American Apostasy at 250 

During his 1984 trip to China, President Ronald Reagan spoke to Chinese college students of America’s commitment to the “self-evident truths” of its founding. Reading from the Declaration of Independence, he affirmed America’s foundational moral principles: All humans are created equal, and valued equally, by God. God grants every person on earth certain inalienable rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  

President Reagan emphasized the importance of religion in living out these truths: “[Our faith is] why we wish well for others. It’s why it grieves us when we hear of people who cannot live up to their full potential.” Americans, he said, have even used their freedom to fight and die while protecting the freedom of others. 

He told the students that their American peers had “committed to memory” the self-evident truths of the Declaration. His implicit message was that America’s students know that human equality, freedom, and dignity are given by God and not by the state. The state’s duty is to secure the inalienable rights of its citizens, especially religious freedom.  

No American president could truthfully make such a statement today. Two hundred and fifty years since our nation’s founding, the public conscience has begun to replace its fidelity to inalienable rights and religious freedom with a state-enforced commitment to radical human autonomy. The reasons for this authoritarian shift are not new, but its emergence in the mainstream is led by the Democratic Party and our elite educational institutions.  

What Is Religious Freedom? Our Students Don’t Know. 

A close colleague of mine, the president of the Religious Freedom Institute, travels the country teaching the meaning and value of religion and religious freedom. He begins each class by asking: “Who can tell me what ‘inalienable rights’ are?” Most college students, he reports, have no idea what that expression means. Worse, many admit they’ve never even heard of inalienable rights, much less what the term has to do with religion or religious freedom. 

Fewer than 20 percent of today’s U.S. college students can answer basic questions about our government or our history. Astoundingly, fewer than a third of our top colleges require a course in American history for history majors. America isn’t a popular subject. 

Most college graduates simply do not know, or do not acknowledge, the significance of the American experiment in freedom that is ordered to truth rather than self. Few are patriots because they see little in their country that is worthy of their devotion.  

Not having learned about or experienced the seminal role of religious freedom—the first of our inalienable rights—many students have internalized the contempt for traditional religion that’s rampant in their schools. This has encouraged both antisemitism and a conviction that devout Christians are bigots and racists. Many students graduate without the slightest notion of how the free exercise of religion has benefited them, their families, and the nation.  

The Cause of the Collapse 

Why is the once-widespread American commitment to inalienable rights and religious freedom disappearing? Longstanding trends of secularization, the Sexual Revolution, a professoriate and media seeking the privatization of religion, and a growing public belief in radical individual autonomy have all played a part. Until recently, most of these trends have been muted by a bipartisan cultural and political consensus on the founding principles. That is no longer the case, not only in our educational system, but in our mainstream politics. 

Evidence that the consensus is dying lies in plain sight. Recent Democratic administrations have openly, proudly abandoned the transcendent truths claimed in the Declaration, embracing instead radical human autonomy as America’s guiding vision. By so doing they are undercutting the moral ground on which America was established and on which it has flourished. Their flight from our founding principles constitutes an American apostasy, a treacherous betrayal of what has made our nation great. To grasp the gravity of this apostasy—especially as the Declaration approaches its 250th anniversary—we must consider the founding principles of our country and apprehend what is being abandoned.  

A Return to the Foundations 

Twelve score and ten years ago, colonial Americans were embroiled in a risky and brutal war against Great Britain to restore their inalienable rights and construct a polity to secure them. A year into that war, in 1776, America’s Founders declared the “self-evident” truths invoked two centuries later by Reagan in China. Inalienable rights are “natural” rights because they are part of the “laws of nature” created by “Nature’s God,” and because they are embedded in human nature.  

The Declaration thus established de facto philosophies of anthropology and limited government. Humans are fallen creatures capable of both evil and noble actions. The Founders, many formed by Christianity laced with Enlightenment deism, all wisely believed their experiment would fail if fallen citizens did not learn to be virtuous. The teacher of that lesson was not the state, but free citizens exercising their religion. “Governments are instituted among men” wrote the Founders, “to secure [inalienable] rights.” 

This approach to religious freedom was not only unprecedented in history; it helped unify a stubborn and disputatious people of irreconcilable religious views. Despite serious challenges, it did its work for two centuries. It limited the power of government, created institutions of virtue, and granted a constitutional right to obey God by engaging in public life as well as in private worship. Religion, wrote James Madison in 1785, is the duty that every man owes the Creator, more important than any other. But it must be pursued, he insisted, according to the dictates of conscience, not the dictates of government. 

The word “religion” comes from the Latin religare, which means “to bind.” Traditional religious believers view themselves as bound to someone greater than themselves, the transcendent source of their existence to whom they owe fidelity and obedience. Many Americans have understood that source as God, the “Creator” named in the Declaration of Independence, fidelity to whom constitutes free exercise of religion.  

The Founders’ consensus on religious freedom for all rested on the recognition that “religion” is inherent in human nature. The consensus was supported by their belief in an objective moral order that precedes the state and limits its authority. This was true despite their own significant religious differences. Many formed their religious opinions by studying classical, medieval, Reformation, and Enlightenment sources. But almost all the Founders read, and were influenced by, the Jewish-Christian Scriptures. 

The Founders were also influenced by a hard-working, independent, and highly religious American public, a product of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening. The religious leaders at the time of the Revolution were mainly Protestant clergy. They were Baptists such as John Leland, Presbyterians like John Witherspoon, and Methodists like Francis Asbury. Minority religious community leaders—like Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration, and Haym Solomon, a Jewish businessman and a member of the Sons of Liberty—also supported the founding claims. Along with other religious leaders, they affirmed the idea of religious freedom as prominent among the inalienable rights. This facilitated the public’s acceptance of the Founders’ view that inalienable rights exist prior to government and have a status greater than any right constructed by government.  

