Between 1619 and the Millennium American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Slavery

is whether we will walk righteously after God’s own pattern for each sphere, or whether we will participate in their degradation and corruption through sin. In such an atmosphere, the rationalist attempt to fragment life into separate, walled-off chambers for “Sacred” and “Secular” withers on the vine. Upon touching the ark of God — which is His sovereignty — the attempt explodes altogether. To the Christian, there can be no meaningful distinction between these two words. All of life is sacred to God, Who has set the world upon the pillars of the earth. There is, therefore, only righteousness and unrighteousness, truth and falsehood, submission and rebellion to God in the whole of life.

It is in this sense that Christians speak of selfgovernment; that we are to “walk in the light, as He is in the light.” And it was to preserve the self-governing integrity of man within these relational spheres from the more ravaging effects of sin that God first created civil government. Its purpose was to restrain lawlessness with force so an environment of ordered liberty — necessary to the practice of virtue — could be maintained, even in a fallen world. Through it, God prevented the total dissipation of humanity into chaos by forcibly and mechanically holding together the pieces of society, which had lost the ability to cohere naturally and organically among themselves. Yet as an organ of immense power, care must be taken to ensure governments do not degenerate, becoming themselves the lawlessness and destruction they were designed to prevent.

Limitation is thus a necessary ingredient for any Christian view of the state. Government, which owes its existence exclusively to God and is dependent on Him for its authority, cannot transgress His patterns for its existence.3 Man must abide in an environment of ordered liberty — not lawlessness — to walk in obedience and blessed fellowship with God, and each other, and to fulfill his moral obligations and duties. Such relational priorities and obligations are impossible under centralized, totalitarian systems which demand total obeisance and devotion to the state. Gene Edward Veith warns what happens when governments consider themselves unbound by God’s moral law: “Excluding transcendent values places societies beyond the constraint of moral limits. Society is not subject to the moral law; it makes the moral law … All such issues are only matters of power. Without moral absolutes, power becomes arbitrary … Government becomes nothing more than the sheer exercise of unlimited power, restrained neither by law nor by reason.” To comprehend all of life under the authority of the state serves practically to stifle man in his desire to obey God supremely and to walk rightly in all of his necessary spheres of relationship. While the precise limiting mechanisms may differ, no government may claim to be Christian which is not wholly consonant with this principle of constraint.

A division of authority in some balanced form must necessarily result from this approach, as well as unambiguous opposition to any attempt by the state to collapse the various other spheres into itself, rendering them dependent on its power alone and destroying their natural ability to govern themselves in liberty and righteousness. Unlawful coercion will destroy the nature of a duty. For Christians, tyranny is chiefly problematic not because it tends to produce violence and poverty but because it dams up the relational channels that God Himself has dug in the human heart, through which the love and the service of His people were to flow freely. “God,” writes Herbert Titus, “has created man to be selfgoverning, that is, to diffuse authority among men, to maximize the extent of man’s volitional allegiance to Him in the performance of his duties.” A separation of power “preserves the national identity of a people in harmony with the institutions of family, ecclesiastical, and selfgovernment.”4 When this fails, tyranny and persecution are the natural consequence. And despite recent romanticizing on the subject, we were most certainly not made to be persecuted, and we should not desire it — or should we hope for sin that grace may abound? God can use persecution. But it is a terrible suppression of His creational design and a horrific affront to His glory.

Much more could be said. Our idea was that a uniquely Christian view of government emerges not in the organizational forms of one historical empire or another but from the basic relational principles of man and life which God Himself has planted in this world and revealed in Scripture. He is the great End of all Being, and it is to His glory, and the good and present use of His Church, that we offer our observations here.

1 This opening is intended as a respectful homage to the opening of Fulton Sheen’s work Communism and the Conscience of the West.

2 See the works of Donald S. Lutz and John Witte Jr.

3 See William Blackstone’s second chapter, Of the Nature of Laws in General in his Commentaries on the Laws of England for discussion on existential dependency and obedience.

