ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS

The key insight behind the American Revolution is that human rights are not privileges that can be revoked; they are gifts from God which no state or sovereign can take away.

The concept of “self-evident” truths originated with the Apostle Paul, back in 60 AD.

The most secular, rationalistic, and self-consciously non-Christian of all the Founders of the United States—the aristocratic Virginian and slave-owner Thomas Jefferson—ended up writing the most biblically charged words ever enshrined in a political document:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he wrote, “that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.”

Once again, we moderns are so brainwashed and asleep, we fail to appreciate the radical, unprecedented quality of those seventy-nine words—still often denied by totalitarians, judges, and college professors the world over.

As described in the Declaration of Independence, human rights are not privileges dispensed or withdrawn at the discretion of the State. Rather, they are gifts from God which no prince or potentate, no State or sovereign, may take away.

That is the key insight behind the American revolution, not democracy or majority rule—and it is derived not from secular philosophy, but from biblical religion.

“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records,” said Alexander Hamilton. “They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

This is a sentiment as old as Genesis: God declared that he made the human being (adam) in his image (tselem) and after his likeness (damut), and gave to him authority to rule over all the earth.

This is also what St. Paul was referring to, writing to the Romans, when he said that knowledge of God can be seen through creation and his law, the knowledge of good and evil, is written on the human heart:

“For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them,” Paul said. “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks” (Rom 1:19–20).

Thus, the concept of “self-evident” truths did not originate with the French Enlightenment or René Descartes but actually dates back at least to the Apostle Paul, writing in 60 AD.

Paul adds that, even though the Gentiles did not have the benefit of the Torah (instruction), certain basic standards of morality can be known even without special divine revelation.

“For when the Gentiles who do not have the [Torah] law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts” (Rom 2:14).

Modern secularists believe that the idea of a self-evident human equality that pervades the U.S. Declaration of Independence came primarily from the agnostic intellectuals of the French Enlightenment; and that the theistic sentiments expressed by Jefferson and other Founders were mere rhetoric, designed to curry favor with Christian colonists.

Scripture Says

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute.”

Proverbs 31:8

But nothing could be further from the truth.

While some of the Founders (like Jefferson or Ben Franklin) were not orthodox Christians by any stretch of the imagination, neither were they atheists.

They were steeped, from childhood, in the stories and values and ideas of the Bible; and most believed that, as John Adams put it, “the Bible contains the most profound philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy, that ever was conceived upon earth. It is the most republican book in the world.”¹

Men like Washington and John Adams, Ben Franklin and James Madison, were warriors and farmers, writers and statesmen, not parsons.

But a raw religious faith was important to them. George Washington, for example, upon taking command of the Continental Army, ordered that each day begin with a formal prayer in every unit.

“The General commands all officers, and soldiers, to pay strict obedience to the Orders of the Continental Congress, and by their unfeigned, and pious observance of their religious duties, incline the Lord, and Giver of Victory, to prosper our arms,” the Order went.

As philosopher Michael Novak argues in his remarkable 2002 book, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, the revolutionary political philosophy that gave birth to government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” was based on two primary sources:

1. A simple but deeply rooted biblical religiosity that saw human rights as self-evident and “unalienable” gifts of a benevolent and almighty Creator

2. A “plain reason” that grew out of rugged, practical experience in self-government

Revolution based solely on “plain reason,” without the moral restraint of religious experience and the fear of God in rulers and legislators, gave birth to the nihilistic atheism, cold calculation, and ultimately bloody massacres of the French Revolution.

The American Founding was different.

It was, as the Great Seal of the United States found on every dollar bill puts it, to be a novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. It was a bold, unprecedented attempt to work out a system of self-government and political freedom that recognized the “unalienable rights” endowed by the Creator and bestowed upon “all” men—not just upon a favored class.

Without the fear of God that religion bestowed upon arrogant and powerful men, the Founders knew, tyranny was never far away.

“Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?” Thomas Jefferson asked.

George Washington agreed.

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” Washington said in his Farewell Address. “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.”

The widespread, stubborn, not always orthodox or churchgoing but sincere religious faith of ordinary Americans—that Europeans and media elites find so childish and unsophisticated—has been a hallmark of the American republic since the very beginning.

