How should Christians think about social inequality? In American politics, the issues of what equality is and how it ought to be pursued are responses to the Declaration of Independence – the list of principles that America was created to protect and advance. Foundational to the American conception of rights is the Declaration’s statement that “all men are created equal.”
American Conservatives often interpret this equality as strictly legal. The United States ought to have rules that do not distinguish between individuals based on their immutable characteristics; all deserve the same rights under the law.
Progressives, on the other hand, advocate a more expansive understanding of equality, one that is often separated from the founding and the Declaration. They see the ideal of equality as the erasure of the hierarchies of wealth and power. Neither of these answers – erasure of hierarchies or strictly legal equality – are true to the ideal of love in human relations that we are called to in the Gospel.
Christ prescribes how we as Christians ought to relate to our fellow man in the synoptic gospels. A Pharisee asks him, “What is the greatest commandment?” Christ replies that the greatest commandment is to love God above all things and that the second greatest commandment, “love your neighbor as yourself,” proceeds from it. Here Christ articulates the principle of Christian Charity, which dictates that our relationship with other men is to be defined by our desire and pursuit of their good. The other commandments we are given in Scripture regarding our relationships with others are expressions of the overarching principle of Charity.
Legal equality artificially contains the ability of the civil authority to love those subject to it. Those with unusually great power have no less obligation to love their neighbor than the rest of us. In fact, their power is given to them by God so that they might be especially able to serve others. As Romans 13 makes clear, those with great power in society have been given their power by God and have an obligation to use it in accordance with his will.
Rules the powerful make for their subjects may be good insofar as they are generally conducive to the good of the subjects. Defaults are often necessary. But these rules must never be applied to the detriment of the subjects. As soon as a rule’s application would, on the whole, harm those it affects, those in power should cease to apply it. A default is only as good as its ability to fulfill its purpose. Those in power should never be prohibited from deviating from a code of rules for the sake of the good. Pretending that the law must be above those in power, uniform, and uniformly applied, does exactly that, preventing whatever deviations from the law circumstances require.
Progressives rightly criticize such an over-commitment to the rule of law. However, the concept of equality that Progressives present is no better. Their ideal equality is one in which there is no variation in the distribution of wealth and power across society. Under the Progressive conception, the law can and should apply unevenly, in order to empower those who are currently disadvantaged and to strip away the unjust privilege of those better-off.
Much like the legal view, this conception introduces a false addition to God’s ethical law. Nowhere does Scripture prescribe the destruction of social hierarchy. Hierarchies of power are described and legitimized as God-instituted in Romans 13, and many passages assume the existence of both the poor and the rich. God does not command the elimination of hierarchy as a good we are commanded to pursue. A Christian view must not condemn what Christ does not condemn; therefore, it must not see inequality in the abstract as an evil or attempt to add arbitrary principles, such as equality under the law or social equality, to the moral law revealed in Scripture.
Due to its prioritization of equality to the exclusion of Charity, the post-founding American political tradition cannot account for inequality in a Christian way. Apparently we must look elsewhere for thoroughly Christian thought on the subject.
The thought of pre-founding America offers compelling answers to the question of inequality. We may look with hope to the works of John Winthrop, Jonathan Mayhew, and Johnathan Boucher for a solid foundation in Christian orthodoxy not at all alien to the American context and to help us rediscover Christian Charity.
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of Cogitare Magazine, nor of Grove City College.
