Personal Responsibility and Systemic Sin

Conservatives: Cumulative, Communal Sin Is Biblical

To the right, I want to say this: You cannot explain everything in society based on personal responsibility alone. This isn’t being attentive enough to the whole of what the Bible says. There are certainly verses and passages that focus on personal responsibility, but they must be held right alongside doctrines like original sin. You see, if personal responsibility was the determinate of all, we would be forced to say some people were burdened with sin and others free of it. But the fact that all are burdened with original sin means that sin has a cumulative, collective pattern to it. It compounds and builds up in families and societies. It is not just wiped away because some of society feel they have moved on. It is not just wiped away because some of society’s systems have been reformed. No, systems that caused injustice affected present outcomes for the privileged and underprivileged, and that has long-term implications for society.

Noah Filipiak puts it well when he says:

I wonder though, when it comes to race, why we feel like the only reason we’d need to do anything intentional or proactive about it is if we had done something really racist.  It’s like our mentality is, “Well I never owned a slave, so I don’t need to acknowledge or do anything about racial inequality.  In fact, that’s un-American!  Those people need to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and stop blaming me for their problems.”  Yet, we don’t use this mentality when it comes to other social injustices and oppression.

We’ll pay to give microloans to those in extreme poverty in Haiti as a way of helping them get themselves out of the extreme poverty inflicted on them by decades of governmental corruption and oppression.  When asked to donate to World Relief for this purpose, no one has ever once said to me, “I’m not an oppressor, I didn’t put them in that situation, how dare you accuse me of that!?  And so why would I need to do anything about it?”  No, in this type of injustice situation, we are able to see objectively (and with the eyes and heart of Christ) that these people have been put into the disadvantage they are in due to a history of oppression.  We don’t claim it’d be “un-American” to help them or that they need to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”  We realize they haven’t been given hardly any bootstraps to pull, through no fault of their own.  The bootstraps they were supposed to have were snipped off long ago.  And what they need is not a handout, nor are they asking for a handout, they are simply asking for a level playing field.  A microloan is an attempt to give them that.  We have an advantage and privilege as whites that our history wasn’t marked by that type of oppression and disadvantage, thus we have the means to help those in Haiti who were, and many of us do.

Why can’t we apply the same principles to the racial inequities we face in America today?  You don’t need to feel guilty about the long bootstraps you were born with.  Nor do you need to throw judgmental stones at people of color (or people like me trying to have a conversation about this), telling them to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop blaming our country’s past for their current problems.

In Numbers, we are told this:

“The Lord is slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love,
forgiving iniquity and transgression,
but by no means clearing the guilty,
visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children
to the third and the fourth generation.”–14:18 NRSV

The visiting of the iniquity on the children to the third and fourth generation is the playing out of natural consequences. If systemic sin were impossible, how would one explain this passage?

What we have reaped in the United States is the fruit of the sin of our ancestors–especially those who oppressed fellow human beings simply because they were black. The natural consequences to human relationships, to race relations, to poverty, to hostilities–all of that comes from the heritage of the past.

It is indeed true that there were those of our ancestors who were righteous as well. In them, we take hope. From them we learn. Their example should give us moral courage for the challenges that we face in our own generation. Their example should encourage us that if we will do what is right today, as they did, there will continue to be positive natural consequences for future generations. We can build on what they began. But we must not stop and say that the work is already done. The voices of those who continue to suffer from systems of discrimination, from racial profiling, and from blatant racism (as we saw in Charleston) must be heard. We must hear our black brothers and sisters who give us very different evidence than we have seen in our white contexts. We must hear how even the most law-abiding citizens fear for their safety at the hands of discrimination and at the hands of those in law enforcement who misuse their power. Take a moment and read just one example, that of Pastor Leonce Crump.