According to Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who penned Democracy in America in 1830, “for the Americans, the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of one without the other.”

The biblical origins of universal human rights

One of the essential intellectual building blocks of a liberal democracy—the belief in the fundamental equality of human beings and their “unalienable rights”—is not derived from secular philosophy but from the Bible.

More specifically, belief in human equality is derived from the basic theocentric values of the Hebrew scriptures and intensified in the teachings and deeds of the carpenter of Nazareth. Jesus taught the world outside the small circle of Judaism that God hears the cry of the poor, that the widow’s mite is worth more than a king’s golden treasures in heaven.

No one in the ancient world believed this.

In fact, there was nothing more self-evident in the ancient world than the fact that men—to say nothing of women—are not created equal.

In The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato insisted that the gods create superior human beings who are fit to rule—he called them the Guardians—and inferior human beings who are to be ruled.

The inferior classes have few if any rights, and much of The Republic is proto-fascist in its advocacy of “strong men,” eugenics, and absolute obedience to the State.

The People of Israel rejected this pagan totalitarianism.

More than 2,500 years before Baron de Montesquieu and John Locke, the biblical prophets Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah, and Hosea proclaimed the equality of all human beings in the eyes of heaven—and the fact that rulers, too, will be held accountable by God.

The prophet Isaiah delivered the Word of God to the people of Israel in the eighth century BC:

Woe to those who enact evil statutes,

And to those who constantly record unjust decisions,

So as to deprive the needy of justice,

And rob the poor of My people of their rights (mishpat),

In order that widows may be their spoil,

And that they may plunder the orphans (Is 10:1–2).

The prophet Jeremiah, writing a century later, also had harsh words for those who dare trample upon the rights of the poor:

For wicked men are found among my people . . . .

They have become great and rich.

They are fat, they are sleek,

They also excel in deeds of wickedness;

They do not plead the cause,

The cause of the orphan, that they may prosper;

They do not defend the rights of the poor.

“Shall I not punish these people?” declares the Lord, “On a nation such as this

Shall I not avenge Myself?” (Jer 5:26, 28–9)

These sentiments were unprecedented in the cultural history of humanity: The creator of the universe will hold unjust rulers accountable for violating the rights of the poor.

But Jesus went further—always further. He took this profound revelation of the biblical prophets and pushed it to extremes.

Not merely are the innocent poor welcomed into God’s kingdom, Jesus said, but all the repentant outcasts and abandoned lowlifes of the world—prostitutes and lepers, scammers and ripoff artists and beggars, liars and crooks (tax-collectors), foreigners, heretics, even despised pagan soldiers.

He came, he said, “not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9:12).

Time and again, in a variety of settings, through word and deed, Jesus emphasized the fundamental equality and innate dignity of all human beings in the eyes of God.

To illustrate what he meant, Jesus told simple but compelling and ultimately subversive stories that continue to reverberate in the human spirit to this very day.

Like this one from the Gospel of Luke:

A certain man was giving a big banquet, and he invited many people; and at the dinner hour he sent his servant to say to those who had been invited, “Come; for everything is ready now.”

But they all alike began to make excuses. The first one said to him, “I have bought a piece of land and I need to go out and look at it; please consider me excused.”

And another one said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please consider me excused.”

And another one said, “I have married a wife, and for that reason I cannot come.”

And the servant came back and reported this to his master.

Then the head of the household became angry and said to his servant, “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and crippled, the blind and the lame.’

And the servant said, “Master, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.”

And so the master said to the servant, “Go out into the highways and along the hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste of my dinner.”

Such stories shocked the pious of Jesus’s day, as indeed they shock the pious of our own. By and large, pious people can feel pity for the widow and orphan, and recognize intellectually that God loves them; but Jesus went further, treating everyone as children of God. Jesus’s radical egalitarianism, as portrayed in the Gospels, extended to women, criminals, and even to hated occupation (Roman) soldiers.

The Bible in American History, Part XI

“Within the covers of the Bible are all the answers for all the problems men face.”

Ronald Reagan

“Of the many influences that have shaped the United States into a distinctive nation and people, none may be said to be more fundamental and enduring than the Bible.”

