Here is Jim DeMint, former U.S. Senator and current president of the Heritage Foundation, explaining one of the most important foundational principles that conservatives must make sure more Americans understand:
Our rights as Americans are considered unalienable only because they were inherent in the natural order of life established by the laws of nature and nature’s God.
While musing on the writings of author and philosopher G.K. Chesterton in his personal notebook, a young John F. Kennedy wrote, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.” Fences hold things in we want to keep close, and protect us from things we want to keep out. But Chesterton and JFK were not making a point about physical fences. They were speaking of the ideas, principles, and institutions that surround the things that make life worth living, and protect us from threats to those things we value and love.
This is the sort of fence we are currently “taking down” in America. Since its inception, America has been surrounded and protected by a unique set of ideas that created the strongest, most prosperous, most secure and compassionate land of opportunity that has ever existed. These ideas were considered by America’s founders to be “self-evident” because they were based on the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” (from the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence).
Generations of Americans have lived in security and freedom because our leaders have generally been faithful to the belief that nature’s God, the Creator, imbued all people with unalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The second sentence of the Declaration is all based on the assumption of what we call natural law:
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, 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 …
Our rights as Americans are considered unalienable only because they were inherent in the natural order of life established by the laws of nature and nature’s God.
Natural Law Is How Nature Teaches Us Truth
The idea of natural law, an inherent order to the universe that can provide governing principles reached by human reason, was accepted by thinkers from Plato to Thomas Aquinas to John Locke—although they each interpreted the concept differently. Natural law often informed arguments of both faith and reason even outside of a Judeo-Christian context, as shown by the ancient Roman statesman Cicero:
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; […] one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.
–Cicero, The Republic, II, 22
Read more: The Federalist
Image credit: The Federalist / Cicero at the tomb of Archimedes, Martin Knoller 1775.
