine grounding of our rights and instead plant them in the unstable soil of limited human governments, we are not just causing our rights to wither, but actively uprooting the foundation of our country.

It is a rotten shame that the senator from Virginia, who might have been a heartbeat away from the presidency, appears to have forgotten the words of 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, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

If Kaine is so intent on stopping us from “demeaning” laws and governments, will he lead a petition for the United States to subject itself again to Great Britain? Should the United States submit itself to the Roman Empire, of which Britain at one time was a part?

Why Is Iran Wrong?

On a more serious note, I agree with the esteemed senator that Iran gets human rights disastrously wrong, but I would ask him how we know that Iran is wrong.

If government is the grounding of our rights, then by what basis do we say one government’s definition of rights is superior to another?

For 250 years, our great nation has grounded our rights in the firm, sturdy soil of God’s creation, and we defend religious liberty precisely because we believe our rights are more abiding than any human government.

That is exactly what Barnes meant when he wrote, “I believe our country and our government is the best in the world, and our strength comes from our enduring values. These values aren’t an endless list of ‘rights’ that people create and change and form to meet their own needs or desires. These values aren’t identity politics. They are the historic, natural rights that we have as individuals, pursuing life, liberty, and happiness in this world.”

“For rights to be untethered from this core principle is to make them mere sentiments, easily manipulated by authoritarians and bad actors,” Barnes added. “Natural rights are a blessing and an immutable reality.”

That’s exactly the sentiment I want to hear from a government official, sworn to follow the Constitution and tasked with promoting human rights abroad.

If anything makes me “very, very nervous,” it is hearing a U.S. senator seeking to chip away at that foundation.

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