4 Herbert Titus, “America's Heritage: Constitutional Liberty,” A Federal Republic (Lonang Institute, n.d.).

Faculty Contribution

Jason Ross Associate Professor and Department Chair Helms School of Government, Liberty University

BETWEEN 1619 AND THE MILLENNIUM: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY

Fewer and fewer Americans today accept that our nation is or ever has been a Christian nation. But almost none would disagree in treating the claim that “all men are created equal” as a kind of American scripture. Whether we see it as an axiom of logic and morality, or as a truth divinely revealed, virtually all Americans accept this passage from the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental truth on which our nation has been founded.

Senses of Exceptionality

If Americans accept that our nation has been founded on this proposition, we may, for this reason, see our nation as exceptional. We may see it as so, first and foremost, in that it was not founded on any ethnic, religious, or cultural identity. Most nations of the world are defined by particular features that make it obvious who shares in their nationality and who does not. Ours is perhaps the only nation in the world in which it is not possible (and is even forbidden) to describe our nationality by relying on any shared ethnic, religious, or cultural traits or, indeed, on any particular traits at all. America, it is said, is an “idea.” Our identity is exceptional precisely because it is shorn of all particularities. For this reason, Americans must see our national identity, out of necessity if nothing else, as universal. The American nation can also be seen as exceptional in having been founded. Most other nations are the products of a long historical evolution, of a particular set of experiences that has shaped a people’s sense of itself. But in tracing our identity back to 1776 — not to a war for independence, but to the Declaration’s proposition that “all men are created equal” — we can come to see our national identity as disconnected from any shared history, and even as timeless. This is so much the case that some now see Thomas Jefferson as having been condemned by his own words the very moment he was inspired to write them.

Finally, Americans have come to see our nation as exceptional in a moral sense. Some still celebrate our nation as exceptionally good because its founding established the moral principle of equality at the heart of our politics, even as we have not always realized this principle in practice. These Americans may share the faith of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that the arc of history should and does bend toward justice, and that justice requires our national identity to dissolve any ethnic, religious, or cultural differences. Others, seeing that the American nation has not always been fully and consistently constituted by the universal and timeless principle of equality, condemn the nation as exceptionally evil, and as unpardonably guilty of an original national sin.

These particular characteristics of America’s exceptional identity go a long way toward explaining the profound success of the New York Times “1619 Project.” That its success has not been slowed even by multiple public setbacks only serves to underscore that the project’s appeal is not related to the veracity of its findings or the originality of its research.1 Instead its teachings appeal to Americans because they are old and familiar. The appeal of the 1619 Project is less so as a work of history and more so as a ritual renewal of America’s exceptional identity.

These teachings are familiar not least because they have become pervasive in historical scholarship over the past half century. The 1619 Project, in drawing directly from this strand of historical scholarship, culminates a broader project to resurrect the critique of the Constitution first leveled by radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, the historians on whom the Project relies refer to themselves and their argument, explicitly, as “neo-Garrisonian.” Not only did Garrison charge that the Constitution was proslavery, he charged that its framers intended for it to be so. His accusation that the founders were hypocrites in appealing to principles they did not immediately and fully realize in practice finds echoes in the 1619 Project’s claim, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.”2

This belief that American national identity is and should be tied to the universal and timeless moral claim of equality has a special appeal to a Christian people. First, we know that God is the creator of this world and remains sovereign over it. “For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16). We also know that in Christ, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female,” but we are all one (Galatians 3:28). This latter passage, in particular, convicts us deeply as American Christians; in light of the historic practice of slavery here, nobody doubts that we are guilty of a national sin. When we recall this sin, the advice of our founders to make a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles may seem misguided, even cynical. Christians may thus be attracted to the more radical answer of the 1619 Project, and to Garrison, its spiritual father. But Christians should also be aware of the ways in which Garrison’s approach was theologically both too radical and, at the same time, not radical enough. Radical Heterodoxy

