The President's Brokenness Is Not His Alone

Is Donald Trump a broken man, or is he the product of a broken country? The editors of The Christian Century didn't think that was the real question, and by the time I finished their May 2026 editorial, "The President's Brokenness," I had come around to their view. The piece makes an argument that a lot of American Christians, myself included, don't sit with as often as we should: the choice between blaming a leader's character and blaming the systems that produced him isn't really a choice at all.

The editorial doesn't let Trump off easy. It says his "wake of destruction is directly attributable to the ungoverned id of this deeply broken man," pointing to his need to dominate people, his lying as a way of proving he's beyond the reach of truth, his apparent relish in humiliating allies he's already beaten. But in the same breath, it says his presidency is "the result of harmful systems he didn't create: White supremacy, American hegemony, economic inequality, cultural resentment, political tribalism." Both claims, about the same man, in the same piece, without either one canceling the other out.

That's the part worth sitting with, because it isn't really about Trump. It's about a much older question that shows up every time a religious community has to explain a failure. Do we say the person was broken? Or do we say the system was broken? Christians have been picking a side in that argument for longer than any of us have been alive, and I've come to think both sides are usually wrong at the exact same moment.

An Old Argument Wearing a New Suit

The personal-sin frame is the older one, at least in American revivalist Christianity. Sin lives in the individual heart, gets confessed by the individual mouth, and gets forgiven by an individual decision. James put it plainly: a person is "drawn away of his own lust, and enticed" (James 1:14). Nothing structural required. Just a man and his choices.

Walter Rauschenbusch broke with that frame on purpose. In A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917), he argued that sin also lives in what he called the Kingdom of Evil: patterns of injustice that outlast any individual who participates in them, patterns that recruit new people into the same cruelty generation after generation. Reinhold Niebuhr sharpened the point in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), arguing that groups act with a self-interest that individuals, left to themselves, would usually restrain. A crowd will do what no single person in it would do alone. So will a nation.

The Catholic Church eventually gave the pattern its own name. Pope John Paul II's 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, in section 36, called certain entrenched patterns of injustice "structures of sin," a category no single person invented and no single confession dissolves. The Christian Century itself grew up inside this lineage. Founded in 1884, decades before its evangelical counterpart Christianity Today existed, it has spent most of its history arguing that personal and structural sin were never competing categories to begin with. The May editorial isn't a new position for the magazine. It's the same position, aimed at a new target.

Why the Split Doesn't Hold

Here's the line from the editorial that stopped me: individual and collective sin, the editors write, are "mutually reinforcing; they constitute each other." Not two separate stories running side by side. One story, told at two different distances from the camera.

I think that's right, and I think the reason it's right is simpler than the theology makes it sound. A culture doesn't manufacture a leader the way a factory stamps out a part, identical and interchangeable. It grows one, the way a garden grows whatever gets planted and watered long enough. White supremacy, tribalism, a hunger for dominance dressed up as strength: plant those long enough in a culture and you shouldn't be surprised when a person grows up perfectly suited to harvest them. And once that person is in power, he doesn't just benefit from the garden. He replants it, thicker, for the next season.

So when the editorial says Trump's cruelty is "directly attributable" to his own brokenness, it isn't contradicting the systemic claim two paragraphs earlier. It's describing the same organism from a different angle. The individual is where the culture becomes visible enough to have a name and a face. The culture is why that individual's particular brokenness found a stage big enough to do "incalculable harm," to borrow a phrase from one reader's letter responding to the piece, rather than staying a private wound that hurt only the people closest to him.

Two Frames, Compared

Neither frame is dishonest on its own. Each one just explains part of the picture, and each one has a specific way of going wrong when it's asked to explain the whole thing by itself.

That last row is the one I'd ask you to notice. A pure systemic account struggles to explain the person inside a corrupt system who simply refused to go along with it. A pure personal account struggles to explain why the same failure shows up again and again, in different people, inside the same institution. You need both rows of the table to explain the whole phenomenon. That's not a compromise position. It's just what the evidence requires.