Ronald Reagan

In the first century, a pious Jew did not speak with women, but Jesus spoke openly with many strange women, even, in one case, with a rather disreputable woman from among the hated Samaritan community (Jn 4:7).

That would be almost literally the equivalent of a young Israeli rabbi today stopping to chat with a Palestinian prostitute in Nablus. What would his haredi followers think?

As for Jesus’s attitude toward the hated Roman occupation authorities, who would in fact put him to death, he not only spoke to them but he even praised their religious faith.

Even if the story of the centurion’s servant (Lk 7) was, as some modern critics like to claim, put into Jesus’s mouth by the evangelists decades after his execution, it is still congruent with the Gospels’ pervasive portrayal of Jesus’s friendship with social outcasts.

It’s a pretty remarkable story in its own right—especially when you consider that, in all likelihood, it was written just a few years after the Roman Army had massacred up to a million Jews and had leveled the holy Temple to the ground.

As the evangelist Luke tells it, a centurion’s slave was sick and about to die. When the Roman officer heard about Jesus and his reputation as a miracle-worker and healer, he sent some Jewish leaders to ask Jesus to come and save the life of his slave.

The Jewish leaders insisted that the Roman was worthy of such a request because “he loves our nation, and it was he who built us our synagogue.”

This meant that the man was a theosobomenos, a “God-fearer”—a pagan who respected the Jewish religion and sought to live by its precepts without actually converting and undergoing circumcision.

Jesus agreed to help.

But before he could reach the house where the slave was staying, the Centurion sent word that Jesus shouldn’t trouble himself to actually visit him—because he knew that a pious Jew would never enter the home of a pagan.

“Lord, do not trouble yourself further, for I am not worthy for you to come under my roof,” he said. “But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I, too, am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, ‘Go!’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come!’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this!’ and he does it.”

When Jesus heard this, Luke relates, he marveled at the Roman officer, turned to the great multitude of pious Jews who was following him and said, “I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such great faith.”

Later, Jesus’s egalitarian attitude was expressed by Peter in the Acts of the Apostles: “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34–35).

Egalitarianism in early Christianity

The political and social implications of Jesus’s radical egalitarianism are obvious. If all human beings are equal in the eyes of God—if, as Jesus said, God causes the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike—then that implies that human beings, too, should treat each other equally.

This is precisely how the evangelist Luke, in his Acts of the Apostles, describes the early Christian community. “The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common,” Luke wrote. “There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need.”

According to the sociologist and historian, Rodney Stark, this openness to people of all races and social and economic classes explains, at least partly, the phenomenally rapid growth of the Jesus movement in the ancient world.

In his remarkable book The Rise of Christianity, Stark attempts to describe and then explain the rapid expansion of Christianity from a tiny, persecuted sect within Judaism to the dominant religion on the planet in just three centuries.

He starts out with the known or suspected end points.

Acts 1:14–15 says that, immediately after the Crucifixion, there were 120 Christians, and by the sixth decade, Acts 21:20 says, there were “many thousands of Jews.” After surveying historians on the question, Stark settles on the conservative figure of about 1,000 Christians in the year 40, or ten years after Jesus’s execution.

For the ending number, Stark accepts the estimates of historians that set the number of Christians in the age of Constantine as no more than 10 percent of the total Roman population—or about 6 million Christians out of 60 million Romans.

That results in a growth rate of about 40 percent per decade—roughly equal to that of the Mormon church. At that rate, Stark calculates, there would have been:

1,000 Christians in the year 40
1,400 in the year 50
7,530 in the year 100
40,496 in the year 150
217,795 in the year 200
1.1 million in the year 250
6.3 million in the year 300
33.8 million in the year 350

That accounts for the mathematics of growth... but what accounts for Christianity’s growth socially and culturally?

One of the reasons Stark gives is the egalitarian ethos of the Christian movement—its openness to people of all social and economic classes, its positive evaluation of women, its strong social concern and interest in the poor and the sick.

Modern enemies of Christianity, from Gibbon and Hobbes to Nietzsche and Friedrich Engels, have insisted that the Jesus movement was made up primarily of slaves and uneducated persons. After all, doesn’t Paul say, in his first letter to the Corinthians, that “not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth”?

