Human

As America reflects on the amazing providence and painful tragedies that have marked her past 250 years, certain questions press upon us with renewed urgency: What anchors our understanding of human dignity? What truths are sturdy enough to outlast the shifting cultural winds? What even makes us human?

Among the ideas that shape our thinking and guide our actions, few are more consequential than the conviction that human life has inherent worth. As Scripture says, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). This isn’t poetic sentiment or a strained attempt to create social order out of chaos; it is the foundation of human dignity. Yet even as our culture continues to rely on this assumption, we have drifted from its source and its implications.

Slavery and its fruit

History offers sobering reminders of what can happen when the image of God is eclipsed. The great atrocities of the modern age – Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, the killing fields of Cambodia – did not begin with violence. They began by redefining the human person, ranking worth by desirable inborn traits or usefulness to society.

America has fallen for the lie as well. Chattel slavery required denial of the full humanity of the enslaved, allowing for violence and oppression that went even beyond the commercial exploitation of people’s bodies. Educator and orator Booker T. Washington recalled that as a child on a plantation, he never experienced the simple dignity of sitting down with his whole family for a meal. Slave children, he wrote, ate like animals – “a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there.” Seemingly small indignities leave lasting scars.

Yet the pendulum can swing. Efforts to correct prior injustices can repeat the same error by reducing humanity to categories of oppressor and oppressed. Dignity is removed; humanity is diminished; individuality is erased. When the image of God isn’t the common ground, unity becomes a fragile, if not impossible, thing.

The dark ideology of population control

Few figures have done more damage to the recognition of the imago Dei (image of God) than Charles Darwin. His theories of evolutionary progress and “survival of the fittest” rejected God as Creator and Sustainer while also attempting to remove His imprint on humanity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenics promised to improve humankind through selective reproduction, sterilization, abortion, and sometimes worse. The vulnerable became “the weaklings, fools, and moral deficient,” as eugenicist Julian Huxley called them.

“More children from the fit, less from the unfit,” said Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger. “That is the chief issue of birth control.”

While eugenics, as a term, would come into disrepute due to the Nazi atrocities during World War II, its assumptions persisted. In establishing UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 1945, Huxley suggested that what was once “unthinkable” could become acceptable through education.

Environmental thinkers like William Vogt warned that mass famine would consume the planet if population growth wasn’t curbed – even calling on doctors to do away with the Hippocratic oath.

“Through medical care and improved sanitation, they [medical professionals] are responsible for more millions living more years in increasing misery,” Vogt said in his bestselling book Road to Survival (1948).

Other “intellectuals,” such as Paul R. Ehrlich in The Population Bomb (1968), would express similar concerns about impending food shortages, and they would commend Vogt’s solutions: abortion access, sex education, one-child policies, and wealth redistribution.

While the mass famines never came, apocalyptic environmentalism continues to see humanity as the natural world’s biggest villain. Today, the fear of climate change drives debate around net-zero emissions and degrowth efforts, always with that lingering emphasis that there are simply too many people. When people are no longer seen as image bearers, even their mere existence becomes a problem.

Image, family, and identity

Scripture gives us a fundamentally different vision. Because human beings are made in God’s image, our worth is not earned or arbitrarily assigned. It does not depend on intelligence, productivity, status, or how small we can keep our carbon footprint. Human dignity is given by God Himself, who intends for us to reflect His thinking, His character, and His choices in a broken and sinful world.

This truth extends further. God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” points to the family as the means by which the image of God fills the earth (Genesis 1:28). Where families are strong and life is welcomed, societies tend to flourish. Where they are fractured, the effects can be far-reaching.

Modern culture has steadily severed the connections between sex, marriage, and children – seeing each as a personal choice to take or leave. The sexual revolution redefined sexuality as a matter of personal fulfillment rather than covenantal purpose. Influenced by thinkers such as Alfred Kinsey, the culture viewed sexual morality as a repressive myth. Adultery, pornography, promiscuity, homosexuality, and the justification of all manner of sexual rebellion flowed in its wake.

“Smash monogamy,” yelled feminists in the 1960s. And effectively, they did.

Commenting on why marriage and family were rejected by the 1960s counterculture, sociologist Gilbert Zicklin described it like this: “The family was still seen to be isolated in its privacy, conformist in its security-mindedness, and dull in its routine, often hypocritical, mode of existence. Life as it was lived in middle-class families seemed to confine and diminish the self.”

Today, personal identity is anything one conceives it to be – transgender to “furry.” The physical body is untethered from inherent meaning, leaving a person free to have a “love affair” with an airplane if he or she so chooses. Likewise, the individual body is disconnected from the larger body of society – which might sometimes be held hostage by the terror of self-definition.

As theologian Carl Trueman observed, “Transgenderism is the repudiation of the significance of history, an intentional act of cultural – and personal – amnesia.”

The recovery of a moral vision

The road ahead offers many challenges. Not only must we rebuild the eroded foundations, but we are also faced with the daunting new definitions of the imago Dei offered by social media, digital life, and artificial intelligence. As technology makes the ideologies of transhumanism seem plausible, the reality of man being made in God’s image becomes that much more crucial.

America’s future will not be secured by good policy alone. It will depend on whether people retain a clear, compelling, and God-honoring vision of human dignity. The doctrine of the image of God is not some relic of the patriarchal past; it is a safeguard of the future. It refuses to rank lives by their usefulness and calls us to something more than living purely for our own gratification. It calls us to self-sacrifice, understanding, and long-suffering.

If that foundation is finally eroded or utterly abandoned, God help us all.