​In a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Pope Francis made a few statements that I have seen many people describe as contrary to basic Christian doctrine. I think this is a mistake. First, let me give the quotes from the 60 Minutes translation of the interview.

At the close of the interview, Norah O'Donnell asks what gives him hope, and this is his response: "Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams, women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead. And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good."

I also note that immediately just before this in the interview, he says the following:

"The Church is like that: Everyone, everyone, everyone. "That so-and-so is a sinner…?" Me too, I am a sinner. Everyone! The Gospel is for everyone. If the Church places a customs officer at the door, that is no longer the church of Christ. Everyone."

So however we want to interpret the quote that I placed first, it has to be taken in light of his immediately prior statement that everyone is a sinner, not just the occasional "rogues and sinners" that he refers to at the end. What might he mean, and is it truly incompatible with the historic teaching of Christianity on such doctrines as original sin and total depravity? I don't think so. And I will look to Augustine as a guide for how these not only fit together nicely but can explain what he means as an expression of historic Christian teaching.

​​What Pope Francis says in this interview is an affirmation of fundamental human goodness. Christian doctrine has always taught that. It also teaches that we are fallen. Augustine expressed this as the doctrine of original sin, which under a Protestant understanding has been expressed by total depravity.

Total depravity does not mean we are as fallen as we possibly could be. It means that every aspect of our being is fallen. Is this compatible with holding that we are fundamentally good? It sure is. Take Augustine for a good example of someone saying both things.

In Augustine's view, virtue is well-ordered love. Being perfect would mean loving everything according to how good it is. All of our desires are lined up in the right order, meaning we love what is most good the most and what is less good less.

Augustine sees evil as a privation, i.e. a falling from what is best. Everything that exists has some good to it, or it wouldn't exist. There is no negative value, then. Some things are not as good as they could be, but they all have some positive value. We thus should love everything God created as good.

But some things are less good than they should be. That's what we call evil. It's a distortion. Some things are evil because good things are missing, such as when the keyboard I am typing on right now has a missing key. It doesn't function as it ought to, because the J key is not present.

Other things are evil because they are in the wrong order, such as when you try to connect the hard drive of the computer in backwards. All the parts are there, but the disorder prevents it from working as it should. In Augustine's view, all evil is one of those two things -- something missing or something in the wrong order.

Sin is a kind of evil. Typically sin is when we love good things but in the wrong order. There is nothing wrong with seeing my well-being as good and seeking it out. But when I place my comfort, which is good, above higher moral concerns, I am disordered.

Total depravity and original sin are concepts Augustine would affirm. He would say that every aspect of my being has fallen desires. I want things that are good, but they are disordered. I place things that are not as good as God above God, which is idolatry. I place self-interest above the good of others, which can be selfish. And I might value good things but in a distorted way.

Yet Augustine would affirm that humans are all fundamentally good in the sense that our desires are all for good things. Everything we seek after can be conceived of as a longing for good, even if it's distorted. What we want is not bad in that sense, even if it's bad in another sense. We were created good, indeed in the image of God. That is what gives us a moral status not possessed by other animals. It's not because we are morally perfect that grounds universal human rights. It's because God made us to have intrinsic value. God declared us good, and we represent God to the world. That image has been distorted, but every human being is fundamentally good. Every desire we have is for something good, even if we have it in a distorted way or out of order with other desires for good things, because everything created by God is good, and having desires for good things is good.

Augustine also insisted on finding ways to talk that allow most of what we say to come out as true. He was a defender of ordinary speech. This manifested in his response to skepticism. He thought of skeptical approaches as having too high a standard for what counts as knowledge. Expecting knowledge to be 100% certainty, as the skeptics did, was misusing knowledge-language in a way at odds with how the words for knowledge are actually used by real people.

He criticized the Stoics for defining emotion in a way that is at odds with ordinary language use, taking emotions to be the bad ones and thus getting the conclusion that all emotion is bad, but they had to pretend that righteous indignation is not anger and is not an emotion to make such a claim, since they had no problem with that emotion. They simply refused to call it an emotion. And he insisted that when we call people good, we are not speaking falsely.

