by Bill Nugent
I heard a discussion on the radio recently about a group of scholars who did a comparative study of the constitution of the United States and the constitution of the old USSR. The amazing thing that they found, in their point by point comparison, was that the constitution of the old USSR had more written guarantees of human rights than does the US constitution! How can such a phenomenon be explained? The USSR was guilty of the grossest human rights violations in spite of their written constitutional guarantees.
The answer to this paradox is contained in one word: integrity. It is not a piece of paper (a constitution) that protects people from human rights abuses but rather it is the integrity of government leaders to abide by the constitution. A constitution without integrity in the hearts of government leaders is useless. Leaders without moral integrity will ignore or twist the contents of any constitution.
Integrity comes from morals and morals are contained in God’s laws and God’s laws are contained in the Bible. Thomas Jefferson said “The reason that Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart.” Our second president, John Adams said “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” The father of the constitution and fourth president, James Madison said“We have staked the whole of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves . . . . according to the Ten Commandments of God.”
The founders set up a limited government with strict accountability to the people. Moral reform movements flourished in America. There was a movement led by Christians to outlaw dueling, to reform prisons and reform insane asylums and to abolish slavery. America’s Christian heritage produced a people who were law abiding and who believed in fair play.
America produced leaders with moral integrity who governed within the limits of the constitution and respected human rights. It is this moral component joined to a constitutional government that accounts for American freedom.
In sharp contrast we can look at the USSR and its reign of terror from 1917-1991. Lenin, Stalin and the other founders of the Soviet Union closed the churches, jailed the clergy and in other ways brutally crushed Christianity in the early days after the 1917 revolution. The Jews were given a pass for a while but then were cruelly suppressed beginning in the years after World War II.
It is undeniable that the USSR was a government based on secularism. It was atheistic. It had no transcendent moral code. Every leader was a law unto himself and not submitted to God’s laws.
The constitution of the USSR, with all of its guarantees of human rights was just a piece of paper. The bureaucrats and judges lacked the moral courage and integrity to enforce the human rights provisions of the constitution.
In America, as secularism advances and Christianity is evermore forced out of the public schools and universities we see a decline in the integrity of most of our leaders. It is not surprising that he see some of America’s leaders twist or ignore the human rights guaranteed in the constitution.
Judges write fanciful judicial decisions that are basically the same as writing law from the bench. This is explicitly forbidden in the US constitution which places all law writing power in the congress. This is how abortion was legalized. The Supreme Court invented the right to abortion and cloaked it in constitutional sounding language. Now mass murder of the unborn continues unchecked. There are many other examples that could be given. We should remember that the source of America’s freedom is Bible based morality. The fact that the fruit of Christianity is a government that honors human rights is further proof that Christianity is true and that the Bible is God’s inspired word.