CRT: Is sin at the heart of social injustice?

My previous post focused on the relationship between social structures and personal responsibility, and the light shed on this matter by Catholic social teaching. Today, we will take on board two responses to Critical Race Theory which offer Catholic insights into the nature of grave social injustices and, therefore, how best to overcome them.

First, an overview by Jesuit priest Andrew Hamilton:

Critical Race Theory itself developed out of a wider discussion among lawyers about the importance of the social context in the interpretation and administration of law. It asked whether legislation was influenced by such factors as the race, wealth, social standing, gender and religion of the legislators, and whether the administration of the law by lawyers, judges and police was influenced by similar factors.

These questions led them further to ask whether such biases prevented those involved and society at large from seeing the prejudice and partiality of their decisions and actions. In other words, whether the system was rigged, and its kings unclothed. And if so, what was the proper response.

CRT is a field of study based in social psychology which has to do with the effects of social relationships on personal attitudes and beliefs, and so on institutions. It is not a set of conclusions but an enquiry in which radical and less radical views on all sides can be stated and questioned. Its focus on race reflects the attention given to racial discrimination in the United States.

The Second Vatican Council committed Catholics to associate concretely with movements for justice and change in the world. In so doing, they found themselves in the company of people who had a similar thirst for justice but located the obstacle to change not in personal sin but on social structures that perpetuated injustice. 

The emphasis on social structures and on a conflictual approach to social reform led Catholics naturally to expand their understanding of sin to account for the destructive, unconscious attitudes of groups enshrined and perpetuated institutionally in economic, legal and policing systems. They spoke of social sin and of sinful structures and emphasised reform through political action. They then faced the challenge to show how this was compatible with the Christian emphasis on personal sin, conversion and reconciliation.

In the Catholic tradition the person, their human dignity and their inner life and values are central in any reflection on their relationships to one another, to institutions and to the world. In all situations human beings are agents and their decisions to act or not to act are of central importance, whether they perpetrate discrimination or suffer from it. Lasting improvement comes only when there is personal conversion, repentance and reconciliation.

This is a laborious process. It accepts the need to change the social structures of law, policing and economic relations that embody discrimination. But it also asks whether such change will be effective or lasting without a change of heart and a meeting of minds, of a respect that goes deeper than condemning our friends’ enemies, supporting a movement, and using right words. 

It suggests that we need to do more than treat either the perpetrators or the victims of discrimination as representatives of a class. We must also enter their lives and their experience in order to understand them. We need to avoid, too, reducing the responsibility of those of us who look on from outside to denouncing those who discriminate and cheering their victims.

Underlying Critical Race Theory and Catholic reflection on social sin is the conviction that we are all complicit in shaping our world and its structures. To reform them commits us to the long process of change of heart, self-reflection, engagement with those from whom we differ, and solidarity. These are building blocks that shape a just society. 

The second Catholic commentator is Dr Jeff Mirus, a writer and publisher, whose article on this topic is headed "Structural sin is personal sin deflected and justified". How he supports that viewpoint is of interest to us as we explore the methods CRT proponents use in promoting their cause.

Mirus begins:

We hear a great deal today about systemic or structural sin, such as systemic racism. And the truth is that we all participate in sin in many more or less institutionalized forms. We take certain modes of action for granted, without examining the network of institutions, beliefs and habits which underlie the results such “systems” produce. [...] That is an inescapable problem in life. But we also take advantage of systemic or structural sin to deflect our own personal guilt.

Most social, political and economic “orders” are unjust in significant ways. It is to temper such injustices that the prophets of the Old Testament so frequently reminded the Israelites to care particularly for those who were injured by, or fell through the gaps in, the prevailing “order”—especially widows and orphans. 

It is part of the human condition that some prosper and some decline under any given set of conditions, and the institutional arrangements of any society evolve and develop in ways that suit the needs and goals of those classes of people with the most power, wealth and influence.

We know all this, and we think about it more often as modern society continues to evolve into a perpetually “managed” or even totalitarian society, not so much because of a brutal and repressive power group as because of the shared values of the dominant commercial/governmental class. It belongs primarily to perceptive, moral and courageous politicians and judges to attempt prudently to restrain the worst excesses and greatest inequities, since excesses and inequities are inseparable from social life and social arrangements.  