On this issue, he insisted that the perfect life is not possible in this life, but it still makes sense to speak of some lives as better than others. So we can call someone's life a good life and, speaking relative to other lives, be speaking truly, even though the truly blessed life is only possible in the afterlife, Similarly, he is very clear that there's nothing wrong with saying that someone is good, in a way that is totally compatible with the doctrine of original sin or what later came to be called total depravity. We can say that Mother Theresa is good, relative to Adolf Hitler. Some people are morally better than others. And we can say that one person is better than they were several years ago. Our desires can become more in line with what they ought to be. We can make such comparative judgments, and they are relative to each other, not to the absolute standard. So we can call someone a good person and not be saying something false, even if the person is not good in an absolute sense.

What Augustine would insist on is recognizing that we are fundamentally good but distorted from the goodness that would be ideally present in humanity's original state. Total depravity is traditionally presented as being fallen in every aspect of our being but not as being fallen to the greatest degree. Every aspect of our being, in Augustine's view, is below where it ought to be. We don't want what is most good as much as we should. We want other things that are less good more than the things that are most good. But that is compatible with recognizing that the things we want are good and with seeing our hearts as mostly directed toward good things.

The pope said that most humans are fundamentally good. In what sense? He says we mostly want good things. Our heart desires good. That's pretty much all he actually said. But isn't that precisely what Augustine says? And Augustine was a firm believer in original sin and what later came to be called total depravity. So I don't see anything here that necessarily is at odds with historic Christian doctrine on this issue. Is it possible that he could have been clearer, perhaps by saying right before this that everyone is a sinner? Sure, and he actually did do that, but the clips posted on social media are conveniently cutting that out in order to make this look worse than it actually is. But that is what the Bible calls false witness. I will have no part of that.

People are getting energized about the idea of a brown Jesus, it seems. This question is a lot more complicated people expect it to be, for several reasons. Don't expect that all of your assumptions about this discussion are true. They probably are not.

1. There is a long, fact-challenged tradition within European art that presented Jesus as blond-haired and blue-eyed and within film using English actors with a similar look. This tradition is almost certainly incorrect, for two reasons. Even today, people from the Middle-East do not tend to look like that. Furthermore, it was probably even less that way 2000 years ago than it is now, because there has been more genetic mixing between the people of the Middle-East and Europeans since then, not less.

2. There is a long, fact-challenged tradition within liberation theology that called Jesus black for political reasons. It was an attempt to distance Jesus from his historical origins in order to deny whiteness a place in its reframing of Christianity that traditional Christians have long resisted because of its denial of biblical theology. The particular claim of a black Jesus is hardly what's really wrong with liberation theology, in my view. Its theological claims are the real problem. But nevertheless the idea of calling Jesus black is a big part of how liberation theology distanced itself from the theological tradition, and many hear something like that in this.

But even aside from the historical political context, the actual words themselves are not unambiguously or obviously true or false. There are several reasons I say that:

Our advent sermons this year are from Isaiah 59-60, and this week we are starting with the first half of chapter 59. (I know this isn't the first week of advent, but we were working through Genesis and had to finish chapter 50 last week.)

One thing that stood out to me about this week's passage is the progression of pronouns in Isaiah 59. The prophet starts out in verses 1-3 speaking in the second person. "Your iniquities have separated you from your God" and "have hidden his face from you." He speaks to the people about their own sin and its effect on them. At this stage he is accusing them, and he is not part of what he is criticizing. They do this.

He then shifts to third person in verses 4-8. At this point no one calls for justice. They give empty arguments, speak lies, conceive of trouble, are quick to shed innocent blood, and walk paths without justice. No one who walks in their ways will know peace. He isn't just accusing others now. He's talking about an objective situation, without placing himself in it our outside it. He's noting something that is true.

