In a Juneteenth editorial, Celebrate Juneteenth as America’s spiritual rebirth, the Seattle Times offered up its take on the newest official national holiday. It wrote;
“Juneteenth National Independence Day” describes a holiday for a nation ready to start living by its founding principles of equality and its promise of a more perfect union.
This is true. The American Revolution, which was fought on the premise that all men are created equal, could never be complete until all men, and of course women, were all truly free and equal before the law. But the Times immediately undercut that observation:
If slavery is America’s original sin, then Juneteenth is a celebration of its baptism.
Original Sin is the premise of perpetual unearned guilt for sins committed by others before birth. It holds that the sinner can only be cleansed through some act of Redemption, however that is defined. In Christianity, it means all people are irredeemably corrupted by Adam’s Fall, with the only salvation being eternal subservience to God’s saving grace. In its American incarnation, the nation—and all people therein—is irredeemably corrupted by slavery, with the only salvation being eternal subservience to . . . what?
To today’s new Original Sin revisionists, the object of salvation takes the form of the state rather than God, in the form of imposing whatever reactionary coercive scheme it deems necessary for redemption. When will America finally pay enough penance? Never. Not after 157 years; not after a Civil War; not after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; not after the 1964 Civil Rights Act; not after the gargantuan welfare state; not after Wokism; not after the tremendous cultural progress on racial attitudes of the past 60 years. Never. Because America, and Americans, will always be corrupted by the slavery in its early decades. That is the nature of Original Sin. Christianity teaches that in Original Sin
. . . all mankind is joined to Adam in both the guilt and the corruption of his first sin. All men and women are joined to Adam both by natural generation and by his covenantal headship. As a people who from our birth are corrupted by sin, we share in Adam’s guilt before God, a guilt imputed to us under the covenant of works. Moreover, men and women are so corrupted morally and spiritually by our natural union with Adam that we are totally depraved.
Substitute Americans for mankind, slavery for sin, and society (or the state) for God, and you get the purpose of anyone who preaches that slavery is an American Original Sin. America is irredeemably depraved. Making clear the irredeemable nature of that depravity, Christianity goes on:
All our human faculties are corrupted by sin so that we have an inborn tendency to commit sin. Moreover, our total depravity renders us spiritual[ly unable [to] love God or believe his gospel and be saved until we are first regenerated by his sovereign grace. Original Sin provides us with a biblical understanding of ourselves and casts sinners in utter reliance on God’s saving grace in the gospel, with no confidence in the flesh and with all the glory for our salvation belonging to the Lord.
This means a life of humbly seeking God’s grace in the words of whomever presumes to know that gospel, but ultimate redemption must wait until after death. Likewise, every achievement of every American since the Founding, big and small, is tainted. Ultimate redemption must wait until every last vestige of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has been expunged from Americans’ psyches—i.e., until after death, the death of America. In the meanwhile, we must be in utter reliance on the state’s sovereign and saving grace. Doesn’t sound like America to me.
Of course, the canceling (i.e. spiritual, or philosophical, death) of America through perpetual guilt is exactly the point for the Original Sin revisionists. What the Seattle Times gets terribly wrong is that identifying slavery as America’s Original Sin is to repudiate the very principles that the Times calls on us to live up to. The irony—or intent—of tying slavery to America’s philosophic origin is precisely to repudiate the Founding principles.
Ask yourself why. I have.
America’s Founding principles contradict the basic premise of slavery. America’s Founding principles signed the death knell of slavery. Juneteenth simply completed the mission of those principles. The Seattle Times calls Juneteenth’s celebration of the liberating of America’s last slaves a spiritual rebirth. But how can you have a spiritual rebirth by first killing the original spirit? Original Sin essentially condemns those principles to eternal damnation. How does one celebrate Juneteenth by damning the principles that made the holiday possible in the first place?
Professor Jason D. Hill, author of We Have Overcome, aptly calls the abolition of slavery America’s Second Founding. America was born of Original Virtue—the radical, revolutionary principles that signed the death warrant for slavery everywhere on Earth—the moral equality of every individual regardless of skin color, creed, cultural background, gender, or anything else. Everybody has the inalienable right to self-governance based on rights to life, liberty, and property. That is America’s Original Virtue. Why would anyone want to cancel that virtue? Answer that, and you will see the motive behind anyone who has ever preached slavery as America’s Original Sin.
Until we reject the idea of Original Sin, we could never fully honor the abolition of slavery from America’s shores, because we would be repudiating the cause. By the time of America’s Founding, slavery had been tolerated everywhere for thousands of years. This nation’s particular brand of African slavery was brought to these shores by the British long before America’s Declaration of Independence.* America did not originate slavery. America inherited slavery. Properly understood, slavery was a birth defect—a sin that contradicted its principles, but not any kind of original sin. You can have slavery as America’s Original Sin. Or you can have America’s innocent, virtuous spiritual essence. But you can’t have both. Without grasping that realization, you can never get America right.
* [The Founding Fathers recognized this. Listed among the grievances in Thomas Jefferson's original rough draught of the Declaration of Independence was this accusation:
he [His Majesty] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
[This passage was removed from the final document by committee. But it shows that the Founders understood slavery to be contrary to what they were fighting for, even as they made political compromises to assuage the slaveholders among them (which included Jefferson himself.]
Related Reading:
If Not for the Fourth of July, We’d Have No Juneteenth.
The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism
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
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America
“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
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