In Ray, the Academy Award–winning biopic about Ray Charles, the audience walks with the singer through the gut-wrenching realization that he’s going blind at the age of seven.
His mother breaks the news to him in a mix of tender love and matter-of-fact sternness. At one point, he trips, falls, and screams for her. Though standing nearby, she tearfully—but wisely—refuses to respond. She knows he’ll never discover his full capacity if he doesn’t learn to use his other senses to work through his predicament. She constantly reminds him that though he has a disability, he also has real choices and shouldn’t resort to self-pity. His mother’s words replay in his mind as the film follows his life: “Promise me you’ll never let nobody turn you into no cripple.”
The Collateral Damage of Sin
The story isn’t a tribute to rugged individualism. Rather, Charles’s life becomes a parable about how resilience in the face of disadvantage and misfortune can introduce us to the heights of our capacities. Despite the many things we can’t control, God gives each of us agency, the power to make choices that impact our lives (Rom. 2:1, 6). This is coupled with the dignity of bearing his image (Gen. 1:26–28). And with God-given agency and dignity comes responsibility for our choices—not only as individuals but also as members of communities.
Our misfortunes and mistreatment can do drastic damage to our lives, but they’re rarely the whole of our problems. We must also deal with the effects of our own foolishness and sin. As an adult, Ray was forced to acknowledge that he’d broken his promise to his mother and made himself a cripple by his choice to use heroin. He found capacity even in blindness and lost capacity through addiction.
And our communities—including our churches—can suffer from problems of their own making too. It’s tempting for communities to avoid internal correction and to blame all their problems on external disadvantages. But both personally and corporately, we must honestly confront the ways in which we’ve injured ourselves.
Jesus had a way of caring about people’s social disadvantages while also making them face their own shortcomings. In John 5, he heals the lame man, then tells him to get up and stop sinning (vv. 8, 14).
Likewise, in the Old Testament, the Hebrews had gone through more than 400 years of oppression before being delivered into freedom by God’s hand (Ex. 12:40). Yet that didn’t absolve them from accountability for misused agency in the wilderness. God’s compassion and conviction extend grace for our afflictions—with external and internal causes alike—without relieving us of responsibility.
In the United States, the political right and left have long been in a heated debate about the impact of social disadvantages on community agency and outcomes. In true culture-war form, many have dumbed this down to an all-or-nothing proposition.
On the right, the characteristic error is to focus too much on agency, to the point of dismissing intractable effects of historical oppression or unjustly blaming people for their own mistreatment. Some conservatives discount the disadvantages caused by racism, sexism, and classism, insisting the solution to any individual or community problem is just to pick yourself up by your bootstraps.
Conversely, some progressives suggest that it’s oppressive to expect any responsibility from certain identity groups. This point of view might sound compassionate, but it’s ultimately disempowering. Telling people they have no responsibility for things they can influence robs them of dignity and agency. It fosters a hopeless and helpless paralysis that forgoes opportunities to take initiative. We’re not always in control of our lives, but we should find encouragement in identifying our spheres of influence and working to better our lives and the lives of others.
Both individually and communally, we must be as clear-eyed about our own wrongdoing—and our own agency—as we are about wrongs committed against us. We should be suspicious of anyone who breaks a man’s leg and then shames him for limping, as well as of the man who complains while refusing physical therapy to work on his limp.
No ethnic group or economic class or political party should be granted a comprehensive excuse for all its problems and pathologies. We cannot honestly blame everything on elites or oligarchs, progressives or MAGA, immigrants or racists. Whatever blame they’re due, to reject our own responsibility is to lean on a diamond-studded crutch. It must be cast away just like everything else that dishonors the agency and dignity God has given us.
For many of us, it will need to be cast away again and again. There will always be opportunists and deceivers ready to offer us fat, succulent scapegoats on whom we can lay all our problems. But whatever the scapegoat, such offers are not liberation. They’re an invitation to “bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice” (Eph. 4:31).
I wonder if Americans’ single-minded focus on national politics makes it easier to refuse responsibility for ourselves and mercy for the oppressed. We’ll overlook the chaos on our front doorstep to obsess over faraway problems and the people we suppose are causing them.
In solidly red Tuscaloosa, we’re preoccupied with the wrongs of distant Democrats. From deep blue Los Angeles, we’re worked up about Republicans clear across the country. To some extent, this habit is a cop-out—an unwillingness to take responsibility for issues closer to home. National politics are important, of course, but can also serve as a convenient distraction from addressing what’s in our control and fixing what we have broken.
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The pattern is particularly dangerous in leaders, as it can steer whole communities away from accountability. When Oakland mayor Sheng Thao was indicted in an FBI corruption investigation, she defiantly blamed “radical right-wing forces” for her predicament. (In California?) Likewise, the Trump administration blamed the media for its Signal security breach. And Christians sometimes blame the devil for our own immoral actions, overlooking dysfunction and bad theology in the church to hyperfocus on an external enemy.
Historical injustices can have stubborn effects. We may have canny political rivals. And certainly, as Christians, we have fierce opposition in the spiritual world. But to exaggerate the power of these external enemies is to impeach the power of God and undermine our own agency.
Even in the face of serious disadvantages, God has endowed each of us with the capacity to make meaningful choices for ourselves and our communities. We must not abdicate that duty, settle for scapegoating, or run from local responsibilities. Let us call one another to God-given dignity that confronts both external offenses and internal shortcomings with grace and power.
Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of And Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the author of the forthcoming book Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us out of the Culture War.
