When Progress Threatens Democracy
“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”
Justice Clarence Thomas gave these words in a talk at UT Austin Law School today. My aim is not to explore all that Justice Thomas said, but simply these words quoted in the first paragraph. They strike at an important ideal that every American should consider no matter which political party they subscribe to.
Justice Thomas hit on an inescapable truth. Our American form of democracy depends upon certain core foundational truths, or else it cannot hold. The American Constitution is founded on the idea that humans have rights, and it is the government’s job to secure those rights. This begs the question, where do these human rights and dignities come from?
The Constitution says these rights and dignities come from our Creator, God. Humans have certain foundational rights and dignities not because they earned them, but simply because they are human. And because God has created all humans in His image, we have intrinsic rights and dignities. American Democracy is predicated on this notion of intrinsic rights bestowed by God, not ascribed rights granted by the government.
If you’re an American, whether you are religious or not, it is an inescapable truth that you enjoy the freedoms you enjoy in this land because its founders and framers believed your rights are tethered to the divine, not the earthly. The founders and framers believed that your rights are inherit to you because you are a person. They did not believe your rights are earned nor bestowed to you by an earthly power.
The fact is that our American Constitution and its resulting form of government is based upon Theism, not atheism. It is based upon the premise that we owe moral duties to one another as our ‘neighbor’ and that we are naturally moral creatures with natural rights bestowed by nature’s God.
What Justice Thomas so pointedly said (quoted above) was once you begin removing the ideas of God, universal moral duties, and natural law, then you are destroying American Democracy. Our nation has grown more secular over the previous two generations and now we are seeing the effects of that in our Democracy.
When people don’t believe in God, the next step is they no longer believe in objective-transcendent morality, and then they no longer believe in natural human rights. After this deconstruction, what is rebuilt is a secular Egoism morality and a government that prefers Utilitarian thinking.
In other words, when you remove from society such ideas as objective-transcendent good and evil, that there is a God, and that human life is sacred, then you no longer have a form of government that upholds your natural human rights. Instead, you get a form of government that sees human ‘rights’ as a tool to hold leverage over its citizens.
Any political or cultural movement that seeks to “progress” away from the American Constitution’s cornerstones of Theism, Natural Rights, and Intrinsic Human Dignity is not progress but rather a self-blinded retreat into societal implosion.