The signers of the Declaration of Independence – Thomas Jefferson being one of them – recognized that God was the Creator, rights are a gift from Him to be protected by government, there are moral absolutes called “laws,” and God is the “Supreme Judge of the world.” Not only is it important that political candidates believe these fundamentals, but it’s necessary that they govern in terms of them. But without a biblical understanding on the limits of civil government, a person with a deeply held set of religious principles can be a danger to the Republic.
How many times have we heard liberals appeal to the Bible in support of the expansion of civil government? President Obama even used the words of Cain — “Am I my brother’s keeper?” — to support wealth redistribution in the name of “fairness.”
Everybody is religious when it comes to politics. Even an atheist is religious. He puts his faith in the sovereign individual and the use of right reason. How does the atheist account for the legitimacy of government or its moral basis? As skeptical as Jefferson was, he believed that a proper understanding of Christianity (his understanding) resulted in liberty and science:
“The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of its benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.”[1]
The religion and politics issue is more nuanced than Medved makes it out to be, especially since we’ve seen the growth of the federal government from the days of Washington and Jefferson. A good dose of religion mixed with politics might be the very thing to put the lid back on Pandora’s Box.
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