Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va. — who was once nearly a heartbeat away from the presidency — declared Wednesday that if you believe in the Declaration of Independence you’re a terrorist.
“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. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.”
But the idea that rights come from God, the Creator, rather than the state, is neither radical nor foreign. It is the foundational principle of the Republic. The Declaration affirms this:
“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.”
The Founders recognized that all people are born with certain natural rights that are pre-political and grounded in nature and reason. These rights exist independently of government or rulers and are “endowed by their Creator.”
This conviction at the heart of our founding was inspired by theologians like Thomas Aquinas, who recognized that God created an ordered cosmos, and that we can fully apprehend the natural law embedded in His creation through a combination of reason and revelation.
“The natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law,” Aquinas wrote.
Natural law, therefore, binds all humans. And natural law is a distinctly Christian holding. As John Adams wrote: “Our great Advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great Principle of the Law of Nature and Nations … to the Knowledge, Belief and Veneration of the whole People.”
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As explained by my colleague John Daniel Davidson, the claim that “all men are created equal” “is a specifically Christian claim” because “God created all men equal, they all bear the imago Dei, the image of God [Genesis 1:27].”
This point was later reinforced by others.
U. S. Supreme Court Justice James Wilson wrote in his 1790-1791 Lectures on Law that “Human law must rest its authority, ultimately, upon the authority of that law which is divine [God’s moral law in the Bible] … Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants. Indeed, these two sciences run into each other. The divine law, as discovered by reason and moral sense, forms an essential part of both.”
President and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (who was the son of John Adams), would later say in his July 4, 1821 address that “From the day of the Declaration, the people of the North American union and of its constituent states were associated bodies of civilized men and Christians, in a state of nature, but not of anarchy. They were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledge as the rules of their conduct.”
It was this very concept of natural rights — rights that come from God — that led the Founders to declare independence and establish a republic. In doing so, they were making a break from the divine right theory of kingship, which had held sway in England since the time of Henry VIII and the Reformation, and returning to natural law as the basis for political authority. Divine right theory held that the right of the monarch to rule is derived from divine authority, hence the king is not subject to the will of the people, the nobility, the church, or any other estate of the realm. In addition, divine right theory asserts that the rights of the people come from the monarch, and can therefore be given or taken away by the monarch. The Founders recognized this theory violated natural law and they understood, therefore, that monarchy, or at least any monarchy based on the divine right theory, is an illegitimate form of government.
They believed legitimate government, by contrast, protects and facilitates the enjoyment of natural rights of every citizen. That’s why they called these rights “unalienable.” They knew that a legitimate government is formed when men recognize these natural rights, form a social compact on that basis, and create a government to protect those rights. When the Founders saw that the English crown was trampling on their natural rights, and that there was no other way to redress their grievances, they declared independence from the king.
Of course, not all law comes from God or natural law. Some laws are indeed created by government — laws that are “positive laws.” These laws are meant to protect and secure everyone’s natural rights.
But Kaine’s claim that rights originating from the Creator are “troubling” is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Founders’ philosophy and the Declaration of Independence. The Founders did not see natural rights — and their ties to Christianity — as a threat: they correctly saw them as the very foundation of liberty. To deny this is to not only misread the Declaration and the Founders, but undermine the very underpinnings of the Republic. Any politician who can’t understand where our fundamental rights come from is unfit to serve in public office.