Politico Reporter Heidi Przybyla recently appeared on MSNBC to attack an “extremist element” in the Republican Party that she refers to as “Christian nationalism.” As Przybyla explained, “The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists … is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God.”
This is not only an unfair attack on people of faith, it also gets wrong the entire foundation of our country’s beginning and constitutional order. Our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence itself, cites “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in its central assertion, which lays the groundwork for our entire experiment in self-government: “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.”
Our Constitution was written to give a guiding structure to effectuate the principles of the Declaration of Independence and create a government to protect and preserve these God-given rights. That’s why the very first amendment to the Constitution protects the right to the free exercise of religion — because our nation was founded on the idea that our rights come from God. All our subsequent constitutional principles flow from that natural order.
If, as Przybyla says, Christian nationalists are defined as people who believe that our rights
