Locke’s influence on the American founders can hardly be denied. When he writes of life, liberty, and the pursuit of private property—he repeatedly used the expression “life, liberty, and estate” or variants—it sounds almost as if the Founders retroactively wrote some Lockean passages. It’s a good reminder of our national cultural, political roots.

The interweb is a funny thing. One never knows what, at any given moment, one will discover. This morning I stumbled on a discussion involving David Harsanyi editor at one of my favorites, The Federalist, over John Locke (1632–1704), God, and natural rights. The thread was difficult to follow (one of the weaknesses of Twitter) but Harsanyi seemedto be suggesting that Locke did not believe that rights come from God. Please note the qualification, seemed. This discussion came out of his defense this morning of Ted Cruz’s idealistic and “God-heavy” announcement of his candidacy for the office of President of the United States. Harsanyi writes,

The Declaration of Independence states, “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.” This founding document informs the Constitution, which restricts government from meddling in important areas of our lives. That’s how the Founders saw it. That’s how we’ve pretended to see it for a long time. Some of us believe that these natural rights, divine or secular, are universal, that they can’t be repealed or restrained or undone by democracy, university presidents, or rhetorically gifted presidents.

If that’s God’s position – or, more specifically, if enough people think that’s His position – well then He’s my co-pilot, as well.

Even though Harsanyi, a self-identified atheist, finds Cruz’s rhetoric a little too religious for his tastes, if he has to choose between those elites who cluck at traditional American rhetoric about rights coming from God and Cruz, he’s happier with Cruz.

On one side of the deep cultural divide, the very notion that God tells us anything is silly. That’s why you see many journalists react with confusion or with contemptuous tweets or feel the need to highlight something so obvious. On a political level, the idea that God can give us unalienable rights only threatens an agenda that doesn’t exactly hold your right to live in peace without interference sacred. And this lack of reverence for rights will lead to a serious battle between religious freedom and progressive aims.

Harsanyi’s invocation of Locke this AM puzzled me—it’s been a long time since I read Locke’s Second Treatise but thanks to the good folks at the Liberty Fund both his First Treatise and his more familiar Second Treatise are easily accessible online. My political science profs (one of them at least, the fellow whose lectures made me want to major in poli sci) used to say that when Locke and his contemporaries wrote about God they were kidding. After re-reading bits of the Two Treatises (1689) I was surprised to find that much of the First Treatise was a detailed exegetical commentary on Genesis 1. Repeatedly in both treatises he treated Adam and Eve as historical figures. He refers sincerely to God more than 300 times. Hence the reference to fundamentalism. In today’s climate, a political theorist who wrote about God as if he really is and Adam and Eve as if they actually were would be regarded as having a slippery grasp on reality or as a fundamentalist of some sort. Doubtless snide references to the Christian Taliban would soon follow on Twitter.

Consider this passage from Locke’s First Treatise.

Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom, and an uncontrouled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power, not only to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men; but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it.

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