by Ben Peterson
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.
– Exodus 20:8-11
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
– Philippians 2:5-11
The signers of the American Declaration of Independence declared it self-evident that all men are “created equal,” endowed with unalienable rights. Milton Friedman wrote in Free to Choose (1980) that, to the founders, “Men were equal before God. Each person is precious in and of himself. He has unalienable rights, rights that no one else is entitled to invade. He is entitled to serve his own purposes and not to be treated simply as an instrument to promote someone else’s purposes.” Carson Holloway has described the fundamental belief in individual human dignity as the ethical core of Western civilization.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Toqcueville argued that Christianity was the ultimate source of the great democratic revolution, a revolution abolishing distinctions based on birth and establishing social equality. In our day, historians such as Tom Holland have argued that Western moral intuitions regarding compassion for the marginalized are rooted in the Christian faith, the central focus of which is the God-man unjustly, but willingly crucified. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who recently announced her conversion from atheism to Christianity, cites Holland to argue that the fruit of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” includes an “elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity–from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning.” She notes that “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms–of the market, of conscience and of the press–find their roots in Christianity.”
Equality before God has a prominent place as a support for the pursuit of equality before the law in American political thought and history, as George P. Fletcher has written. There is a strong case to be made that secularism cannot provide the spiritual and intellectual resources to undergird equality before the law, in turn grounded on the belief in human dignity. Glenn Tinder argues that “respect for the individual and a belief in the essential equality of all human beings” depend on the “union of the spiritual and the political achieved in the vision of Christianity,” and that “to renew these indispensable values… we must rediscover their primal spiritual grounds.”
Yet, as Robert Kraynak has pointed out in Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, the revealed truth of the Bible does not necessarily support the notion of equality as liberal democrats conceive of it: “We must face the disturbing dilemma that modern liberal democracy needs God, but God is not as liberal or as democratic as we would like him to be.” The Christian view of human equality recognizes both alikeness and difference, calling Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female, to mutual submission to Christ and love for neighbor.
Unmoored from the anchor of human createdness in the divine image, pursuit of equality goes beyond a proper understanding of equality before law, treating all identities and behaviors as equal and contributing to the emergence of a culture denigrating achievement, celebrating vice, and undermining the structure of important social institutions like the family—a culture careening between pride and despair. A proper view of equality before the law and its foundations, acknowledging that we are created equal in some respects and unequal in others, will better bear the weight of human glory, fallenness, and difference.
Biblical Equality and Difference
The fourth commandment in the Decalogue may be the first known reference to equality before the law, a principle grounded in equality before God. Likewise, Leviticus 19:15 says “You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor.” A number of other passages from Torah command impartiality between rich and poor, and native and foreigner. The Psalmist also expresses a negative side of human equality: “There is no one who does good, not even one” (Ps. 53:1).
New Testament writers expressed both sides of this equality; for example, the apostle Paul quotes the Psalmist to make the same point about universal sinfulness early in his letter to the church at Rome (Rom. 3:9-18). He makes a radical statement, though, regarding equality in the church: “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Gal. 3:27-29).
These two aspects of the notion of human equality before God relate also to equality before the law. There is the lofty dignity of human beings, made in the image of God–equally exalted. And yet there is the inescapable fallenness and unworthiness of all–equally fallen. As Yuval Levin put it, according to the great religious traditions of the West, man is “a fallen and imperfect being created in a divine image, a creature possessed of fundamental dignity and inalienable rights but prone to excess and to sin and ever in need of self-restraint and moral formation.” C.S. Lewis wrote that he was a democrat not because he believed in the inherent goodness of men, but because he believed in the Fall. Many are fit to be slaves, none to be masters. Whereas submission to authority is good, it cannot be unreservedly entrusted to fallen men, and so “legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.” Legal scholar David A. Skeel notes that these two elements of biblical teaching firmly support the commitment in American constitutionalism to “legality” or the rule of law–the principle that “law rules, and law rules everyone.”
Before God and in Christ, all are equal. Yet, according to the biblical witness, equality before God does not abolish difference. Rather, equality before God reframes natural and conventional differences and inequalities. Christian marriage does not erase the natural difference between men and women; it imbues their bond with mutuality amidst difference, transforming, elevating it into an expression of the love between Christ and his church (Eph. 5:21-33).
