Burnham perceived the problem with contemporary American Christianity already in the early 1960s—people compartmentalized their faith. Thus, the problem of guilt lingers. Since everyone feels guilty and nobody accepts God’s forgiveness for actual sins, man finds other means of dealing with guilt. Naturally, people search for reasons they feel guilty. Wealth inequality is one area where liberals point. (Despite the fact that increased wealth inequality seems to be a feature of liberalism itself, as Patrick J. Deneen explores in Why Liberalism Failed.) It is the adoption, or acceptance, of this guilt without the Christian possibility of forgiveness that is the key to exploitation. It results in calls for reparations—or what some might find more familiar, the endless duty to purchase indulgences and engage in public acts of repentance. These acts include ritual diversity trainings and public acts of self-flagellation where one recognizes one’s white privilege.

The Liberal exploitation of Guilt and how the Church is now compromised by its pietistic urge to self-flagellation.

“I fear that this burden upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and I shall fall into Tophet.” –Pilgrim’s Progress

“Guilt, and the feeling of guilt, are facts of the human situation. Christianity, the traditional religion of Western civilization, faces the reality of guilt, provides an adequate explanation for it, and offers a resolution of the anxiety to which it inevitably gives rise.” –James Burnham, Suicide of the West

Introduction

Modern man feels guilty. Though, he does not know why since almost all have rejected or are ignorant of the Christian explanation—that we are in fact sinners and need salvation. Popular culture, political leaders and medical authorities do everything in their respective powers to eliminate, or at least medicate away, this feeling of guilt. Every urge is legitimized. Every desire is valorized. Yet still, something troubles man and woman.

So, why not exploit it? That is, in fact, what liberal elites do.[1]

The Suicide of the Church is the Suicide of the West

As James Burnham noted in the quote above, Christianity was the religion of Western Civilization. It was a bulwark against the encroachment of radical atomization. That bulwark collapsed. Now self-esteem or respect for one’s identity is the organizing principle of political society.

As political scientist Francis Fukuyama explains, “A liberal society increasingly came to be understood not just as a political order that protected certain minimal individual rights, but rather as one that actively encouraged the full actualization of the inner self.”[2]

This is the legacy of Rousseau.

It is also now the organizing principle of many evangelical churches. The church has succumbed to the culture. The salt has lost its savor.

How Elites Hide Behind Systemic Racism

Hannah Arendt observed, “When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits.” This is how systemic racism functions—it labels everyone (of one racial group) as guilty and that eliminates the need for placing specific responsibility on liberalism for its failures. White privilege and systemic racism obviates the need to examine how entitlement programs destroyed the black family. White privilege and systemic racism eliminate the need to stigmatize specific cases of racism among the Elites. Instead, this allows the burden of guilt for racist policies of the past to be shared between the Elites (who ruled) and the rest of society who simply toiled in obscurity.

This is a specific gambit of all Critical Social Justice. It is why Thabiti Anyabwile, pastor and a leader in The Gospel Coalition and the Southern Baptist Convention, blamed all white people for the political assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Notice that he blames all white people and not specific leaders—this places the burden of repentance just as much on the 19th century illiterate hillbilly as racist elites like President Woodrow Wilson.

He writes, “I know Dr. King’s life was much greater than his death. I understand that his death gives us opportunity to reflect on his legacy. But it also gives opportunity to reflect on that twist in our soul that rose up and killed him. It gives opportunity to repent of the things some have with too much pride too often refused to admit is there. My white neighbors and Christian brethren can start by at least saying their parents and grandparents and this country are complicit in murdering a man who only preached love and justice.”

All our parents and grandparents were complicit in Dr. King’s murder? All white people should repent for the sins of their parents and grandparents? This hardly seems like the message of Christ and His Gospel.

While this is a tool of the Elite to escape its responsibility for generations of bad policy, why are Evangelicals adopting the same message and pointing this venom at the conservatives sitting in the pew?

Manipulation. And manipulation yields grift and power.

One of the best examples of the Social Justice grift is Dr. Walter Strickland’s UnifiED. This is an organization that provides diversity and multicultural training to Christian organizations and schools. This organization recently partnered with the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) to provide this dangerous training to K-12 Christian schools. (See more: ACSI partners with Critical Race Theory promoter.) For a fee, UnifiEd will train you via the latest and best analytical tools of racial identity politics suitably synthesized with Biblical sounding platitudes.

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