What This Means the Next Time It's Your Pastor, Not the President

This debate doesn't stay in Washington. It's the exact fight that breaks out in a congregation the week after a pastor's affair comes out, or a denomination's decades of covered-up abuse finally reach daylight.

One camp reaches for the personal frame immediately: he was a broken man, pray for him, this was a private failure and the church itself is fine. That framing feels compassionate, and it can be, but it also happens to be the framing that costs the institution the least. It lets the board that hired him, promoted him, and shielded him from scrutiny stay entirely out of the story. I've written before about how institutions protect themselves when their own survival is on the line, and the personal-brokenness frame is one of the cleanest tools available for that job, precisely because it sounds so merciful.

The other camp reaches for the systemic frame: the culture of the institution made this inevitable, so don't be surprised, don't even be that angry at the man himself. That framing can be just as convenient in its own way. It can drain the specific choice out of the story until nobody, including the person who actually did the harm, is left holding anything.

The honest version holds both, the way the Christian Century editorial does. The pastor made a choice a system rewarded him for making, and would very likely reward the next pastor for making too. Naming the choice doesn't erase the system. Naming the system doesn't erase the choice. I've written elsewhere about the gap between personal faith and institutional faith, and this is one place that gap shows up most clearly: a congregation can love its pastor as a person while still asking hard questions about the office that shaped and protected him.

Where This Argument Goes From Here

I don't think this fight is going anywhere soon, and I'd guess it gets louder before it gets quieter. Every scandal, every resignation, every next election is going to reopen the same split, and the fast version of both answers, blame the man and move on, or blame the system and never make anyone answer for a single choice, will keep winning because it's faster. Holding both frames at once takes longer than either shortcut, and it doesn't produce a villain you get to feel entirely finished with.

What I keep coming back to is that "by their fruits ye shall know them" (Matthew 7:16-20) was never written as a test for individuals alone. Fruit grows out of soil as much as it grows out of the tree. Judging the tree without asking what's in the ground around it, or judging the ground while pretending the tree had no say in what it became, both get you half a diagnosis. And half a diagnosis is exactly the kind you can live with indefinitely, because it never quite forces you to change the one thing you'd actually have to change.

So maybe the more useful question isn't whether the president is broken, or whether the country that produced him is. Maybe it's this: what have you planted, in whatever ground you actually stand on, that you'd be uncomfortable seeing harvested at scale?

Frequently Asked Questions

What did The Christian Century's editorial "The President's Brokenness" actually argue? The May 2026 editorial argued that Donald Trump's presidency reflects both his own personal brokenness, including his need to dominate others and his relationship to truth, and the harmful systems that produced and rewarded that brokenness, including white supremacy, American hegemony, and political tribalism. The editors described the two explanations as "mutually reinforcing" rather than competing.

What's the difference between personal sin and structural or systemic sin in Christian theology? Personal sin refers to an individual's own choices, classically described in James 1:14-15 as being "drawn away" by one's own desire. Structural or systemic sin, a term Pope John Paul II used explicitly in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, refers to entrenched patterns of injustice that no single person created and that outlast any one participant.

Where does the Bible address both individual sin and systemic evil? James 1:14-15 locates sin in individual desire, while Ephesians 6:12 describes a struggle against "rulers," "powers," and "spiritual wickedness in high places," language that points to something larger than any one person's choices. Both threads run through scripture without one canceling out the other.

Does calling a leader "broken" excuse what he's done? Not if the word is used the way the Christian Century editorial uses it. The editorial pairs the language of brokenness with direct attribution of responsibility for specific harm. Naming a cause isn't the same as granting an exemption from consequences.

How does this personal-versus-systemic debate show up in local churches, not just national politics? It shows up almost every time a congregation has to respond to a pastor's misconduct or a denomination's cover-up. Framing the failure as purely personal tends to protect the institution from scrutiny; framing it as purely systemic can dissolve individual responsibility. Congregations that hold both tend to ask harder, more honest questions than those that pick one side.

Last updated: 2026-09-22