The “values voter” of the political right has, in recent years, become a meaningless term, if not one of ridicule. A generation that came of age watching the Clinton impeachment and listening to conservative leaders proclaiming that “character counts” witnessed many of these same leaders go on to defend womanizers like Donald Trump and Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore — simply because the political ends justified the means. Herein lies the danger of pinning our values to fallible political heroes to fight culture wars for us.
What is needed today is an enduring moral foundation for our values, for a new generation of “values voters.” The values that we look to government to defend should be rooted in something unchanging and universal, such as the natural law and the Imago Dei, or image of God.
According to the natural law tradition, there are unchanging moral truths, grounded in our human nature and knowable through the light of reason. This tradition has roots in classical antiquity and flowered in the religious thought of the Middle Ages. The Imago Dei is a biblical notion, found in the very first chapter of Jewish and Christian scripture, that says human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. It underwrites the belief that every person is equal in dignity and worth. Together, the natural law tradition and the Imago Dei gave rise to the modern concept of universal human rights — according to which every human being is born with intrinsic value and inherent rights.
These values are not abstract. They became real to me when I gave birth to one of this world’s newest image bearers — my son — and subsequently became disabled within the same month.
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