Introduction
Ever since the Garden of Eden, mankind has wanted someone or something to blame for the evil of the world. Adam blamed “the woman,” and the woman blamed the serpent, and they would have blamed the Jews if there had been any. But God in His mercy told the truth: “because you have done this.” I call this the dignity of guilt. Blame-shifting is not merely a lie; it is not merely an abdication of responsibility; it is also a fundamental denial of personal moral agency and therefore, a form of self-loathing. Regardless of what others have done, you always have a choice – a powerful choice before God, will you obey or disobey? The dignity of guilt insists that your choices matter, and in so doing, insists that you matter. But abdication, excuses, and blame-shifting are all ironically paths of self-loathing. Wallowing in victimhood is an attempt to wallow in a self-destroying meaninglessness.
Aaron did this: “thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief” (Ex. 32:22). Saul also blamed the people: “the people took of the spoil” (1 Sam. 15:21). And Adam really could point to “the woman.” They could all “notice” the actions of others, but the fundamental problem was that they had disobeyed the word of the Lord. If some other person or group of people can be successfully identified as uniquely malevolent, the antithesis can shifted – even if only slightly. The focus might be a little less excruciatingly on me but spread out to include others. But the irony is that this move necessarily means that you matter less: it’s an attempt to recede into the background that turns out to be the outer darkness. And the real antithesis bleeds through with the bitterness: behind the supposed unique malevolence of that other person or collection of people stands God Himself who allowed it: “the woman whom thou gavest to be with me” (Gen. 3:12). All blame-shifting is a self-destroying attempt to blame God.
David, by contrast, re-centers the antithesis after his sin with Bathsheba and the arranged murder of Uriah: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight” (Ps. 51:4). While it was true that a number of other people had also been sinned against, and there were other factors and contributors to David’s sin (e.g. Joab’s bloody compliance), David confessed that the real antithesis was between him and God. The central evil in the world is the rebellion of individual men against their Maker. God is good all the time, and we are not. God is not the author of evil. We are. This is the cause of genocides, sexual infidelity, every virulent strain of cultural destruction. The nations rage and plot vain things against the Lord and against His Christ, but all the hatreds and enmities of men are only the echo of their curses flung at Heaven — which curses always boomerang back at those who fling them. To defy God is to defy the very source of your life. To curse God is to curse yourself. To blame God or the way He has allowed history or even just your story to unfold is to commit a kind of moral and metaphysical suicide.
Ethnic Sin & Antisemitism
But because men only rarely want to acknowledge that their beef is with God, they frequently fixate on others, and in the course of human history, this routinely results in various ethnic animosities. The first and by far most prevalent human enmity is sexual, between men and women, using and abusing one another, but right after that comes ethnic sin. As Douglas Wilson has noted, ethnic sin is always a matter of vainglory, malice, or a separatism based on vainglory or malice (or both). Vainglory is sinful pride in one’s ethnicity, and malice is sinful hatred of others for their ethnicity. Sinful separatism is simply the fig leaf of “prudence” or “tradition” or “natural law” attempting to cover the shameful nakedness of that vainglory or malice.
Historically, this ethnic malice has often also settled on the Jews. Douglas Wilson’s definition of antisemitism captures the point: “Antisemitism is the notion that Jews are uniquely malevolent and destructive in their cultural, economic, and political influence in the world.” You could replace the first word with “sinful hatred” and “Jews” with any number of other identifiers: “women” or “men” or “blacks” or “whites” or “Muslims” or “communists” or “nazis,” and you’d have a quick list of other sinful enmities.
It is certainly true that some sins and crimes are worse than others: “some sins in themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are more heinous in the sight of God than others” (Westminster Larger Catechism, 150). But it is a point of basic biblical orthodoxy that no sinner is himself more heinous in the sight of God than others, and thus, there is no group of people that are more heinous in themselves. Certain groups of people may for a time conspire together to commit more heinous sins and crimes, which are “by reason of several aggravations” “more heinous in the sight of God than others,” but there is nothing unique in their DNA as far as sinfulness goes. It is all the same sinful, Adamic nature.
Yes, it is also true that groups of people at different times and across generations are allowed by God’s providence to grow in the heinousness of their iniquities (like the Amorites of Canaan), but that is not a unique power on their part; it is a unique providence on God’s part, who ordinarily restrains our evil hearts by His common grace. As 16thcentury English Reformer and martyr, John Bradford said, “But for the grace of God, there go I.” And this sentiment is actually the foundation of all moral agency and civilizational greatness. To the extent that western civilization has been great, it has been great because of the widespread conviction of that statement. It has been great because of the doctrine of Original Sin.
