Toward Better Race Relations in America

The Spirit of the Declaration of Independence: There’s Only One Race—the Human Race

Racial divisiveness has been given a major, unhelpful boost by the Obama administration and the Eric Holder Department of Justice. Without knowing the facts, Obama falsely spoke of the Cambridge police ‘acting stupidly’ with respect to ‘Skip’ Gates; without reading the law, Eric Holder falsely spoke of Arizona’s immigration law as including or involving racial profiling (and is now suing to stop its implementation); and the undisputed details emerging from the DOJ’s dismissal of voter intimidation charges captured on videotape show a Department of Justice utterly dismissive of all facts and law other than the race of the accused when making prosecutorial decisions.

There’s a better way.

Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

We need to follow Lincoln’s feelings, and look deeply into the ‘sentiments’, or spirit, of the Declaration of Independence. When that spirit is seen in its true divine light (yes, we said ‘divine’), it will guide the American people to the highest and best answers to most if not all of the major public policy questions of today or any day. (See our earlier essay, “The Spirit of the Declaration will Prevail”). But notice again that we’re talking about the spirit of the Declaration.

For the mind determined to discredit and deny the greatness and goodness of the America that sprang from the Declaration of Independence, the marching orders are to begin and end any consideration of the Declaration based on the fact that some of the signers owned slaves. The logic seems to be that if any signers owned slaves, the entire Declaration is a sham and must be ignored. This totally ignores the spirit of the stature and the stature of the spirit of the Declaration—and it ignores the profound influence that spirit has had on American development.

We believe the spirit and stature of the Declaration is in fact the reason slavery ultimately had to be eliminated in America and was successfully eliminated. Slavery could not possibly be reconciled with a proclamation that all men are created equal by one Creator and endowed with inalienable rights to, among other things, liberty. The evil of slavery was not the fault of the Declaration but of human inability to live up to it. But the spirit of the Declaration is divinely true, and any justification of human slavery is a lie. Truth always prevails, though it sometimes takes more time than we would like, and in the case of eliminating slavery, at horrible human cost.

The spirit and the stature of the Declaration are pointing the way even now toward the right ideal of race relations, though we continue to struggle to live up to it. It’s very simple: if all men and women are created equal by one Creator, we are one family, referred to in the Bible as ‘the children of God’. We are, in the truest sense, of one race—the human race. Skin color is no more relevant to us than it is to our Creator—which is to say, not relevant at all.

These words are definitely in the category of ‘easier said (or written) than done’. And they surely elicit the scoffing ‘get real’ attitude of those who would forever look backward at the development of humanity and insist on the past being prologue. But human slavery in America is a past that is past, because the spirit of the Declaration led Americans to a higher ideal. In the highest sense, the Civil War was not won by black-skinned Americans nor by white-skinned Americans; it was won by the human race in its struggle to see itself in better, higher and nobler terms—to see itself as the image and likeness of a loving Creator.

The spirit of the Declaration will continue to lead us to a higher ideal of race relations if we let it. Again, the Declaration in reality proclaims one race: the human race. Members of the human race do not naturally want to hate and kill and preach violence against or intimidation toward other members of the human race; they universally want the rule of law in society to protect them from such attitudes. Members of the human race universally want to be shown love, respect, dignity, honesty and decency, and they have been given the Golden Rule by which they can be assured of receiving them—and that is by giving them to their neighbors.

The hardness of contemporary cynicism and faithlessness will dismiss these ideas as syrupy sweet pabulum from a bygone era. They are not. They are timeless truths given immortal stature by the courage of the founding fathers, who themselves were standing on the shoulders of human history’s greatest leaders, including Moses and Christ Jesus.

We’re destructively wasting a lot of time in America now, and generating a lot of unnecessary froth, fear and fury over spiritually immature, ‘stuck-on-stupid’ attitudes exalting skin color as the preeminent factor around which we must forge all manner of social and government and ‘justice’ policies. We have a higher, better ideal right in front of us. Abraham Lincoln knew it and ‘felt’ it; so can we. It’s the immortal sentiment of the Declaration of Independence.

Paul Gable

July 10, 2010