Made in God's Image, the Idea Behind Every Claim to Human Dignity

Everybody believes in human dignity now. It is in the United Nations charter documents, in the constitutions of countries that jail dissidents, in corporate mission statements printed next to the vending machine. The word has never been more popular. The question nobody at the conference wants to ask is where it came from, and whether it survives once you cut the root.

Here is the thesis, stated plainly so you can disagree with it plainly. The Western conviction that every human being has an equal and inherent worth, a worth no king, court, majority or expert panel gives and none can take away, comes from one verse in the first chapter of the Bible. Take that verse away and the conviction does not collapse overnight. It drains, slowly, like a battery nobody is charging.

Defining the terms

Three terms do the work in this argument, so let us fix them before we use them.

Dignity here means inherent worth: value a person has by being a person, not by being useful, clever, healthy, wanted or a citizen. It is the opposite of conferred worth, which is worth handed out by someone else and therefore revocable by someone else.

Equal means that this worth does not come in grades. The newborn and the Nobel laureate, the king and the day labourer, have the same amount of it. Not the same talents. Not the same deserts. The same worth.

The image of God, in Latin imago Dei, is the teaching of Genesis that human beings, alone among creatures, were made to reflect their Maker. The text, in the King James translation:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

That is Genesis 1:27. Notice the three clauses. The first says the image belongs to "man", meaning humanity. The second narrows it to "him", the individual. The third extends it to "male and female", both sexes, equally. No caste is mentioned. No tribe. No exception for the weak.

The argument in five premises

Here is the case, numbered so it can be checked one step at a time.

1. If a person's worth is conferred by other people, it can be withdrawn by other people. This is not cynicism; it is the logic of conferral. What the committee gives, the committee can take.
2. History shows that every authority which has held that power has, sooner or later, used it. Societies have ranked people by birth, by sex, by tribe, by productivity, and have treated the lower ranks accordingly.
3. A worth that cannot be withdrawn must therefore come from a source above every human authority. It has to be anchored in something no government made and no government can amend.
4. Genesis supplies exactly such a source. It locates each person's worth in a relationship to God that precedes the state, the family's wealth and the person's own abilities.
5. Therefore the claim that dignity is equal and inherent rests, logically and historically, on the doctrine of the image of God, and the secular attempts to keep the conclusion while discarding the premise owe us an alternative foundation. As we will see, they have not produced one that holds.

Premise one is close to a definition. Premise three follows from one and two. The weight sits on two and four, so let us test them.

What the ancient world believed instead

Premise two is a historical claim, and the historical record is not shy about it.

Take the laws of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king of the eighteenth century before Christ, whose code is one of the oldest legal collections we have. It is a serious piece of law, and it is organised by rank. Penalties for injury depend on whether the victim is a free man of the upper class, a commoner or a slave. Put out the eye of one and you lose your own; injure the other and you pay a fine. The law is not lawless. It simply assumes that persons come in different values, and it prices them accordingly.

Or take the most brilliant philosopher of the ancient world. In the first book of his Politics, Aristotle argued that some human beings are slaves by nature, fitted to be ruled by a master. He was not a monster. He was describing what nearly everyone around him took for granted, and giving it the best reasons he could find.

And in the great kingdoms of the ancient Near East, the phrase "image of god" was not absent. It was reserved. Royal inscriptions in Egypt and Mesopotamia applied that kind of language to the king, who stood in for the gods on earth. The ruler bore the divine likeness. Everyone else bore the ruler's burdens.

Now read Genesis 1:27 against that background, and you see what a revolution it was. The writer takes the title of the king and hands it to every man and every woman. The farmer is royalty. The slave is royalty. That is not a pious sentiment. It is a political earthquake, and it took the West thousands of years to feel all of its aftershocks.

The Bible draws the legal consequence almost immediately. Genesis 9:6 grounds the prohibition of murder in the same doctrine:

Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.

The reason a human life may not be taken is not the victim's rank, wealth or usefulness. It is the image. The law of Hammurabi asks who you are. The law of Genesis asks only whether you are human.

