An Equality of Dignity - Part 3

Equal Dignity’s Importance to American History and Political Culture

Two weeks ago, we examined why an Equality of Dignity is the type of equality central to American political culture. We focused on the Biblical origins of this concept. We took an aside last week to consider the special import of the dignity of work.

Today, we’ll connect the line from equal dignity’s origins into American culture and history to show why it’s a fundamental norm within American democracy.

America’s Founders closely read the Bible, and therefore made frequent connections to the divine origins of humankind.

1. “God,” the “Creator,” and “the protection of Divine Providence” begin and end the Declaration of Independence.

2. James Madison held all Americans, equally, had a “prior duty” to God that outranked any political allegiance.^[i]

3. John Adams believed equality was so fundamentally grounded in the Bible that he remarked with scorn: “How the present age can boast of this principle [of the equality of mankind] as a discovery, as new light and modern knowledge, I know not.”^[ii]

The Founders even respected the God-given dignity of every individual when they knowingly denied it to others: Jefferson wrote that for himself and other slave owners: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.” He concluded that regarding slavery’s immorality: “The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us.”^[iii]

Throughout American history, enslaved and disenfranchised black Americans, despite their legalized subjugation, affirmed their own divinely-ordained dignity in many ways. One way was through the Brer Rabbit stories. In these tales, a rabbit with a “a fragile body but a deceptively strong mind” outwits his oppressors. Contemporary American literary critic and African-American Studies Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. believed these stories were “the creative way the slave community responded to the oppressor’s failure to address them as human beings created in the image of God.”^[iv]

In the 1960’s, President Kennedy cited the dignity of humankind’s divine origins,