The Evangelical Atheist, Part V: Temple of Reason

by Walter Scott Hudson

Authority is necessary. It is a requirement of nature. Anarchy is a Platonic ideal which cannot truly exist. Without a government strong enough to protect inalienable rights, strong individuals will assert themselves upon the weak. The more successfully individuals can govern themselves – which is to say, restrain themselves from violating the inalienable rights of others – the less government is necessary.

Perhaps the greatest example of this truth in the last century was the civil rights movement of the 1960′s. There were so many individuals unwilling to govern themselves, to keep from violating the inalienable rights of blacks, it took federal intervention to force the issue. This was a tragedy for federalism which progressives perpetually leverage to justify further and less appropriate expansions of government. It demonstrates that the chief enemy of liberty is a people unwilling to govern themselves.

John Quincy Adams put it another way, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Observance of God as the chief authority enables what we call liberty, which is not an anarchical condition of absolute freedom, but the ability to act on one’s own judgment, constrained only by the rights of others, and accountable only to the Divine. When you remove God, you remove the accountability, and something else must take His place. Progressives understand this, which is why they have worked to deconstruct the religious aspect of our culture.

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