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restoring our biblical and constitutional foundations
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Politics and Guilt
The Apostle Paul tells us that God has written a
certain rudimentary knowledge of God’s law on every human heart (Rom.
2:14-15). Human experience confirms this truth. But Scripture also warns
that the conscience can be misinformed, even conditioned to regard evil as
sin. Paul also cautions that the human conscience can become dulled or
seared through repeated sin (I Tim. 4:2).
A troubled conscience is not merely problematic for individuals, but can
become a powerful force driving social, cultural, and political
transformation. A people plagued by guilt can either bring their behavior
into accord with their morality, or they can adjust their morality to suit
their behavior.
The first option is repentance. Paul writes that as Adam’s heirs we are
sinners (Rom. 5:12) dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1). However,
as the new Adam, Jesus stared down the great tempter in the wilderness and
lived a perfect and sinless life. He became our representative in
obedience. Moreover, in His atoning death, “many will be made righteous”
by the imputation of His righteousness to those who accept His work in
faith and turn from their disobedience.
The ideal is a conscience freed from guilt that is Biblically informed and
able to lead us toward holiness. Christ said that if we abide in His Word
and know Him that we will know the truth. For “if the Son makes you free,
you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). In Galatians, that great epistle of
Christian Liberty, Paul says that we are to “stand fast,” or cling
tenaciously, to the liberty “by which Christ has made us free.”
Paul goes on to say that Christ’s death frees His adopted children not
only from the curse of the Law, but from the yolk of man’s guilt. Paul
says in Romans 8:1 that, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those
who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but
according to the Spirit.”
As a culture becomes progressively de-Christianized, then, we should not
be surprised if guilt becomes an important ingredient in the social milieu
as more and more individuals are enslaved by it. As E. Michael Jones puts
it:
This thing called guilt is an elusive but persistent commodity. If we repress it in one area of our lives, it pops up somewhere else. If we refuse to acknowledge the atoning power of Jesus Christ and the immutability of the moral law His Church propounds, we find ourselves, not free from guilt as the propagandists would lead us to believe, but enslaved to it, consumed by it, succumbing like the most ignorant and benighted savage to ritual acts of propitiation.
Guilt will thus become an engine driving the political train as the non-believer seeks redemption through the messianic state. Rousas Rushdoony foresaw this in a prophetic little book called The Politics of Guilt and Pity:
The reality of man apart from Christ is guilt and masochism. And guilt and masochism involve the unshakable inner slavery which governs the total life of the non-Christian. The politics of the anti-Christian will thus inescapably be the politics of guilt. In the politics of guilt, man is perpetually drained of his social energy and cultural activity by his overriding sense of guilt and his masochistic activity. He will progressively demand of the state a redemptive role. What he cannot do personally, i.e., to save himself, he demands that the state do for him, so that the state, as man enlarged, becomes the human savior of man. The politics of guilt, therefore, is not directed, as the Christian politics of liberty, to the creation of godly justice and order, but to the creation of a redeeming order, a saving state. Guilt must be projected, therefore, on all those who oppose this new order and new age.
Thus we have so-called “liberal guilt,” driven by the
fury of secularism.
But Paleoconservative writer and historian Paul Gottfried has identified
another source as the wellspring of social guilt – Protestantism. In
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Gottfried argues that
Protestant cultures “stress individual redemptive experience and giving
witness thereto.” Moreover, says Gottfried, while Catholics ritualize
repentance, the Protestant practice is done in public. “It is a means of
showing the righteousness of the redeemed sinner and underscores the power
of divine grace in a fallen world,” says Gottfried.
Gottfried largely identifies guilt-mongering with liberal Protestantism.
And, indeed, one will find a great deal of hand-wringing about “racism,”
sexism,” “homophobia,” etc., among liberal Protestant theologians and in
the public statements of various denominations. He argues, in effect, that
Protestantism has inherent theological tendencies toward guilt and the
rejection of social hierarchy and authority in favor of individualism. But
what Gottfried identifies isn’t so much liberal Protestantism as
liberalism itself.
Unfortunately, the overweening guilt Gottfried identifies is not merely
confined to the PCUSA or the United Methodists. Indeed, plenty of emoting
about slavery, racism, and anti-Semitism has come from conservative
Protestant denominations, such as my own Southern Baptist Convention, and
parachurch ministries such as Promise Keepers.
Not to be outdone, Pope John Paul II has done plenty of groveling in
recent years, too. He has apologized to Protestants for the Inquisition,
Jews for the Holocaust, Muslims for the Crusades, and even the Greek
Orthodox Church.
In effect, liberalism as an ideology has infected all Christian sects in
the last century, and blame for this should not be laid solely at the feet
of Protestants. This liberalism has been employed by the managerial elite
as an instrument to bludgeon any and all opposition to the ruling class.
Indeed, virtually every anti-Christian political movement (statism,
feminism, egalitarianism, homosexualism, internationalism, etc.) is driven
by the politics of guilt.
Here as elsewhere, so much of the blame for our current plight must be
laid at the feet of Christians and an impotent Church. As Christ’s
ambassadors, we must preach a Gospel that liberates rather then enslaves
and live in the freedom that Christ died to give us. We must not seek our
salvation in the arms of an omnipotent, idolatrous state, but in the
loving arms of the Lamb of God who died to reconcile us to the Father.
September 12, 2004
Darrell Dow writes from Jeffersonville, Indiana. He is a sinner saved by God’s grace, husband of Kathy, and father to Andrew and Joshua. In his spare time, he maintains a website and a blog. He can be reached for comment here.