Mirus then gets into the subject matter the title of his article points to. Beyond the inequities apparent in typical cultures, he sees dominant portions of cultures also captured by false philosophies and values, that they then attempt to impose on the rest of society. He states:

In addition to dominant cultures [affected by] intrinsic unrecognized shortcomings, there are dominant narratives which are carried forward not only by persons and families but, increasingly, by the media and educational institutions which are informed by the dominant culture. This includes what we call “virtue signaling”, and it is important to note that secular cultures signal virtue in substantially different ways from religious cultures.

This virtue-signaling arises inescapably from the sense of guilt which is entirely natural to the human condition, and which may be at times denied but never escaped. For Christians, this sense of guilt is deliberately focused on personal sins. While Christians may not always recognize clearly the particular forms of heartlessness and even violations of “fairness” which are endemic to the cultures of which they are a part, when they do recognize them they typically recognize that they are personally involved in the pattern and must strive to break the pattern in their own spheres of influence through deliberate changes in their own behavior.

That’s how Christian guilt works. It is largely the same as with our own more obvious personal sins. Certain evils that are protected or fostered by the larger patterns of any given culture—in our families, our socializing, our businesses, and our laws and governments—become opportunities for the recognition of our own personal failure to mitigate these evils, first through our own cultivation of the missing virtue, and then through whatever influence we can bring to bear on those around us, those with whom we interact, those for whom we vote, and so on.

Yet that is most definitely not how guilt works for secularists, for it is in the nature of secularists to be in denial. Refusing to acknowledge an authentically spiritual horizon—a God who is to be worshipped, a conversion that is to bear personal fruit here and now so that the converted can be welcomed joyfully in heaven—secularists must find a different way of dealing with guilt, which is the human person’s natural response to sin. If a Christian seeks to renew himself to be worthy of the perfect society of love in heaven, the secularist seeks to transform his earthly heaven by eradicating the attitudes and influence of others whom he sees as impeding the progress of a worldly paradise.

Sometimes this requires the marginalization of particular groups believed to stand in the way of a permanent earthly paradise (as if anything earthly were permanent); sometimes it requires more overt revolutionary action to raise up a new right-thinking regime which promises to force social perfection on all those who fail to see the great promise of each new worldly moment. Now, Satan, of course, operates at the heart of moral zealotry (as opposed to moral goodness), ever hiding his face and his purposes under the guise of an angel of light—and we are not wrong to notice that secularists are far more likely to acknowledge Satan than to acknowledge God. 

But the point is that, even as the true Christian takes the guilt of others on to himself, the secularist continually projects his own guilt on to others, making them almost literally the scapegoats, sacrificing them to the brave new world. And yet nothing ever suffices to end the relentless cycle of enforced change to create a misconceived heaven on earth.

This is what I mean in my title which says that “structural sin is personal sin deflected and justified”. [...] The secularist continually projects his own sins on to others, thereby justifying himself—placing himself on the road to paradise by remaining on the “right side of history”. It is always others who must be reformed or eliminated. 

In his conclusion, Mirus offers this perceptive observation:

To use a new term which is very convenient in this context: The secularist projects his guilt onto the world at large and asks: “To create the perfect world, what must be changed and whom must I cancel?” But the Christian, who is always profoundly ashamed, asks: “To love God better, how must I change and whom must I help?” And when enough Christians ask enough hard questions of themselves, “structural sin” recedes.

As Mirus averred above, an insidious "soft totalitarianism" is showing itself as part of the Critical Race/Justice Theory mindset. There is no sense of collaboration, of solidarity with the whole of society, in trying to remove the structural issues relating to race relations and inequality in the United States and elsewhere. Likewise, in the conflictual social setting that CRT advocates champion, Hamilton would have to look long and hard to find any of the "engagement with those from whom we differ, and solidarity" that he posits as the building blocks of a just society.

[] My thanks to the writers used here as my sources for their wisdom on this fraught topic. Read their full articles using the links given above.

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