Who Gave Americans Our Basic Rights?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is the basic rights of Americans and the source of them. Democrats, Progressives, and Communists are acting to destroy the powers of the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence. Rachel del Guidice at The Daily Signal reported on a statement by one such person. 

According to del Guidice, Heidi Przybyla, a reporter at Politico and a finalist for journalism’s Pulitzer Prize in 2023, made a statement that is wrong. On Friday, Przybyla appeared on MSNBC and said the following about “Christian nationalists.”

The one thing that unites all of them … as Christian nationalists, not Christians by the way, because Christian nationalists is very different, 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 their Supreme Court, they come from God.

All the Christians that I know – del Guidice says, “Most, if not all, traditional Christians” – believe that our rights come directly from God and are provided or dismissed by some governments. However, Przybyla should study the founding documents before making such statements.

I found a “transcription is the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, the broadside produced by John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776.” The first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence read as follows: Text of the Declaration of Independence | Declaration Resources Project (harvard.edu)

When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

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 – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness….

These words in the Declaration of Independence show that the Founders believed that our rights come from God. They do not come from politicians, judges, or media talking heads who are trying to rewrite the history of the United States. Del Guidice wrote the following:

Somehow, our Founders had the wisdom and foresight to know that this truth would be questioned again and again. So much so that they thought it was critical to make it the subject of the second sentence of the document declaring the United States of America to be an independent country.

Yes, Benjamin Franklin’s writings questioned the divinity of Christ. But about a month before he died, Franklin wrote in a March 1790 letter to theologian Ezra Stiles that it was a “question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needles to busy myself with it now.” He maintained that our rights and freedoms come from God.

“Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men,” Franklin’s fellow publisher, John Webbe, wrote in 1736 in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, “but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.”

John Adams, who became our second president, held that the bedrock of everything the Founders did was taken from Christianity.

“The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity,” Adams said. “I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”

Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, said that the rights written into the founding documents came straight from God.

“I do not believe that the Constitution was the offspring of inspiration, but I am as satisfied that it is as much the work of a Divine Providence as any of the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testament,” Rush said.

The above statements by various Founders show the ignorance – or possible intention -- of Przybyla in making her statement. However, the Founders statements should settle “the debate over whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation.” The “Founders said in black and white – even Franklin, who wasn’t entirely convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ” that God is the Source of human rights.