{"id":14265,"date":"2025-12-29T22:17:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T22:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=14265"},"modified":"2025-12-29T22:17:56","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T22:17:56","slug":"tucker-carlson-and-bad-theology-go-hand-in-hand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=14265","title":{"rendered":"Tucker Carlson and bad theology go hand-in-hand"},"content":{"rendered":"


By John B. Carpenter<\/span><\/span>, Op-ed contributor Saturday, December 27, 2025<\/span>Screenshot\/YouTube\/1819 Podcast<\/span><\/p>\n

Since Fox News exiled Tucker Carlson, he claims to have found the light. He says he\u2019s read the Bible for the first time. Normally, Christians would rejoice, like the angels, at one podcaster repenting. <\/p>\n

But rather than bearing good fruit, he\u2019s been issuing pronouncements, weaponizing Christian theology against Israel and the USA, punctuated by his trademark, \u201cThat\u2019s just true!\u201d \u201cPeriod!\u201d But his cage-stage piety quickly led him to espouse conservative and Christian heterodoxy. We could declare his new doctrine \u201cheresy,\u201d if only his dogma were serious enough to be worthy of that red stamp. If only.<\/p>\n

The reality of corporate guilt<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chief among Tucker\u2019s new dogmas is that Christianity opposes \u201ccollective punishment.\u201d Tucker\u2019s core claim is that guilt is always individual and, thus, so should the consequences of sins be. He preaches that any sense of group identity or \u201cblood guilt\u201d is evil \u2014 perhaps the ultimate evil. But it isn\u2019t, not absolutely. Sure, Christianity, when applied to civil justice, opposes individuals being intentionally punished for the specific sins of others. But it also holds that before God no one \u2014 except the Son \u2014 is truly innocent, because we all inherit the \u201cblood guilt\u201d of our first parents. This concept is famously refined in the doctrine of Original Sin.<\/p>\n

As promulgated by Augustine, based on Romans 5:12-21, and formally affirmed by the Second Council of Orange (529 AD), humanity is subject to the ultimate collective punishment: the inherited guilt and mortality of Adam\u2019s transgression. Augustine called this the massa damnata <\/em>\u2014 the mass of perdition, a humanity collectively lost without grace. Puritans learned this with their alphabet: \u201cIn Adam’s fall, We sinned all.\u201d Original Sin, even if bewildering to modern individualists, is a (small-c) \u201ccatholic\u201d Christian doctrine shared by all major branches of Christianity: Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. It is an essential Christian belief\u2014one Tucker seems unaware of.<\/p>\n

The error of modern Pelagianism<\/strong><\/p>\n

By rejecting collective guilt, Tucker aligns himself not with orthodoxy, but with the ancient heresy of Pelagius, who insisted Adam\u2019s sin was merely a bad example, not a corporate curse. Pelagius was condemned for denying that we required God\u2019s grace for salvation, even from conception, because he believed that human beings inherited no corruption or guilt from Adam. Each of us is our own rugged individualist.<\/p>\n

Tucker\u2019s theology, like Pelagius\u2019, is radically individualistic. By denying our collective plight, he unwittingly denies the collective cure: the atonement, in which the Son paid for the sins of the whole body of the Church, what, in theology, is called \u201cfederal headship,\u201d in which one person acts as a representative for a whole group. Adam acted as the head of all those born from Him (everyone except Christ); Christ acted as the head of all His people. That is, just as there is, indeed, corporate guilt for the sins of the first Adam, there is also corporate salvation (for the Body of Christ) because of the last Adam.<\/p>\n

Scripture\u2019s corporate lenses<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scripture frequently sees people corporately as part of bodies. This biblical \u201ccorporateness\u201d isn’t confined to the pews or the pages of Romans. It spills over into the messy, tragic reality of geopolitics. If we are part of a \u201cmass of perdition\u201d spiritually, we are also part of national bodies that face collective consequences, like the Great Flood, the incineration of Sodom, and the plagues of Egypt, which were all divine collective judgments where the (relatively) innocent suffered alongside the guilty. Prophets frequently denounced national sins. Yes, Ezekiel 18:20 insists the son shall not die for the father’s sin \u2014 a vital civil-law principle. But Tucker turns a courtroom procedural into a geopolitical absolute. Yet Scripture defies Tucker\u2019s absolutism.<\/p>\n

