True antidote to racial divide found in Constitution

Talk of racial tension and calls for national conversations sometimes seem hopelessly abstract and ineffectual. Protests, riots, and policing reform initiatives across the country today are merely the latest manifestation in an everchurning news cycle. How can we break it? To ask the timeliest question, “Why do black lives matter?”

To answer, we must examine the historical context of our country’s troubled racial history in light of our robust anthropology, which offers an account of why human life matters. Only when our social action in response to injustice is rooted in a true understanding of ourselves and our circumstances can we expect worthwhile change.

The first and most obvious fact – diluted, ignored, or denied by some — is that racial prejudice and animus is real. Some of this ignorance is just that; others fear that acknowledging racial prejudice risks unleashing corrosive resentments and anger throughout society, or that conceding the problem renounces the legitimacy of the American founding. Yet, denying this truth of American experience only suppresses anger rather than resolves it. Speaking the truth regarding the reality of race prejudice in our society does not commit us to disorder. Confronting this harsh reality is necessary not only to heal racial tension, but also to realize the universal call to holiness and to renew and strengthen our institutions.

At the American founding, there was a contradiction: a society founded on claims to human liberty on the basis of inalienable rights simultaneously tolerated human bondage. It makes no moral difference that slavery was a ubiquitous practice then. The American founding precisely sought to be different in its recognition of freedom.

Chattel slavery not only led to the degradation of the slaves themselves, but also to the moral degradation of its participants. It corroded the institutions and the very foundation of justice by forcing positive law into service of slavery. Yet, while it set loose a poison throughout society, its antidote is to be found in the Constitution itself.

Pagan philosophies justified slavery, arguing that some peoples were incapable of freedom — a notion directly at odds with the Christian understanding that all persons are created in the image and likeness of God. The fact that the Church, from her inception, baptized people regardless of race and legal status (thus recognizing they had souls) destabilized this philosophical foundation of slavery, even if it would take centuries to come to fruition.

The great promise of the Declaration of Independence, itself derived from Natural Law, that people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” eventually was enlisted to root out institutional slavery. The Founders’ philosophy of protection of private property and limited government, rooted in a religious culture that holds its institutions together, was not a mistake or a cynical profession to sustain the power of the elites, but a promise, never fully realized, that deserves to be kept.

Christians have a unique opportunity to keep and extend this promise to all people. We are called to defend human dignity and to have a special love and care for the poor and the powerless, regardless of race, color, or creed. We also know that the reality of sin requires skepticism of all utopian “solutions.” While we cannot forget, ignore, or erase our history, we must be careful that our call for justice be grounded in a clear understanding of the human person.

The inspiration of the abolitionist movement right on through to the civil rights era was that religious people, particularly Christians, were grounded in a biblical anthropology that inspired not only their movement for human freedom, but also the founding philosophy of America. This same inspiration can animate us again today.

FATHER ROBERT A. SIRICO is president and co-founder of the Acton Institute and pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish and Academy, both in Grand Rapids, Mich.