Your Christian Heritage: The Scandal of Equality

Equality.  Human rights.  These are words that resonate deeply with us here in America.  The idea of equality is perhaps the most foundational and important value in our culture.  It doesn’t matter whether we are discussing healthcare, economic policies, justice, or sexuality, we start with the immovable assumption that every single human being possesses equal dignity and worth.

But have you ever stopped to consider why you believe that?  Where does that idea come from?  Why do you believe so deeply?  The answer to all of those, is because it has been hammered into our collective souls for centuries through a very specific story.  A Christian story.  And here is the catch…without that story, it won’t last much longer.
 
The Immense Value We Place on Human Rights
Consider the COVID pandemic, a phenomenon where we saw almost the entire world grind to a halt to protect the vulnerable.  We made enormous economic, relational, and educational sacrifices because we believed the lives of the elderly, immuno-compromised, and others were of infinite value.  We did not just let nature take its course; we valued the individual over the system.

Consider also our reaction to international human rights abuses.  Even when an injustice happens across the world to someone who we do not know, will never see, and share nothing with, we feel a visceral sense of indignation a their being taken advantage of.  We believe they have rights, simply because they are human.  Not because of any particular property that they have.
 
The Problem: Where Does Equality Come From?
The reality is, equality is a very difficult thing to prove without a religious foundation.  Science, the overlord of modernity, can tell us what is (i.e., how photosynthesis works, the chemical composition of a substance, etc.), but it cannot tell us what ought to be (i.e., how we should treat people, why a particular action should or should not be done).  Yuval Noah Harari, a noted historian, says this “Take a human being, cut him open, look inside; you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA.  But you won’t find any rights.”  Rights are not natural features of human beings; they are moral claims.

Furthermore, if we look out into the natural world we find inequality everywhere.  Some are faster, some are smarter, some are stronger, some are more beautiful…the list goes on and on. With nature as our guide, inequality is the rule and the survival of the fittest, whether it be in love or war is the only law.
 
Consider also certain religious stories outside of Christianity.  Many have codes of justice, but they are almost all written within a framework of a very specific hierarchy.  For example, in Islam, there is no equality and rights are based on a hierarchy that begins with the Muslim male.  He is at the pinnacle of the social order and he alone has the right to lead families, the state or many business enterprises.  Muslim women are a decidedly second-class citizen, often prohibited from learning to read or write and forced to remain covered in public.  Even further down the hierarchy are those conquered and subjugated by Islamic regimes or forces.  They are the dhimmi’s and must pay the jizya tax.  They have rights in-so-far as their Muslim overlords choose to give them.  At the bottom of the hierarchy are the unbelievers and polytheists who have no rights and are often given the choice to convert to Islam or die.  In this system, your rights are based on your beliefs and your gender.

My point here is not to denigrate other belief systems, but instead to help you to realize that what you believe comes from a very particular God story, and without it what you believe makes no sense.
 
The Vertical Connection: A Love Story That Levels the World
So where does this idea of human rights and equality come from?  If we can’t find it in the natural world, or science or pretty much every religion, where does it come from? The answer is as beautiful as it is scandalous to us.  It comes from Christianity and the very radical idea that our equal worth is a gift given to us from above.

The Bible begins with the book of Genesis, the origins story.  In it we find a God who creates out of love; not out of need or accidentally.  The first chapter of Genesis chronicles the rhythmic work of the Lord in speaking and creating and pronouncing that what he has created is good.  When he reaches the pinnacle of his work, the creation of the man and woman, he does something new and different, he breathes his own life into us.
 
Genesis tells us that every single human being has value not because of how we look, or how smart we are or how much money we can earn, but because of the fact that we are created in the Imago Dei – the image of God.  You have value because you are a child of God and are stamped with his image and likeness.  You are his regent here on this earth; here to exercise dominion over the world God created and tasked to fill it and subdue it. 
The Apostle Paul, in the New Testament, writing to the church at Galatia, and to a culture deeply divided by race, status and gender, reminds the church in Galatians 3:28 that:

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

One simple sentence levels all the hierarchies in the world.  Now, keep in mind, Paul isn’t saying that categories don’t exist – they do.  He was saying that your value or your worth isn’t defined by whatever category you fall in.  The Roman emperor was not inherently more valuable than the slave or the barbarian.  You want to talk about a cultural and theological grenade?  That idea seems second nature to us, but that is because you have been taught it for centuries.  It was not natural to them; it was scandalous and dangerous.  Paul and Christians were imprisoned and executed for ideas like that.  

Listen, please.  You believe that the person standing next to you at the grocery store, the child halfway across the world, and the neighbor you disagree with all have equal rights. But it is only the Christian God story that makes sense of that conviction. It is the only story that says your value is absolute, unchangeable, and given by a God who loved you before you ever drew a breath that makes sense of that.
 
We still value equality in 2026, but when we try to hold onto it and let go of the God and story that gave it to us, it’s like trying to enjoy the light of a lamp after you have unplugged it.  The light fades and darkness falls.  I am inviting you to see that what you believe can only be sustained by the faith that brought it to you in the first place.  Maybe you should give it another or deeper look.  Maybe you will find a foundation on which to stand in this crazy world.

Join me next week as we look at the second value in our heritage: Compassion.

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 Water We Swim In
If you live in the West, whether you were raised in a pew, haven't opened a Bible in years, or find yourself skeptical of organized religion, there is a story beneath your story. Whether you identify as an atheist, a seeker, or simply "spiritual," the values you hold most dear did not emerge from a vacuum. They have roots, and those roots are deeply Christian.

In his book The Air We Breathe, Glen Scrivener offers a capturing illustration: "Goldfish don’t see water. Goldfish see what is in the water, they see what’s refracted through the water, but... goldfish don’t see the water itself. And yet there it is. It’s their environment. Universal but invisible."

For those of us in the modern world, Christianity is that water. It is the air we breathe and the soil in which our morality grows.

The Values We Take for Granted
If you are reading this, I suspect you value things like equality, scientific inquiry, human progress, compassion, and individual freedom. We often treat these ideas as "common sense" and obvious truths that any rational person would eventually land on.
Yet, history tells a different story. These concepts are not the default setting of humanity; in fact, for most of human history and in many parts of the world today, they are considered quite radical. They didn't appear by accident; they were forged in the fire of a specific worldview.

A Journey of Discovery
The purpose of this series, "Your Christian Heritage," is to pull back the curtain on our most cherished ideals. We want to explore where these values actually come from and why the teachings of Jesus provide the only sturdy foundation to keep them from crumbling.
Over the coming weeks, we will "set the table" by looking at the world as it existed before Jesus—a world that was often much harsher and more indifferent than the one we enjoy today. Then, we will take an honest look at six distinct values:

• Equality & Compassion
• Consent & Freedom
• Science & Progress

An Invitation to See Clearly
If you aren't a follower of Jesus, this isn't necessarily an invitation to believe something entirely "new." Rather, it is an invitation to explore the origins of what you already believe and to see a deeper, more robust version of your own convictions. My goal is not merely to contradict your perspective, but to provide a context that makes sense of it and perhaps to invite you to begin a journey to rediscover the roots of your beliefs – the person of Jesus Christ.

And if you are already a Christian, I hope this series equips you to understand our culture more deeply and gives you a warmer, more confident way to engage with your neighbors.

Pull up a chair and let's look at the water together.  

I will try to publish a new post each Thursday.  

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This series will draw primarily on the following books.  I highly recommend them:

The Air We Breathe, Glen Scrivener
Dominion, Tom Holland
How Christianity Changed the World, Alvin Schmidt