George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and…Tim Kaine?
As our nation celebrates Constitution Day on Wednesday, the contributions of these Virginians demonstrate how our foundational documents and the principles upon which they were built have become a national Rorschach test.
Some look at the idea, written in the “laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” that we are “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights” as “self-evident truth.” These truths provide a bedrock of stability in an ever-changing world, the unifying principle in an ever-divisive political environment, the guarantor of liberty and prosperity for generations of Americans, and a beacon of hope for the world.
Yet Sen. Tim Kaine sees the fact that our rights come from God as “extremely troubling.” In a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he equated it to “what the Iranian government believes” as a “theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets…religious minorities.”
To compare a tyrannical regime like Iran to the American republic is the predictable result of pseudo-intellectual sophistry that has contorted our Constitution’s protection of religious freedom and religious pluralism with moral relativism. The free exercise of religion and freedom of speech ensure that all people may speak and live according to their faith. It does so not out of some relativist view of all religion as different roads to the same destination, but in the confidence that, when all are free to espouse the tenets of their chosen religion, the truth will ultimately emerge victorious above the civilized, if sometimes raucous, discourse.
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Kaine, a professing Catholic who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2016, doubled down on his criticism in an op-ed for Fox News. In it, he claimed the rights to vote, trial by jury, freedom of the press, bear arms, due process, assembly, and others as examples of rights explicitly protected in the U.S. Constitution that are not mentioned in “the Bible or other sacred texts.” He cited the legality of slavery until the passage of the 13th Amendment as an example of how a natural right to freedom was not protected in the U.S. until slavery became illegal.
Kaine failed to mention that the brilliance of the Constitution is such that when nine lawyers in black robes so badly misinterpreted the principles of liberty found therein, the means to correct the course of our nation were established in the document itself.
When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led the civil rights movement, he did not lay the blame at the foot of our nation’s birthright. In his most famous speech, he spoke forcefully the words of the Declaration of Independence to collect “on the promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
Kaine’s claim that constitutional rights are not found in any sacred text is akin to the secular humanist view of a “Godless Constitution.” While the name of God is not written in our Constitution, those who speak of a “Godless Constitution” reveal how little they know of God or the Constitution.
In a study published in the American Political Science Review, Donald Lutz surveyed the political literature of the American founding, looking to see who Americans were citing in these documents. He reported the Bible was cited more frequently than any European writer or even any European school of thought, such as Enlightenment liberalism. The book of Deuteronomy alone—which includes instructions for governing a nation “under God”—was the most frequently cited work. The Apostle Paul was mentioned about as frequently as Montesquieu and Blackstone, the two most-cited secular theorists.
The fundamental features of the American constitutional design—covenantal relationships among free men and between men and God, limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, the rule of law, due process and equality under the law, and the consent of the governed—are deeply rooted in biblical principles. Some may refer to these ideas as principles of the Enlightenment era, but they were enlightened precisely because they were biblical.
The text of the preamble states the purposes of the Constitution, including “to form a more perfect union.” Not perfect, but more perfect than what Americans had enjoyed under the Articles of Confederation. The Founders did not succumb to the utopian delusion that, given enough power, a government could create a perfect society. Instead, owing to their knowledge of man’s nature, they humbly set about to improve upon their previous efforts “to secure the Blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”
The Constitution is the architectural blueprint crafted to achieve the artistic vision cast by the Declaration of Independence, yet the source of the ideas that Kaine finds “extremely troubling” is older by millennia—the depth of which the greatest human minds have yet to fully plumb. The principles etched into the cornerstone of America and the hearts of Americans are not what troubles us; they are the answer to our troubles.
Thus, on this Constitution Day, there is still cause for celebration.
Lathan Watts is the vice president of public affairs for Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal) and its sister organization ADF Action. He earned his juris doctor degree from the University of Mississippi.
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