America and the Christian West have been magnificent beacons of liberty and justice and opportunity precisely because most folks have known that there is nothing in our material circumstances that prevents our breaking out in the most heinous of evils. And all the most heinous evils occur in their seed forms in the chest of every human being. Rape, adultery, murder, genocide? Jesus said those seeds are in your heart if you’ve lusted, if you’ve cursed your brother. There is nothing in white genes or black genes or male or female genes or Jew or Gentile genes that restrains our fallen impulses. There is no difference. It is only the grace of God. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). As young Americans learned their alphabet for centuries, “In Adam’s fall; we sinned all.” This is what made America great. What made us great was the confession that all deserve God’s eternal wrath. All deserve Hell. This includes Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, and every stripe of unbeliever, even the kind that have been baptized and take communion, who have the audacity to draw near to the Lord with their lips but whose hearts are far from Him.
All of this is to underline the point that when it comes to interpreting evil in the world, the first and most fundamental truth is that each human being stands before God as a responsible moral agent, whatever material contributing factors may be in play. This is the fundamental antithesis. And this is because whatever the material factors, God is behind them all. And every subtle shift off this point is a shift toward self-loathing and self-destruction.
Defining Hatred & Love
I want to close by bringing something up that may seem like I’m changing the subject, but I assure you that I am not. Proverbs says that failure to spank your children is a form of hatred: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (Prov. 13:24). And those who fail to discipline their children are destroying themselves: “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame” (Prov. 29:15). My point in bringing this up is that love and hatred are some of the most weaponized terms in culture wars. But as Christians, love and hatred must always be defined by God in His Word. This is not merely a matter of telling the truth. It is a matter of life and death. As Wisdom says, “he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate me love death” (Prov. 8:36). Those who hate God’s wisdom hate themselves.
In our day this is done when the progressive left call sodomy and trans-surgeries “love,” but it is actually a seething hatred. It is also being done by some on the right who say they are just “noticing” that Jews perpetrate many evils in the world and object to us calling that “hate.” They say they do not hate Jews; they’re just noticing patterns. But then they should also notice the patterns of all the Jews not plotting the overthrow of western Christendom. They should simultaneously take into account the many ordinary Jews just living ordinary lives of unbelief. They should notice all the Jews winning Nobel prizes in the sciences and all the Jews doing good to their neighbors, even their Christian neighbors, even some Jews happily defending and applauding the historic goodness of Christendom and western values, not to mention all the Jews that have turned to Christ. It is sinful hatred to only notice the evils, and it is a failure to love your neighbor to refuse to notice the good. And failure to practice this kind of wisdom is a form of self-destroying loathing.
Conclusion
As Will Spencer recently pointed out, there is a real gnostic move in a lot of these conspiracy theories. It’s a dark rabbit hole that goes deeper and deeper, sucking time, energy, and resources, feeding resentments, lusts, and envies, allowing the most obsessed to feel a buzzing sensation that they mistake for wisdom. The key is that this so-called knowledge must be secret and esoteric. But it’s a false red pill. It’s a misplaced antithesis. Yes, you’ve been lied to. Yes, many hate Christ and His ways. Many want to destroy western Christendom and your way of life. But so have you. If the crucial issue is actually the Jews or blacks or whites or Nazis or the gynocracy then even for a few minutes you can pretend that the issue is not you and God.
But the point is this: to the extent that you shift the antithesis, shift the focus of the conversation, you are actually at some level joining in the conspiracy you claim to be identifying. You’re joining them in sinful hate and enmity, but you’re also even joining their hatred of you. The failure to take responsibility for your evil is a self-destroying, self-loathing move. For all the talk about the self-loathing of modern White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, one of the most self-defeating moves you can make is obsess over the evil other people. This is not some kind of cringe “judge not” banality. This is the simple point that you must take the log out of your own eye before you will be able to see clearly to take the speck from your brother’s eye. But when you do that, you must honestly admit that you have been part of the problem. And that is the beginning of wisdom and human greatness. Because only those who truly humble themselves under the mighty hand of God will be exalted, but everyone who exalts himself will be humbled.
A day will come and is soon coming when you will stand before the living God, and you will be stripped naked of all your excuses, all your blame shifting, all your grand historical narratives, and you will stand there with nothing. The only thing that will matter in that moment will be whether you are in Christ or not. If you are not in Christ, nothing will set you apart from a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, male, female, white, or black – just a naked, shriveled soul to be cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. But the glory is that if you admit that now — that at bottom the same sinful nature seethes in every one of us and that but for the grace of God, sin bursts out in soul and societal destroying ways, then you accept the dignity of guilt, the glory of moral and metaphysical meaning. If you lose your life, and deny yourself, you can find your life, and when families, communities, and nations have done that, they have found themselves in remarkable places of greatness.
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