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Viral Guilt Doesn’t Work
“In the eyes of God we’re all equally guilty,” I said. My Sunday school teacher answered, “That’s absolutely right.”
I was raised in a moderate church, but in Texas, even the mild end of Christianity tends to be pretty strong medicine. I was taught to believe in original sin and I believed in it — the steep, thorny path to Heaven and the wide and easy one to Hell. Adam and Eve ate the apple. We’d all inherited a share of their guilt. None of us, by ourselves, could live up to the standard God had set — and despite that basic inability, we were nevertheless fully individually to blame for failing.
As a teenager, I left the church bitter. I meant to reject all of that. How could I personally be at fault for what some distant ancestor did before I even existed? (My growing awareness of my own gender and sexuality didn’t help, either; if being LGBTQ wasn’t God’s plan, why did it hurt so badly to be stuck in the gender category I’d been assigned?)
Besides, I had new concerns now. As a US citizen, how could I look at the 19th century’s history of genocide, conquest, and slavery (right there in Texas!) without shame? America was born in injustice and lived in injustice. I couldn’t believe anyone at church cared like I did about the victims of oppression.