Here’s the lesson we must learn from Black history

The proclamation from the White House noting National Black History Month, 2022, says that “Our nation was founded on an idea: that all of us are created equal and deserve to be treated with equal dignity throughout our lives.”

This, I think, is false.  

Our nation was not founded on an idea.  An idea is a product of thought.  

When slave trader John Newton, composer of the haunting hymn Amazing Grace, confronted himself of his horrible sin, he did not discover that he had a bad idea and decided to replace it with a better idea.

Newton realized that there is truth in the world which he had gravely violated and then he wrote, “I was lost but now I am found, I was blind but now I see.”

The presence of slavery at the nation’s founding was about man’s ability and willingness to sin. 

Slavery was the symptom, not the cause.

Black History is documentation that even in a great nation, sin was present.  

The Creator gave man the ability to choose.  This is why freedom is so important. 

Men should not be denied their ability to choose.  And men also should not be allowed to escape their responsibility to choose good over evil.

This is the lesson we must learn from Black History.  

Black history tells a uniquely important story in our nation.  It is a story that no other race or ethnicity shares.  No other ethnicity shares a history in which their ancestors did not come here by choice. And it’s this uniqueness of this story that must be comprehended if we are to understand our country, where it has been, and where it needs to go.

In a nation founded on the principles of human dignity, human liberty, almost one fifth of the population were slaves.  How should we understand this?

Some want to tell us that slavery is not just a stain on American history, but it defines America and American history. That America is a nation founded in racism and evil and that the task today is to reinvent and recreate the nation.  

This is what “wokeness” CRT and DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion programming – is about. 

Those who have declared that the nation was evil at its birth now want to seize control over every aspect of our lives and put themselves in charge of deciding what we can and cannot do.

This is a great and dangerous distortion, doomed to add on to, not erase, the sin at America’s founding.

And like the plantation owners that usurped truth, so today we have a new generation of usurpers.

The truth that the progressive left is attempting to distort is that the ideals upon which our nation were founded were rooted in Divine principles that all are created equal because all are the product of the same Creator. 

It is for this reason that those who signed the Declaration of Independence concluded saying …. “With a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

“Sacred” is not about ideas.  “Sacred” is about faith and divine truth. It’s not about wokeness or better ideas.

America is in crisis today because recognition of Creator God has been widely purged.  

And we will not live right, we will not treat our neighbors right, until we recognize the sin present in our own individual lives and accept our own unique role and responsibility to purge it from ourselves.

This is the lesson of Black History.