A Response to John Carter
The American right is finally done singing from the progressive hymnbook. After decades of insisting that “Democrats are the real racists,” many Republicans have discovered the imagination and courage to assert that there’s more to our constitutional tradition than the endless extension of “civil rights” to marginalized groups. Every Republican president from Nixon through the first iteration of Trump could have, with the stroke of a pen, rescinded LBJ’s executive order imposing affirmative action on federal contractors. In 2025, Trump actually did it.
This realization became widespread only after the cultural revolution of 2020. The race riots, the re-naming of streets and landmarks, the toppling of statues by mobs and local governments, the destruction of gifted programs that enrolled too many whites and Asians, the abolition of cash bail, the integration of DEI commissars into all our institutions, the aggressive imposition of transgender ideology, the opening of the border under Biden, and the glee with which our elites contemplated white demographic decline all made it impossible to ignore.
By that point, though, it may have been too late to undo the damage. The Left overreached and suffered an electoral defeat in 2024, but courts have consistently blocked Trump from carrying out his democratic mandate to roll back progressives’ institutional power. There’s also a significant share of normie Republicans and right-leaning independents, including many conservative Christians, who still don’t realize “what time it is.” They simply lack the stomach for a counterrevolution they regard as too cruel or “authoritarian.” For them, politics as it really is, is too brutal. Their default posture is studious aloof.
According to the segment of the online right often labeled “Nietzschean,” “vitalist,” or “pagan,” this problem is endemic to Christianity itself. Adherents of a slave morality that view all people as equal before God will always balk at doing what’s necessary to stop gay race communism. It’s not enough to apply the same meritocratic standard to everyone and accept inequitable outcomes as the result. Our only chance, they insist, is to abandon the idea of the imago dei altogether and assert that individuals, sexes, and races are fundamentally unequal — not just in their capacities, but in their intrinsic value — and should be treated as such.
It’s true that our Founding Fathers managed to believe that “all men are created equal” without immediately turning America into Zimbabwe, but pseudonymous e-right Substacker John Carter believes the imago dei functions as a slippery slope toward exactly that. “The doctrine of outcome equality called ‘equity’ is the poison fruit of the diseased tree of the belief in biological equality, which sprouted from the cursed seed of egalitarian political equality, which was planted in the sweet-smelling but toxic soil of spiritual equality,” he writes in his cleverly titled essay “The Imago DEI.” For Carter, the only way to “remove this overgrowth of noxious weeds” is “to dig down to the root, and pull it out.”
To begin, it’s worth noting that Carter’s argument is not as novel as he seems to think. Thomas Jefferson, for example, frankly acknowledged the existence of a “natural aristocracy” even as he took care to maintain “the equal rights of men.”
Carter believes he’s played a trump card when he refers to differences in the assessed IQ of various races, but it turns out Jefferson was way ahead of him. Our third president admitted to harboring a “suspicion,” though not a certainty, that black people on average “are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination.” He just didn’t think it mattered. “Whatever may be their degree of talent, it is no measure of their rights,” he wrote in an 1805 letter. “Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.” All Jefferson meant by “equal” is that human individuals are inherently, as one historian put it “neither the masters nor the slaves of other people.”
But in this case, politics is downstream from theology. If the equality of intrinsic value asserted by the imago dei is incoherent, then so is any assertion of political equality. Carter bases his argument on the claim that the divine image cannot be an either-or characteristic that inheres equally in all humans and not at all anywhere else. He defines the imago dei as “a combination of those spiritual and intellectual qualities which are unique to mankind … [such as] man’s possession of logos or rational intellect, his free will, his relationality, his self-awareness, his role as a steward and co-creator of Creation.”
Here, Carter echoes St. Thomas Aquinas, who argued that “man is said to be the image of God by reason of his intellectual nature,” specifically his “natural aptitude for understanding and loving God.” The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that “intellectual” comes from the Latin “inter” and “legere” (“to choose between”) and includes among its functions “attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness.” One conclusion this leads St. Thomas to is that angels bear the image of God more fully than humans.
Leaving aside the fact that humans seem to use language in a way that really is categorically distinctive even from how animals communicate, it’s true enough that sentience, reasoning, and love are faculties in which we differ from the animals by degree, not kind. If so, then Thomas’ definition is vulnerable to the critique Carter offers. He compares Koko the gorilla, “who after mastering a sign language vocabulary of around 1,000 words was shown to be perfectly capable of rational thought, affection, and, yes, creation,” to human sociopaths who seem impervious to therapy and incapable of redemption.
St. Thomas would, of course, distinguish between an aptitude of the soul and the brain’s actual cognitive ability (which may be lacking due to some defect in the matter), but Carter thinks that begs the question. To him, I imagine, this assertion of a hidden equality for which no evidence can be produced sounds a lot like a mom who insists that her straight-F son is “just as smart as the other kids” but “just doesn’t apply himself.”
If the imago is some form of consciousness or rationality, then it seems like it’s neither limited to humans nor evenly distributed among humans. Most scholars now reject the idea that animals are just biological machines with no degree of self-awareness. Admitting that there’s such a thing as “what it’s like to be a bat,” doesn’t solve the hard problem of consciousness, but it does strongly suggest that these faculties exist on a spectrum and that there’s no hard cutoff between humanity and all lower animals.
