Sunday, July 5, 2015

"Americans Are Blessed with Liberty, but Not Because We Deserve It."

The American proposition is a theological proposition: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Just how radical that idea is is difficult for the 21st-century Western mind to comprehend. For the entirety of the human experience, most men had been subjects — the ruled living their lives at the sufferance of rulers. The American proposition inverts that: We are citizens, not subjects, and government exists at our sufferance, not the other way around. Americans first applied to politics the Christian belief that we are made in the likeness of Almighty God Himself, not in the likeness of livestock to be herded, milked, and slaughtered.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The author asked the wrong question, and from his idealology, one can reach the conclusion that Christianity has no place in American discourse. The real question to ask is, Was the United States founded on Christian morals and precepts? The answer is absolutely, yes. The natural rights are the rights given to man, as a result of his mere existence, by his Creator. Of course the Founding Fathers refused to sanction any state sponsored religion, as they understood that such would ultimately lead to tyranny of one form or another, regardless of how soft it could be. As a Christian, I can say that the laws handed down from God were for the benefit of society, and not the arbitrary whims of some capricious supreme being. As the Creator of society, He knew how best to organize it so that it flowed as smoothly and peaceably as possible. As we are witness to today, divergence from these morals and precepts can have a catastrophic affect on society.