Last Wednesday on MSNBC, Politico correspondent Heidi Pryzbyla made comments about the relationship between rights, government, and God that caused viewers to gasp in disbelief — at least, viewers with a cursory grasp of America’s founding documents and ideals.
In an attempt to fearmonger about the rise of “Christian nationalism,” the veteran journalist ended up scoring one of the most jaw-dropping “own goals” in cable news history: “The thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalist 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.”
It should go without saying, of course, that America was founded upon the very notion that Pryzbyla attempted to paint as sinister: that God is the source of human rights, not government, not kings nor queens.
“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,” reads the Declaration of Independence.
Among the first figures of national prominence to issue a comprehensive rebuke of Pryzbyla’s remarks was Bishop Robert Barron, who leads the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota and is the founder of the Catholic ministerial organization Word on Fire. For the past 17 years, Word on Fire has endeavored to reintroduce the Western world to Jesus Christ through contemporary forms of media with an emphasis on the intellectual tradition of the faith. By every available measure, the organization has been enormously successful — in February, Barron’s YouTube channel surpassed 1 million subscribers. (Pryzbyla’s employer Politico, by way of contrast, has 130,000 subscribers on YouTube).
“It’s one of the sanest principles of our democratic governance, that our rights come from God,” Barron remarked in his taped response to Pryzbyla on X. “Government exists to secure these rights, the Declaration says, not to produce them. … 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.”
On Thursday, the Washington Examiner spoke with Barron about the controversy surrounding Pryzbyla’s comments:
Followers of your work would have noticed an uncharacteristic edge in your voice when you responded to Heidi Pryzbyla’s comments. What was it about this incident that caused you particular agitation?
Barron: I think the edge came from the fact that she was not only wrong but dangerously wrong. To say that our rights come not from God but from the government opens the door to totalitarianism, for the very government that gave them can take them away. To hold that our rights come from God is to affirm that there is a power greater than the state, and such a conviction is essential to the preservation of our freedom.
What do Pryzbyla’s comments reveal about the state of the American news media and the broader culture?
Barron: To me, they disclose a disturbing tendency in the American Left to take a position hostile to traditional religion. When I was growing up, any number of key Democratic leaders (John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, etc.) demonstrated no similar hostility. But much of contemporary leftism has become aggressively materialist and secularist in orientation.
In a subsequent post on X, Pryzbyla attempted to clarify her statement and indicated that she had been raised Catholic. As a Catholic bishop, how would you interpret the following comments?
“Natural law has been invoked throughout our history as a nation. It is a core pillar of Catholicism and, particularly among the Jesuit priests from my childhood, it was applied to social justice and the inherent rights all humans have for dignity: ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ MLK, likewise, invoked natural law when he spoke of social justice and the civil rights movement. In the full clip, I say men are making their own interpretations.”
Barron: They represent some pretty definite back-pedaling! Look, I’m happy that she had a Catholic formation and seems to believe in the natural law. But the comments that I responded to did not reflect that formation at all.
What do you hope the American public takes away from the episode?
Barron: That we have to be constantly vigilant against secularist forces which would undermine one of the pillars of our democracy. Jefferson’s great teaching is imperiled by the regnant secularist ideology.
Is there anything exciting coming up at Word on Fire you’d like to share with our audience?
Barron: Lots of things. We are coming out soon with volume four of our ambitious Word on Fire Bible project. Three more volumes are anticipated. Within the next week, another lengthy podcast conversation between me and Jordan Peterson is coming out. I just published on YouTube a conversation with Ro Khanna, the influential Democratic representative from Silicon Valley.
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Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.