Approaching the question from the other side, it’s worth asking whether newborn babies or adults with severe mental handicaps have an intellectual “aptitude for understanding and loving God.” And if not, would that justify infanticide or euthanasia? If cognition confers dignity, it’s hard to argue that a human fetus deserves more rights than a crow.
These objections undermine the Christian attempt to root universal human status in the divine image. We instinctively treat elephants as more intrinsically valuable than ladybugs because they exhibit a higher degree of consciousness and apparent value. If that’s the case, why not apply the same principle to, in Carter’s phrase, “racial groups of disparate intellectual capacity”? Blacks, he suggests, should be subjected to a separate, more paternalistic legal code “following the same logic that applies to children and wildlife.” Others who make similar arguments advocate for outright eugenics. “Depends what race it is” has become a common e-right meme in debates about abortion.
Carter’s entire argument for dechristianization is ultimately a response to the rationalistic idea of the divine image he inherits from St. Thomas. Fortunately, the Angelic Doctor does not represent the entirety of Christian tradition. By supplementing the St. Thomas’ definition with ancient Syriac theology, Christians can place the imago dei — and the equality before God it implies — on much firmer ground.
“The Father gazed at the likeness of His Son and molded Adam. Since He was going to give His Son to the world, He delineated Him beforehand,” wrote 5th-century theologian Jacob of Serugh. “For this cause He said, ‘Let us make man in our image,’ in this same likeness in which Mary gave birth to the Only One.”
It’s a paradox right out of a sci-fi novel: a man goes back in time to serve as the template for (and co-creator of) the human race. When Jesus of Nazareth ascended into heaven, he stepped into eternity. The terms “before” and “after” don’t apply. Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as the “pre-incarnate” Christ. There was never a “time” when Logos was not God-man.
If that’s the case, St. Thomas’ understanding of the imago dei is incomplete. It’s not just about our intellectual aptitudes, which may be inferior to those of angels, aliens, AI constructs, or even Koko the gorilla. It’s about sharing a nature with the incarnate second person of the Trinity.
This idea — that a “nature” is something real and not just a descriptive label — requires us to stop thinking like nominalists, which isn’t easy. That’s why Carter dismisses the idea of an equally shared human nature as a “linguistic abstraction.” It’s also probably why contemporary Western Christians tend to present forgiveness of sins as the whole of salvation. Most people would struggle to transcend modernity’s core presupposition, but everybody has some idea of how a law court works.
That’s certainly not how early Christians like St. Athanasius saw things. His book On the Incarnation is built around the idea that by becoming man, Christ effected some kind of ontological change in human nature. Athanasius compares humanity to straw being soaked in a divine flame retardant. Every man and woman will rise at the last trumpet because every man and woman shares in Christ’s defeat of death by virtue of being human.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited, the character known as Black says, “[Jesus] couldn’t come down here and take the form of a man if that form was not done shaped to accommodate him. And if I said that there aint no way for Jesus to be ever man without ever man bein Jesus then I believe that might be a pretty big heresy.”
But it’s not a heresy. It’s a richer, older, more mystical, and (most importantly) fuller understanding of the imago dei. It’s why Christ could say, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” No exceptions. A zygote, a sociopath, and a nonverbal autist have the same claim as a genius or an aristocrat to the dignity the Incarnation bestows. We honor every man and woman not just as a rational being, but as an icon of Christ.
Armed with this understanding, we can assert with confidence that all humans are equal in value no matter how unequal they might be in ability or intelligence. Such an understanding demands no dogmatic assertion of equal capacities. It doesn’t stand or fall depending on how one interprets the scholarly data on race and IQ. It insists only that all humans are human, which is both a tautology and a biological fact. It is also perfectly compatible with high educational standards, freedom of association, broken windows policing, a strict immigration policy, and inequitable group outcomes.
Yet, an important question remains: What if, as a practical matter, Carter is right about any concept of the imago dei being a slippery slope to DEI? If that’s the case, then as a Christian, I have no choice but to say, “so be it.” I’ll fight the distortions, but I don’t want to go back to a world where “defective” infants are abandoned at Roman garbage dumps. The saints who rescued those babies are heroes, regardless of the effect their actions had on the gene pool. Nothing will convince me otherwise.
If Nietzsche was right about Christian slave morality smothering civilization–despite mountains of evidence to the contrary–I can only accept that as the working-out of a process Christ Himself set in motion. He knew that His incarnation, preaching, death, resurrection, and ascension started a countdown. Everything between His time on earth and Second Coming is the end times. Perhaps the reign of anti-Christ will mark the culmination of this process — the triumph of a Christless pseudochristianity in which human equality and autonomy swallow up all other values.
Right-wing American Christians have a Scylla and Charybdis to navigate. How do we reject the distortions of the imago dei without losing sight of it altogether? But also, how do we insist on the imago dei without succumbing to its distortions? We’ll simply have to get used to being called fence-sitters, that is, insufficiently extreme. We’ll never be “compassionate” enough for the post-Christian liberals or ruthless enough for the pagan vitalists. And that’s just fine.
Image: The Garden of Eden by Thomas Cole (c. 1828). Wikimedia Commons.
