Sins of the Father

This was written by Gabe, one of our student interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (Gen. 3:6-7).

According to Catholic Dogma, when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, they irreversibly changed the course of human history. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, a summation of the beliefs of the Catholic faithful, plainly describes the Fall: “Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of. All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness” (Catholic Church 397).

Sin itself is defined in relation to what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. When one sins in the present day, it is not only because of, but in the same base manner of the Original Sin: “All men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as St. Paul affirms: ‘By one man’s disobedience many (that is, all men) were made sinners’: ‘sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned’” (Catholic Church 402).

The “sins of the father”, so to speak, do indeed follow the descendants in Christian theology. Though contracted, rather than committed, the ills remain and perpetuate the original sin all the same. Sin may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about it.

So, how do you get rid of original sin?

Deliberate, clear action. In Christianity, it comes in the form of Baptism, a literal washing away of original sin. This is not to say that one is absolved of all future sins through Baptism, rather that it is the first step in living a faithful life.

Racism is America’s original sin. The Founding Fathers were wealthy, white, land-owning and often slave-owning men. This is objective truth. We know every name on every document. We have the “hard history” of each person involved in the framing of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. But history is more than dates and names: it involves understanding the motives, circumstances, and decisions that guided the people of the past. We can say that laws like the Stamp Act were causes of the Revolutionary War, and that would be true, but doing only that and declaring it “History” paints an incomplete picture of the multifaceted reality these people lived. Their reality included founding a free nation based on the “Rights of Man” with “Liberty and Justice for all” yet maintaining the enslavement of Africans as an institution. A nation cannot accurately describe itself as free while allowing slavery. It is an affront to human dignity and antithetical to the ideology of the founding documents.

The Civil War, arguably, was America’s Baptism, in which the initial stain spread across the nation was first washed away. But Baptism does not prevent future sins, nor did the Civil War prevent future racism. We have the hard history. The phrase “Jim Crow laws” appeared as early as 1884. The “Separate but Equal” laws of the Southern United States existed as plain and deliberate ways to segregate Black Americans from civil society. Poll taxes and literacy tests were created to prevent full suffrage and maintain white power structures which had established themselves in state governments across the South. Such firm injustices require equally firm justices to undo the harm they have caused.

All Americans, especially those who most reflect the Founding Fathers—that is, white Americans—bear the original sin of the Founding Fathers. This does not mean they themselves have sinned, rather that they are able to sin and are more likely to replicate the original sin. It will take deliberate and clear work to absolve the nation of those sins. We cannot change the past. We cannot make the Founding Fathers not slave owners. We cannot make the Founding Fathers not white. We cannot separate America’s past from America’s present. What we can do, however, is understand what happened, why it happened, how it still lingers today, and what that means for us now.

Critical Race Theory helps us to recognize those failings in American history. If we are to maintain our understanding of original sin theologically, we must also approach America’s historicity with a more encompassing lens than what we use now. To have an accurate and nuanced discussion of CRT, we must understand exactly what it is. According to Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist, “Critical race theory is a practice. It’s an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.” Fundamentally, theory is not history; rather, theory is how we approach history. Critical Race Theory is not attempting to “rewrite” history, but instead, approaching it in a way our current understandings are not equipped to do. We can see the creation of the Constitution merely as a cementation of American Law, or we can ask ourselves why the Framers included what they did. How did that influence the past and how does it continue to influence the present? What were the political motivations behind the three-fifths compromise? How did the reality of the three-fifths compromise affect political posturing and power in the United States leading up to the Civil War? What were the effects on power balances following the abolition of slavery and, by extension, the three-fifths compromise?

The introduction and use of Critical Race Theory has been at the center of recent debates over school curricula in the US in these past few months. Just last month, members of the Rockwood school district assembled a forum with Missouri State Senators Andrew Koenig and Cindy O’Laughlin to debate the implementation of Critical Race Theory in the Rockwood school district. It was tense. One mother from Clayton went so far as to claim the teaching of Critical Race Theory was indeed “Child Abuse”.

Nevermind that the debate itself centered around something that isn’t happening—the Rockwood School Board plainly stated in a May 6^th address, “the Rockwood School District is not teaching Critical Race Theory”—the room was packed, and statements drew applause and boos from the predominantly white crowd. One mother, close to tears, declared “When I hear people calling us racists, it actually hurts my heart… And just because I do not want Critical Race Theory taught to my children in school does not mean I’m a racist, dammit!” Then, breaking for applause, she concluded by saying “We love God” and offering an ultimately generic statement that she loves people regardless of skin color or political identity.

Racism is a sin. Not only is it a sin, but “every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design” (Catholic Church 1935). Christianity is a critical piece of American history. Now, 250 years after the founding of this nation, we as Christians need to recognize how our faith has been used to perpetuate America’s original sin and how we as individuals have benefitted from or furthered America’s original sin. It won’t be a perfect process; I would be more surprised if it was. It will be messy and uncertain, that’s okay. America is allowed to be not okay. It is not only allowed, but right and good that we can look upon the past and recognize that the figures who founded this nation were not gods, but humans; humans who were both good and bad, whose imperfect realities were reflected in their actions, and whose consequences we witness today. It is a more comprehensive history, it is a more true history, and it is the first step in equipping ourselves to think critically about the nation we live in to make it the best nation it can be. The Declaration of Independence was composed 245 years ago. If we are to truly “hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” then we must acknowledge the original sin of our Founders, and work tirelessly to heal the wounds that sin has caused and continues to cause when left unchecked.