Garrison’s radical and recently resurrected critique of America’s founding is impossible to disentangle from his unorthodox theology. In embracing the doctrine of moral perfectionism, Garrison was influenced by John Humphrey Noyes, who would go on to launch the infamous social experiment in communism and free love at Oneida, New York, in 1848.3 Amid the Second Great Awakening, where speculation flourished about the Second Coming, Noyes was convinced that the spiritual return of Christ had already occurred. Those professing to be Christians were blind to this, Noyes believed, because they had not yet been spiritually awakened. The promise of Christ’s millennial reign on earth would be realized only when Christians accepted a third dispensation (the dispensation of the Old Testament being the Mosaic law, the dispensation of the New Testament being the grace of salvation) — that of the moral perfection of the saints.4

In light of this standard of moral perfection, Noyes saw America as irredeemable. He believed that as a Christian, he could have nothing to do with such a “villain.” He saw no way to remain above or apart from its sin, no way to remain “in the world and not of the world.” Instead, he condemned “[e]very person who is, in the usual sense of the expression, a citizen of the United States, i.e., a voter, politician, etc.,” as “at once a slave and a slaveholder.” He told Garrison that he had made his own personal declaration of independence, “renouncing all allegiance to the government of the United States, and asserting the title of Jesus Christ to the throne of the world.” Finally, he believed that he and other perfect saints were “authorized not only to hope for the overthrow of the nations, but to stand in readiness actively to assist in the execution of God’s purposes.” He explained to Garrison, “My hope of the millennium begins … AT THE OVERTHROW OF THIS NATION.”5

Garrison almost immediately adopted this radical doctrine. He recited Noyes’s call for the overthrow of the nation, verbatim, at a lecture he delivered the next Fourth of July.6 He asserted, “Total abstinence from sin, in this life, is not only commanded but necessarily obtainable,” and claimed that through such moral perfection, the Kingdom of God “is to be established upon the earth.” In light of all this he asked, “Shall we, as Christians, applaud and do homage to human government? Or shall we not rather lay the axe at the root of the tree?”7 Ultimately Garrison would call for immediate dissolution of the United States,

making “No Union With Slaveholders” the motto of his weekly abolitionist publication, The Liberator. Garrison’s approach was seen as radical even by his fellow abolitionists at the time. It represented a break from the stated principle of the New England AntiSlavery Society, which Garrison founded, that, “The whole American people ought to be an Anti-Slavery Society. This is the very first principle upon which our government is built. The spirit of civil and religious liberty requires it. The Declaration of ’76 requires it. The spirit and letter of our Constitution require it.”8 It also represented a break from the abolitionist strategy of interpreting the Constitution, especially in light of the Fifth Amendment, as protecting individual liberty and the due process of law.9

A More Radical Orthodoxy

This view of our Constitution, which Garrison rejected, has been vindicated in the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.10 But the moral claims at the heart of the 1619 Project trace their origins back to the radical doctrine of moral perfectionism and the speculative eschatology that Garrison embraced.11 Christians ought to be aware enough of these false doctrines to guard ourselves from them — though who would follow false doctrines if they were not tempting? But if these critiques of America’s founding — and of human politics — that flow from them may appeal to Christians precisely because of their radical nature, there is another way in which these critiques are not radical enough. This is in failing to recognize that the Christian teaching of redemption is more radical even than the perfect justice demanded by those following the spirit of Garrison.

The belief that the legacy of slavery in America amounts to a national sin resonates with the doctrine of original sin that we accept as Christians. Yet there is no parallel in American political theology for redemption from that sin. Many call for reparations, and indeed it is just and fitting to offer recompense to those who continue to suffer the consequences of slavery. But we who live in the light of the Reformation know that the payment of indulgences is not adequate to absolve us of sin. More, who can say what these reparations should be? This was the conclusion of Abraham Lincoln when he conceded that payment for the sin of slavery may continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” As long as the principle of an eye for an eye endures as the reigning principle of justice in America, our nation will remain under the judgment of an exceptional original sin and will remain without hope of redemption.