How the idea did its work

Premise four claims that this doctrine did not just sit in a book. It moved people, and the record of what it moved them to do is the strongest evidence for it.

The abolitionists. In 1787 the English potter Josiah Wedgwood produced a medallion for the campaign against the slave trade. It showed a kneeling African in chains under the words "Am I not a man and a brother?" That question is an argument from Genesis in eight words. If he is a man, he bears the image. If he bears the image, he cannot be property. The British and American antislavery movements were driven overwhelmingly by Christians who read their Bibles that way, and the slaveholders who quoted other verses back at them never found an answer to the first chapter.

Frederick Douglass made the same point with more force than anyone. He escaped slavery, taught himself to write some of the finest prose of his century, and spent his life arguing that the American founding promise belonged to him. He knew the difference between the Christianity of the plantation pulpit, which he denounced, and the Christianity of the Bible, which he claimed. We have written about his great 1852 address in What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution.

The Declaration. The American version of the argument is one sentence long. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Notice the verbs. Men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator. The rights are not granted by Parliament or by the Continental Congress. They come with the creature. That is why they are unalienable, a word we unpack in Unalienable Means You Cannot Even Give Your Rights Away, and Here Is Why.

The civil rights movement. In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. answered clergymen who called his protests untimely. His test for whether a law was just came straight from the natural-law tradition of Augustine and Aquinas: a just law squares with the moral law of God, and an unjust law degrades the human personality. Segregation was unjust, he argued, because it treated persons as things. The argument does not work without the premise that persons are not things, and the premise does not hold without a reason. King, a Baptist preacher, knew exactly where the reason came from.

Three movements, three centuries, one premise. That is not a coincidence. That is a cause.

The best secular objection

Now for the other side, stated as its best defenders would state it.

The secular objection goes like this. Human dignity does not need God. It can be grounded in reason alone. Immanuel Kant argued that rational beings must always be treated as ends and never merely as means, and he built that principle without appealing to scripture. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, opens its first article with the words "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" and names no deity at all. Millions of decent atheists believe in human equality and act on it every day, often better than believers do. To insist that dignity needs theology is insulting to them and, worse, false: it makes our most important moral commitment hostage to a religious claim many people reject. Better to ground dignity in what we all share, our capacity for reason, for suffering, for choosing our own path.

That is a serious argument, and the last point deserves respect. Nobody is saying an atheist cannot be a good person or a firm defender of human rights. Many are. The question is not whether secular people believe in dignity. It is whether the secular arguments for dignity can carry the weight on their own.

Why the objection does not hold

Take its pieces one at a time.

One: grounding dignity in capacities makes dignity unequal. If worth comes from reason, then people with more reason have more worth, and people with less have less. The newborn has very little reason. The man with advanced dementia has less every year. The person in a coma has none we can measure. A capacity theory either admits that these people count for less, or it quietly borrows the conclusion it cannot derive. Some philosophers have taken the first road in public. The longtime Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has argued for decades that moral status depends on capacities rather than on membership in the human species, and he has followed that view to conclusions about infants and the severely disabled that most people find horrifying. He deserves credit for consistency. He has shown where the road goes.

Two: Kant lived downstream. Kant was raised in a pietist Lutheran household in eighteenth-century Prussia, in a civilisation shaped for more than a thousand years by the Bible. His ends-not-means principle is a philosopher's translation of an inheritance he received, not a discovery made in a vacuum. That does not make it wrong. It makes it borrowed. The question is how long the loan lasts once the lender is forgotten.

Three: the 1948 declaration is a statement, not a foundation. Its drafters deliberately left the source of dignity unnamed, because the committee included delegates from very different traditions and could agree on the conclusion but not the reason. That was a sensible diplomatic choice. It was also an admission. A document that asserts dignity without grounding it is only as strong as the next majority that decides to reinterpret it, and the twentieth century produced plenty of governments that signed fine words and ran camps.

