One standard of law for the resident and the native

“Love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31) is a commandment. It is also, in South Africa, a constitutional question — and the two have been in tension for a generation, because the country built a system of preferential treatment on the one hand and proclaimed non-racialism on the other, and has spent three decades arguing about which of those it actually means.

Start with the text. “You are to have the same standard of law for the foreign resident and the native; for I am the LORD your God” (Leviticus 24:22). That is a legislative principle, not a sentiment: one law, applied to every person, without exception carved out by ancestry. And Paul puts the reason in the clearest possible terms: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). A Gospel that reconciles Jew and Greek in one body cannot then be used to justify measuring people by descent. If a man is my neighbour in Christ, he cannot be a category in law.

That is why the standard here is deliberately narrow, and it is worth being precise about it, because vagueness is where this country has got itself into trouble. The policy on this row is against discrimination — against classifying people by race for the purpose of deciding who counts and who does not. It is not a claim about who is more equal in the eyes of God, because the Bible is unambiguous on that: “So God created man in His own image… male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27), one image, distributed without preference. It is not a claim that one group of South Africans has suffered more than another, because that is not a Bible question and it is not a question any voter should outsource to a party platform. It is a claim about the design of the law: a law that measures entitlement by ancestry is a law that has made race a legal category, and a legal category is a wall built in the present tense.

And the reason a Christian must say this plainly is that the alternative has become the default. “Showing no partiality and accepting no bribe” is how Scripture describes the God of Israel (Deuteronomy 10:17), and “the LORD our God… shows no partiality” is how Peter describes his discovery at the house of Cornelius (Acts 10:34). “Do not show favoritism… if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (James 2:1, James 2:9). The pattern is consistent across the whole testament: God is impartial; we are commanded to be impartial; the law of the nations is to be impartial. Partiality is a moral failure before it is a political one.

There is a second reason, and it is the reason that keeps this row from being a piece of tribalism. “Learn to do right; seek justice and correct the oppressor. Defend the fatherless and plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; uphold the rights of the afflicted and oppressed” (Psalm 82:3). “Open your mouth for those with no voice, for the cause of all the dispossessed” (Proverbs 31:8). The Bible is relentlessly specific about who God commands His people to notice: the fatherless, the widow, the poor, the stranger, the wage-earlier kept waiting. A Christian who wants a nation built on one standard of law cannot then be indifferent to the actual condition of the people in it. Indifference to a single standard of law and indifference to the suffering of a township are not the same position, and the first is a door to the second.

Which is also the honest test of any party that claims to be for the poor. “You shall not deny justice to the poor in their lawsuits” (Exodus 23:6). “You must not defraud your neighbor or rob him. You must not withhold until morning the wages due a hired hand” (Leviticus 19:13). “Making a fortune by a lying tongue is a vanishing mist, a deadly pursuit” (Proverbs 21:6). A programme that transfers wealth on the basis of who a person’s grandparents were has not solved poverty; it has solved the problem of who is owed, and left the problem of the poor where it was. The genuinely poor, the one whose children have no school and whose clinic does not open and whose tap has not run for a month, is not helped by a debate about classification. He is helped by a party that will build the school, staff the clinic, fix the tap, and open the door of opportunity to every child in the street regardless of what is on the birth certificate.

And that is the argument for the row that does not depend on which party holds what view. Discrimination in this country has had two faces for thirty years: the face of a person turned away from a queue, a job, a neighbourhood, a school; and the face of a policy that has made a person’s birth certificate the first question asked about them. Both are contrary to “the same standard of law for the foreign resident and the native.” A Christian cannot pick the comfortable one and pretend the other does not exist. Leviticus 24:22 is not a season.

So read the manifestos of the parties contesting your municipality on 4 November, and look for this specifically: does the party commit to a single standard of law for every citizen? Does it commit to removing racial classification from the allocation of contracts, licences, bursaries and jobs? Does it commit to treating poverty as a condition to be cured rather than a category to be administered? And does it commit to that in a way that does not require the voter to accept a new category in its place? A party that promises to replace one form of classification with a subtler one has not heard the verse. A party that says nothing about the subject has left the subject where it is.

Then read it again, in the light of the other rows on this table. Because a party can pass this row and fail the next one. A standard of law that leaves a township without water is a standard of law nobody can live under. “For lack of guidance, a nation falls, but with many counselors comes deliverance” (Proverbs 11:14). “When the righteous flourish, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan” (Proverbs 29:2). A vote for a principle is a vote for a government, and the government will still have to fix the taps.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The same people have been offered the same choice for thirty years, and the same country has got the same answer. On 4 November, read the manifesto, look for the sentence about one standard of law for every citizen, and vote for the party that means it.

Mark the tick if this analysis holds. And in the comments: is there any version of racial redress that does not make race a legal category — and if there is, why is it not the policy?