Then we see a shift to the first person in verses 9-13. "Justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows." He speaks of his own people, him included, as if they collectively walk around blindly and mourning, looking for justice and deliverance but not finding it.

But verse 12 shifts to an explanation. "For our offenses are many in your sight, and our sins testify against us. Our offenses are ever with us, and we acknowledge our iniquities." Rebellion against God, oppression, revolt, and lies are in the same breath given as the reasons why "we" end up with the effect of verses 14-15. Justice is driven back, righteousness pushed off at a distance, truth stumbling in the streets, honesty unable to enter. "Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey."

He's still giving the effects on those around him, but he's identifying with them in their sin and collectively recognizing that it's not just some other group of evildoers that he is calling out. We are all in this group. And when he calls for justice, the reason it's not happening is because of the doing of injustice that he is also participating in.

You might argue that he's just collectively identifying with his fellow Jews the way Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel do in Ezra 9, Nehemiah 9, and Daniel 9 when they weren't committing the sins of the people but were still offering prayers of collective repentance for the people they belonged to. But I think this is different. Ezra didn't commit the sin of marrying pagans who didn't worship God that he was lamenting. Daniel didn't bow to the idols around him in Babylon. Yet they collectively repented as a way to lead their people to repent.

But the things Isaiah is dealing with here, though not all sins we all commit, includes things that he and any other generally righteous people in his time, were complicit in. So even though he starts out pointing out the sins of others and describing the effects on them, none of that false, he ends up identifying with it enough to describe it as something true of "us" in a way that leads him to express public and collective repentance that he seeks those around him to join with him in. And then he says that the reason they have not experienced the justice that they now long for (which they started out not even wanting) was because of their own injustice.

If, as I think is true, the presentation of the prophecy of Isaiah should be taken at face value, and it was actually composed by Isaiah himself in the 8th century looking forward to a time much later when the Jewish people were living in exile in Babylon, then there are even more interesting implications of this. Isaiah is here identifying with not just his own generation of God's people in their current rebellion but with the future rejection of God's ways by a generation that he isn't even part of. His notion of collective responsibility and group identity is that strong, which speaks volumes about how easily we get away from those notions with Western individualism. And all of this is compatible with recognizing that in one very important way we really are responsible for what we ourselves do. That runs all through this (and through the other collective repentance prayers of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel).

And it's also jarring to many of our sensibilities, where we like to think of things in an oppressor/oppressed binary, to see God's prophet speaking to oppressed people and telling them that one chief reason why they are oppressed is that they are themselves complicit in injustice, and then he has his prophet communicating this identify with them in that injustice, as much as he also seeks in that identifying to offer a prayer of repentance for them to turn from that injustice and experience the fruits of righteousness and peace.
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It's hard for me to read this passage and think anyone in our current setting (politically left or right) should come away from this feeling comfortable about themselves. If they do, they are either rejecting its teaching or not understanding it.

Three episodes into the Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power, it's very clear that the writers of this show are trying to capture the central theological framework of Tolkien in their story. Tolkien's view of providence and the portrayal of the faithful remnant in Numenor is simply getting him right, at least so far. I was expecting this to be completely insensitive to Tolkien's major themes, perhaps even contradicting them, as Peter Jackson did numerous times in his original trilogy (less so in the Hobbit, ironically, given how much more hate there is from Tolkien fans about that). I could list numerous things:

1. Aragorn as reluctant king rather than biding his time for the right moment to assume his rightful throne while working behind the scenes to meet his kingly responsibilities, as in the books

2. Eowyn as seeking the second-wave feminist goal of trying to make women be like men rather than Tolkien's view of recognizing differences between men and women as something to affirm in women as equally good to any virtues more typical of men

3. Faramir's reduction to being a second-rate Boromir rather than the faithful remnant within Gondor who valued the right things

4. the Ents' motives for helping at Helm's Deep being presented as a hasty decision, completely contrary to their character

5. the presence of any elves besides Legolas at Helm's Deep running contrary to the entire theme in Tolkien of the elves in the Third Age largely hiding and avoiding the evil that was on the rise

I don't see anything as egregiously offensive as that in this show.

Some are upset that this show has been forced into inventing their own details to fill in, because the Tolkien estate refuses to let them use Tolkien's actual second-age materials outside the appendices, but that is the fault of Tolkien's heirs, not the creators of this show. What matters more is whether it is consistent with the world Tolkien gives us, and so far it mostly is. And what matters even more than that is whether the moral and theological framework is compatible with Tolkien's, and it seems from the third episode that they are actually trying hard to get it right.

Now there are a few things they could do to alienate Tolkien fans that I sure hope they do not do. If Meteor Man turns out to be any of the Istari other than Alatar or Pallando (or whichever other names Tolkien used -- I know there are several versions, and one version does have them appearing in the Second Age), then there is reason to be outraged. I think he is more likely to be Sauron than Gandalf, though, but we'll see.

If they don't follow through on the promise they have made that this is a transformation of a very imperfect Galadriel into what we see in the Lord of the Rings story, then that would be bad. But I am taking them at their word on this and thinking the claims of critics are simply premature. This is the Galadriel who becomes that Galadriel, and these experiences will serve to explain why she would know herself well enough to think Frodo's offer of the ring to her would play to all her bad tendencies. They have to had existed sometime in her long life for that whole scene in the Lord of the Rings to make sense.

Some I see are complaining that the show is woke, which of course is a stupid term at this point in its unclarity and lack of precision. I can think of a couple things that the now-orthodox social justice movement in our society wants to see that this show is doing, but they seem hardly concerning to any healthy conservative on social justice issues. There might be some issues on faithfulness to Tolkien's world, but I'm conflicted on that, even.

​I've been paying attention to what I am seeing about the Dobbs case on social media, but I've had some time today to do some reading of the opinions and figure out which things people are saying are actually true. I'm seeing some real ignorance about how the Supreme Court works and about the legal issues in the Dobbs case. We live in a time where there is a grand tradition of social media activists who don't know very much about the issues they are commenting on but still feel like they need to further their own and everyone else's ignorance by chiming in on things they don't understand, and you end up with lots of hot takes that don't reflect reality. There is a good deal of misrepresentation of what the decision does and what some of the concurring and dissenting opinions actually say. Here are a few things I think need to be recognized.

​This week I got through another round of going through some of the main points of John Locke's political philosophy. One theme I emphasize is how strongly Locke's views condemn slavery and in particular the kind of slavery that was going on in his own day. That's why I was so surprised this semester to encounter the view that Locke was a slavery apologist. It just so obviously did not fit his quite explicit view on the matter. Slavery is, for Locke, an example of the kind of violation of the principle of equality and autonomy that absolute monarchy violates, and absolute monarchy is his main opponent. If I enslave someone, that is by its very definition a contradiction to the principle that government requires the consent of the government. Additionally, Locke explicitly says that no human being can take another human being as property, because we are not really even self-owned, and we are all God's property, and God has not given us the right to own each other. I don't know how someone could be any clearer than Locke is about such things.

But a colleague this semester mentioned in passing something about Locke's defense of slavery, and she didn't mean his allowance for the British legal penalty in a just war where those willing to initiate an unjust war, whose penalty might be death, could be spared the death penalty in exchange for servitude, something Locke does present in his Second Treatise on Government while going on to reject the actual practice of slavery of his own day in the entire rest of that work. No, she seemed to think Locke simply agreed with the practice of slavery of his own day. I couldn't imagine how anyone could read the Second Treatise and think such a thing. He explicitly rejects that practice throughout his work.

I encounter people of all sorts fairly regularly on social media. There is a real debate about how the word "racism" should be used. I have a lot to say about that, but I'm not interested in that debate for the sake of this post. There are those who have tried to rework our categories in such a way that prejudice and discrimination are not racism. Racism is purely a structural or systemic thing. Prejudice and discrimination are bad, but they are not racism. We ought to resist them and avoid them to the extent that we can, but racism is just the institutional, structural, and systemic stuff. In their view, we should reserve the word "racism" to refer to the system itself, not the people who do it or their attitudes or actions. Thus racism can only be in one direction, the direction that society enforces with structural, systemic, and institutionally determined forces that act mostly to the advantage of white people and mostly to the disadvantage of others. I happen to think that approach to how we should use the word "racism" is wrong in a few ways, but as I said I'm not interested in that debate for the sake of this post. I'm interested in a reaction against that view that I think goes too far in the other direction.

A very common response to those who reserve the word "racism" for structural, systemic, and institutional stuff is simply to deny that there is such a thing as systemic racism. That sort of statement has been increasingly common on the right in response to what they (rightly in my view) regard as problems in how people (mostly on the left) are conceiving of racism. But what seems to me to be an overreaction is simply to deny that there is such a thing as systemic racism or to deny that it is our most serious sort of racial problem.

The idea of systemic, institutional, or structural racism goes back before the Civil Rights era. People had been calling attention to these sorts of problems well before the time of MLK. But it began to be more mainstream as people noticed that changes in laws and societal attitudes were not bringing along changes in some of the other forces that advantage or disadvantage people along race lines. MLK began to see this toward the end of his life, and he began to recognize that just getting people having the right attitudes and making changes in laws to prevent explicit and deliberate discrimination would not be sufficient to solve all of our race problems. There are systemic, structural, and institutional forces that lead to disadvantage and advantage in ways that no one intends. No one is deliberately discriminating or explicitly prejudiced. Yet disadvantage and advantage occur. The problem is in institutions, structures, and systems rather than in beliefs, desires, emotions, or actions of individual people. That is the concept of systemic racism.

On one conception of racism, the one I was raised with, the one that feels to me like how the English language actually operates, these systemic problems are simply not racism. I completely understand those who don't like to call it racism. I myself don't like to call it that. Racism is an attitude of the heart or a set of actions of individuals. But that's a linguistic issue. It's not an issue of what the world is actually like. The thing people are in fact calling systemic racism, and in fact the only thing that term has ever referred to, is real. Not only is it real, but it consists of what seem to me to be the more significant and substantial problems that we have in our society at this point. The stuff I'm inclined to call racism is becoming less present, less effective in causing real problems. Why? Because there is such a stigma attached to racism, to even being perceived as racist, that it's diminished to a much greater degree than the systemic problems have. But the systemic problems remain. And the systemic problems do trace back to racism in the classic sense, when you look hard enough and far enough. They wouldn't be present without racism having occurred.

​Here's an non-racial example for anyone having trouble understanding the concept of a systemic problem. Adderall is a controlled substance. People take it when they have no condition requiring it, and people take doses that are much too high. That means it's illegal for a pharmacy to put it on auto-refill, and it's illegal even to prescribe it with refills. You have to call your doctor every month to get them to submit a new prescription. Typically, the people who are taking Adderall are the same people who have executive control issues and are going to have a harder time being organized and remembering to call about that new prescription, which places an additional burden on people who are already worse off when it comes to things like this. That results in days without the medication that helps them be more organized and attentive. No one is trying to make life harder for people with ADHD and autism who rely on this medication. That's not the point. The goal is to prevent abuse by those who don't need the medication to begin with. But because of laws designed to prevent that abuse, the people who need the medication suffer. This is what a systemic or structural problem looks like. 