Tucker\u2019s theology collapses when it hits \u201cJust War Theory.\u201d He attempts to take a vital principle of civil law \u2014 that a son shouldn’t be executed for his father\u2019s crimes \u2014 and turns it into a geopolitical absolute that would render any national defense impossible. By insisting that any action resulting in “collective punishment” is inherently un-Christian, he ignores centuries of theological wisdom regarding how a fallen world must be restrained.<\/p>\n

The complexity of just war<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tucker\u2019s (implied) claim that opposition to \u201ccollective punishment\u201d is inherent to jus in bello<\/em> (justice in war) is true, to a degree. Non-combatant immunity holds that intentional, indiscriminate attacks against non-combatants (so-called \u201ccivilians\u201d) are immoral. The principle still holds, but the application has changed. Ancient war was hand-to-hand; modern war is \u201ckinetic.\u201d Ancients had to intentionally target non-combatants. Modern warfare, with its devastating weapons, is inherently collective.<\/p>\n

Augustine and other Just War philosophers taught that war could be, in part, an instrument of retributive justice: \u201cPunishment Theory.\u201d An aggrieved state could wage a just war to punish its attackers. When Al-Qaeda murdered about 3,000 Americans, the USA was the \u201caggrieved state.\u201d It could justly invade the nation that hosted its attackers. In so doing, the USA would likely, though inadvertently, harm or even kill people who took no part in the terrorist attack. Inevitably, there will be \u201ccollateral damage,\u201d that hideous euphemistic label. It\u2019s tragic. It\u2019s horrible. But it\u2019s a just war, nonetheless. This inherently allowed a degree of collective punishment, despite all Tucker\u2019s \u201cthis is just true, period!\u201d claims to the contrary. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Tucker\u2019s dogma would lead to total pacifism if applied consistently. In his world of theory, we would not be allowed to retaliate, not even for 9-11 \u2014 because it\u2019s \u201ccollective punishment.\u201d Would we deploy social workers, going door-to-door among the Taliban to counsel them on their support for terrorism? Of course, the enemy will have no such reservations, and the alternatives will be bloodier. Tucker never gets into the nuances of theological jus in bello<\/em> or the real-life choices of war. He\u2019s been too busy chumming it up with pimps, fake historians, and neo-Nazi Stalin fans. Such is the depth of Tucker\u2019s moral musings.<\/p>\n

Despite Tucker\u2019s pious pronouncements, Christian theology has an element of corporateness, and it is much more complicated than his ill-thought-through truisms suggest. Tucker\u2019s selective denunciations of \u201ccollective punishment\u201d appear not to be the product of thought at all. Tucker\u2019s sloganeering is a child\u2019s pining for a fantasy world where only the bad guys in black hats catch the bullets.<\/p>\n

Heresy is usually truth out of balance. Calling Tucker\u2019s musings \u201cheresy\u201d gives them too much credit. His radical individualism \u2014 likely just a cynical vehicle to condemn Israel\u2014is simply bad theology. That\u2019s just true. Period.<\/p>\n

John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By John B. Carpenter, Op-ed contributor Saturday, December 27, 2025Screenshot\/YouTube\/1819 Podcast Since Fox News exiled Tucker Carlson, he claims to have found the light. He says he\u2019s read the Bible for the first time. Normally, Christians would rejoice, like the angels, at one podcaster repenting. But rather than bearing good fruit, he\u2019s been issuing pronouncements,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[1244,70,4213,884,69],"class_list":["post-14265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-christian-living","tag-bad","tag-carlson","tag-handinhand","tag-theology","tag-tucker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}