Senator Tim Kaine’s recent assertion that our rights do not come from God has puzzled much of the country. Bishop Robert Barron rightly summarized Kaine’s remarks as stupid, noting that locating the source of rights within government means that the government can take them away as easily as it grants them. As a member of a political party that currently holds neither the House, nor the Senate, nor the White House, nor, ideologically, the Supreme Court, from the standpoint of partisan interest alone, Kaine should have questioned the wisdom of surrendering people’s rights to the whims of those in power.
But the cluelessness runs even deeper.
As putative evidence for his assertion, Kaine explained,
The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law. . . . And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.
This statement reveals face-palming ignorance about religion.
One of the most basic distinctions within religious thought is between “reason” and “revelation.” “Revelation” applies to truths about God and humanity that can only be known because God has directly communicated them, usually in a sacred text. These truths are beyond the human mind’s natural capacity to grasp.
“Reason,” on the other hand, applies to truths about God and humanity that, though grounded in God, are also, by God’s design, part of the very structure of reality itself. Consequently, human reason, by its own God-given light, can universally apprehend them. They are not epistemically restricted to those who believe in a sacred text.
There is a religious and philosophical chasm between the worldviews of Iranian theocrats and American little-d democrats.
Natural rights in the Western philosophical and theological tradition, which includes the Bible as its foundation, are grounded in reason—not revelation. We have rights because we can rationally deduct that human beings are both a) unique from everything else in existence, and b) radically equal with one another because every individual, notwithstanding his or her individual differences, is composite of body and soul. That metaphysical fact is not only what gives us our rights, it’s also how we know we have rights.
This is what the Declaration of Independence means in affirming, “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.” It’s also why the founders refer to the “laws of nature” and “nature’s God” a few lines earlier.
Comparing the American conception of rights to the Iranian mullahs’ conception (to the extent they believe in rights at all) is thus sophomoric equivocation. Claiming that we shouldn’t believe that our rights come from God because some cultish fanatics somewhere else in the world also believe that rights come from God is akin to saying that we shouldn’t believe in honor because in some places there are honor killings, or that we shouldn’t believe in medicine because in some places they practice voodoo, or that we shouldn’t believe in justice because in some places they treat women as second-class citizens. What matters is not the words being used but rather the meaning of those words and, crucially, the structure of the metaphysical and epistemic reality that generates that meaning.
And there is a religious and philosophical chasm between the worldviews of Iranian theocrats and American little-d democrats.
The former believe they are the exclusive interpreters of what they see as divine revelation and the moral dictates of their sacred texts; the latter believe that everyone has access to basic truth about God, existence, and morality—including where our rights come from—because this truth constitutes human nature itself.
In this sense, the Western conception of God is not opposed to a democratic republic grounded in unalienable rights. It is the condition for the possibility for such a republic to exist—something our founding fathers, familiar with the abuses of tyrannical monarchies fancying themselves as divinely sanctioned, well understood.
Ironically, Tim Kaine’s view ultimately puts him closer to contemporary Iran than to his own country: He, like the theocrats, believes that a powerful and coercive cadre—the government and senators like himself—should be the first and final arbiters of what rights exist and who gets to enjoy them. The tradition he attacks, on the other hand, democratizes rationality and, consequently, democratizes human rights.
If Kaine truly cares about shielding our nation from irrational religious zealots, he should thus worry less about the mullahs and more about himself.