The debt we stopped sharing

From Christian theology to our current political wreckage

The typical American has never read Anselm of Canterbury, could not name Augustine’s century, and has no idea what “Penal Substitution” or “Christus Victor” means — and nonetheless carries, deep in his bones, the assumption that salvation is a private transaction, that his standing before God (or the universe, or fate) is an individual ledger, his alone to balance. He assumes this is simply what Christianity has always taught. It isn’t.

The original Christian understanding of salvation was “Christus Victor” — not a ledger, but a captivity to be broken. It is the individual ledger that was the newcomer, and it took the better part of a millennium to dislodge the original vision, one legal metaphor at a time.

Something structurally identical to the displacement of Christus Victor happened in miniature, and far faster, in twentieth-century America. A public architecture briefly rose on the older, communal premise — that a decent life is a shared undertaking, not an individual account each person settles alone — and then, within a few decades, began to be dismantled by the same ledger-logic that had already displaced the older theology centuries before. Different centuries, different vocabularies, the identical substitution: a shared account replaced by a private one, each time sold as moral progress.

You don’t have to believe in the Resurrection to have been shaped by this. The theological argument and the political argument are two expressions of a single habit of mind that has been working itself out in the West for a very long time, and a secular person raised in a Lutheran church basement or a Baptist Sunday school absorbed the habit whether or not the doctrine stuck. The vocabulary outlived the belief. That is how deep cultural substitutions work.

The earliest Christian thinkers, Irenaeus, Origen and the Eastern fathers generally, understood the human condition as a kind of captivity. Humanity, as a whole, as a people, was enslaved to death, to sin, to hostile powers with a legitimate-seeming claim on them. The cross was not a payment. It was a jailbreak. Christ entered the captivity and broke it from the inside, and what got liberated was not a collection of individual accounts but a people — a body, incorporated, freed together.

Augustine, who has a strong follower in Pope Leo XIV, is the hinge on which this turns. He still knew the old language and used it — his image of the cross as a mousetrap, baited with Christ’s blood, luring the devil into overreaching and forfeiting his claim, is about as vivid a piece of communal-liberation theology as you’ll find in the patristic era. But Augustine was also, more than anyone before him, the theologian who gave the West a vocabulary of individual guilt — inherited sin as a legal liability, culpability as something a soul carries and answers for on its own account. He did not intend to dismantle the old cosmic drama. He supplied, without quite meaning to, the spare parts his successors would use to replace it.

Anselm assembled those parts in 1098. For him, sin was no longer primarily bondage, but debt — an offense against God’s honor requiring satisfaction. The Reformers took that frame and sharpened it into a doctrine called penal substitution: Christ does not liberate a people from a captor; he pays a fine on behalf of each individual defendant. By the time this doctrine reaches its full American form — revivalist, individual, “ask Jesus into your heart,” “accept Christ as your personal savior” — the transformation is complete. The unit of salvation is no longer the community. It is the single soul, alone before the ledger.

Frances Perkins did not build the New Deal’s architecture of social insurance from theology – nor, as many have pointed out, did she develop that architecture alone. But she was the agent who gave it legal form. She built it from what she saw in the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire — that risk borne alone destroys people who could have survived it borne together. Social Security, unemployment insurance, the whole apparatus, rests on a wager that is structurally identical to the old cosmic-liberation frame: you are not saved — not protected against poverty, illness, old age — by your own individual foresight and merit. You are protected because you are incorporated into a pool, a body, that bears the risk collectively. Nobody’s individual account has to balance for the system to hold. That’s the whole point.

That architecture has been under sustained, patient attack for more than 50 years, and the attack has used Anselm’s logic without knowing his name. Personal responsibility, commodifying social benefits as individual and carrying a steep price rather than communal and paid for by all. Individual retirement accounts replacing pensions. Means-testing, which quietly re-individualizes what was built to be shared. The moral case against collective provision is always dressed up as clarity and fairness — *why should I pay for someone else’s failure to plan* — which is precisely the emotional register in which penal substitution was sold against Christus Victor: cleaner, more legible, more just, because now everyone gets exactly what their own account has earned. What gets lost in both cases is not fairness. It’s the binding — the structural fact that people who share risk are stitched together in a way that people who each carry their own account never are.

None of this requires anyone to sign onto a Christology. It requires only noticing that a single cultural habit — the substitution of individual accounting for shared bondage and shared liberation — has been operating simultaneously in the sanctuary and the statehouse, and that both have been impoverished by it in the same way. The corrective, in both domains, is not sentiment. Nobody is helped by a vaguer, cozier version of “togetherness.” What is needed is the same test applied consistently: does this arrangement — a doctrine, a royalty structure, a health care bill — actually bind people together in shared risk and reciprocal obligation? Or does it merely gesture at communion while quietly handing everyone back their own separate ledger to settle alone?

That is a question you can ask of an atonement theory or a pension plan without believing a word of the creed. It is, if anything, a more useful question for the person who doesn’t believe — because it strips the argument down to the structure underneath the theology, and the structure is what has been under attack all along.