Transcription
You've seen these people on social media: the female pastor doing a land acknowledgement before the service, the gay minister explaining to his congregation why they need to repent for slavery, the youth group leader wearing a rainbow scarf leading a moment of lament for colonization. This isn't Christianity. This is Hindu karma. You were born owing a debt for what people who came before you did, and there's nothing you can do to pay it off. This is racial blood guilt. You're guilty because someone who shared your skin color did bad things hundreds of years ago. This is the tribal blood feud. Your great-grandfather killed mine, so you owe me a life.
Here's the truth about these progressive Christians. They aren't Christian at all. They're pagans. Every major worldview in human history, except one, holds the group responsible for the sins of the individual and the individual responsible for the sins of his ancestors. Christianity is the exception. Christianity teaches that a son does not bear his father's guilt, that your skin color doesn't determine whether you're innocent or guilty, that every man stands before God on his own record. And that conviction built the West. Innocent till proven guilty. Due process. No bloodline can condemn you, and no ancestor's debt is yours to pay. So, when these fake Christians preach inherited guilt, they're not preaching the Christian gospel. They're resurrecting the paganism our faith was built to destroy.
Before Christianity, every civilization on Earth ran on collective guilt. Ancient China, pagan Rome, the Germanic tribes, the Aztec Empire. In all of them, you were born owing a debt for what people who came before you did, and you would die owing a debt your descendants would inherit. The clearest version that still survives today is Hinduism, and a billion people still live under it. Hinduism sorts everyone at birth into rigid social classes that determine who you can marry, what you can do for work, and how much you're worth as a human being. At the bottom are the untouchables, born owing a debt from past lives they can't remember and they can't repent of. There's no working your way up. There's no paying it off. You're just born owing. And Hinduism isn't alone. Honor killings are still common across the Middle East and parts of Africa. Fathers and brothers murdering daughters and sisters when the family's honor is questioned. Sometimes a woman did something the family disapproved of. Sometimes she was raped. Sometimes nothing happened at all and the rumor was enough. She pays the price either way.
Christianity is the only worldview in human history that broke this. Now, somebody's going to bring up Judaism and Islam. Judaism does reject blood guilt, but Judaism has never worked to transform other nations. The principle stays inside Israel. Christianity is the first faith called to take the rejection of blood guilt to every culture on earth and the only faith that actually did. Islam claims the same principle on paper. In Sura 17:15, it says, "No soul shall bear the burden of another." But, where's the Islamic civilization that built that principle into law? They run on honor killings, on blasphemy laws that punish whole families, on blood feuds that grind on for generations. The Quran says one thing, but the cultures it produces does the opposite. Christianity is the only revelation in history that both rejects group guilt and produces civilizations that run on it.
But the blood guilt is back and it's being preached from American pulpits. In many so-called Christian churches, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo was required reading. In it, DiAngelo argues that white people are thoroughly socialized into the racist culture in which we were born and that a racism-free upbringing is not possible. Translation, you were born guilty by skin color and there's nothing you can do about it. Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today, has spent years calling white evangelicals to repent for what their grandfathers did. He keeps invoking complicity, a word that means partnership in the sin itself. The Presbyterian Church USA actually wrote a litany of repentance for white members to read aloud in worship. It opens, "As white Christians, we repent of our complicity in the belief in white supremacy." This is their liturgy. Liturgy is the script of corporate worship. It's the words a church says together to praise God, to remember what he's done, to ask for what we need, and confess sin to him. It's how a congregation glorifies God for what he did for us through Christ. And they've perverted it into a pagan blood ritual.
And the most literal version of blood guilt the progressive church not only allows, but actually celebrates is abortion. The child killed for the sins of the parents. Look, Carthage did this, the Aztecs did this, Rome did this. Christianity ended it, and these monsters bring it back and call it faith. Here's what scripture actually says. "Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their fathers." Deuteronomy 24:16. And Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:10, "For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that each one may receive what is due for the things done in the body, whether good or evil." Fathers don't die for sons. Sons don't die for fathers. Every man answers for what he did.
Pagan honor cultures ran on hereditary punishment. Your father's crime was your debt to pay, your children's debt to pay after you. English common law, built by Christians, rejected this with a doctrine called corruption of blood. A traitor's children inherit none of his guilt. But look at the Islamic world today. Honor killings of family members for a relative's transgression. Blood feuds running for generations. Same with slavery. Pagan civilization ran on hereditary slavery. You were either born owning or you were owned. Christian abolitionists ended the legal slave trade in every Christian majority nation by the 19th century. But meanwhile, a billion people in India still live under caste, born into hereditary station that they cannot escape. Why? Because Christianity never penetrated India and hasn't overturned the Vedic system.
Christianity is the only force in human history that ever made collective blood guilt obsolete on a civilizational scale. And where it hasn't deeply penetrated, it still exists today. And wherever Christianity retreats, it comes right back. Which is exactly what we're watching happen right now. The world was made good. And then sin broke it. And one of the ways it broke was that mankind started believing they had to inherit another's guilt and pay for another's debts. Children born owing for what their fathers did. Whole tribes condemned by the blood in their veins or the melanin in their skin. Christ came to set it right. He went to the cross to set us free from sin and from shame and from guilt. That's what the cross bought. Freedom. And we carry that freedom out to the Hindu born under caste, to the Muslim trapped in honor codes, to the white kid told he was born guilty for what dead men did. Every culture still running on inherited guilt is a culture waiting to hear that the debt has already been paid.
When Christ established his church, he launched a restoration project the world has never seen the end of. Christians have been carrying it forward for 2,000 years. You belong to a faith that ended legal slavery, broke the doctrine of hereditary guilt, and built the legal foundations of every free nation on earth. So pick up the work. You inherited the restoration project to make earth look more like heaven. One church, one school, one family at a time.