When God created us, He gave us minds that could observe, contemplate, reason and act. He also gave us a soul with an inherent, though obscure, hunger to connect with and please Him. And mixed in there somewhere is a conscience that supposedly tells us what pleases God. So, you would think He would have designed us such that we would use our reason guided by our consciences to determine what pleases God and act accordingly. But of course, we don’t. Not even close. Instead, we usually begin by determining what is in our most self-serving interest, use our reason to figure out how to get it, then we reorient our consciences such that we convince ourselves that whatever it is that we want to do pleases God. There are exceptions, but by and large this is how we humans are. Well, we didn’t design ourselves. If God wanted us to serve and worship Him but wired so that we don’t, is it not His fault? If so, then it seems to me to be a Design Flaw. But what do I know?
Let’s consider a classic example: Thomas Jefferson. This is man who penned one of the most admired sentences in human history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” And yet as inspiring and certainly God pleasing as this declaration was, it ran counter to Jefferson’s self-interest. Somehow, he found a way to reason that it was ok to enslave 200 African Americans and cleared it with his conscience. Some say there are two sides to every story – with neither being significantly righter than the other. That is patently false. If all men are created equal, then Jefferson was dead wrong to not free his slaves and the promoters of abolition were right.
Eventually this wrong was righted after the death and maiming of millions of Americans. A core belief of the Confederates, per the Vice President of the CSA, stated that the cornerstone of their constitution “rests, upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” Most Southern Whites believed this. They were all wrong while the abolitionists and defenders of the Union were right.
I grew up in South Mississippi in the 50’s and 60’s. My parents, along with a large majority of Southern Whites, believed that Blacks were inherently inferior to Whites and believed it best to continue the practice of subjugating and segregating Blacks. There were organizations in the South and in some cases nationwide, such as the Ku Klux Klan, whose primary mission was to maintain Jim Crow and to discriminate against people of other races and religions. They used terror and murder to accomplish their objectives and many of them convinced themselves that what they were doing was pleasing to God. Well, they were dead wrong and the Blacks and the “Liberals” who fought for Civil Rights, and who later became the bedrock of the Democrat Party, were right.
In all these cases, those who were driven by self-interest, regardless of their being Christians and avowed supporters of America’s founding documents, were always in the wrong. And yet they did so anyway. Why? Because humans are naturally wired to find a way to justify whatever they perceive to be in their personal self-interest.
And yet, we know this wrong. Jesus teaches us to overcome these natural predilections – to love our neighbors as ourselves – to seek the common good.
Many people have done this to some degree. Rarely was the personal financial or political gain at stake for those who fought for the abolition of slavery or the promotion of civil rights. Most of the Whites who did this were motivated by America’s declared beliefs and by moral teachings.
There are issues today where one side is significantly righter than the other. And, if the arc of history really does bend toward justice, those primarily driven by self-interest are usually wrong and those seeking the common good are more often right.
Donald Trump has mastered the art of appealing to people’s self-interest and convincing them to subvert their moral and constitutional beliefs. My objective is to encourage his supporters to question whether this really is making America the Good and Great nation that we all want it to be and seek consensus on what will better do so.
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