The Seven Sins of the American Church

A Reckoning We'd Rather Skip

Go ahead, close your eyes, and picture our nation’s worst moments. Now ask yourself whether you naturally see the church’s role or influence in any of those moments. All too often our history books, and we ourselves, remember slavery as a Southern economic system, Jim Crow as a set of unjust laws, the near destruction of Native peoples as westward expansion, as if these things simply happened rather than being preached, funded, and defended into being by someone. But look at who wrote the sermons justifying slavery, who founded a denomination to protect it, and who ran the schools built to erase Native children. The church was not standing off to the side of these stories. No, she was the one holding the pen, writing the justification.

I am not writing this as a pastor or a scholar. I'm just a Christian who believes that loving the church means being honest about her, the way you would be honest with a friend headed down a bad road. So here are seven sins, recurring patterns rather than one-time incidents, that the American church has committed again and again across three centuries. Each one shows up more than once in our history, which is exactly what should worry us. I write this hoping each of us decides to do what we can to keep this history from repeating itself.

1. Dehumanization: twisting Scripture into a leash

Before the Civil War, plantation-region ministers did not quietly tolerate slavery. Many preached it. They took a badly twisted reading of Genesis 9, the so-called "curse of Ham," and built a theological engine that ran for two centuries, teaching enslaved people that obedience to their masters was obedience to God. That same instinct, using doctrine to decide who counts as fully human, resurfaced a century later at Bob Jones University, which barred Black students until 1971 and banned interracial dating altogether until the year 2000. They defended it as biblical conviction. It took a presidential campaign controversy, not a change of heart, to end the policy.

This is the sin of taking God’s Word, meant to set people free, and forging it into a leash.

2. Hatred: blessing racial terror with a cross

In 1915, the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan restricted membership to white Protestant Christians, used a burning cross to symbolize “the light of Christ,” and was founded by William Simmons, a former Methodist minister. Pro-Klan pastors lectured congregations on the order’s Christian virtues. Meanwhile, public lynchings across the South were often treated as community outings, attended by families in their Sunday best, sometimes photographed and turned into postcards people mailed to relatives like souvenirs. This was not the fringe acting alone. It was churchgoing America, robed in its own symbols.

This is the sin of hatred so complete it borrows the cross to bless the very thing the cross condemns.

3. Idolatry: bowing to flag, heritage, and power

After the Civil War, many white Southern churches did not examine their complicity. Instead, they built monuments to it. Confederate flags hung in sanctuaries, veterans were memorialized as Christian gentlemen, and a mythology called the “Lost Cause” recast slaveholders as noble. That same fusion of nation and faith reappeared on January 6, 2021, when crosses and “Jesus Saves” banners were carried alongside Confederate flags into the U.S. Capitol during a violent attempt to overturn an election. It was the visible tip of a strain of American Christianity that has quietly merged national identity and political power with the gospel itself.

This is the sin of bowing to something other than God and calling it faithfulness.

4. Cowardice: choosing comfort over justice

Dr. King once said eleven o’clock Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America, and he was not being clever. He was naming a wound. Writing from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963, he aimed his sharpest words not at the Klan but at white clergy who called his methods "unwise and untimely." King concluded that the Black American’s greatest obstacle was not the outright racist but the white moderate, more devoted to order than justice.

That same silence repeated itself in 1942, when the government forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into incarceration camps and the overwhelming majority of American churches said essentially nothing, with many congregations instead helping the War Relocation Authority resettle families rather than asking why they had been rounded up. The Quakers notably broke from the pack.

This is the sin of mistaking a quiet conscience for a clear one.

5. Violence: crushing the vulnerable to "save" them

Starting in the 1800s, the federal government paid churches, per child, to run boarding schools built to strip Native children of their identity in the name of saving their souls. Kids lost their names, their languages, their hair, and often their families for years, all under a Christian banner. The U.S. Interior Department's 2022 Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative report documented physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at these schools, and has since identified at least 74 burial sites, marked and unmarked, on the grounds of institutions run by denominations who believed, sincerely, that they were doing good.

This is the sin of mistaking erasure for salvation, and force for love.

6. Self-protection: guarding the institution over the innocent

In 1845, Northern Baptist mission boards told Southern churches that slaveholders could not in good conscience be funded as missionaries. Rather than repent, roughly 293 Southern representatives met in Augusta, Georgia, and founded their own convention, the Southern Baptist Convention, still the largest Protestant body in the country, for the specific purpose of protecting the right to own human beings.

Nearly two centuries later, in 2022, an independent investigation by Guidepost Solutions found SBC Executive Committee leaders had kept a secret internal list of more than seven hundred credibly accused abusers, stonewalling survivors rather than protecting them. It was a pattern that has played out in Catholic dioceses and independent churches nationwide, including my own church fellowship.

This is the sin of loving the institution’s reputation more than the people it exists to serve.

7. Materialism: selling blessing to the broke

A different corner of the American church has spent decades preaching that God’s favor shows up as bigger houses and fatter offering plates, often targeting the very people who can least afford to give. Pastors have flown private jets and traveled extensively to luxury locations, partly funded with tithes from folks skipping meals, all while quoting verses about seed and harvest. It’s a gospel that sounds like good news for the preacher and often bad news for the poor.

This is the sin of dressing up greed as blessing and calling it faith.

None of this is ancient history dressed up as a guilt trip. It is a mirror. Somewhere in my own church tradition, and probably yours, there is a version of "the reasonable pastor" who counseled patience instead of justice, and a version of "the faithful congregation" that just never got around to talking about it. The question isn't whether those churches back then were bad people. Most of them thought they were being faithful. The question is which of these seven sins (dehumanization, hatred, idolatry, cowardice, violence, self-protection, materialism) is quietly at work in my own church, or my own heart, right now.

History has a habit of repeating its sins in new clothes whenever nobody’s watching for them, which means an eighth sin could already be forming in a church that looks a lot like ours, waiting for someone later to write the paragraph. Where is your church silent right now that it should not be? Where are you? And what will you do today to make sure you land on the right side of history, and more importantly, the right side of God, when someone else is doing the remembering?

For Further Reflection:

A church that can only tell the parts of its story that make it look good is practicing marketing and not faith. Twenty years from now, will your church’s silence today be someone else’s chapter eight? And what can you do about that now?