We live in a highly spiritualized age, I argue, when we believe that our ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken but actually evil. We live with religious anxiety when we expect our attitudes toward social questions to explain our goodness and our salvation. The anxiety appears today on too much of both the left and right, but it’s hard to imagine a clearer case of the theological origins of this spiritualizing of secular politics than the perceived guilt of white privilege. 

1. The Return of Original Sin

Every day she must search her conscience. Every day she must confront her flaws—discern the dark that dwells within her, seek the grace to turn toward the light. Oh, she is a moral person, she believes: good willed and determined to do good deeds, instructing us all about the heart’s deep iniquity. But even she, Kim Radersma, a former schoolteacher now preaching our bondage to sin—even she still feels the fault inside her. Even she must struggle to be saved. And if someone like Kim Radersma has to fight the legacy of inner evil, think of all that you must do. Think how far you are from grace, when you do not even yet know that you are lost and blind.

In another age, Radersma might have been a revivalist out on the sawdust circuit, playing the old forthright hymns on a wheezy harmonium as the tent begins to fill. In a different time, she might have been a temperance lecturer, inveighing in her passion-raw voice against the evils of the Demon Rum. In days gone by, she might have been a missionary to heathen China, or an author of Bible Society tracts, or the Scripture-quoting scourge of civic indifference—railing to the city-council members that they are like the Laodiceans in Revelation 3:16, neither hot nor cold, and God will spew them from his mouth.

But all such old American Christian might-have-beens are unreal in the present world, for someone like Kim Radersma. Mockable, for that matter, and many of her fellow activists today identify Christianity with the history of all that they oppose. She wouldn’t know a theological doctrine or a biblical quotation if she ran into it headlong. And so Radersma now fights racism: the deep racism that lurks unnoticed in our thoughts and in our words and in our hearts.

The better to gird herself for the struggle, she gave up teaching high-school students to attend the Ph.D. program in Critical Whiteness Studies at Ontario’s Brock University. But even such total immersion is not enough to wash away the stain of inherited sin. “I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body,” she testified to a teachers’ conference on white privilege this spring. “I have to choose every day to do antiracist work and think in an antiracist way.”

Radersma is hardly alone in feeling this way (except perhaps for the peculiar bit about racist actions in her body). Discussions of the kind of racial privilege that she hates have been much in the news. A Prince-ton undergraduate named Tal Fortgang, for example, received considerable notice for a student newspaper column in which he recounted the Holocaust suffering and hard work of his family, all to explain why he rejected Ivy League demands that he identify himself as racially and economically privileged. Television host Bill O’Reilly mocked a “Checking Your Privilege” orientation program at Harvard, claiming to be exempt from white privilege himself because he had to find jobs while he was young. And the response from any number of commentators was that Fortgang and O’Reilly just didn’t get it. Just didn’t grasp the insidious way the shared guilt of racism appears in the form of white privilege. Just didn’t see their own sinfulness.

So profound is the sin, in fact, that not even its proponents escape. The more they are aware of white privilege, the more they see it everywhere, even in themselves. “There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased,” admitted University of Texas professor Robert Jensen in an essay assigned to Wisconsin high-school students in 2013. At the Daily Beast website, columnist Sally Kohn added that “racial bias is baked” into American history. “It’s just something we all learn to do.” She did note the nearly universal condemnation that met explicitly racist comments from the likes of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and California billionaire Donald Sterling this year. But all that, she insisted, actually distracts from awareness of the real racism that dwells in every white American heart.

Some of this, of course, derives from the perception of actual economic and social effects still lingering in the long aftermath of racial slavery and segregation. But taken just as a concept, considered purely in its moral shape, white privilege is something we’ve seen before—for the idea is structurally identical to the Christian idea of original sin. Indeed, the relation involves more than just a logical parallel, the natural contours of any idea about shared guilt and inherited fault. Historically and genealogically (as Nietzsche taught us to phrase such things), there is a clear path that leads from original sin, in which the most advanced Americans once commonly believed, to the idea of white privilege that they now assume.

