Dispatches from the Creation Wars

America derives its laws from its Constitution. It derives its values from the Bible. We don't get inalienable rights from the Constitution; we get them from God. Which is exactly what the signers of the Declaration of Independence wrote: We are endowed with inalienable rights by our Creator, not by government and not by any man-made document. And that Creator and those inalienable rights emanate from the Bible. Keith Ellison's freedom to openly believe and practice Islam and to run for elective office as a Muslim is a direct result of a society molded by the Bible and the people who believed in it, a fact he should be willing to honor as he is sworn in.

Prager's ignorance of history is staggering here, as is his ignorance of the Bible. There is not a single verse in the Bible that supports the notion of inalienable rights; there are innumerable verses that stand squarely against the idea. The notion that the Creator of the Declaration is the same as the Biblical god is disproven simply by the fact that the three principal authors of that document (Jefferson, Adams and Franklin) all rejected the Biblical conception of God.

The further ignorance of the passage is the notion that Jews and Muslims have freedom in America because America is based on "Judeo-Christian" values. At the time the Constitution was written, leading the charge against the new Constitution was - guess who? - the religious right of that day. They were very upset about the ban on religious tests for office. You know why? Because they were afraid that it would allow Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Quakers and other undesirables to hold public office. And they were right, it does allow exactly that.

The conservative clergy of that day, the Calvinists and Congregationalists in particular, certainly didn't believe in religious liberty for Jews or Muslims. And the Constitution was a radical break with their ideology, which caused them to fight against the passage of the Constitution and to proclaim that its passage would bring down the wrath of God upon the country. Prager is too ignorant to see that the very people who argued that the nation should be based on those values were not "Judeo-Christian", they were anti-Judeo and Christian (and anti- virtually any other form of Christian too).

But nowhere in the Bible will you find a hint of the notion of religious freedom, or political freedom. You can trace all of those ideas to Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and none of them to the Bible, or for that matter to Christian theology for the 1700 years prior. Any notion of such freedoms was non-existent everywhere that Christianity was the official religion, from the post-Constantine Roman Empire to Calvin's Geneva to the officially Christian European monarchies.

It is to the Enlightenment that we owe those values, not to Christianity; those values were an explicit rejection of hundreds of years of imposed Christianity. Jefferson made that clear when he argued for true freedom of religion, as opposed to what had been imposed by officially Christian governments for centuries:

Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves. But every state, says an inquisitor, has established some religion. No two, say I, have established the same. Is this a proof of the infallibility of establishments? Our sister states of Pennsylvania and New York, however, have long subsisted without any establishment at all.

In the past I've always found Prager to be among the more reasonable religious right voices; not any longer. This latest screed convinces me that he's just as loony as the Dobsons and Falwells of the world.