But if Christianity were to meet the mathematics of growth described above, it must have had tremendous appeal among all social and economic classes. The New Testament itself gives tantalizing clues that upper-class persons were attracted to the new movement.

There is little doubt that Jesus had rich and influential followers, such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathaea (Jn 19:38–42) and that he was quite comfortable with the affluent. All four Gospels record an incident in which an apparently rich female follower, whom John names as Mary the sister of Martha, pours an alabaster flask of perfumed ointment on Jesus’s feet—which “some” (John says Judas Iscariot) complained cost more than three hundred denarii. And the evangelist Matthew even mentions in passing that Pontius Pilate’s wife (not named in the Gospel but called Procula in later tradition) begged Pilate not to harm “that righteous man” because of the nightmares she was having over him (Mt 27:19).

Because of its emphasis on fundamental human equality in the eyes of God, Christianity was open to both slaves and freemen, women and men, pagans and Jews. As the apostle Paul put it, there is no longer “neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all.”

This meant that Christianity’s recruitment universe was vastly larger than those of most ancient religions which tended to restrict membership along ethnic or sexual lines.

The role of women was crucial.

You’d never know it from the shrill talk of “patriarchy” and sexism among today’s aging feminists, but Christianity was undoubtedly the most pro-female religion in history.

Not only did Jesus count among his most fervent followers large numbers of women, but the New Testament proves that women were active leaders in the early Christian movement. Writing to the Romans, the apostle Paul commends “Phoebe our sister, who is a minister [deacon] of the church at Cenchreae,” and mentions “Mary who has worked hard for you” and “Junia, my relative and my fellow prisoner.” He describes the woman Junia and perhaps her husband Andronicus as “prominent among the apostles [who] were in Christ before me.”

That Christianity accorded women greater social status, based on its conception of basic human rights, can be seen in the peculiar early Christian rejection of abortion, infanticide, and divorce.

The Christian rejection of divorce tended to give women greater social status, not less, as some modern feminists allege. That’s because it conferred upon women a fundamental economic and social security that both Jewish and pagan women lacked. In Judaism, women had no right to divorce at all and could be dismissed by their husbands simply by his putting it in writing (a “bill of divorce” or ghet). In Roman law, women had the right to divorce their husbands but, among the lower classes, no way of supporting themselves if they did so.

Another way in which human equality and the concept of fundamental human rights were reinforced was through the Christian ban against infanticide and abortion. Infanticide, which tended to be practiced, then as now, disproportionately against female babies, was forbidden—as was abortion—precisely because life was viewed as a fundamental human right. In the Didache or “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles”—written in 70 AD and one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament—Christians are told that “you shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child” (2:1–2). Many pagan commentators noticed this strange Christian refusal to kill children (a view also shared by Jews).

The fact that all human infants—including even female infants—possessed, in Christian eyes, a fundamental right to life, naturally reinforced in the Christian community the belief that human beings did possess certain rights that no one could legitimately abrogate.

The development of human rights in Christendom

The ancient world did not have any true conception of human rights. Socrates insisted that he had a right to teach the truth as he understood it; the Athenian assembly disagreed and forced him to commit suicide for his trouble.

For the ancients, with a few exceptions, the state and religion were one and the same thing: What the state decreed to be just was, in fact, what was just.

Aside from the biblical prophets, there were few voices in the ancient world that discerned any distinction between what was legal (in the sense that it was decreed by the state) and what was moral or right.

One of the few exceptions was the Roman Stoic philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero who did attempt to articulate a theory of natural right over and above the positive law of the state.

In his classic text, De Res Publica, Cicero held that “True law is right reason in agreement with Nature . . . it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting.”

He insisted that “there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.”

These are noble sentiments. Alas, the reality of Roman society did not allow their application—and Cicero did not follow them himself.

As consul (the highest Roman official) of the senate, Cicero discovered a plot to overthrow the government (the Catiline Conspiracy, 63 BC). He ordered the five ringleaders to be executed without trial.

But he who lives by the sword will die by the sword. When Mark Antony came to power briefly as part of the Second Triumvirate, he ordered the death of Cicero and his entire family. In 43 BC, Cicero was murdered and his head and hands were nailed to the speaker’s podium in the Roman Senate.

