Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Well, this year as America celebrates its 250th anniversary, Breakpoint will examine aspects of the American story through the lens of a Christian worldview.

Today, why was slavery established in a country built on such a

strong Christian consensus? Thomas Jefferson is rightly called a hypocrite. In the Declaration of

Independence, of course, he wrote these famous lines. We hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their creator with certain

inalienable rights.

Among them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, Jefferson was among

America's founders who owned slaves. From thousands of his writings on the establishment of the

United States, it's clear that Jefferson understood his moral breach. He held aspirations

that slavery would end, but maintained a different

reality. Slavery, he once wrote, is like holding a wolf by the ear. We can neither hold him

nor safely let him go. According to the Jefferson Monticello project, and I quote,

he thought that his cherished federal union, the world's first

democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson

thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave

revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of

abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war

that would destroy the union. Now, a helpful framework to understand the gulf that often exists

between ideals and practices for a civilization, and certainly in America's founding, comes from

the eminent sociologist Paterim Seroquen. Serocon described three types of cultures.

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