Every generation has its great myths – the beliefs which help define it, and which it cherishes with little or no evidence to support them. In perhaps the most misunderstood passage of his masterpiece of American literature, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain called attention to and mocked one of the great myths of antebellum America: that black people were not human beings on par with white people. In the passage, Aunt Sally, having been told by her nephew, Huck Finn, that there was a steamboat accident, exclaims:

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

“No’m,” replies Huck. But he adds, “Killed a nigger.”

“Well it’s lucky,” says Aunt Sally, “because sometimes people do get hurt.”

Many modern critics often point to this passage as a clear example of Twain’s racism, but, of course, it is nothing of the kind. Twain was an ardent abolitionist who used his considerable talent to paint an accurate picture of pre-Civil War America in order to make a point: most people at that time tended to think that blacks were not human beings, even though they clearly were. Nothing except ideological blindness could have convinced people that this was not so, yet for hundreds of years otherwise intelligent people in Europe and the US believed it.

We in the West are not exempt from great myths, though our cocksure rationalism may lead us to think otherwise. Notwithstanding our extensive use of reasonable deduction and the scientific method, however, today we in the West cherish a great myth. We believe that human equality, the principle that human beings are essentially equal in all meaningful respects, is a self-evident principle. That the evidence does not, in fact, appear to support this belief does not seem to bother us in the least. There are a host of differences between individual people and between different groups of people that seem to strongly suggest that a basic human equality does not exist. It may be true that human beings are equal, that they have an equal share of human dignity just because they are human beings. I believe that this is the case. This a priori equality is something I accept partly because of my religious beliefs, however (my belief that a supreme God is responsible for human existence and that all humans share in the human nature that this God gives them). It is not something I arrive at, nor do I think it is something that any honest thinker can arrive at, from reasoning or experience alone.

For virtually all of recorded history, and probably for thousands of years before that, the basic inequality of human beings was the assumed truth. The myriads of monarchies, empires, and feudal states that people built and lived under since they stopped living as hunter-gatherers over ten thousand years ago literally couldn’t have existed if people didn’t believe, at a fundamental level, that their rulers were also their betters. About two thousand years ago, Christianity added a genuinely radical innovation when it taught that within the Christian community there is real equality before God. While this teaching was honored in the breach more often than not, its mere existence provided the philosophical underpinnings in Christian Europe for the Enlightenment’s principles of human equality. People reasoned that, since God is no respecter of persons, then people should not be either.

It took over three hundred years for the full implications of that conclusion to permeate all of Western society, but by the late twentieth century the US and (especially) Western Europe had more or less fully integrated it into their legal systems and social consciences. The problem, however, was that, in the process of integrating the concept of universal human equality that they now revered, the US and (especially) Western Europe had largely jettisoned the religious tradition which undergirded it. The focus on the individual and the concept of basic human equality which flourish in the West are essentially a product of the Christian faith that the West shared for well over a millennium. Where that faith doesn’t hold – or never held – sway, the historically common belief that people are not fundamentally equal usually remains. One unmoored from the religious tradition which justified it, the theory of basic human equality became the most ambitious parade of a naked emperor through the city streets ever attempted. It has almost become a religion in itself, as anyone who dares to point out – even obliquely – that the emperor has no clothes finds out.

For example, at the end of a lengthy interview with the Times of London, the eminent biologist, James Watson, questioned whether different human populations – often geographically separated for tens of thousands of years – evolved equal intelligences. Although his words had no direct bearing on it at all, many people interpreted his statements as casting doubt on the principle of human equality. Had he questioned whether humans separated by continents evolved equal heights or skin or eye colors, he may have been laughed at because the answer is so obvious: of course they didn’t. Human populations (or what people usually call “races”) differ in innumerable ways, just like individual humans. But for reasons that remain unclear, many people consider the idea of differences of intelligence to be tantamount to differences in inherent human worth – a fundamental inequality, in other words. For questioning, however obliquely, the religion of human equality, Watson, quite possibly the most revered living scientist in the world, was condemned as a racist, fired from the institute that he founded, and has resigned in disgrace.

(This religious reaction, wherein Watson’s statements were treated as acts of heresy instead of scientific statements to be evaluated and judged on their merits, is doubly curious, since much of the recent science seems to indicate that human genes likely change relatively quickly – certainly quickly enough to account for possible differences in intelligence among populations separated for tens of thousands of years.)

Attempts to ground the concept of basic human equality outside of its original religious foundation inevitably end up begging the question. They assume first that humans are equal and then attempt to reason why this is so, instead of questioning whether it is so in the first place. The main problem with the modern belief in the basic equality of all humans is that it has no real answer to the questions, “Why, exactly, is everyone equal?” or “What makes everyone equal?”

There may certainly be very good practical reasons for society, and especially the government, to consider people equal in the eyes of the law. Democracy, for instance, is an excellent system for running a society, but it is hard to make it work well if citizens aren’t considered equal in the eyes of the law. That may be a good reason to act like people are equal, but human equality still remains, to use the words of C.S. Lewis, “a legal fiction.” Believing in basic human equality certainly doesn’t make it true, anymore than believing in Santa Claus makes him real. Christmas may have been a lot more fun when we believed that Santa existed, and we may pass on the Santa illusion to our children to make them happier and better-behaved at Christmas time, but their belief does not make Santa exist.

The major difference, of course, between basic human equality and Santa Claus is that, while Santa will not exist whether you ground his existence on an explicitly Christian foundation or not, basic human equality may. If we are willing to accept that the concept of basic human equality only has meaning within a Christian framework – one which requires belief in a common human nature made by God and is therefore worthy of equal respect in all people – then we can, in good conscience, continue to affirm its existence. Without such a belief, however, we seem to have no good reason to affirm – in the face of the countless differences in talent, appearance, behavior, character, heredity, and achievements between individuals and races – that people share some a priori equality. For thousands of years we believed that human beings were not equal, that some people were just better than others. If we refuse to go back to our Christian roots to justify our belief in human equality, perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves, “Were we right all along?”