Such were human rights in the pre-Christian days of the Roman Empire.

It was not until after the legalization of Christianity by Constantine in 313 AD that Christian thinkers developed a theory of human rights separate from and above the power of the state.

The early Christian philosophers, strongly influenced by the teaching of Jesus and the theocentric ideas inherited from Judaism, believed in what is now called natural law. In essence, natural law is simply the idea that there is an objective moral order, established by God and grounded in an essential humanity, which stands above mere human law and against which mere human law must be judged.

There are basically three theories of rights articulated over the last 2,000 years:

Judeo-Christian natural law theory

This is the belief, enshrined in the Magna Carta and the U.S. Declaration of Independence, that human rights are not derived from the whims of the state, but as gifts from the Creator. Man-made laws that violate these fundamental natural rights are not valid and are, in fact, illegal. A government that repeatedly violates God-given natural rights is an illegitimate tyranny and may be overthrown.

Social contract theory

This was a view, gradually evolved in the Middle Ages and then adopted by anti-Christian philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that sees civil government as primarily an agreement among sovereign individuals to consent to restrictions on their freedoms in order to live better in a group than they can on their own.

Legal positivism and legal realism

These are modern, rather cynical theories of jurisprudence, developed by Jeremy Bentham (c. 1748–1832) and refined by John Austin (c. 1790–1859), that basically hold that law is whatever the state says it is. Law and morality have nothing to do with one another. As described by the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., legal realism is simply the doctrine that the practice of law is the ability to predict what the Leviathan State, like a large and dangerous animal, might do under certain circumstances—the better to advise clients.

Legal positivism was a highly influential theory of jurisprudence throughout the first half of the twentieth century. But the horrors of World War II and Communist and Nazi totalitarianism made many law professors rethink whether it is a good idea to teach the doctrine that what is legal is whatever the state says is legal.

After all, Adolf Hitler was democratically elected by the people of Germany. The summary executions and brutalities of the Communist regimes were “legal” in the sense that the state authorized them.

Much of what has gone wrong in Western law, over the last 150 years—from the approval of slavery in the Dred Scott decision to the legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade—stems from this fundamental, anti-Christian belief that basic human rights do not really exist, that the state may grant, or take away, whatever rights and “privileges” it deems necessary.

In contrast to the “new” theories of rights advocated by Rousseau and his followers, the classic Judeo-Christian view (expressed most succinctly in natural law theory) has always been that governmental elites must answer to a higher law than mere human legislation. When governments repeatedly transgress these fundamental human rights, it is the right of the people—as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of the Independence—“to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.”

Governments that fail to respect the “unalienable rights” endowed by God are tyrannies and, therefore, illegitimate.

Once again, these ideas stem, not from atheistic philosophers, but from Christian theologians reflecting upon the truths found in the Bible.

The notion of a Divine Law above mere human law was expressed clearly by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, ratified by John Calvin in his Institutes, and summarized succinctly by Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), one of the chief sources used by Jefferson (and all the colonists) in crafting the new American government.

According to Blackstone, civil law is given, not to create rights, but to protect already pre-existing natural rights.

The primary object of law, he says, is to maintain and regulate those “absolute rights of individuals . . . such as would belong to man in a state of nature, and which every man is entitled to enjoy, whether in society or out of society.”

“Those rights then which God and nature have established, and are therefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared by the municipal laws to be inviolable. On the contrary, no human legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture.”²

Who Said It?

“The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.”

Charles Dickens

This great tradition of classical natural right—which extended from the biblical prophets and the teaching of Christ through the medieval scholastics and Protestant divines up to the U.S. Declaration of Independence—was challenged directly by what is sometimes called “political atheism.”

Modern people, indoctrinated as they often are, tend to think of the Renaissance as a great “rebirth” of humanism and enlightenment, but in terms of human rights and of the rights of women it was actually a profound step backwards.

This is because the Renaissance was a return to the ideas of Roman and Greek civilization and a rejection of medieval Christianity—yet it was precisely medieval Christianity which championed what we today call human rights.

A long string of anti-Christian thinkers—first Machiavelli, then Thomas Hobbes, and finally Jeremy Bentham and John Austin—rejected the notion of human rights as nothing more than, as Bentham put it, “anarchical fallacies.”

