“Republicans want to force women who don’t want children to have them.” That’s how a New York Congressman appealed to voters in 2024.^[1] Many absurd arguments are made in public during an election year. Such arguments reveal something about the politicians’ worldview, but even more about those who accept the blather without question.

For many years, the idea that women have “freedom to choose” an abortion has held some sway over Americans. It’s a slogan that assumes complete human agency. But the appeal of the congressman’s argument that people are “forced” reflects a new stage of progressing moral absurdity. Indeed, dehumanization now extends not only to babies in the womb, but to the women and mothers themselves. The implication is that their choice to engage in sexual relations doesn’t count as a choice.^[2] Such an argument dishonors the humanity and agency of women and, further, what it means for any of us to be human.

Here is our thesis: in our age, there is an inverse relationship between victimization and personal agency. The more people are perceived as victims, the less personal responsibility they are perceived to have. As the neo-Marxist doctrine of victimization (detailed later in this article) has escalated, acknowledgment of personal agency has proportionally diminished, as if the all-powerful oppressors have rendered humans utterly helpless—like pieces of driftwood tossed about on the waves of life’s boundless sea. In other words, as the doctrine of victimization has come to dominate the culture, so has the belief in an impersonal force, often called “The Universe,” that robs individuals of agency, rendering personal decisions pointless and wholly ineffectual.

To put it more tersely, and at the risk of being rude, never in history have so many people been whining, complaining fatalists—politicians and people alike.

This argument about “force” did not win out in the 2024 U.S. election, but it did have sway with the broader American public. Why is this so? How did we get here? What does Scripture say to this?

Though the concept of victimization has gained prominence in cultural, social, and political discussions in recent years, it is hardly new. While reality constrains us to acknowledge genuine suffering and oppression exist and obligates compassion, it also requires us to acknowledge that the doctrine of perpetual victimhood—an ideology that frames individuals as powerless, blameless, and entirely at the mercy of external forces—stands in opposition to reality and starkly contradicts the teachings of Scripture. This article explores how the deceptive doctrine of victimization subverts personal agency and responsibility while emphasizing God’s irrevocable design for human beings to function as agents whose choices are consequential.

The Roots and Rise of Victimhood

Ideas indeed have consequences. So do idols. Victimization is an idol fashioned over centuries by the hands of men, with dire consequences for people and society.

A generation ago, Allan Bloom demonstrated how Jean-Jacques Rousseau “single-handedly invented the category of the disadvantaged.”^[3] Rousseau led the way in linking the assault against human culture while simultaneously calling for both the unrestrained self and compassion. The combination of these three attitudes—“hostility toward the bourgeoisie [the upper middle class], faith in the self, and the embrace of compassion”^[4]—became the policy foundation for modernity’s attitude toward culture.^[5] Bloom points out that before Rousseau, “men believed that their claim on civil society had to be based on an accounting of what they contributed to it. After Rousseau, a claim based not on a positive quality but on a lack became legitimate for the first time.”^[6]

In Rousseau’s ideal republic, society is founded on the principle of tolerance, whereby “compassion,” for the “sensitive man” (L’Homme Sensible), is not to be regarded as a sacred duty owed either to God or fellow humans but a way to refine one’s sense of self-identity and self-awareness. Consequently, for “the Romantics of the early nineteenth century, concern for the downtrodden and with human suffering became not only fashionable but a form of self-therapy and elaborate self-indulgence. Abstracted from the moral order, pity became contagious, turned first on a lengthening and shifting list of putative sufferers but ultimately back upon the se1f.”^[7] Thus Joseph Amato appropriately affirms that “Suffering itself became a vehicle for self-identity and expression.”^[8]

Consequently, obsession with self and compassion for others became inseparably linked. Genuine “moral concern had become virtually indistinguishable from aesthetic posturing.”^[9] So, as the twentieth century dawned, the revolution of ideas gave birth to a fully developed “sensitive man” who, thanks to the twentieth century’s Cultural Marxists, has become the “virtuous human” who fixates on the alleged oppressor v. oppressed dynamic, publicly signaling one’s virtue.

Hence, our therapeutic society transforms any disadvantage from a misfortune that needs to be overcome to the essence of existence and, thus, an entitlement to dependence on society. Virtue signalers coddle the alleged oppressed victim and condemn the oppressive circumstances and agents as victimizers. Two generations ago, Herbert Schlossberg correctly identified and rejected the politics of our therapeutic culture, which

exalts categories of weakness, sickness, helplessness, and anguish into virtues while it debases the strong and prosperous. In the country of ontological victimhood, strength is an affront. Denying the possibility of strength for the weak keeps them weak. Being freed from dependence would bring the victim back into the human family, responsible for himself and others. How much better to remain a victim, shielded from trouble and responsibility by altruism.^[10]

Schlossberg’s assessment appropriately applies to every form of alleged oppression. He also observes that Rousseau promoted embittered enviousness.

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