Four: suffering cannot ground equality either. If dignity rests on the capacity to suffer, then human beings stand on the same footing as every other animal that feels pain, and the distinctive claim of human rights dissolves into a general rule against cruelty. That is a good rule. It is not the Declaration of Independence.

Five: the historical test. Look at what happened when governments explicitly rejected the image of God and tried to build a moral order on class, race or historical progress. The Soviet state treated persons as raw material for a plan. The Nazi state graded human beings by blood and murdered the ones it ranked lowest. Neither regime lacked intellectuals. Both lacked the premise. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived the Soviet camps, drew the lesson in a single image, which we discuss in Solzhenitsyn's Line Through Every Human Heart Is Where Conservatism Starts.

The verdict is not that secular people cannot believe in dignity. It is that secular arguments for dignity, when pressed, either make it unequal or assume it without proof. The image of God makes it equal and gives a reason. That is the difference between a conviction and a foundation.

The doctrine's hard edges

A fair argument admits the hard cases, so here are two.

First, Christians and Jews have not always lived up to this doctrine. Slaveholders went to church. Pogroms were led by men who called themselves Christians. That record is real and should be stated without excuse. But notice how the reform always came. The critics of the slaveholders did not abandon Genesis. They quoted it. The doctrine was the standard by which the believers were judged and found wanting, which is exactly what a standard is for. A principle is not refuted by people who fail to keep it.

Second, the doctrine has demanding consequences that many modern people dislike. If every human being bears the image, then the unborn child bears it, the prisoner on death row bears it, the political opponent bears it, the person you are tempted to treat as an enemy online bears it. The doctrine does not let conservatives pick and choose either. It cuts against cruelty in every direction. That is not a weakness of the idea. It is the proof that it is a principle and not a weapon. We have argued the life question at length in Dred Scott, Roe and the danger of a Court deciding who counts as a person, which shows what happens when a court decides who counts.

What it means for a free country

So why should a conservative care about a theological premise in a political argument?

Because the American constitutional order was built on top of it. The Declaration states that governments are instituted to secure rights that come before government. If rights come from government, they are permissions, and permissions can be revised by the next administration, the next court, the next panel of experts who have decided that some lives are not worth the cost. If rights come from the Creator, they are not the state's to revise, and the state that tries is, by the Declaration's own logic, acting outside its authority.

This is why the founders' generation, whatever their private theology, kept reaching for the language of creation. It was the only language that put rights out of reach. The thread runs from the Hebrew scriptures through Cicero and Aquinas to Jefferson, a line we trace in From Cicero to Aquinas to Jefferson, the Long Road of Natural Law. And it is why C. S. Lewis warned that a civilisation which debunks every objective value will end up producing what he called men without chests, a warning examined in C. S. Lewis Warned About Men Without Chests in a Book About Schoolbooks.

You can run a country for a while on the moral capital of an earlier age. Plenty of people today speak the language of equal dignity without knowing that they are quoting Genesis. That is fine, as far as it goes. But a society that wants to keep the conclusion should be honest about the premise and should teach its children both. Otherwise the conclusion becomes a slogan, and slogans are easy to amend. If you want to see how the right-giving and right-taking argument plays out in politics, start with Rights Are Not Social Constructs, and Here Is the Answer to That Claim.

The case in brief

1. Dignity means inherent, equal worth, and any worth conferred by human authority can be withdrawn by human authority.
2. The ancient world, from Hammurabi's graded penalties to Aristotle's natural slaves, ranked persons by birth and use; Genesis 1:27 gave the royal title of God's image to every man and woman.
3. That doctrine drove the abolitionists, shaped the Declaration's "created equal" and "endowed by their Creator", and powered the civil rights movement.
4. Secular grounds for dignity, whether reason or the capacity to suffer, either make worth unequal or assume the conclusion they cannot prove.
5. A free country that wants rights beyond the reach of government needs a source of rights beyond government, and should say so.

What you can do: read the first chapter of Genesis and the Declaration's second paragraph side by side with your children this week, and ask them where each says our worth comes from.