A good rule of thumb when having a conversation is to avoid speaking about things you know little or nothing about and instead listen to those who do. It keeps you from looking foolish, and it also helps you learn.
Apparently, Politico‘s National Investigative Correspondent, Heidi Przybyla, didn’t get the memo. She provided a case study of how not to talk about things you don’t know about during an appearance on MSNBC‘s All In with Chris Hayes on Thursday.
Przybyla was attempting to explain that “Christian Nationalism,” which is based in natural law, is going to be a major part of policymaking in a second Donald Trump presidency, and she said that what differentiates these Christian nationalists from other Christians is the belief 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.”
As the clip went viral, Przybyla tried to defend herself on X, claiming that the clip was cut off and that what she really said was that “men are making their own policy interpretation of natural law.” I reached out to Przybyla to offer her the opportunity to clarify her comments and explain them further, but she only provided me with the extended clip of the segment that she also shared on social media.
The full clip does nothing to make Przybyla look better. In fact, the full segment actually betrays how little she knows about natural law and Catholicism, the Christian religion of her childhood. Here are Przybyla’s full comments after her description of Christian nationalists.
“The problem with that is that they are determining; men are determining what God is telling them. And in the past, that so-called natural law — it’s a pillar of Catholicism, for instance — has been used for good and social justice campaigns, Martin Luther King evoked it in talking about civil rights. But now you have an extremist element of conservative Christians who say that this applies specifically to issues including abortion, gay marriage, and it’s going much further than that, as you see, for instance, with a ruling in Alabama this week, that judge is connected to that Dominionist faction in talking about a lot of other issues including surrogacy IVF you know, sex education in schools.”
On X, Przybyla again tried to explain that Christian nationalists manipulate natural law to enact a “man-made policy agenda,” saying that non-Christian-Nationalist Christians believe that natural law and rights come from God, but that that stops at the three rights named in the Declaration of Independence.
“While there are different wings of Christian Nationalism, they are bound by their belief that our rights come from God,” she wrote in her post. “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.”
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.
— Heidi Przybyla
(@HeidiReports) February 23, 2024
Leaving aside the fact that opposing abortion is about protecting the right to life, Przybyla may want to take an explainer course on natural law, especially in Catholicism. Despite what she says, it has been used for centuries to create a coherent and consistent moral teaching on numerous specific topics, because its precepts and its application can be known by men.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “The natural law is written and engraved in the soul of each and every man, because it is human reason ordaining him to do good and forbidding him to sin.” In other words, the capacity to reason allows human beings to determine what is moral and immoral under the natural law, because it is part of our nature as human beings to know it.
And that reliance on reason has informed the Christian teaching that abortion is the willful killing of a human being. It is that same reason that has informed Christian teaching that marriage is an unbreakable and lifelong bond between one man and one woman. And it is that same reason that has informed the teaching that the sexes are immutable, and that children should be shielded from the sexual interests of adults.
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For most of human history, and indeed most of United States history, the natural law was at the forefront of lawmaking. It was understood that lawmaking involved the prohibition of immoral behaviors and the proscription of moral ones, as laid out by the natural law. A nation that divorces lawmaking from natural law subordinates lawmaking to the sheer political will of the men in charge. In other words, it is the most “man-made policy agenda” of all.
While she may not see it, the irony of her claim that Christian Nationalists are pushing a “man-made policy agenda” is that she is arguing that natural law can only be used to achieve policy goals if they are pre-approved by the men of the secular regime. And while her defective explanation of natural law may be due to ignorance, she is actively assisting efforts to drive Christians out of public life. But then again, perhaps her “man-made policy agenda” is to do precisely that.