Politics has always been a contact sport. But today the screaming and yelling we see from demonstrators in the streets, pundits in the media, and—most disappointingly—during congressional debate and in courtrooms across the country reflects something deeper than ordinary rough‑and‑tumble. It reveals a collapse of civility and the rise of undisciplined minds that have never been taught how to listen, reason, or argue from coherent first principles.
There is another very important difference between our time and earlier chapters of American history. Conservatives and progressive liberals are no longer arguing from shared assumptions about right and wrong. They are arguing from fundamentally different moral predicates.
The conservative movement, at its best, is grounded in both natural law and Biblical morality. By contrast, today’s progressive left often draws—knowingly or not—from Hegelian and Marxist theory, grounded in atheistic, secular moral and political philosophies in which the State is supreme, and citizens exist for the good of the State. Those are not merely two policy preferences. They are two rival accounts of what a human being is and what the state is for.
Our Founders knew nothing of this latter vision. The Declaration of Independence is not a secular manifesto but a fusion of natural law philosophy with Biblical conviction. By appealing to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the Founders claimed there is a real moral order, authored by God, that human reason can recognize and human rulers must obey. When they call it “self‑evident” that all are “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” they are drawing on both classical natural law and the Biblical claim that every person bears the image of God. Rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are therefore not favors from the state but gifts from above, which no majority vote can legitimately erase. That fusion of reason and revelation is the deepest root of the American experiment in ordered liberty.
In short, the Founders claimed that there exists a single moral law, authored by a personal God, written both into human nature and into Scripture. That law establishes all persons as equal image‑bearers with inherent rights and measures all human governments and laws. The Declaration’s architecture stands at the intersection of Enlightenment natural‑rights philosophy and a broadly Biblical worldview, rather than being reducible to either a purely secular rationalism or a narrowly sectarian creed.
Communism, by contrast, in its classic Marxist form, is a this‑worldly attempt to remake human society without reference to God, the soul, or any transcendent moral law. It begins from philosophical materialism: only matter exists, human beings are products of economic conditions, and history is driven by struggles over material resources—not by providence, not by conscience, and certainly not by natural law. Religion is treated not as truth but as a social product, “the opium of the people,” a consoling illusion that helps maintain unjust class structures.
On that basis, communism presents itself as a kind of scientific humanism. Abolish private property, erase class divisions, centralize power in the name of “the people,” and you will supposedly liberate human beings to become fully themselves in a classless, stateless future where production is rationally directed for collective human needs. In practice, where that vision has been tried, it has elevated the Party and the State to a quasi‑divine status, with ordinary citizens serving as instruments of a secular salvation project.
Set these two visions side by side. The American Founding begins with “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and proceeds to a limited government tasked with securing pre‑existing God‑given rights. The Marxist tradition begins with matter and power and proceeds to an all‑encompassing state tasked with engineering equality and “liberation” from those in power. One vision places a higher moral law over every ruler: the other treats law and morality as tools of class struggle and historical necessity. The rulers are the law and are above the law.
Even the God‑language of the Declaration reflects a rich theistic framework that modern secular ideologies cannot supply. The Declaration’s four references to God track distinct biblical offices: God as Lawgiver (“Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”), Creator and giver of rights (“endowed by their Creator”), Supreme Judge of the world, and providential Governor of history (“firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence”). The new nation’s legitimacy, in that view, rests in a higher moral order above kings and parliaments, above presidents and parties.
Though I have not always agreed with his political philosophy, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan once said that “every aspect of my life, including my politics, is informed by my faith in God.” In that respect, he spoke much like the Founders. They did not all share the same theology, but they shared the conviction that human dignity and human rights ultimately come from a transcendent Source, not from a bureaucrat’s pen.
That brings us back to our present moment. What and who is informing the arguments of today’s political left? Too often, they appear grounded in emotion, in shifting notions of “lived experience,” and in applied situational ethics—rules that change with the political needs of the moment. No stable moral predicates there.
If our public life sounds more like a prolonged shout than a reasoned argument, perhaps it is because one side is still trying to reason from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” while the other increasingly treats law, morality, and even truth itself as useful fictions in the long march of history. Until we recover a shared belief that there is something—and Someone—above the State, the contact sport of politics will only grow more brutal, and the American experiment in ordered liberty will stand on thinner and thinner ice.
