What the church got wrong
An honest reckoning with Volume 5
The modern church has done extraordinary things. It has also done things that will require generations of repentance.
The slave trade: Christians built it, operated it, justified it with scripture, and profited from it for four centuries. The abolitionists who dismantled it were also Christians — but they were a minority, swimming against the majority of their own tradition.
Colonialism: the church arrived alongside, and sometimes ahead of, the colonial project. Missionaries brought the gospel and the empire came with them. The two were inseparable in many minds and many practices. Indigenous cultures were destroyed in the name of the one who said the kingdom belongs to such as these.
The Holocaust: the church that should have screamed was mostly silent. The Confessing Church, which did resist, was a minority. Most German Christians accommodated, collaborated, or looked away.
The abuse crisis: the systematic abuse of children by clergy, and the systematic protection of abusers by institutions, is one of the most catastrophic failures in the modern church's history — not only in Catholicism but across traditions. It is ongoing. It has not been fully reckoned with.
Racism: the church has been a primary vehicle of racial ideology in American history — sanctifying slavery, enforcing segregation, producing the theology that justified Jim Crow. The Black church that produced King and the civil rights movement was built partly in response to the white church's betrayal.
These are not peripheral failures. They are central ones. They happened in the name of Jesus. They must be named.
“The Church must always be reformed — and always repenting of what it has been.”
— A summary of the Reformed tradition's ongoing call
“For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God. If it begins first at us, what will happen to those who don't obey the gospel of God?”
Judgment begins at the household of God.
The church does not get to point at the world's failures while ignoring its own. The tradition that has produced the most remarkable acts of courage and love in human history has also produced some of the most catastrophic betrayals of the person it claims to represent.
Both things are true. And the tradition that takes its own theology seriously — that believes in sin, in repentance, in the grace that meets honest confession — is, of all institutions, the least entitled to defensive denial.
Name it. Confess it. Do the work of repair.
The tradition survives its failures not by minimizing them but by being the kind of community that can name them honestly and keep going.