The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism

One of the Christianity’s most inhumane features is its doctrine of Original Sin. In 2008, Barack Obama gave a speech applying that doctrine to American history. It’s the first time I’d ever heard the term “America’s original sin of slavery.” That same year, I wrote Obama's Collectivist Manifesto-Part 1...the "Original Sin" gambit, in which I said of his speech:

His opening words, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” sets the stage for a complete perversion of the Enlightenment principles upon which our nation was founded. There are many egregious examples of this. This essay will focus on the following one. In the third paragraph, referring to the U.S. Constitution ratified in 1787, the Senator declares that:

“The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery.”

This dangerous injection of religion into the issue of America’s past slavery cannot, in my view, be dismissed as mere rhetorical flare. The doctrine of Original Sin holds that man is depraved or evil by his very nature…i.e., because of influences or events beyond his control. Man is guilty, in other words, because he is man. Man can never correct his innate sinfulness, since his nature is beyond his control, but he must atone for it through a lifetime of duty-bound self-sacrifice to…God, or society, or “others”, or the state…take your pick.

It’s not difficult to see where Mr. Obama is going with the induction of this monstrously unjust doctrine into the political fabric of America. One can say that he is laying the philosophical groundwork for some future attempt at slave reparations, but I doubt it. For one thing, he undoubtedly knows it would never fly as an explicit proposal, at least not yet. The truth is much worse. He is in effect declaring that America, and Americans, can never escape the “guilt” of slavery, reparations or not, but must pay eternal penance or atonement for that guilt, in the form of whatever socialist scheme “We the People” declares is needed at any given time. (“We the People” is used by Obama as a collective, democratic term here, rather than according to it’s original meaning of a society of sovereign individuals possessing inalienable individual rights.) Is the “stain” of “this nation’s original sin of slavery” to be used as that doctrine has always been used, as a guilt-manipulation tool…in this case to advance a political agenda? [My emphasis]

Obama did pay verbal respect to the Founding documents. He did not repudiate them. He just did as thorough a job of undercutting them as any collectivist. Now, Obama’s Original Sin seed has borne fruit in the form of The New York Times’s The 1619 Project, which embeds America’s “Original Sin” into its educational curriculum. 

Since 2008, the term “original sin” has sporadically popped up in speeches and editorials, especially from the collectivist Left and particularly since the election of Donald Trump. But I had never come across any repudiation of or push-back against the term from anyone other than me, leaving the reactionary so-called Progressives to gradually pollute America’s Founding ideals without challenge. 

Until now. Columbia University Professor John McWhorter’s Reason piece The 1619 Project Depicts an America Tainted by Original Sin takes on the Original Sin gambit head-on. “In this worldview,” he writes of the 1619 Project, “redemption for the founding seems impossible.” Zeroing in on the “1619” essential, McWhorter observes:

[T]he parallel with Christianity seems almost deliberate in that the 1619 idea lends the American story an original sin. Already, the Great Awokening's emphasis on white privilege has constituted such a concept on the level of the individual. As even children are now often inculcated in the concept, we have a substitute for the idea that we are born stained, and always will be. One can only endlessly "testify" to the stain throughout life, in hopes of being "saved" at some point in prosperity—Christianity calls it Judgment Day, anti-racism terms it "When America Gets Past Race." 

But now we have a true Genesis-style scenario under which, at the very outset, a ship brings Africans to this land in 1619 and everything that happens here afterward is rooted in the unjustifiable bondage of those human beings and what was connected to it. Now, not only does the American individual harbor the original sin of being born privileged, but America itself is a product of a grand original sin, permeating the entire physical, sociological, and psychological fabric of the nation, to an extent no one could ever hope to undo, and for which any apology would be insufficient to the point of irrelevance. [My emphasis]

Christianity is the antipode of Americanism. It’s ethics form the core of socialist doctrine, as Bernie Sanders well understands. And now, America’s enemies, the socialists, have teamed up with Christianity’s other monstrous evil, the doctrine of Original Sin, to pound the final spike in America’ coffin. Thousands of years after Adam ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, humans still haven’t escaped the guilt of that “sin”. According to slavery as America’s Original Sin, neither can anyone calling themselves Ameican ever escape that sin. Americans, and America, like Christians, will always be burdened with the duty of never-ending atonement.

There you have it. Obama’s "Original Sin" gambit has borne fruit--the poisonous fruit of the Tree of Totalitarianism. As another Reason writer, Robby Soave, dishearteningly observes, The 1619 Project is already being woven into America’s schools. “The 1619 Project—The New York Times Magazine's much vaunted series of essays about the introduction of African slavery to the Americas,” Soave reports, “will now be taught in K-12 schools around the country.” 

Original Sin is being woven by the Leftist intellectual establishment into America’s history, and, as with the Christian version, logic be damned. Neither the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Civil War, Affirmative Action, or the reaffirmations of Americanism’s pro-liberty, anti-slave ideals by giants like Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Emancipationist President Abraham Lincoln, Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, and Gay Rights leader Harvey Milk, or any future reparations will ever be enough. Just as Christians can never escape their guilt and will always be “fallen,” so to for Americanism. America can never be redeemed. Just as Christians are guilty for being born, no matter what, so Americans are guilty for the “stain” of slavery, no matter what. You’re a Mother Theresa? Your a sinner. Your a fighter for individual rights? Your a sinner. Your charity and your Declaration of Independence are irrelevant. Why adopt the Original Sin Gambit? Because without the Declaration of the universal inalienable Rights of Man, America’s Original Virtue, the road to socialist slavery is cleared.

Yes, Original Virtue. Let me be the first to coin the term. There is nothing original about slavery. It has infected and been accepted by every culture in every corner of the globe throughout human history--until, as historian Thomas Sowell observes, the first serious intellectual opposition arose in the late 17th and 18th Centuries. Thanks largely to John Locke’s discovery of individual rights, America became the world’s first explicitly Lockean, Enlightenment state, born as a direct outgrowth of the anti-slavery principles percolating in the 18th Century. Yes, America inherited slavery. But it’s principles diametrically, irredeemably opposed it. Harvey Milk said it best:

In the Declaration of Independence it is written “All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights . . . .” That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence.

Slavery as America’s Original Sin? Nothing can be further from the truth. The real truth is just the opposite. Far from being burdened by Original Sin, America is blessed by Original Virtue--the virtue of being created under the banner of the equal, inalienable rights of individuals. No matter how hard you try, you can’t erase the anti-slavery essence of that principle.

Related Reading:

July 4, 1776: Words that Will Never Be Erased

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery

Another Reactionary’s Flawed Framing of American Ideals

Charles Sumner’s Principled Attack on Slavery--Timothy Sandefur

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

The Founders Were Flawed. The Nation Is Imperfect. The Constitution Is Still a 'Glorious Liberty Document.'

“As part of its ambitious “1619” inquiry into the legacy of slavery, The New York Times revives false 19th century revisionist history about the American founding.” -- Timothy Sandefur

Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers -- Brooke Allen