In sum, the Founders envisioned free exercise as planting deep into our culture the truths of the Declaration: one Creator God, human moral and spiritual equality, inalienable rights, a natural world and human nature created by God, and freedom ordered toward objective truth rather than to the self. 

Over time, the free exercise of religion has largely fulfilled that role. It has driven our internal quest to overcome deficiencies present at the Founding, especially slavery and its legacy of racism, and the treatment of women as unequal under the law. Religious actors have led movements for civil rights and women’s suffrage and fought against social evils such as cruel child labor practices and indifference to poverty.  

How the Democratic Party Embraced Apostasy  

Thanks in large part to progressives, changes in American culture and politics have in recent years shifted the ground on which all claims about God, human nature, and objective moral authority rest. Indeed, confidence in objective truths of all kinds has declined.  

Unfortunately, the shared American conviction that objective moral and physical truths even exist outside the mind and will of the individual has collapsed. Traditional institutions based on authoritative claims of objective norms have dramatically weakened, including marriage, the family, education, and human nature, especially the natural distinctions between men and women.  

Because truth is today seen as subjective, the pursuit of personal choices is increasingly understood as a virtue superior to pursuit of the common good. The idea of virtue as “being true to yourself” is now ascendant in our culture and in our education system.  

Today we are seeing growing hostility to traditional Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others whose religious exercise opposes the newly constructed rights of radical human autonomy: abortion and LGBTQ rights. Commitment to those rights has led the last two Democratic administrations to proclaim that religious freedom has become a front for bigots and racists. The previous two Democratic presidents clearly illustrate this apostasy from binding moral order.  

The two Obama presidencies fashioned a de facto new declaration of American rights, with religious freedom low in the new hierarchy and LGBTQ rights at the top. President Obama’s first appointment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Chai Feldblum, declared that when religious liberty and homosexual rights clashed, she would “have a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.” 

In 2016, President Obama’s Chairman of the Commission on Civil Rights summed up the Democratic position: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”  

A new concept of human rights was emerging. The Democratic party was now abandoning the concept of inalienable rights, especially religious freedom. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared the new regime. In a 2011 speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council, she asserted that “cultural or religious traditions” are subordinate to the rights of gay people. In a speech to a Summit on Women’s Rights, Clinton declared that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed” if they stand in the way of abortions. 

Following the Obama administration, President Donald Trump tried to counter the Democratic attack on inalienable rights. Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo established a Commission on Unalienable Rights to retrieve the concept for American foreign policy. Applying the Founders’ word for “inalienable,” Pompeo affirmed that “unalienable rights … are a foundation upon which this country was built. They are central to who we are and to what we care about as Americans.” Without that foundation, America’s foreign policy effort “to protect and promote human rights is unmoored and, therefore, destined to fail.”  

The commission’s report concluded that “Religious liberty enjoys … primacy in the American political tradition … [It] is an unalienable right, an enduring limit on state power, and a protector of seedbeds of civic virtue.” 

The following year, Pompeo’s successor, Antony Blinken, spoke on behalf of the Biden administration. Blinken condemned the report and the idea that there are inalienable, prepolitical rights that warrant “primacy” in America. 

One of the core principles of human rights is that … [a]ll people are entitled to these rights, no matter where they’re born, what they believe, whom they love, or any other characteristic. Human rights are also co-equal; there is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others (emphasis added). 

Blinken spoke for the President in saying: “I promised that the Biden-Harris administration would repudiate [the Pompeo report’s] unbalanced views. We do so decisively today.” The Blinken speech provided the moral blueprint for the Biden administration.  

Later, the administration asserted that “attacks on the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons … signal broader threats to civil society, economic prosperity, and even national stability. These threats, in turn, pose risks for the United States … [including] terrorism.”  

This assertion represented the supplanting of religious freedom by the new sexual rights regime. The connection of sexual rights to the common good came straight from the playbook of American international religious freedom experts. The difference is that clear evidence shows that religious freedom strengthens “civil society, economic prosperity and national stability.” It also combats terrorism and increases national and international security. There is little to no evidence that LGBTQ rights have such positive effects.  

The American apostasy, much like the struggle for independence 250 years ago, is recognized worldwide. Under Democrats, the United States no longer recognizes certain rights as given by God, inherent in human nature, or that, as the Declaration puts it, “governments are instituted among men to secure those rights.” 

“Apostasy” is a strong word. It derives from the Greek “apostasia,” which means “revolt, defection, or falling away.” The apostasy of the Democratic Party meets this standard. It constitutes a schism and a defection, a gross infidelity to the founding and lifeblood of America. At stake is the meaning of the United States and its greatness as a nation. 

Some, it is true, on both the left and the right, believe America is no longer a great nation. Conservatives who take that position usually attribute our decline to the loss of military and economic power. Liberals usually attribute it to our persistent failure to protect abortion and minorities.  

“Minorities” for the left used to mean racial, ethnic, or gender minorities, but now includes, enthrones, sexual minorities. Liberty ordered to truth has become liberty ordered to self, not to the public good.  

I’ve argued that this favoritism constitutes an American apostasy, not because Americans have no right to apostasy. The Founders established us as a free people, the masters of our own destiny. But as Bishop Robert Barron recently reminded us, “a people … becomes what it worships.” We forget that truth at our peril. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.