Friends: Humanity’s spiritual sin debt is settled in hope and sacrifice, while our modern spiritual social debt is mired in irresolution. The right hand needs to understand what the left hand is doing … and fast.  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #932

September 24, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Debt Load   

By Bob Walters

“…forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus, Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6:12

In the beginning, there was debt.

With only barely-necessary apologies to Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning,” etc.) – whether considering Genesis 3, the Code of Hammurabi, Plato’s Republic, Jesus and Paul in the New Testament, or humanity’s march through history – we see justice, price, and the paying of debts as the “central consideration from the very beginning of human civilization … No agreed understanding of debt, no civilization.”

So asserts Georgetown political theorist Joshua Mitchell in his recent First Things article, The Age of Incomplete Religions. (Link below.)  Yes, Mitchell does a laudable, circumspect job of assessing the Christian, historical, and political ubiquity of debt in human interaction.  But his assessment of contemporary social debt, I think, is brilliant.

As we wonder and lament why so much of current western civilization makes so little sense, Mitchell’s description of the pervasive, incomplete religion of identity politics lays out a coherent and rational – if disturbing – description of debts and economies.

As sin debt is unpayable by us, so is our social debt to the perpetually offended.

While Jesus settled sin debt on the cross to bring forgiven believers back to God, the social debt charged to us by the identitarian left perpetually boils in a cauldron of hate.  It is not forgiveness that is sought or even on offer.  Just, agree … or be purged.

Mitchell makes the good point that long trusted, conservative political kill-shot descriptives like “Marxist,” “Communist,” and “Progressive” are now neutered.  Bernie Sanders’s Marxism, for example, isn’t the enemy; the enemy is Identity Politics.

On a fervored religious par with Christianity, this unpayable social debt of grievance-based politics is the incomplete religion about which Mitchell writes.  Christianity is complete because it divinely shepherds us into the eternal. Any number of social movements in history (The Terror of the French Revolution, for example) or today guarantee only a pious busyness in this life of inconsequential, self-made angst. 

Wokeness, LGBTQ, Critical Race Theory and the rest constitute an overall religion that offers no salvation and won’t follow one’s soul into the grave.  Or, maybe it will, but the religion itself is temporal and only of this world.  What happens next?

Let’s just say I’d rather be right with Jesus.

Mitchell tracks conservative confusion regarding this new “truth,” if you will, to previously understood human debt in three categories. One is the spiritual debt about which we are speaking, and the other two are economic and traditional debt.  Economic debt is about money; traditional debt is about what we owe our fathers (both Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, etc., and our parents). Conservatives understand them.

A Christian’s spiritual debt is vertical … it goes upwards to God.  Social debt, in a telling turn of phrase, goes sideways.  It is demanded by the all-virtuous “pure, mortal, innocent victim groups,” i.e., the liberal left, from “impure, mortal, transgressor groups,” i.e. the conservative right. Forgiveness is not on the table, but civilization is on the line.

Politically, and in light of the election, may I suggest we know left from right.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) highly recommends The Age of Incomplete Religions.