Post-Christian Guilt

 

Mike Gallagher asks, “Would you mind expanding on what you mean by "self-criticism grounded in inherited Christian guilt"?  This came from my essay Civilisationism.  My answer is as follows. 

We live in a post-Christian era, in that Christian influence has affected all parts of the Western world, mainly Europe and anglophone countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and our own.  It is what built our institutions into what we see today, business, legal, educational, governmental and more.  But our current era is secular; the church has little direct influence on day-to-day interactions, yet is grounded in Christ’s comment, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.”  The Muslim world does not have this separation of church and state.  Islam is both church and state, dependent on the will of Allah. 

Western guilt arises directly from the doctrine of original sin due to the Augustinian view that humanity inherits both the corruption of Adam's nature and the guilt of his actual transgression. Because every human was theoretically "in Adam's loins," this inherited guilt implicates every individual, creating an innate, lifelong sense of moral debt even before personal sins are committed.  This guilt is remediated by redemption through baptism and faith in Christ’s sacrifice.  

The previous paragraph is courtesy of Google’s AI since theology isn’t my specialty.  In terms of redemption, we see guilt affecting moral responsibility.  The West’s self-criticism of slavery, for example, is regarded with guilt, and reparations are being advocated as a form of redemption, along with destruction of statues of those who benefited the nation with its profits.  Cultures such as Islam and in Africa which engaged in far worse examples of slavery don’t feel any guilt at all.  That the West ended slavery and made it illegal throughout the world is ignored and not seen as redeeming its sinfulness.  The same goes for colonisation.  The West’s response is to assist in ‘decolonising’ both formerly colonised states and of their own.  This has clearly not benefited either party, but in terms of redemption this doesn’t matter very much.  Again, Islamic culture has colonised to a greater or lesser extent over fifty countries world-wide and feels no guilt for its irrevocability, its slaughter or its tyranny. 

There is another factor which gets little notice in terms of Western redemption of guilt, and that is the feminisation of society, in part a result of a period unique in Western history of eighty years of peace.  Helen Andrews has written about this in Compact magazine, and J Stone in The Great Feminization – women as drivers of modern social change.  The leading factor resulting from the feminisation of society is an increase in empathy, inherent in the female psyche because of the demands of motherhood.  Empathy has been wittily contrasted with sympathy by describing the latter as seeing someone struggling in a quicksand and throwing them a rope and calling for help.  The empathic person feels compelled to jump in and give the victim a hug.  In its way, this summarises much of the response we see to the results of war elsewhere in the world, only to have the West’s generosity exploited mercilessly.  

I hope this answers your question, Mike.