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\u2014most disappointingly\u2014during congressional debate and in courtrooms across the country reflects something deeper than ordinary rough\u2011and\u2011tumble. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The conservative movement, at its best, is grounded in both natural law and Biblical morality. By contrast, today\u2019s progressive left often draws\u2014knowingly or not\u2014from 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cthe laws of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God,\u201d 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 \u201cself\u2011evident\u201d that all are \u201ccreated equal\u201d and \u201cendowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2011bearers with inherent rights and measures all human governments and laws. The Declaration\u2019s architecture stands at the intersection of Enlightenment natural\u2011rights philosophy and a broadly Biblical worldview, rather than being reducible to either a purely secular rationalism or a narrowly sectarian creed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Communism, by contrast, in its classic Marxist form, is a this\u2011worldly 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\u2014not by providence, not by conscience, and certainly not by natural law. Religion is treated not as truth but as a social product, \u201cthe opium of the people,\u201d a consoling illusion that helps maintain unjust class structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On that basis, communism presents itself as a kind of scientific humanism. Abolish private property, erase class divisions, centralize power in the name of \u201cthe people,\u201d 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\u2011divine status, with ordinary citizens serving as instruments of a secular salvation project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Set these two visions side by side. The American Founding begins with \u201cthe Laws of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God\u201d and proceeds to a limited government tasked with securing pre\u2011existing God\u2011given rights. The Marxist tradition begins with matter and power and proceeds to an all\u2011encompassing state tasked with engineering equality and \u201cliberation\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even the God\u2011language of the Declaration reflects a rich theistic framework that modern secular ideologies cannot supply. The Declaration\u2019s four references to God track distinct biblical offices: God as Lawgiver (\u201cLaws of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God\u201d), Creator and giver of rights (\u201cendowed by their Creator\u201d), Supreme Judge of the world, and providential Governor of history (\u201cfirm reliance on the protection of divine Providence\u201d). The new nation\u2019s legitimacy, in that view, rests in a higher moral order above kings and parliaments, above presidents and parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Though I have not always agreed with his political philosophy, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan once said that \u201cevery aspect of my life, including my politics, is informed by my faith in God.\u201d 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\u2019s pen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That brings us back to our present moment. What and who is informing the arguments of today\u2019s political left? Too often, they appear grounded in emotion, in shifting notions of \u201clived experience,\u201d and in applied situational ethics\u2014rules that change with the political needs of the moment. No stable moral predicates there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cthe Laws of Nature and of Nature\u2019s God,\u201d 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\u2014and Someone\u2014above 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2014most disappointingly\u2014during congressional debate and in courtrooms across the country reflects something deeper than ordinary rough\u2011and\u2011tumble. It reveals a collapse of civility and the rise of undisciplined minds that have never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19631,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1051],"tags":[865,978],"class_list":["post-19630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-john-livingston","tag-conservative","tag-founders","cat-1051-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19632,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19630\/revisions\/19632"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gemstatepatriot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}