Were our Founding Fathers tyrants?

Were our Founding Fathers worse tyrants than the British tyrants they overthrew? Was there an American family/clan operating at the same time, unrestrained, that was worse than Pharaoh? Does American history need to be rewritten?

Supposedly, the American Revolution took place to overthrow the tyrannical British. But a few historical facts appear to challenge this widely accepted thesis. Both countries legally ended the slave trade at about the same time---1807 and 1808; in America, some illegal slave trade continued as late as 1859. The British ended slavery in 1833; America in 1863. The British tyrants ended slavery BEFORE the American tyrants.

In America, slavery was quickly replaced by neoslavery---segregation, sharecropping, lynching and prison gangs. When slavery and neoslavery are combined, this type of oppression did not end until the 1960s. Beginning in the 1980s, the racial wealth gap exploded and continues down to this day---2015. Beginning in the 1980s, the criminal justice system became the new agent of oppression---the combination of extensive racial profiling and the resulting mass incarceration; this criminal oppression system continues to this day---2015. In America, tyrants/oppressors really don't end systems of oppression, they merely redesign them. In my opinion, the DeWolf clan that was engaging in the slave trade and slavery during and after the Revolution were more evil than Pharaoh because Pharaoh never engaged in the slave trade, only slavery. In Bristol, the DeWolfs are honored as the "great folks"; in reality, the DeWolfs, though church members, were an evil clan. For more of the DeWolf clan, read Inheriting the [Slave] Trade.

Next, a partial list of America's historical failures/paradoxes:

1. The Bible-believing Puritans paid money for the scalps of Indians.
2. The great Puritan theologian, Jonathan Edwards, went down to Rhode Island and purchased his own slave.
3. Our founding fathers who celebrated their freedom from the British tyrants denied freedom and equality to the poor, women, Native Americans and African Americans.
4. Lincoln declared that our nation was conceived in liberty; in reality, our nation was conceived with a perverse mixture of oppression and liberty.
5. The supposed government of, by, and for the people was really a government by a rich, white, male elite for a rich, white male elite.
6. At Asuza Street, the Holy Spirit broke down racial and ethnic divisions; within 10 years, white racism divided Pentecostalism into white and black streams.

Where was the American church in all of this? Why was it powerless to stop these evils? Why did it far too often participate in these social evils? What negative values did it let go unchallenged? I suggest three sets of negative values that have pervaded American history from our founding down to today:

1. The American Trinity: hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism, and hyperethnocentrism.
2. The American Trinity: whiteness, richness, and maleness.
3. WASPs: white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (race, culture and religion).

The abolitionists, many of them Christians, eliminated legal slavery; good, but not good enough; personal liberty but not economic justice.

The civil rights movement eliminated legal segregation; good, but not good enough; civil rights but not economic justice.

The Christian Community Development movement rebuilt poor communities; good, but not good enough; it did not change the larger white evangelical church.

The progressive evangelical movement, led by persons such Ron Sider and Jim Wallis, developed a strong applied political and social ethic; good, but not good enough. The next generation must do better.

None of the above movements produced a biblical theology on ethnocentrism and oppression, never a NT theology of oppression and justice, never a theology of the Spirit and the kingdom. Therefore, in 2010, Michelle Alexander could still write that America never solves its systems of oppression, only redesigns them, only repeats the mistakes of the past.

To summarize, we must ask the question why the American church is so impotent, so uninvolved; why such a flawed, incomplete theology of society. American evangelicals, self-righteous as they are, have never repented of their part in American ethnocentrism and oppression, never restituted to repair the damage done to the oppressed. Americans have not developed a theology of society built around the Spirit, the kingdom and justice. Our Christian colleges and seminaries have failed us. Are they a part of the problem, not the solution?