The Spiritual Myth Of The Generational Curse
And The Spiritual Reality Of Generational Blessing
It’s a rare thing—practically endangered—to find someone deep in the therapeutic ecosystem who actually takes full, unfiltered responsibility for their own wreckage. Most don’t. Not really. Instead, we default to the elegant, socially acceptable form of blame: victimhood. A nuanced, Instagrammable martyrdom.
Therapy culture has perfected a kind of holy self-pity. The narrative goes something like this: I am fundamentally good, wounded only by exposure—to manipulation, to broken parenting, to a culture that objectified me, to people who didn’t attune to my emotional needs. I am, in essence, a celestial being sideswiped by entropy.
It’s never quite said that way, of course. That would be too crude. Instead, it’s a soft-focus narrative: I’m not broken because I chose badly, I’m broken because bad things happened to me. Trauma becomes the alibi for everything. And so the therapist becomes priest, and therapy becomes penance without confession.
Now, I suppose I could tell you about discovering pornography at 13 years old, and make it the origin story of my moral collapse—turn the entire thing into a psychological Marvel movie: innocent boy exposed to darkness, corrupted, but redeemable. I could say lust was something that happened to me, not something that came from me.
But that would be dishonest.
Because I know myself better. I wasn’t the damsel. I was the dragon. My friends’ dads’ poorly-hidden cardboard box didn’t victimize me with their Hustler magazines—they just showed me what I already wanted: to take what wasn’t mine. Not because I was pure and they corrupted me. But because I was always hungry for what I was never meant to have.
And that’s the uncomfortable turn no amount of EMDR or shadow work can quite touch: I’m not an adulterer because I lust. I lust because I’m an adulterer. Jesus puts it that way, I think, to make it unavoidable—so you’re cornered into admitting that the lust isn’t the disease. It’s a symptom. The disease is the human heart and its relentless output.
This is why John Piper says there are no innocent children. That’s why it scandalizes people, even Christians. Because it smells cruel until you remember he’s borrowing it from Augustine. And that Augustine said it because of Paul. And Paul said it because it was just—obvious. This is why the Church baptized infants and why the Jews circumcised them: not because they were innocent, but because they were claimed. Children of the covenant, not clean, but sanctified. It was grace marking her territory.
Which brings us into dangerous territory: corporate solidarity. The idea that sin is not merely personal, but inherited. Like debt. Like blood. Like war.
And yet, grace. If the Law was given in generational form, perhaps grace arrives to unravel it—to explode it. Grace does not just cancel curses; it transcends them.
Which is precisely why a theology of generational curses, as constructed in some charismatic frameworks, begins to wobble theologically when placed under the weight of the New Testament. Because the gospel doesn't reform the old man—it kills him. And you can’t curse a corpse.
Here’s where the therapy-worshipers go wrong doctrinally, why Generational Curses are a theology of convenience, and how an historically orthodox anthropology eats their lunch:
