Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal. Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be. There are honest ways to confront that. You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love. Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle.

via Andrew Klavan: My Way Into and Out of the Left – by Jamie Glazov | FrontPage Magazine.

Of course, I prefer to say that Jesus came to save us.  But having done so, it is inevitable that he would show by his life in word and in deed the evil that is self-salvation.

Not sure how much I agree or disagree (I assume both) with things said in the interview.  But I do think that what Klavan points to above is a problem found in other places beside the culture Klavan is analyzing.

The TULIP subculture comes to my mind.  “Grace” is a pharisaical slogan more often than not.