What is the greatest threat to the United States? About half of Americans believe it is Communist China. Others think it’s America’s own weaponized intelligence and policing agencies. Some believe it’s global warming. But some are like Democratic strategist James Carville, who refers to popular American traditionalism as “Christian nationalism” and calls it a bigger threat than al Qaeda.

Carville says Americans who believe in God and limited government are a bigger threat than radical Islamists who mass murdered 2,977 people on 9/11. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, at least 210,000 people have been brutally murdered in Islamist terrorist attacks. Is Christian nationalism worse?

“This is a fundamental threat to the United States,” Carville told Bill Maher in an interview on December 2. “It is a fundamental thing.” He said these American “Christian nationalists” “don’t believe in the Constitution.”

Filmmaker Dan Partland made the same accusation in his new documentary Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump, which portrays patriotic Christians as violent rebels seeking to destroy democracy and abolish the Constitution.

Journalist Heidi Przybyla supported Carville and Partland’s narrative, claiming in a February 22 msnbc panel discussion that Donald Trump has surrounded himself with an “extremist element of conservative Christians” united by a 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.”

This is the narrative now: If you believe your rights came from God, you are an “extremist.”

President Abraham Lincoln, a founder of the United States Republican Party, famously noted that the Declaration of Independence articulated the principle upon which the American nation was founded, and the Constitution was the practical attempt to achieve the Declaration’s ideals through free government.

What was this principle?

“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.” In other words, your right to life, your right to liberty and your right to happiness do not come from the founders, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, any of the many Congresses in America’s history, the Supreme Court, any president or any other earthly authority. Your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness comes directly from your Creator.

To assert otherwise is self-evidently extremist.

This is how we know that every human being is equal to every other human being. It is self-evident that no two human beings are equal in composition, experience, aptitude, wealth, personality or any other attribute. But in their unalienable rights endowed by their Creator, they are equal exactly.

The Constitution does not grant you rights to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness. You and every other human being in every other country at every other time have already been equally endowed with these by your Creator. That is why Alexander Hamilton stated:

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

The Constitution attempts to comply with these facts rather than resist them as does a tyranny. It attempts to block men entrusted with political power from using it to deprive other men of their rights, which is to break the laws of nature and nature’s God. The Constitution applies this by splitting government power into legislative, judicial and executive branches, into federal and state levels, and into other divisions that are checked and balanced by one another, and by limiting the total power of the government over the individual and maximizing the power, responsibility and accountability of that individual over his own life.

The entire American idea only works if Americans believe there is a higher authority than Congress or the president.

Carville, Partland, Przybyla and many other radicals are willfully ignorant of the fact that the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution recognize the existence of “the laws of nature and nature’s God,” the “Creator,” “divine Providence” and “the supreme Judge of the world.” All 50 state constitutions also acknowledge this God—the God of the Bible. Perhaps these radicals are betting that enough Americans have forgotten or never learned the truth about their founding. If they aren’t laughed out of their jobs for this, then perhaps they bet right.

America’s founding documents recognize that all men have the God-given right to worship pagan gods, the Islamic god or no god at all. Yet these documents are still Christian documents because the very idea that you have inalienable rights only makes sense in a universe created by an all-powerful Creator who wants you to live, prosper and be happy. It does not comport with other religions and other gods.

Once enough people tolerate or believe Carville, Partland, Pryzbyla and their fellow narrators, America fundamentally transforms into a different society. According to that core belief, whoever was recently elected into office—or whoever successfully seized power through other means—can revoke the rights the government gave you in the first place.

It is common knowledge that the radical left is the party of “big government,” therefore it resents constitutional restraints on its power. Could this be the real reason leftists are labeling those who believe in God-given rights as the greatest threat to America?

If you believe what you’ve always believed about the fundamental American idea, you are either about to become a reluctant part of the fundamental transformation or an “extremist” who stands up and says No.

But even if you stand up, you will still have a choice to make.

Many Christians see what is happening and are rallying around Donald Trump. But at this critical stage, a resurgence in President Trump’s power, conservatism or even traditional American Christianity is not enough.

The first step is recapturing the understanding that our rights come from our Creator. The second step is to humbly admit that we have become “too proud to pray to the God that made us,” to “humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness” and “to pray that we may be spared further punishment, though most justly deserved,” as President Lincoln said.

The third step is humility and repentance toward God, which America has rarely known and has never needed so badly.

The “Christian nationalism” attack rhetoric has little to do with protecting the God-given rights of non-Christians and everything to do with the final separation of Americans from the understanding that God-given rights are God-given. America’s only hope is to get back not only to what Abraham Lincoln and our founding fathers told us—but to the sublime truth that they themselves were reaching for.

For more information on why the national documents of the U.S. are indeed Christian documents, read “The Bible and the Constitution,” by Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry.