Dr. Albert Mohler Jr. said on Washington Watch Thursday that Heidi Przybyla's take is not surprising, given the Politico news reporter is a product of her environment. Przybyla's mission in a guest spot on MSNBC recently was to inform Americans of the danger created when Christians are politically engaged. The journalist stated:
"The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists – not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalists 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 [that] men are determining what God is telling them."
It's a take that underscores what's being taught in institutions of higher learning, Mohler, the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told show host Tony Perkins.
"[You look at the argument] made by Przybyla … and you recognize that's exactly what the leftist academy has been teaching – and this is what's being regurgitated now as if it makes sense. We can be very smug and self-satisfied ourselves, just given sin, if we're not careful; but it's as if she discovered how to split the atom. She's just saying, 'Look, I just discovered this. These are very weird people. They believe that rights come from God,'" Mohler said.
Przybyla's point of view, Mohler argued, reveals little understanding of American history.
"It's as if all of a sudden she's discovered that Christians believe that human dignity and human rights come from the Creator – which, by the way, is exactly what it says in the Declaration of Independence. The entire American system is built upon respect for rights, not the rights," Mohler emphasized.
Many college profs ignore American history
A report directed by Arizona State University professor Donald T. Chritchlow and commissioned by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and two other Republicans found that basic points of American history are often ignored or, if discussed at all, are presented to students in a negative light.
The year-long project focused on class syllabi from the leading universities in the country, many of them ranked in the top 150, Fox News reported.
"As you look at the American Revolution, it was a revolution of sorts based upon continuity of belief in human dignity coming from a divine creator and human rights that we're endowed with by the creator," Mohler said.
In that way, said Mohler, the American Revolution stands in stark contrast to the French Revolution.
"What came later in the French Revolution was a very secular revolution in which you had a declaration of the rights of man as if they all of a sudden existed. So, the Left has gone in the French direction," Mohler continued. Yet he detects more irony in that "they've been in France so long, [but] they don't even understand that the French revolutionaries were rebelling against the very claim that rights come from God."
Mohler said "Christian nationalist" is just a new label for an old narrative from the Left.
"… I'm old enough to have gone through the entire vocabulary of the modern conservative movement in terms of the dismissals of the Left," Mohler noted. "It has been the 'Radical Right,' the 'Christian Right,' the 'New Christian Right,' the 'Radical Christian Right.' A lot of these people are so young they actually believe this is a new thing. The same criticisms were made against Evangelicals in the age of Ronald Reagan."
The end game that Christians cannot accept
The seminary president argued that Christians should be willing to address and refute the narratives and to remain politically engaged.
"We take ideas seriously. We're willing to talk about every one of these arguments – what it means to be a Christian, what it means to understand the nation, what might rightly be identified as 'nationalism.'
"But we do this while telling Christians, 'This just reminds us what's at stake.' We've got not only to vote, we've got to be right. This is an intentional effort to try to keep us out of the public square or to dismiss us … to make conservative Christians embarrassed about being conservative Christians. That's what we know we cannot accept," Mohler said.
