Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Snoomstreet.
Well, last week, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine made this bold statement during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. 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 Shia law. And target Sunnis, Baha'is, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. 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.
Now, it's one thing when a progressive media figure says something like this. For example, back in 2024, a Politico reporter warned that believing human rights don't come from Congress or from the Supreme Court, but they come from God, that makes one a Christian nationalist. But still, it's another thing when a sitting U.S. Senator and a former vice presidential candidate claims this belief is indistinguishable from Islamic fundamentalist.
Now Kaine's comments were quickly condemned by fellow senators and religious commentators for, among other things, rejecting the words of the Declaration of Independence. But the senator also failed to realize that his own belief that rights come from government. That's what every communist, fascist, and totalitarian regime in history believed. At least the very first part of the senator's claim is not fully wrong. After all, the mullahs in Iran, like all committed Muslims, do believe that human rights come from God.
And so do Christians. But that's where all the similarities end. As Ayan Hirsi Ali, who lived in cultures rooted in both Islamic and Christian notions of human rights, says in the new film Truth Rising, and I quote, you don't have to imagine how life would be under Islam. All you have to do is go to any of these places that Western civilization has barely touched. And the education you'll get there is much better than at Harvard, end quote.
In fact, though Muslims and Christians do agree that our rights come from God, they hold widely diverging views about what those rights are, how those rights should be understood, and how the government should recognize and enforce human rights. And that's because Muslims and Christians hold such fundamentally different and conflicting ideas about who God is and who humans are. As Ayan Hirsi Ali also points out in the Truth Rising film, the God of Islam, who only reveals to us his will, demands our submission. But the true God reveals himself in Jesus Christ and offers us. Freedom.
The Christian God created humans in his own image. He, as the Apostle Paul said, determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, so that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. In other words, not only does God want to be known, He made us in such a way as to be able to know Him. Islam, on the other hand, refers to God as love, but then reveals him to be vindictive and cruel. According to Islam, humans have not fallen.
According to Christianity, humans are sinful. having inherited a fallen nature from our first parents. And if humans are inherently ordered toward sin and evil, as Christianity claims, then a government that's run by humans will then be prone to abuse its citizens, and so it has to be ordered instead toward preserving those rights which God has ordained. But in Islamic society, humans are not seen as bearing God's image and need only to be forced into submission by the state, which is inseparable from the religion itself. And that's why in practice, Islam looks far more like the totalitarian governments that think of human rights in the same way that Senator Kaine does.
If humans do not have intrinsic dignity as individuals, then individuals must be at times sacrificed on the altar of the state or the collective. In just the 20th century alone, Joseph Stalin oversaw the execution of 800,000. Perceived political opponents in the Soviet Union, and many put his overall death toll at 20 million. And Mao's China 15 to 45 million people were slaughtered. And of course, Cambodia under Pol Pot and Germany under Hitler also have to be put on the same list.
In other words, whenever and wherever human rights have been attributed to the government, they are subsequently trampled. Colson put it this way. If the government thinks they grant rights, then they also think that they can take them away. But the very idea that humans have rights Rights that transcend class and sex, tribe, and nation can be. to the very individual.
That has a singular source in all of human history. and in his book A Brief History of Thought the atheist French philosopher Luc Ferry identified that source. Christianity was to introduce the notion that humans were equal in dignity. an unprecedented idea at the time. and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.
For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to live like a Christian today, go to Breakpoint.org.