In his revolutionary book The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli (c. 1469–1527) taught that politics must be utterly divorced from moral concerns of any kind. “Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed,” he said, “for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.”

The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) agreed. In his work The Leviathan, he advocated a strong totalitarian government (the “leviathan”) as the only way to save human beings from themselves. Famously describing human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Hobbes insisted that the reality of human interaction was that of “war of every one against everyone.”

From this, he says, it follows that “nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place [in the state of nature].”

The only hope for a modicum of peace and civilization, Hobbes thought, was for individuals to surrender irrevocably their natural rights to a totalitarian state (such as an absolute monarch). Fear of the “leviathan” would force selfish and violent men to maintain order and limit their crimes. For this reason, Hobbes rejected the Christian notion that individuals could ever disobey immoral laws or criticize the state in any way.

Nevertheless, Hobbes accepted the classic notion, developed in the early Middle Ages, that government derives its powers from the “consent of the governed.” This “social contract” idea did influence the American Founders. But for Hobbes, the “consent,” once made by a majority, is irrevocable and cannot be changed or transferred without the permission of the original sovereign.

It sometimes happens that a sovereign puts to death an innocent man, he says, but, in essence, this is simply the price people must pay for having a government. “Nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretense soever, can properly be called an injustice or injury, because every subject is author of every act the sovereign does,” he says. For this reason, “tyranny” is merely an empty word for a monarchy that someone dislikes . . . just as “oligarchy” is merely a word used for an aristocracy that someone dislikes.

Needless to say, the American Founders didn’t accept Hobbes’s notion of absolute, unquestioning obedience to the state. Rather, they worked out an entirely new theory of government that combined the best of both the classic Christian theory of natural rights and the notion, drawn from the early Middle Ages, that the legitimacy of a government was the result of the “consent of the governed.” But unlike Hobbes, the Founders believed that, when a government violated a people’s natural rights “endowed by their Creator,” then it was the “duty” of the people to “alter or abolish it” and to “institute new government.”

Not surprisingly, not everyone took to this new theory of government. Totalitarians throughout history, whether monarchists or communists, dislike the idea that the power of government can be constrained in any way.

The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), who witnessed the American Revolution, rejected entirely the notion of natural rights and the entire natural law tradition. His enemies were both Sir William Blackstone and John Locke. The idea of natural rights, he said, “is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.” The founder of the movement called “legal positivism,” which is still influential today, Bentham believed that the only rights that truly exist are rights created by the civil government. If the government hasn’t granted the right, he said, it’s not a right but a wish. Whereas Aquinas and other Christian thinkers insisted that a civil law that violated the law of God is not a true law and can be justly disobeyed, Bentham and legal positivists insist that this is not the case. According to John Austin, another influential founder of legal positivism, morality and law have nothing to do with one another. The validity of a law lies only in that it is proclaimed by a sovereign. The influence of Thomas Hobbes is evident throughout legal positivism. The power of the state is virtually limitless.

In conclusion, what we can say is this. The ancient world had no concept of what we today call human rights. That concept arose from the assumptions and declarations of the Torah and the biblical prophets, was deepened and radicalized in the deeds and teachings of Jesus Christ, and was further universalized as the early Christian community left the ethnic confines of Judaism and began to evangelize in every language and among diverse groups of people.

As the Christian church began to think through the political implications of the belief that every human being is a child of God, created in his image and likeness and possessing an eternal destiny, canon lawyers began to insist that there were God-given rights that could not be justly abrogated by government officials. As these ideas developed, in both Catholic and Protestant countries, the Christian tradition of natural rights eventually developed into a theory of self-government that directly influenced the Founders of the American republic.

Those modern philosophers who rejected the truths of biblical Christianity—such as David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Rousseau, and Karl Marx—not surprisingly also rejected the biblical, Christian theory of human rights.

And as we shall see in the next chapter, once government leaders decided that the only law is man-made law—that human rights are merely “nonsense upon stilts”—then all restraints could be thrown off. At last, ambitious social planners could attempt to remake society in their own image—and the nightmares of twentieth century totalitarianism could begin.

As Dostoevsky said, if there is no God, then all things are permitted.