The Theology of Collective Guilt

Post-war Europe became a theater for competing spiritual myths, where historical trauma was transmuted into theological substitutes. While America constructed a narrative of righteous infallibility, France embraced a counter-myth of total complicity. This shift from de Gaulle’s pride to the collective guilt that emerged after May 1968 reveals a deeper crisis: the human hunger for redemptive narratives in a post-Christian age.

Eric Voegelin warned against “immanentizing the eschaton,” the attempt to bring heaven to earth through political revolution. However, the modern obsession with exorcising evil suggests a darker evolution of this impulse. By framing history as a binary struggle between absolute good and absolute evil, societies create secular liturgies. These myths demand not just political victory, but moral purification.

When a nation adopts self-hatred as its primary identity, it mirrors the penitential rites of old faiths. The source notes that these dominant myths participate in a mode of theologizing politics revolving around evil’s final exorcism. We must ask: does this focus on purging sin offer true healing, or does it merely trap us in an endless cycle of confession without absolution? The spiritual cost of such rigid dualism remains unexamined.