All members of the church are equally deserving of dignity, equally members of the body of Christ, but they are not equivalent or interchangeable. They have different giftings and callings–some are even more or less presentable, like parts of human anatomy (1 Cor. 12:14-26). Further, some differences relate to hierarchy. The New Testament is replete with commands to obey those in authority–including, uncomfortably for many readers in our day–wives to “be subject” to their husbands “as to the Lord” and slaves obedient to their masters, “as to Christ” (Eph. 5:22, 6:5). Those in positions of authority or in higher places within hierarchies are not more valuable or more loved by God, but they play different roles for the good of the body.
Biblical equality also certainly does not mean all behaviors are equal or approved. Members of the body are to put off the “old nature” with its “licentiousness,” and greed for “uncleanness” (Eph. 4:22, 19). As Jacqueline Rivers, arguing against the redefinition of marriage in pursuit of so-called “marriage equality,” wrote, “though all people are equal in God’s sight, all sexual practices are not.”
The biblical picture of equality before God and the law provides a basis for respect for each member of the human family, but that fundamental equal dignity is based on a common accountability to God’s purposes in creation, and to his law and gospel. Biblical equality is based on the teaching that all are equally created to submit to the Lordship of Christ, created to know God and enjoy him forever.
Mutuality in Difference
Biblical equality suggests an embrace of mutuality in difference, sustained by common submission to God. John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charity” highlights providential reasons for differences of wealth and station in a community, providing opportunities for bonds of service and mutuality, and a strengthening of the common good. Lewis likewise argues that legal and public equality should be viewed as a hedge against abuse, not an ideal in itself:
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian.
Lewis’s point is not to argue against equality before the law: “But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.” Rather, he aims but to reframe equality before the law in light of the recognition of difference–indeed, of the possibility of excellence and superiority.
Tocqueville makes a similar point in Democracy in America. People in democratic ages are prone to a pantheistic erasure of all distinctions–between classes, sexes, and ultimately between human and divine–conceiving all people and things as part of a single, divine entity. The effect of mentally erasing all distinctions is, of course, not to actually erase them. Indeed, Tocqueville raises the possibility of a new kind of aristocracy arising in the midst of equality of conditions, a coarser aristocracy without the noblesse oblige and natural-seeming bonds between members of different classes and the recognition of interdependence in traditional aristocracy.
The conservative thinker Russell Kirk argued for a Christian conception of social justice, which accounts for differences, particularly differences in behavioral choices, as much for sameness:
True justice secures every man in the possession of what is his own, and provides that he will receive the reward of his talents; but true justice also ensures that no man shall seize the property and the rights that belong to other classes and persons, on the pretext of an abstract equality. The just man knows that men differ in strength, in intelligence, in energy, in beauty, in dexterity, in discipline, in inheritance, in particular talents; and he sets his face, therefore, against any scheme of pretended “social justice” which would treat all men alike. There could be no greater injustice to society than to give the good, the industrious, and the frugal the same rewards as the vicious, the indolent, and the spendthrift.
Interestingly, some social psychological research has suggested that a reason conservatives tend to report higher levels of happiness than liberals is that they are comfortable with the idea of meritocracy and believe that their actions contribute to life outcomes. In any case, in his many writings, Kirk is keenly aware of the need for societies to allow for the exceptional few to enjoy the fruits of their exceptionality, while preventing them from dominating or abusing common folk.
Beyond Pride and Despair
To the extent the post-Christian culture of the West has abandoned biblical equality, rooted in recognition of the divine image in each person, defaced by the Fall but redeemable in Christ, the culture careens between pride and despair, or idealism and cynicism as Tinder put it. At the extreme, an inability to recognize our createdness as the source of our equality has led in Canada–among the most egalitarian countries in the world–to acceptance of suicide as a legitimate means of ending inadequately curated, imperfect lives.
Recovering a proper conception of human equality, recognizing human life as created and endowed with purpose, would better constrain our elites and empower our common folk, providing the foundation for a proper respect for human persons in our created equality and inequality.
Ben Peterson is an assistant professor of political science at Abilene Christian University. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 