Tucker Carlson and bad theology go hand-in-hand

By John B. Carpenter, Op-ed contributor Saturday, December 27, 2025

Since Fox News exiled Tucker Carlson, he claims to have found the light. He says he’s 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’s been issuing pronouncements, weaponizing Christian theology against Israel and the USA, punctuated by his trademark, “That’s just true!” “Period!” But his cage-stage piety quickly led him to espouse conservative and Christian heterodoxy. We could declare his new doctrine “heresy,” if only his dogma were serious enough to be worthy of that red stamp. If only.

The reality of corporate guilt

Chief among Tucker’s new dogmas is that Christianity opposes “collective punishment.” Tucker’s 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 “blood guilt” is evil — perhaps the ultimate evil. But it isn’t, 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 — except the Son — is truly innocent, because we all inherit the “blood guilt” of our first parents. This concept is famously refined in the doctrine of Original Sin.

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’s transgression. Augustine called this the massa damnata — the mass of perdition, a humanity collectively lost without grace. Puritans learned this with their alphabet: “In Adam's fall, We sinned all.” Original Sin, even if bewildering to modern individualists, is a (small-c) “catholic” Christian doctrine shared by all major branches of Christianity: Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. It is an essential Christian belief—one Tucker seems unaware of.

The error of modern Pelagianism

By rejecting collective guilt, Tucker aligns himself not with orthodoxy, but with the ancient heresy of Pelagius, who insisted Adam’s sin was merely a bad example, not a corporate curse. Pelagius was condemned for denying that we required God’s 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.

Tucker’s theology, like Pelagius’, 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 “federal headship,” 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.

Scripture’s corporate lenses

Scripture frequently sees people corporately as part of bodies. This biblical “corporateness” 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 “mass of perdition” 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 — a vital civil-law principle. But Tucker turns a courtroom procedural into a geopolitical absolute. Yet Scripture defies Tucker’s absolutism.

Tucker’s theology collapses when it hits “Just War Theory.” He attempts to take a vital principle of civil law — that a son shouldn't be executed for his father’s crimes — 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.

The complexity of just war

Tucker’s (implied) claim that opposition to “collective punishment” is inherent to jus in bello (justice in war) is true, to a degree. Non-combatant immunity holds that intentional, indiscriminate attacks against non-combatants (so-called “civilians”) are immoral. The principle still holds, but the application has changed. Ancient war was hand-to-hand; modern war is “kinetic.” Ancients had to intentionally target non-combatants. Modern warfare, with its devastating weapons, is inherently collective.

Augustine and other Just War philosophers taught that war could be, in part, an instrument of retributive justice: “Punishment Theory.” An aggrieved state could wage a just war to punish its attackers. When Al-Qaeda murdered about 3,000 Americans, the USA was the “aggrieved state.” 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 “collateral damage,” that hideous euphemistic label. It’s tragic. It’s horrible. But it’s a just war, nonetheless. This inherently allowed a degree of collective punishment, despite all Tucker’s “this is just true, period!” claims to the contrary.  

Tucker’s 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 — because it’s “collective punishment.” 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 or the real-life choices of war. He’s been too busy chumming it up with pimps, fake historians, and neo-Nazi Stalin fans. Such is the depth of Tucker’s moral musings.

Despite Tucker’s pious pronouncements, Christian theology has an element of corporateness, and it is much more complicated than his ill-thought-through truisms suggest. Tucker’s selective denunciations of “collective punishment” appear not to be the product of thought at all. Tucker’s sloganeering is a child’s pining for a fantasy world where only the bad guys in black hats catch the bullets.

Heresy is usually truth out of balance. Calling Tucker’s musings “heresy” gives them too much credit. His radical individualism — likely just a cynical vehicle to condemn Israel—is simply bad theology. That’s just true. Period.