 And Bishop Juan Barron, this is a little longer, and he wants to, he is there to basically share some reflections with you, concerning a recent clip you saw, I saw from MSNBC, which was one of the most disturbing and frankly dangerous things I've ever seen in a political conversation, which is a little funny because whatever she said in that clip is basically standard practice. On basically left of center, and maybe even among many right of center. It's basically standard practice among most people who are not super religious, who don't hold the idea that rights come from God. So here is Bishop Robert Barron. He's got that big cross, just in case you didn't notice the white collar, just in case you didn't see the uniform, he's here to let you know that he is from the school of Christ. He is a bearer of a cross. This is pretty powerful stuff. All right, let's watch the Bishop explain the alternative. The alternative to the leftist conception of rights. Everybody, it's Bishop Barron. I want to share with you some reflections on a clip I saw. I think it came out last night, Heidi Prishbulla from Politico was on MSNBC. It was one of the most disturbing and frankly dangerous things I've ever seen in a political conversation. She's going after what she calls Christian nationalism. But what she said was, there are these Christian nationalists out there who are claiming that our rights don't come from any human authority, they come from God. And she specified that they're claiming these weirdos that they're coming, not from the Supreme Court or from Congress. Well, first of all, it was Thomas Jefferson who made that claim. We hold these truths to be self-evident that we're endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. And may I say everybody, it is exceptionally dangerous when we forget the principle that our rights come from God and not from a government. Because the basic problem is, if they come from the government or Congress or the Supreme Court, they can be taken away by those same people. This is opening the door to totalitarianism. This is not some kind of religious nationalism or sectarianism. It's one of the sanest principles of our democratic governance that our rights come from God. Yes, government exists to secure these rights, the Declaration says, not to produce them. It is exceptionally dangerous to go down this road because as I say, we lose our groundedness in something transcendent and become, therefore, by that very move, victims of a potentially totalitarian state that can take away the same rights that they gave us in the first place. So can I just say that in their enthusiasm, I suppose, to go against so-called Christian nationalism, they're actually going against the foundations of our democracy. And it's a further evidence of this extreme hostility of the left now toward religion. No, no, precisely as an American, I want to hold that my rights come not from something as vacillating and unreliable as Congress or the Supreme Court, they come from God. All right, so we don't want to rely on something completely unreliable like Congress or the Supreme Court, we don't want to rely on something that can move around and change. We want something solid. We want something that is not going to change, that is going to be permanent. And therefore, what we want is rights given to us by God, by a made up delusion, by a pretend creature that people believe in, not through logic, reason, facts, evidence, but through faith, in other words, through emotion. So Congress and Supreme Court could change their mind, rights could change, rights could alter. God, on the other hand, that's permanent, that is fixed. And we know that if rights can change because of Congress and Supreme Court, we could get totalitarianism. But we know also that God would never, never promote totalitarianism. He would never go for that. And that he has given us these rights that are fixed, that are there to preserve and make it permanent, our liberty and our freedom. How do we know this? I don't know. How do we know this? Because God told it to somebody because people derived it from, out of Christianity, how do we know God believes in rights? I mean, let me just be very clear. The God of the Old Testament does not believe in individual rights. No such concept. Not for anybody. Does the God of the Christians believe in individual rights? Well, not really. I mean, Christians have slaves, indeed, you know, slavery in the South that defended for the most part on the basis of religion. Constantine, who brought Christianity, made it the religion of the Roman Empire, was a, as close as you could come to a totalitarian in an era without technology, certainly authoritarian. He didn't have the concept of rights. Is the concept of rights anywhere to be found in Christianity's first, certainly 1400 years? No. No. And has God ever changed his mind about anything? Well, let's just take the Catholic Church as an example. Has the Catholic Church ever changed his mind about anything? Well, just as an illustration, just recently, the Pope said it was okay for priests to confirm gay marriage. That's a big change, not a little, big change. The Catholic Church has changed his mind about usury laws. Used to be a mortal sin, it is now okay. The Catholic Church has changed its mind about pretty much, not everything, but a lot, a lot. And who's to say the Catholic Church is right about even the dogma of Christianity and what Jesus actually said, given how often the Catholic Church has splintered, disagreed, demolished its rivals, slaughtered them, killed them. Has God changed his mind about killing? Is there a consensus about killing? Is killing moral, immoral? Is individual rights applied to killing, not killing? I mean, and what happens? Bishop Barron, if it turns out God doesn't exist, which I think is pretty much a certainty. What happens then to the issue of individual rights? Does it just go away? Does it disappear? Does the achievement of John Locke and the achievement of Thomas Jefferson just be meaningless? Because it turns out they were wrong about God. I'm not sure Jefferson was wrong about God, but it appears they were wrong about God, at least in the formulation. And therefore the concept is void, null, void, gone. We have to revert to the democracy. We have to revert to... So individual rights are too important a concept to foundational a concept. Too important an achievement in individual rights as an idea or an achievement to be left to the notion of a fairy tale. A made up being who, how do we know what he actually thinks even if he exists, we have no idea. We have no idea, right? We don't know if God exists, he doesn't. But if he existed, what he thought? He certainly wasn't clear about it. And there's no reason to believe that Thomas Jefferson had any direct link to him or John Locke had any direct link to him and got it from him in revelation with certainty. So grounding one of the greatest political achievements in all of human history in terms of conceptual achievements in terms of God is in Barron, Bishop Barron's term, super dangerous. It makes that achievement contestable. It makes it debatable. And it makes it open to revelation, new evaluation, new information about what God thinks or doesn't think. I can imagine a Christian conservative one day saying, yeah, yeah, individual rights, but I'm communing directly or I've got the passages right in front of me and God meant something a little different than what Thomas Jefferson, that atheist, that deist, that horrible person actually meant. Jefferson got a right for the time. But now we have an updated version just like Jesus and update on the Old Testament. Now we have an updated version of what rights mean. So rights are not fixed. I mean, ultimately God is not fixed. And we have the same problem. God ultimately, if you believe in God, ultimately is a totalitarian. Is there anything more totalitarian than God? He is everywhere. He knows everything. He judges you constantly. He rewards you and punishes you. At his whim, not even related to anything you particularly did, just read the book of Job, if you don't believe that. It's really completely arbitrary. Completely arbitrary. So God is the foundation of rights is actually a scary and in the wrong hands, scarier than Congress and the Supreme Court. And I think Thomas Jefferson knew what he was doing when he said creator, not a Christian God. He left it kind of open. Is this the creator nature? Is it part of our nature that we have rights? Which I think is the way Thomas Jefferson was closer to thinking in those terms rather than in terms of God instilled those rights, gave us those rights and without God, they go away. Without a belief in God, they go away. I think Jefferson probably believed in God but a very different God than Bishop Barron. Very, very different God than Bishop Barron. Bishop Barron would be horrified by Thomas Jefferson's God. Jefferson was, by all accounts, a deist. And deists believed more in a prime mover, somebody who initiated the process and basically lives us alone than a God who intervenes and a God who places and endows us with rights. He endows us with rights. I think in Thomas Jefferson's concept, only to the extent that he has designed the process in which he started brought about nature and nature brought about human beings and human beings because of their nature endowed with these rights, which we'll talk about.