Of Individual Worth and the Fatherhood of God

In recent times Jesus Christ declared, “Remember, the worth of souls is great in the sight of God” (Doctrine and Covenants 18:10), a reminder of the high value that Christianity places on the value of the individual. This is unusual where much of the world focuses on masses and classes and elevates rights of the group over the rights of the individual. In much of the world and throughout history individuals have been considered expendable, particularly if expending them could be feigned as benefiting the group. That is certainly at the core of Marxism and other variants of socialism, that read history as the story of classes. It is at the core of statism, that considers all issues in terms of how they affect the state rather than how they affect the individuals in the state. Of course, just like the oriental despotisms (the ethos of which prevails in many “modern” oriental governments) the focus on the rights of groups and of the state or the society is a mask for reinforcing the power of the rulers of the masses who pretend to speak for the masses and govern for their good while continuing to exploit them.

The worth of the individual in the doctrines of Christianity comes from the fact that each man and woman is literally and not figuratively a child of God. That is fundamentally what makes men and women different from all other animals, a fact that requires little reflection to recognize its truth and lots of sophistry to convince people otherwise. You need a lot of explaining to make people believe that they are no different from the dogs and the snakes and the trees, and even then the idea is so foreign to everyday observable reality that few are convinced, and of those, few stay convinced. The intellectual and moral gap between man and beast is too vast, despite enormous efforts throughout the ages to make it appear not so.

Individual worth based on the literal fatherhood of God is an original doctrine of Christianity, found in the first pages of the Bible. Consider these words from the story of the creation. “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind” (Genesis 1:21). Notice that the creatures of the sea and air all came forth “after their kind”. Those are not accidental words. Consider the description of the creatures of the land. “And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creapeth upon the earth after his kind” (Genesis 1:25). Again, all of the land creatures were made “after their kind”. Notice how differently the creation of man is described; what was the “kind” after which man was created? “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)

Of course, this idea of the divine heritage of man is unpopular with despots who choose to use and abuse God's children. In the ancient Americas a prophet of God was killed by his king for preaching “that man was created after the image of God” (Mosiah 7:27).

Again, in the New Testament the Savior and His disciples taught the divine lineage of man. For example, Paul wrote to the saints in Rome, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:16, 17). That notion probably did not sit well with the Caesars, who were busy eroding the rights of the individual found in much of Roman law.

The worth of the individual is certainly at odds with the modern-day Caesars. Their emphasis on group rights, their programs to divide societies up by classes and ethnic groups, would leave individuals powerless to protect themselves against sacrifice on state altars except by appeal through their membership in some favored group.

The worth of the individual is the foundation for the freedom of the individual. Consider how much of the Constitution—particularly the Bill of Rights—is focused on the preservation of individual freedoms: freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, free speech, right to armed self protection, right to trial by jury, protection of private property, and so on. These constitutional rights are a partial enumeration of what the Declaration of Independence proclaimed to be “unalienable Rights” by which all men have been “endowed by their Creator.” While you may not have to be a Christian to believe in the divine worth of the individual, this very Christian doctrine is embedded in our system of government and at the heart of what has made America different from much of the world and much of history.

That is why those who seek to change America work to undermine all that proclaims the individual worth of each and every man and woman. It is hard to justify treating God’s children like so many cattle; you first have to get people to believe that they are more like cattle than they are like their Father in heaven. So far, most Americans have shown a stubborn adherence to truths that they have held for more than 230 years to be “self-evident” and which God our Father has taught us from the beginning.