Source.

A reporter for Politico is firing back at critics she says are taking her out of context based on comments she made bashing “Christian nationalists.”

Appearing on MSNBC Thursday, Politico national investigative correspondent Heidi Przybyla was asked about the “infusion of Christian nationalism” in Congress following the appointment of Louisiana representative and devout Christian Mike Johnson as House Speaker.

“The base of the Republican Party has shifted, right?” Przybyla began. “Remember when Trump ran in 2016, a lot of the mainline evangelicals wanted nothing to do with the divorced, you know, real estate mogul who had cheated on his wife with a porn star and all of that. So what happened was he was surrounded by this more extremist element. They’re gonna hear words like ‘Christian nationalism,’ like the ‘New Apostolic reformation.’ These are groups that you should get very, very schooled on because they have a lot of power in Trump’s circle.”

“The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists – not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalist is very different – is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court. They come from God. The problem with that is that they are determining- man, men, it is men are determining what God is telling them,” Przybyla said.

[ … ]

“That is NOT what I said & you know it. Why don’t you play the full clip?” Przybyla reacted to Miller’s viral post of her comments. “I said men are making their own policy interpretation of natural law. MLK did so w social justice. You’re welcome to as well but you don’t speak for all Christians & certainly not for God.”

She later added, “While there are different wings of Christian Nationalism, they are bound by their belief that our rights come from God. If you are Hindu, Jewish etc, this might help you understand the next part of my point, which is they are using this for a man-made policy agenda… which distinguishes this from other Christians who leave these God-given rights at our inherent right to ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ — vs banning abortion, contraception etc.”

She’s a ditz. She sounds like a second-grader. She wouldn’t be able to think her way out of a wet paper bag to save her life. Unfortunately, the study of epistemology has gone by the wayside.  Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge – where it comes from, how you define its basis or foundation, in short, how one would assign positive or negative truth-value to propositions. Additionally, in order to study philosophy properly, one has to learn syllogistic reasoning, the role of presuppositions, pre-theoretical commitments, or axiomatic irredicibles.

She knows none of those things. Notice how quickly and naively she completely reverses the order of things. God speaking authoritatively and clearly through His Holy Writ is man making things up as they go. But the notion of rights coming from the congress or courts somehow avoid that trap. It’s astonishing, really, how stupid she is and in fact how stupid most young Americans are.

But she did land on something – even as a blind squirrel finds a nut I guess. That is the concept of natural law and how it can be twisted. This writer is smarter than she is and so he should have done a better job with this.

Now at last let’s answer the question this column’s title posed. If someone actually asks you whether you are a “Christian Nationalist,” there are several things you could say — depending on whether you thought the person sincerely confused or deluded, or instead was trying to trap you as the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus. Here are a few sample responses, for use in different contexts, to the question, “Are you a … Christian Nationalist?”

• “Are you a pagan globalist? Just wondering.”
• “That’s a hate-mongering dog-whistle, like Josef Goebbels’ made-up slur ‘Judeo-Bolshevik.’ Would you ask a Jewish person if he were one of those?”
• “I believe that Natural Law, revealed to everyone Christian or not, ought to undergird all our laws. I learned that from reading Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’ Do you think he was wrong? The Nazis did. They persecuted people for promoting Natural Law.”
• “I’m a patriotic Christian, like George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Billy Graham, and Pope John Paul II. What do you think I should be instead?”

No, don’t quote Martin Luther King. That’s an appeal to emotion or might be the genetic fallacy – and appeal to authority, or at least, one whom many men won’t criticize. Martin Luther King knew no more about epistemology that the ditz above did. And no, don’t appeal to so-called “natural law.”

Natural law, which is in fact one of the pillars of Roman Catholicism, comes from the Thomistic synthesis, or the combination of the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle. I won’t bother you with the details, but you can do your own reading on the Thomistic synthesis. Every student of philosophy has done some or will do some reading on that most important part of history.

It relies on what the reformers would call general revelation, which as they point out is enough to hold all men accountable for the fact that there is a God and He is our creator, but not enough to save a man. That requires special revelation, i.e., the revelation found in the Holy Scriptures.

Besides, Paul points out in Romans Chapter 1 that men suppress the truth in unrighteousness, just as congress and the supreme court do. Natural law, or general revelation, gets twisted by wicked men, contrary to the ditz above who believes that God’s words are the only twisted thing. She has it exactly backwards.

No, God has spoken, he was clear (it’s called the perspicuity of Scripture), it’s authoritative, and it’s final. God has declared that all men everywhere are accountable to Him, and in addition, that life is sacred and not only deserves but demands defense. We have discussed that at length and in detail before.

You don’t need to turn to silly, childish arguments or appeal to emotion or other logical fallacies. For the difference between right and wrong, turn to the Scriptures. Yes, yes, I know, the animal kingdom teaches us that all animals defend their lives, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I don’t care. Men aren’t animals and I don’t need to study the African safari to understand that God demands that I defend my own life and those of my family. I need only to turn to the Scriptures.

I am not a libertarian, and moreover I don’t believe in natural law. I am a Christian libertarian, and I believe in God’s law.