Partisan God?

I am increasingly perturbed by politicalized religion. This past weekend, on a site I frequent, someone linked to a video where the orator advanced the proposition that “The GOP protects God-given rights… Dems protect government”. I’m sure this was accepted and applauded by many conditioned to unquestioningly believe our statutory rights are God-given. But upon reflection it may be as justified to say that our rights, if by “rights” we mean the notions in The Bill of Rights, are more a product of the Enlightenment and a philosophical consideration of Man by men, than the Bible.

When in The Declaration of Independence it said, “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, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”, they made the determination a priori that men are endowed with these rights, because nowhere in either the Old or New Testaments are any such assertions made. Conversely, the God of the Old Testament is as dictatorial as any Earthly potentate in demanding obedience and prescribing allowable behavior. There was absolutely no suggestion of unalienable rights that could be contemplated by man, and no implication in word or action that all men are created equal. There was no right to freedom of speech, right of assembly, right to bear arms, and of course no separation of church and state. And in the eighteen hundred years of Christianity before Jefferson set pen to paper there can’t be found any theological instruction or civil manifestation indicating acquaintance with any Biblical proviso positing unalienable rights (personal or political), or right of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, or political equality. These concepts were distilled from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and others, and signify a rather rebellious secular divergence from the existing church/state theology. So quintessentially, God is being endowed with these thoughts and intentions by Man, rather than man acquiescing to any expressed aspiration or mandate of God.

So when this video says “the GOP is protecting God-given rights”, the most charitable assessment is that it is just inappropriate rhetoric founded in the voluntary ignorance that many feel they must undertake when the words God or religion are broached. Or less charitably, it may be a sordid political calculation based on the well established phenomena that people seldom challenge long-standing orthodoxy or reflect on the things they have been led to believe by rote.