Legislating Innocence: Theology and the Politics of Guilt in Contemporary America

Since Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13950 in September 2020, bills have emerged across state legislatures to combat what the executive order described as “divisive concepts” that promote “race or sex scapegoating.” The bills differ in their targets: critical race theory, wokeism, DEI, the 1619 Project, critical assessments of meritocracy, gender theory, and so forth. Yet these bills are haunted by anxieties about sin and guilt.

Take the example of Oklahoma’s House Bill 1775, which prohibits teachers from advocating that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.” The bill also bans teaching materials that imply that anyone should feel “guilt… on account of his or her race or sex.” To this guilt, Alabama’s Senate Bill 129 adds prohibitions against “complicity, or a need to apologize.” The passage of such bills into law has been fueled by claims that school curricula make students, especially white and male students, feel guilty about histories of racism, (hetero)sexism, colonialism, and transphobia. In states like Oklahoma and Alabama, where over seventy percent of residents identify as Christian, this legislation paradoxically upends classical Protestant interpretations of original sin’s inheritance. Moreover, in rejecting guilt’s connection to race and sex, HB 1775 and SB 129 disavow social sin. 

My paper asks: what might a robust articulation of sin’s inheritance offer contemporary Christians and the broader American public to challenge the racism, sexism, colonialism, and transphobia perpetuated by this recent legislation? 

To explore this question, I turn to two significant Protestant theologians: the nineteenth-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the twentieth-century Black liberation theologian James Cone. Throughout my paper, I highlight the ambivalence of sin’s inheritance in response to this question. On the one hand, sin teaches us that there is something devastatingly wrong with a world in which we continually seek to disavow our guilt as we enact quotidian and systemic violence. On the other hand, sin’s inheritance also exemplifies just how guilty we, as Christian theologians, are. When it comes to the history of Christianity, such sinful violence abounds, and the doctrine of sin is no exception in its use to justify colonial, racial, and sexual violence (see Mark Jordan 1997, Stephen Ray 2003, Willie Jennings 2020, Kathryn Gin Lum 2022, Calli Micale 2023).

My paper proceeds in two parts. First, I examine Schleiermacher’s articulation of original sin’s transmission in terms of social and historical imbrication in The Christian Faith (§§66-74). Schleiermacher’s account of originated and originating original sin—in contrast to the proliferation of bills legislating how history must be taught—historical guilt is not confined to the past. Schleiermacher’s work on sin offers one way to articulate what James Baldwin described in his essay “The White Man’s Guilt” (1965): “History is literally present in all that we do.” Schleiermacher’s account of depravity cuts across any fantasy that we are good, deeming all—even the children in whose names such legislation is enacted—“wholly incapable” of doing, knowing, or willing the good (§70). 

Despite what Schleiermacher teaches us about sin, he also exemplifies the perils of this doctrine. I briefly consider the racialized logics of Schleiermacher’s developmental account of sin in §§67-69. Here, Schleiermacher treats sin as a contagious agent—a lingering effect of underdevelopment—that might threaten the redeemed community. This shows us the troubling character of contemporary Christianity’s inheritance of sin.

In the second part, I turn to Cone’s work on sin (1969, 1970, 1975, 2004). Cone challenges how abstract notions of sin’s universality enable white Christians to externalize sin and evade culpability. He articulates the social and systemic dimensions of sin—namely, the idolatrous existential power of white supremacy and antiblack racism. Contrary to Cone’s critics who have charged that his account of sin depends on a claim about the Black community’s innocence, I trace how Cone instead expresses the uneven distortive power of sinful attachments to whiteness across Black and white communities. 

The ambivalence of sin’s inheritance is also seen in Cone’s work. Despite Cone’s powerful account of the depravity of white supremacy and its uneven effects across racial communities, Delores Williams (1993) has pointed out the shortcomings of Cone’s work on sin when it comes to addressing the uneven dimensions of sin intra-communally, especially the harms of sexism and lesbophobia for Black women. Cone’s 1989 preface to Black Theology and Black Power grapples with this problem, confessing his embarrassment at the sexism that marked his work. When offered the opportunity to revise his 1969 edition, Cone refused: “I decided to let the language remain unchanged as a reminder of how sexist I once was and also that I might be encouraged never to forget it” (x). Here, Cone both exemplifies and reminds us that Christianity’s “farewell to innocence,” in the words of Allan Boesak (1976), “cannot be done innocently” (12-13).

In the face of the devastating proliferation of legislation about critical race theory, DEI, and related disciplines, there is a temptation to defend our pedagogies by claiming that we are not teaching about guilt. Choruses abound across American periodicals and news outlets about how effective DEI and critical race theory are really about understanding and empathy rather than blame, shame, or guilt. In response, Schleiermacher and Cone elucidate the necessity of teaching about guilt’s inheritance. Such work can challenge our impulse to refuse the bad feelings associated with guilt. However, Schleiermacher’s and Cone’s work on sin each exemplify—in very different ways—how even our ethical desires, best intentions, and theologies of sin reflect our total depravity and our impulse to sustain the fantasy of our innocence.