Are there such problems that occur along race lines? There certainly are. There are institutional, systemic, and structural forces in our society that work against people of color, some of them stronger for certain groups than for others, some of them not because of any present discrimination but just because of the effects of past discrimination (e.g. housing segregation today is not a result of present-day bank practices but because of past discrimination in mortgages and racial contracts of who could live in which neighborhoods), and there remain disparities in infrastructure, housing quality, locations of shopping or other necessities nearby, and so on. School segregation no longer has any laws forcing it, but kids tend to go to school where they live, and the quality of schools reflects the resources of the neighborhood. Together with policies like school choice, which allows enterprising parents and students to get out of the bad schools but also thereby makes the bad schools worse for those without that initiative and drive, our schools get more segregated and more disparate in quality and outcome, and that occurs along race lines. There is many careful studies that identify biases that affect law enforcement and criminal justice, disparities in health care, stigmatizations and stereotypes that affect our behavior even if we think the stereotypes are false, and so on. It should be obvious that many of these things are not racism in the classic sense, but they are the only thing that people  have ever meant by terms like "systemic racism." They are disparate results that occur along race lines in ways that are predictable and systemic. The forces in our society tend to produce those results along certain lines in ways that are consistent and recurring. And these problems are much more serious than a privileged white kid using the N-word or not inviting the one black kid in the mostly white neighborhood over for a birthday party.

Now if you prefer to call these things "systemic advantage" and "systemic disadvantage" or something like that, I have great sympathies for why you might want to do that. But the fact remains that these are the only thing that terms like "structural racism" and "systemic racism" have ever meant. Words mean what they are used to mean. So those terms do in fact refer to these sorts of problems. That is so, whether you want to think of these sorts of issues as racism or not.  I tend to be in the "not" category on that myself. But systemic racism is real, and those who consistently deny it are in effect denying that any of these problems are real. It does not help the cause of the political right in trying to push back against some of the excesses and unhelpful behaviors of the left on race issues if it just looks like you are denying observable facts, and that's what denials of systemic racism look like to the left. If you want to have real conversations where you engage with real people and actually try to convince them of things, to help them see that you have a legitimate point against anything they are saying, it helps to understand their view and get it right first. You are not doing that if you simply deny the reality of systemic racism and say no more. That strategy is doomed to failure. It is no wonder that they will call that strategy "white fragility" or "white supremacy," because it just looks like a desperate attempt to pretend that our most serious problems along race lines simply don't exist. Let's stop doing that, please. If you don't want to be accused of white fragility and white supremacy, then do not set yourself up to be accused of it by behaving in exactly the way the left predicts you will act. And then maybe there will be room for an actual conversation where people seek to understand each other and move forward.

Matthew Franck notes [note: link is now dead, and I haven't been able to find the specific post if it's still up) that on one of Barack Obama's exam questions from when he was teaching law, he asks whether an equal protection challenge can be brought against a law requiring states to be color-blind. Franck says he knows of lots of people who think the equal protection clause requires states to be color-blind, but he hasn't encountered a serious argument anywhere that such laws violate the equal protection clause. I haven't either, but I don't read law reviews. Still, such an argument isn't hard to imagine, and I think it's actually a sound argument.​

The equal protection clause entitles people of all races to equal protection of the laws. The laws therefore need to be able to rely on the distinction between members of one race and members of another if they are to ensure that each race is equally protected by them. Therefore, color-blind laws, which disallow the state from paying attention to race, violate the equal protection clause.

It sounds like a pretty good argument to me. As a policy issue, I don't mind restricting affirmative action in universities to class rather than race, or at least ensuring that the standards aren't lowered as much as they are. There's a significant argument that the way affirmative action is typically practiced in that setting (as opposed to in the workplace, which is a very different matter) seems to me to harm the people it's intended to help, given that admissions officers already go out of their way to promote diversity (so there's no discrimination to combat at that level), and it means accepting people who won't be able to do as well and then will appear less good when they graduate than they would at a lower institution with much higher grades and more time for extracurriculars. There are other negatives too, but that's the one that seems decisive to me. I think it's much better to work at the high school level and below to help kids do better in school, to care more about school, and to think of college as something worth doing.

But I can't see how it could be good to ban affirmative action by not allowing a state to recognize racial distinctions in any way. That sort of law is not just bad policy. It really is unconstitutional because it prevents enforcement of the equal protection clause.