The Meaning of Fairness and Equality
by Fr. Andrew Gromm
I mentioned in my sermon the question of fairness and equality. So I’ll elaborate. The Lord
Jesus does not want all religions to be equal, nor does he want us to be left only to equal
exchanges of human interactions. While it’s good for friends to love friends, return good with
good and pay back loans, He wants us to do all these things and go further, even to love our
enemies, return kindness to the ungrateful and not expect reimbursement from evil people. This
is a higher equality. St. Paul also spoke of Christians separating from society by our beliefs and
actions, being an exclusive people of God, which is perfecting holiness in humility. This is divine
inequality. So, fairness and equality aren’t always what the world makes them seem to be.
Our current obsession with equality comes from the French Revolution. This revolution was
not simply a claim of people power and human rights, liberty and equality, democracy and
fairness, but a demonic force that literally erased Jesus Christ from public view. Thousands of
bishops, priests, monks and nuns were murdered, tortured and persecuted as the state tried to
impose a government-run church, an attempt to make all religions equally secular. It was no
longer 1791 or 1792, based on so many years after Christ’s birth. It was changed to the year 0
or the year 1, based on the revolution. An actress dressed up as the Pagan goddess of reason
was led in a procession to Notre Dame, where the people joyfully worshipped her as divine.
Equal rights extended to other features of life. Attempts were made to force everyone to wear
the same clothes and to tear down church spires, so that all buildings were the same size. And
everyone definitely had to think the same. An estimate of people murdered by the spirit of
equality is 300,000, most of whom were farmers, shopkeepers, poor people, women, the elderly
and babies. This is why America’s founders, as well as people since before the time of Christ,
despised democracy and equality. The United States’ Constitution was purposely written to
resist such abuses. Checks and balances were to hinder centrality, singularity and sameness.
This comes from Jesus Christ and the Apostles, who endorsed slavery, non-public ideals for
women and other forms of inequality. They did not want equality to be treated as sameness.
The Apostles at first had a centralized banking and welfare system to semi-equalize Christians’
financial needs, which was dismantled soon after being established, probably due to a normal
break-down of the system, ordinary difficulties with secular economic laws, spiritual problems in
its application and serious potential sins from within, as the Bible suggests in Acts 4-6. Thus,
inequalities of all kinds were further endorsed. This doesn’t mean they allowed abuses in
society. Instead, they wanted the Church to regulate all inequalities, so as to infuse them with
human dignity, and to regulate equality, so as to restrict its evil tendencies. The State was to
deal with politics and law, not determining morality, compassion, love, righteousness, etc.
The Church Fathers were more obvious about distrusting unchecked equality. Socrates was
killed by unregulated democracy, and Jesus Christ was crucified by voting rights. Aristotle had
to escape the excesses of people power. Thus, some early Christian saints rejected democracy
and some allowed slavery. In spite of this, social equality did manifest, but in different ways. For
instance, some slaves became respected philosophers or rich merchants, while some of the rich
were slavishly indebted to others. In America’s first generation, free men over 20 years old, who
happened to own land, were the only ones who could vote, which raised the quality of elections,
since landowners felt obligated to govern the land by voting for the best qualified politicians. In
Brazil, only college-educated people could vote. Other places had similar laws to regulate
equality and restrict democracy, so that life and morals didn’t imitate the French Revolution.
They knew that the more equality there is, the more crime, immorality and irreligion there are.
So when anyone talks about fairness or equality, the meaning of the word and its application
need to be made clear because equality can be about the Church’s personal unity or about
various man-made communities and self-constructed utopias, either saving lives or harming
people. We may laugh at the goofiest stories of the French Revolution, where the spirit of
equality proved to be absurd. But it still happens now.
In fact, almost 100,000,000 unborn babies have been murdered for equality, where women
seek to be men, dress like men, not give birth like men, etc. Estimates show that at least two
million people have died in the eco-cause to make people and animals equal. Financial aid to
the poor and the idea of workers of the world uniting have killed many millions of people all over
the world for economic equality. Such equality becomes more important than life itself. Just last
week, a woman in charge of White House security endangered the lives of the president and his
family for years by making law enforcement equal to Disneyland, which is literally what she said
her goal was! There are top officials publicly inferring that since people die of an ebola virus in
Liberia, people should also die here, just to make things fair. Moreover, equalizing homosexual
love with marital love is the result of sameness, of men with men and women only with women.
It’s easy to laugh at the wacky antics of equality, but it’s the spirit of our times. The Lord Jesus
and the Apostles in the Holy Spirit did not preach fairness and equality, not in the sense that it’s
applied by today’s leaders, professors and those in charge of all institutions in every society on
earth. Call it Relativism or Political Correctness, but whatever its name, it is not from God.
Each of us is created by the Holy Trinity to be unique forever, a member of Christ’s Body, so
that all Christians are of higher nobility. As the Church Fathers say, we are created to be priests,
prophets and kings on earth, as was the case when man was in Paradise. Only sin makes us
peasants, so our nobility is a great responsibility and a fearful thing, since any mistake before
the King’s presence can jeopardize one’s noble position. This is true equality, where all are
supposed to be nobility. But the world wants everyone to be spiritual peasants. The New-Age
movement advances this for a one-world religion of Ecumenism. Equality becomes uniformity
and conformity to man-made philosophy, not the relational unity of divine revelation. Hyperequality is a religious cult of man seeking sameness and centralist collectivism, but true equality
respects inequality and difference. Even the Son of Man obeyed God the Father, though they
are one divine nature. And this relates to Christ seeking the good of others before seeking His
own good. True freedom and fairness come only from God’s nobility, not from man’s peasantry.