Your Christian Heritage - The Myth of the Self-Evident
Are Our Values Really as Obvious as We Think?
The second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration of Independence famously states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To us today, these truths remain part of the very landscape of our culture. They are so ingrained that we treat them as common sense. They are the water we swim in, and we rarely stop to ask why. Why are these truths self-evident?
The uncomfortable answer is that, outside of a very particular Christian worldview, they aren't self-evident at all. To see this clearly, we have to look at the world from a few different vantage points.
The View from Antiquity
Ancient cultures, whether Roman, Persian, Mongolian, or Mayan, were built on a foundation of power, not equality. In first-century Roman culture, the weak were expendable. The widows, the sick, and the poor were largely invisible. Unwanted infants were frequently "exposed"—left on hillsides or trash heaps to die or be claimed by slavers.
In the ancient mind, there were superior races, superior sexes, and superior classes. Justice was simply the enforcement of these inequalities. The idea that a commoner or slave had the same inherent "right to life or happiness” as Caesar would have been laughed out of the Forum. The water we swim in simply did not exist.
The View from Nature
If we look away from history and toward the natural world, the picture becomes even colder. Alfred Lord Tennyson famously described nature as "red in tooth and claw." In a purely Darwinian or naturalistic worldview, there is no such thing as a "right." There is only the biological imperative: the strong survive, and the weak are eliminated.
Nature does not recognize equality. In fact, evolution relies on inequality—on the reality that some organisms are faster, stronger, more intelligent or better adapted than others. If we are nothing more than highly evolved animals, then our impulse to care for the weakest among us is actually a move against nature. From a purely naturalistic perspective, compassion is an evolutionary glitch, and equality is a fiction. Nature doesn't care about your "unalienable rights"; it only cares about your survival.
The View from Modernity
In more recent centuries, we have tried to ground these values in "Modernity"—the era of Atheism and Marxism. We tried to keep the Christian values of equality and justice while discarding the God who defined them. But as it turns out, when you cut the flower from the root, the flower eventually withers.
Pure Atheism struggles to explain why a human being is any more valuable than a rock or a virus or a Koala. If we are just or biological machines, rights become nothing more than convenient social contracts. They are rules we make up today that can be changed or erased tomorrow; perhaps against our wills.
Marxism attempted to create a form of equality, but it did so by stripping away the dignity of the individual. In the Marxist view, you are not a person made in the image of God; you are a member of a class, a cog in a giant economic machine. History has shown us that when the state or the collective becomes the source of our values, the individual's right to life and liberty is the first thing to be sacrificed. Without a Lawgiver higher than the government, rights are just permissions that can be revoked at any time.
The View from the Cross
So, why do we still feel, in our very bones, that every human life matters? Why do we feel a rush of indignation when we see the weak oppressed? It is because, we are living in a world that has been fundamentally reshaped by the birth of Jesus. These truths are only "self-evident" to us because we have spent two thousand years sitting at the foot of the cross.
Our Western values of equality, compassion, and freedom didn't emerge from the brutality of nature or the cold logic of atheism. They were endowed to us by our Creator. They flow from the radical Christian claim that every single person—regardless of their strength, status, or utility—is made in the Imago Dei, the Image of God.
As we continue this series, we’re going to look at these values one by one. We’ll see how the water we swim in was poured out by a Savior who took the place of the weak so that we might truly be free. I hope you'll join me next week as we dive into our first value: Equality.
The second paragraph of the U.S. Declaration of Independence famously states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To us today, these truths remain part of the very landscape of our culture. They are so ingrained that we treat them as common sense. They are the water we swim in, and we rarely stop to ask why. Why are these truths self-evident?
The uncomfortable answer is that, outside of a very particular Christian worldview, they aren't self-evident at all. To see this clearly, we have to look at the world from a few different vantage points.
The View from Antiquity
Ancient cultures, whether Roman, Persian, Mongolian, or Mayan, were built on a foundation of power, not equality. In first-century Roman culture, the weak were expendable. The widows, the sick, and the poor were largely invisible. Unwanted infants were frequently "exposed"—left on hillsides or trash heaps to die or be claimed by slavers.
In the ancient mind, there were superior races, superior sexes, and superior classes. Justice was simply the enforcement of these inequalities. The idea that a commoner or slave had the same inherent "right to life or happiness” as Caesar would have been laughed out of the Forum. The water we swim in simply did not exist.
The View from Nature
If we look away from history and toward the natural world, the picture becomes even colder. Alfred Lord Tennyson famously described nature as "red in tooth and claw." In a purely Darwinian or naturalistic worldview, there is no such thing as a "right." There is only the biological imperative: the strong survive, and the weak are eliminated.
Nature does not recognize equality. In fact, evolution relies on inequality—on the reality that some organisms are faster, stronger, more intelligent or better adapted than others. If we are nothing more than highly evolved animals, then our impulse to care for the weakest among us is actually a move against nature. From a purely naturalistic perspective, compassion is an evolutionary glitch, and equality is a fiction. Nature doesn't care about your "unalienable rights"; it only cares about your survival.
The View from Modernity
In more recent centuries, we have tried to ground these values in "Modernity"—the era of Atheism and Marxism. We tried to keep the Christian values of equality and justice while discarding the God who defined them. But as it turns out, when you cut the flower from the root, the flower eventually withers.
Pure Atheism struggles to explain why a human being is any more valuable than a rock or a virus or a Koala. If we are just or biological machines, rights become nothing more than convenient social contracts. They are rules we make up today that can be changed or erased tomorrow; perhaps against our wills.
Marxism attempted to create a form of equality, but it did so by stripping away the dignity of the individual. In the Marxist view, you are not a person made in the image of God; you are a member of a class, a cog in a giant economic machine. History has shown us that when the state or the collective becomes the source of our values, the individual's right to life and liberty is the first thing to be sacrificed. Without a Lawgiver higher than the government, rights are just permissions that can be revoked at any time.
The View from the Cross
So, why do we still feel, in our very bones, that every human life matters? Why do we feel a rush of indignation when we see the weak oppressed? It is because, we are living in a world that has been fundamentally reshaped by the birth of Jesus. These truths are only "self-evident" to us because we have spent two thousand years sitting at the foot of the cross.
Our Western values of equality, compassion, and freedom didn't emerge from the brutality of nature or the cold logic of atheism. They were endowed to us by our Creator. They flow from the radical Christian claim that every single person—regardless of their strength, status, or utility—is made in the Imago Dei, the Image of God.
As we continue this series, we’re going to look at these values one by one. We’ll see how the water we swim in was poured out by a Savior who took the place of the weak so that we might truly be free. I hope you'll join me next week as we dive into our first value: Equality.
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