Created Equal

On May 29, 2020, Michael Gerson writing in The Washington Post commented on yet another shooting death of an unarmed African American citizen by a white male, in this case, a not infrequent situation, he is a policeman. There have been literally hundreds, even thousands of such incidents over the past several years and perhaps before. This type of racism is a modern form of slavery, so disrespecting a black citizen that in his own mind he or she becomes a second-class citizen with fewer rights, indeed without the right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as guaranteed to all Americans by the Declaration of Independence. These rights were denied to slaves in the 18^th Century and largely are denied to black citizens—by the police and others in real or imagined authority today. This is an act contrary to God, to moral conscience, and to American principles.

Michael Gerson notes, in commenting on the racial attack by police in Minneapolis:

“Who is supposed to care deeply about racial justice and reconciliation in the Republican coalition? I should have hoped that religious people would make such moral commitments a priority. Yet (in general) they haven’t. It is the kind of failure that does grave injury to the Christian witness.

“Historically, the most effective attack on the role of Christianity in society has been that it is an epiphenomenon—that Christians employ mystical language to justify their tribalistic interests. In this view, religion is more of a mechanism to rationalize a preexisting political and social worldview rather than transforming it. (This is precisely what Southern slaveholders did when they provided religious justifications for slavery.)…

“People of faith should apply a moral yardstick to any political coalition they join…In Christian terms, the Kingdom of God is not some future blessed state. It becomes present when believers live by a different set of values in the here and now. The nature of those duties can be debated. But they do not include providing an alibi for racism.”

The type of behavior exhibited in Minnesota that gratuitously killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man, is also what Southern slaveholders and their employees and agents employed. As President Obama said recently, “…that for millions of Americans, being treated differently because of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’” This is indeed the 2020 version of slavery.

What were our Founders’ view on slavery, this systematic depravation of African Americans of all their rights and their debasement from humanity so as to be treated as property? Black citizens today are no longer chattels but beyond this the rights they do have are set in reality almost unrecognizably far below the Declaration standard. These are rights that the Declaration states that all men (and women) are endowed with by their Creator and their denial is an affront to the Kingdom of God on Earth.

“That men should pray and fight for their own freedom, and yet keep others in slavery, is certainly acting a very inconsistent as well as unjust and perhaps insidious part…”  — John Jay 1785

“Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” —   Benjamin Franklin 1789

“This abomination must have an end, and there is a superior bench reserved in heaven for those who hasten it.” — Thomas Jefferson 1787

“Slavery in this country I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century.” — John Adams 1821

“Ignoble slavery my soul disdain, my only country is where freedom reigns.”  —  John Quincy Adams 1786

“Were not the disadvantages of slavery too obvious to stand in need of it, I might enumerate and describe the tedious train of calamities inseparable from it. I might show that it is fatal to religion and morality, that it tends to debase the mind and corrupt its noblest springs of action. I might show that it relaxes the sinews of industry, clips the wings of commerce, and introduces misery and indulgence in every shape. — Alexander Hamilton 1774

“I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in this province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” — Abigail Adams 1774

John Jay