Jamin Bradley

Father Flanagan was a Catholic priest and Irish immigrant who started an orphanage for young boys in the early 1900s. His efforts quickly expanded and eventually became the famous village of Boys Town, Nebraska, where boys grew up peacefully alongside each other regardless of race, creed, or culture—an unimaginable feat in a great time of racism, segregation, and the KKK. One of the theological driving points for Flanagan was that there’s “no such thing as a bad boy, only bad environment, bad modeling, and bad teaching.”

This is at the heart of the creation story. God makes good things, and our human identity as the image of God is a part of that goodness. No evil or sin we could ever commit can override the image or fully smother our potential to cultivate goodness, for goodness is our true identity. 

Flanagan’s beliefs put him at odds with the eugenics movement of his day, which was racism masquerading as science in which certain people are bad and undesirable while others are good and desired. A form of this lives on today when entire people groups are said to have “bad genes,” as Trump just declared about immigrants, claiming that “[being] a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes.” Political fear-mongering over immigrants is one of America’s oldest sins, and it continues well into the present. 

While helping a Latino seek out citizenship with their attorney, I asked a question that accidentally set off a wrong signal. “I promise I’m not a criminal,” they said sincerely, for fear that I saw them as a stereotype. My heart broke that they thought I could have wondered if that was the case. Clearly, they had run into such a dynamic before or feared that this was how they were perceived by people like me.

When the people of another race become bad or sketchy while yours remains good and right, you have lost sight of the importance of the doctrine of the image of God. This doctrine is fairly unique to the Bible, as most ancient religions only allowed kings to carry this designation. But the God of the cosmos teaches us a different way forward: we are all made in the image, made to be good, and worthy of dignity and respect.