Does Christianity believe that "No Human is Garbage?"

I wrote this weeks ago and let it sit.

Something occurred to me as I was reading Jeff Chu’s post, “No Human is Garbage.” Jeff is pastor, journalist, and speaker. He was as guest at Still Processing in May 2024. We talked about his first book, Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America. He is a beautiful thinker and writer.

President Trump called Somalia immigrants “garbage.” This was so long ago that you probably forgot. He continued, “I don’t want them in my country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks.”

Trump has been saying these kinds of things for ten years and has only gained more Christian adherents along the way, especially Hispanic Evangelicals in 2024. White Evangelicals and white Catholics have been MAGA from the jump. Even the majority of white non-evangelical Christians (Christians from major denominations, sometimes referred to as “mainline”) have been MAGA for ten years (2016: 57% Trump, 2020: 57% Trump, 2024: 58% Trump).

Chu writes: “It’s hard to say, in this age of rampant cruelty, why one bad thing hits harder than any other. For me, watching the American president sit in a Cabinet meeting and hearing him call a group of immigrants ‘garbage’ broke something in me.”

I understand this “breaking.” I suspect you do too.

As I read Chu’s post, I was struck by a simple fact: a Christian writer felt compelled to persaude other Christians that, “No human is garbage.” After nearly 2,000 years of existence, Christianity has no consensus around the statement, “No human is garbage.”

I am, of course, sympathetic to Chu’s position. The inherent dignity and worth of every human being has become an article of truth for me.

Chu mounts a case for the claim, “No human is garbage,” by adding the phrase “Every person is a beloved child of God.” He asserts that such a claim should be obvious to all Christians: “It should not be difficult for those of us who claim to be Christian to stand by these convictions. Anything else is heresy.”

But as Chu points out in a footnote, the particular stream of Christianity that Chu adheres to, and that I once adhered to, believes all humans are garbage.

Here is that footnote:

Someone valiantly tried to make the case to me that some Reformed theologies are in fact based on the assertion that all humans are garbage. First, I don’t think the president was trafficking in Reformed theology when he said this. Secondly, that’s a gross mischaracterization even of a hardline understanding of total depravity, but that’s really a conversation for another day, because God’s unconditional love remains greater in the equation.

Essentially every form of Christianity believes that we need to be saved. There is no Christianity without salvation, sin, conversion, submission, grace, punishment, etc. Humanity’s brokenness and sinfulness are at the heart of Christianity.

Furthermore, one of the central claims of Christianity is that if you don’t join it, you are indeed very fucked. God’s love is not unconditional in most versions of Christianity because most of the Bible does not present God in such terms.

God loves Israel and kills all kinds of innocent non-Israelites (Egyptian and Canaanite babies, for example) to prove it (these events are myths, fantasies, of course). No one reads the Old Testament and comes away with the idea that the God presented within it believes that “Every person is a beloved child of God.”

The New Testament does seem slightly softer than the Old Testament. Then again, in Matthew 25:31-46 (helping people in need is like helping Jesus), a passage universally beloved by liberal Christians, there is the small problem of eternal punishment.

Jesus has good news for those who helped the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoner. These folks are getting in the kingdom (whatever that means).

For those who did not help others, Jesus tells them, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” The passage ends with this: “And these will go away into eternal punishment but the righteous into eternal life.”

Also, Revelation is in the New Testament. Whatever that creepy book is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess, but violence is very much permitted and Jesus partakes.

So when Chu rightly points out that Jesus is for loving your neighbor, and even for loving your enemy, we are left wondering why this love has an expiration date. Advocating for eternal punishment for someone cannot somehow also mean “loving them.” Be so for real.

And the idea of punishment or eradication of some people is central to Jesus’s teachings. Jesus is an eliminationist. I’m sorry if that’s uncomfortable for liberal Christians.

In the footnote included above, Chu calls God’s love “unconditional.” Maybe there is a God who loves us unconditionally, but I’m sorry to say that it’s not the God of the Old or New Testament.

When modern Israeli men and women purposefully kill 70,000 Palestinians, they are doing a disgusting, monstrous thing. But they are not betraying their sacred texts, nor their ancient religion.

When Calvin University, Calvin Seminary, and the Christian Reformed Church (along with every other conservative Christian organization) tells LGBTQIA people that they are, essentially, “garbage” in the eyes of God, the Bible agrees with them. Christian history is on their side. Their position is disgusting and cruel, but it is not unbiblical, or even unChristian.

A Pew Research poll from 2021 showed that 62% of Americans (not Christians, but all Americans) believe in hell.¹ Amongst Christian Americans, 79% believe in hell. For mainline Christians (this would include Chu and those associated with denominations like Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, RCA, CRC, etc.), 69% believe in hell.

In Chu’s post, you can see that the case is harder to make than one would like. Here is Chu’s main argument for “No human is garbage. Every person is a beloved child of God.”

“Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted,” Rowan Williams writes in a majestic essay called “The Body’s Grace.” “The whole story of creation, incarnation and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this; so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.”

For those outside of Christianity, whose numbers have grown significantly, this is unintelligible, a fantasy. I put it bluntly because I want to startle you a bit here. This way of talking about God is bizarre, and no one outside of Christianity would take it seriously.

Furthermore, if asked to explain Christianity, very few Christians would say something similar to the quote above. Most would find it difficult to understand.

Liberal Christianity, which I appreciate and find common cause with, cannot overcome what the Bible actually says. It cannot make Christianity good.

Christianity simply isn’t what Chu wants it to be, or what I want it to be, or what most liberal/progressive/socialist/leftist people want it to be. And every single day, it gets more out of touch, more strange, and more dangerous.

Liberals have spent too long contorting the Bible and Christianity, churning out pastors and professors that try to make it make sense. Begging it to be good, to be true, to be beautiful, to be expansive, to be kind.

But it isn’t. And it isn’t going to be. It doesn’t want to be.

We practically beg Christianity to reflect reality, or at least to be interested in reality. But that’s not the objective of Christianity. Reality is known. “The Bible” is reality, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

We have to find another way.

We have to learn to trust ourselves, meaning trust human empathy, goodness, knowledge, and wisdom. We must.

We have to assert that, yes, “No human is garbage,” not because the Bible says so or Christianity says so, but because we say so.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/11/23/views-on-the-afterlife/