Heritable guilt is in vogue

I made a poor excuse for a Presbyterian even as a kid. I resented religious indoctrination every precious school-free Sunday. Yet despite my apostatic nature, any number of biblical tenets with broad secular application have become touchstones. Of particular value during our post-Floydian festival of flagellation is Ezekiel 18: ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.’ Ergo, while we can’t take credit for our forebears’ virtues and achievements, at least whatever horrors our ancestors got up to is not our fault.

The handing down of grudges generation after generation inculcates a dismaying moral helplessness in so-called culprits who were supposedly born into sin but never themselves did anything wrong, while stoking an unappeasable resentment in the descendants of long-dead ancestors whose injuries can never be healed. Sound like a world you recognise? The left increasingly embraces the highly un-Christian principle of heritable guilt.

Last week, the NewsHour on PBS (America’s similarly hectoring version of the BBC) began its Tuesday evening programme with the obligatory rundown of the day’s mass shootings coast to coast. There followed another obligatory report on the nation’s ignorant right-wing militias, whose members resist all social progress since 1960 and have never heard of slavery or Native American genocide – which, given today’s cultural climate, is quite an achievement; clearly the Proud Boys do their drills in caves.

The highlight of the show was an interview with one Tom Lasseter. The Reuters journalist had just released a report exposing five living presidents, two Supreme Court judges, 11 governors and more than 100 members of Congress as having one or more ancestors who owned slaves.