During a speech commemorating the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told an audience in Austin, Texas, last week that progressivism threatens America’s system of government:
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.
It is unfortunately rare these days to hear any public figure describe the threats of “progressivism” so clearly. At its heart, progressivism is a worldview that elevates man’s will above everything else. It assumes that if the right people — the smartest, best people — are allowed to design human systems in the correct ways, then humans will flourish. Consulting God to find correct governing solutions undermines progressives’ fundamental belief in themselves. To admit that a divine authority exists is to admit that progressivism is a pale imitation of that authority. Because progressivism presumes to be capable of acquiring all knowledge and applying that knowledge in perfect ways, it is incapable of deferring to God’s will. Progressives must replace God with themselves.
In practice, it is quite easy to see how progressives’ deification of themselves plays out in the public square. Progressives are obsessed with promoting the lie that there can be no overlap between a government official’s duties and that official’s religious convictions. They scream about the supposed inviolable “separation” of Church and State, as if the Constitution were written for a godless people and an atheistic government. The exact opposite is true.
Almost every signer of the Declaration of Independence and delegate to the Constitutional Convention was a committed and faithful Christian. In their public speeches, editorials, and recorded debates, the Founding Fathers referred to God frequently and beseeched Him to protect and guide their endeavors. The Christian churches of the colonial era shaped political discourse before, during, and after America’s War for Independence.
In the years that followed, the first elected representatives appealed to Americans’ obedience to God as the thirteen original colonies worked to coalesce into one nation united by common principles and shared Christian virtues.
For progressives to deny the Christian roots of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is to starve both documents of their vital meaning. Progressives often belittle their significance by denigrating the Founders as just a collection of dead, white men who “declared” something no longer important and “constituted” a government steeped in racism. In truth, those men declared something revolutionary: Our rights do not arise from the whims of monarchs. They come from God. And those rights belong to each and every one of us. No king, aristocrat, or petty bureaucrat can strip those rights away.
What does the Declaration declare? “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.” Every man, woman, and child has rights. Those rights come from God. Progressives cannot conjure rights from thin air, nor can they deny rights that God has graciously given us. Similarly, the Preamble to the Constitution tells us how the Declaration’s principles shall be applied to the structures of government.
Why did the delegates at the Constitutional Convention “ordain and establish” our system of government? To “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The Declaration reminds us that our liberty comes from God; the Preamble reminds us that the Constitution is legitimate only insofar as it secures God’s blessing of liberty to each of us.
Never has a nation been founded on more consequential ideas. Together, the Declaration and Constitution reject the false notion that strong, wealthy, or otherwise powerful people are entitled to decide what freedoms the rest of us may enjoy. Our Founding documents safeguard the indispensable truth that a government’s authority arises only after the people’s liberties have been secured. As Justice Thomas said last week in Texas, “Our rights and our dignity are inherent. They do not come from others, and they do not come from government. And our government derives its legitimacy and its authority from our consent.”
Justice Thomas’s truthful exposition of our rights directly threatens progressives’ beliefs. For if our rights and dignities belong to us, then progressives have no authority to take those rights and dignities from us. Furthermore, when progressives falsely claim to be empowered with the authority to dilute, diminish, or deny our rights, they simultaneously delegitimize their government offices. No matter how superior progressives believe themselves to be, they are never entitled to take from us what we have received from God.
It is easy to see why so many progressives openly mock God. He stands in the way of progressives’ pursuit of absolute power. When President Obama mocked Americans for clinging to their Bibles, he was attempting both to diminish God’s authority over all of us and to diminish the foundations for our unalienable rights. By disparaging Americans who do their best to obey God, Obama and his fellow progressives wish to sever the link between God and our liberties. Progressives wish to cloud our minds until we forget both God and the blessings He affords us. To become gods on Earth, progressives must first eliminate God.
Progressives do not hide their anti-God agenda. They are the first to criticize members of the government for invoking the will of God or praying for His guidance and protection. Progressives walk around the halls of government like anti-God fumigators seeking to eliminate His presence. In God’s place, those progressives speak reverently about “science,” “government,” and “democracy.”
They treat these human disciplines as gods that must be respected and obeyed, and by doing so, elevate the authority of scientists, bureaucrats, lawmakers, and agency regulators over the rest of us.
By worshiping at the altars of “Science” and “Government,” progressives strip naked the essential meaning of the Declaration and our Constitution. They return us to the old forms of government that place monarchs and royal courts of aristocrats above everyone else. Progressives drag us back to a time when powerful government officers decided whether ordinary people would be “allowed” to exercise their God-given rights. By denying that a government’s legitimacy and authority come directly from the consent of those governed, progressives turn government into a false god and the people into serfs.
By calling out progressivism for its dogged efforts to usurp the “basic premises” of the Declaration and Constitution, Justice Thomas is warning Americans that their rights and freedoms are under attack. Should the generations alive today not recognize the threat to their inherent liberties, the generations that follow will inherit no liberties at all. The more successful that progressives are at convincing Americans to forget God, the more successful progressives will be at convincing Americans to relinquish their rights, submit to their government masters, and become slaves.
As a society, we no longer debate important ideas. We exist in an age saturated with soundbites and aspersions. Few officers of the government — and even fewer agitators in the street — are capable of stating a position clearly, providing evidentiary support for that proposition, and refuting counterarguments persuasively.
Justice Thomas is the rare exception. He is telling Americans to rise in defense of their freedoms. He is telling Americans that if they do not find the courage to do so today, then they will soon enjoy no freedoms at all. He is reminding Americans that they inherited a system of government intended to protect God-given rights. And he is urging us to protect those rights in obedience to God.
