As a believing follower of Christ, I have to agree with you. There is no biblical mandate for a republican democratic form of government. If anything, there has been a call to a theocratic state or an absolute monarch / autarch; with a command to obey the presenting government (Book of Romans). The transcendence of allegiance to God is emphasized over all forms of government.

Nowhere is a statement to the effect that the power of government derives from the consent of the governed. In fact such sentiments would have been anathema and viewed as an opportunity for either anarchy or apostasy!

Posted by: SharonB | April 3, 2006 11:29 AM

It's been quite a while since I read Judges, but I seem to recall that God was initially against the whole king thing, preferring that Israel remain leaderless except in times of great need. Is nobody pointing to that to say that it's a sign of God being hip on the representative republic thing? It's a stretch, I know, but what doesn't get all stretchy where religion meets real life?

Posted by: pough | April 3, 2006 12:47 PM

Ed-- he says he's against homosexuals adopting children in the interview to which you link. ;-)

Posted by: Gretchen | April 3, 2006 3:05 PM

One of the more interesting (also infuriating and disturbing) things about the fundamentalists is their attempt to coopt the Constitution as a religious document. The Constitution is perhaps the purest flowering of Englightenment political thought. A document that begins with "We the People", mentions god not at all, and mentions religion only to tell the government to stay the hell out of it, may justly be called "secular humanist", but it cannot be called Christian.

And yet, they can make statements like this: "Our national Constitution established a republic upon the 'absolute laws' of the Bible, not a democracy based on the changing whims of people."

Whack jobs.

Posted by: shargash | April 3, 2006 5:06 PM

Alan Keyes likes to say that what liberals forget is that our rights are "given to us by God," (as if he'll take them away, or as if we're being ungrateful, or something, if we don't let theocrats run things) and it's disappointing to see Gingrich, who is not a total jackass, buying into it too. The Declaration reads:

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.

This sentence rejects the then prevalent idea that our having rights is contingent on their being bestowed by some agent external to us (like a king, say), rather than their being ours by nature (and thus necessarily). The point of referring to the Creator here is to endorse the latter idea: we have rights simply in being human beings at all. This being the 18th century, the chosen wording is about what we should expect. It's a good choice - forceful, poetic, and yet doctrinally non-committal (between deism and traditional theism). And of course that's why it says "endowed" (which means "provided with some quality," i.e., by nature) rather than "bestowed" (although another meaning for "endowed" is "bequeathed," as in a university endowment, which may be causing some of the confusion here).

But Keyes (and now Newt) misses the point entirely, as if the founders were accepting the original idea (rights bestowed by external agent) and simply changing the agent from king to deity. But that can't be right. For one thing, they would hardly hold such a metaphysically contentious idea to be "self-evident." Indeed, that idea is barely coherent, assuming as it does that making us human and bestowing rights upon us are conceptually distinct things, as if it were possible to be fully human, but without the right to liberty until it was subsequently bestowed upon us (by a wave of His mighty hand - which did what, exactly?). But this is just what the Declaration denies. To be human just is to have the rights in question. They depend on nothing external to us, natural or supernatural. That's what the part about it being "self-evident" is meant to emphasize: that having rights is (metaphysically) necessary for being human. It doesn't say that they couldn't give an argument for that claim, but indicates the kind of argument that it would be if they did give one (if the DoI were a philosophical treatise, which it is not). That argument would not be an appeal to Scripture (which is the very opposite of self-evident, concerned as most of it is with contingent matters of fact), but one concerned with (as Kant would say a few years later, in a different context) "necessity and universality," the marks of the a priori.

Not that I agree with that exactly (that sharp necessary/contingent dualism looks funny nowadays, for starters) but that's what the founders thought.

Also, what SharonB said.

Posted by: Dave M. | April 3, 2006 9:57 PM

Yes, Gingrich is a history professor. It makes his blunders all the more inexcusable.
I've heard that as a professor of history, he favored winning arguments over writing peer-reviewed articles and books. I don't think authority goes to the person who wins the argument.
Authority goes the way of the person who does strong research and thinks coherently enough to express a thesis in relation to it.

Posted by: Goethechosemercy | April 4, 2006 10:03 AM