In my book An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, I note that the Protestant churches in early America were widely divided on theological and ecclesial issues—and yet they somehow joined to form what Alexis de Tocqueville would call the nation’s “undivided current of manners and morals.” We can debate how long-lasting and all-encompassing that central Protestantism really was, but many of those churches would eventually coalesce into the denominations of the Protestant mainline, and the collapse in recent decades of the mainline churches (from around 50 percent of the nation in 1965 to under 10 percent today) remains one of the most astonishing cultural changes in American history.

And with that mainline collapse, a set of spiritual concerns, once contained and channeled by the churches, was set free to find new homes in our public conflicts. We live in a highly spiritualized age, I argue, when we believe that our ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken but actually evil. We live with religious anxiety when we expect our attitudes toward social questions to explain our goodness and our salvation. The anxiety appears today on too much of both the left and right, but it’s hard to imagine a clearer case of the theological origins of this spiritualizing of secular politics than the perceived guilt of white privilege.

From the Puritans to the nineteenth century, the central current of American culture held a generally Calvinist view of original sin as injuring the whole of human nature. In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all, as the old New England Primer taught generations of schoolchildren. Corrupted with concupiscence and pride, expelled from the garden, we lost the ability to do the good with proper motives, even if weakened reason were able to discern what that good might be.

Early in the twentieth century, however, the main denominations of liberal American Protestantism gradually came to a new view of sin, understanding our innate failings as fundamentally social rather than personal. Crystallized by Walter Rauschenbusch’s influential Christianity and the Social Crisis(1907), the Social Gospel movement saw such sins as militarism and bigotry as the forces that Christ revealed in his preaching—the social forces that crucified him and the social forces against which he was resurrected. Not that Christ mattered all that much in the Social Gospel’s construal. Theological critics from John Gresham Machen in the 1920s to Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1950s pointed out that the Social Gospel left little for the Redeemer to do: Living after his revelation, what further use do have we of him? Jesus may be the ladder by which we climbed to a higher ledge of morality, but once there, we no longer need the ladder.

Millions of believing Christians still populate the United States, of course: evangelicals and Catholics and the remaining members of the mainline churches. Demographically, America is still an overwhelmingly Christian country. But the Social Gospel’s loss of a strong sense of Christ facilitated the drift of congregants—particularly the elite and college-educated classes—out of the mainline that had once defined the country. Out of the churches and into a generally secularized milieu.

They did not leave empty-handed. Born in the Christian churches, the civil rights movement had focused on bigotry as the most pressing of social sins in the 1950s and 1960s, and when the mainline Protestants began to leave their denominations, they carried with them the Christian shape of social and moral ideas, however much they imagined they had rejected Christian content. How else can we understand the religious fervor with which white privilege is preached these days—the spiritual urgency with which its proponents describe a universal inherited guilt they must seek out behind even its cleverest masks? Their very sense of themselves as good people, their confidence in their salvation from the original sin of American culture, requires all this.

In order to believe in white privilege, however—in order to feel the universal guilt of it—we must also believe in the necessary ground for the idea: a widespread American racism, however unrecognized, that is the current form of the same old social sins that gave us slavery and segregation. It “drives me nuts,” writes Sally Kohn, that “to avoid acknowledging racial bias in America, conservatives have taken to accusing those of us who point out racial bias as being racist.” Kohn’s example comes from the reaction to congresswoman Barbara Lee’s claim that a “thinly veiled” racism lurks behind descriptions of cultural problems in black neighborhoods. Lee was promptly attacked by several commentators who pointed out that she was exhibiting her own kind of racism, exempting blacks from the cultural analysis that would be directed at any other group.

The trouble is that those commentators seem right almost by definition: It surely is racist to single out a particular racial group for special treatment. Or, at least, Lee’s comments appear racist within a particular way of understanding racism as the reduction of social, political, and cultural issues to matters of race.

So why does someone like the liberal activist Sally Kohn complain that the conservative reply to Lee is an “insult” and an “Orwellian” abuse of language? Mostly because she too is right about racism. Or, at least, she is right if we accept her spiritualized way of understanding the idea. Even while she writes that she does not assign “blame or guilt or punishment,” Kohn sees race in America much as Kim Radersma and Robert Jensen do, with racism shaped into inherited sin: a moral blight in the American mind that “consciously or unconsciously” creates racial bias even in the absence of explicit racism. “Racial bias is like the proverbial water in the fish tank,” Kohn points out. “It’s there all around us, always, whether we realize it or not.”

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