God does not create bad humans

Recently, I was co-facilitating a retreat when someone recounted a story from their early years, qualified with, “I mean, I wasn’t a ‘bad’ kid. I wasn’t doing drugs or harming people.” The phrase struck me deeply, as I often sit with people wrestling with their spirituality and identity. It is so common for people to carry deep shame or guilt about not only what they have done, but about who they are or have been perceived to be. It is easy to say that humans are deeply good at the core. But why do so many of us carry a deep fear that we are somehow not good enough – or even bad?

Several years ago, as the world wrestled with the death of George Floyd and the countless ways in which people of colour experience injustice and discrimination, I did a lot of learning about anti-racism. It was hard and deep work, but one of the most significant insights I found was from Ibram Kendi’s book How to Be an AntiRacist. 

He argues that racist is not a thing that people can be, at the heart. People can have racist assumptions, ideologies, biases, or beliefs; they can make racist decisions or behave in racist ways, surely. But his conviction is that “racist” is an adjective that does not apply to a human being. 

Advertisement

This idea is important for Kendi because it means, fundamentally, that racism is a learned set of ideas, words, and actions that can be unlearned. A person is always capable, then, of awareness about their perspectives, beliefs, and actions. We can learn to see racism’s unjust discrimination, and we can choose to accept or reject its lies. Racist thoughts, words, actions, and systems can be dismantled by people with freedom and goodwill.

When I heard the insistence that “I wasn’t a ‘bad’ kid,” it got my mind racing. What about ones who were doing very harmful things? What about the little ones who are repeatedly called “bad”? What about the humans whose emotions are too big, whose behaviours get out of control, whose choices cause harm? I cannot even tell you how often someone will state that that they or someone they love is the “black sheep.” (Let’s also acknowledge how often black and brown are associated in language with impurity, immorality, otherness, and exile).

Advertisement

As I raise my own children, it has been abundantly clear to me that every fruitful effort to respond to their mistakes requires them to see how deeply I can see their inherent goodness. If they sense that I think they are inherently flawed, broken, or bad, they lose all trust and hope. What is the point of trying if they are just downright bad?

Poorly articulated religious doctrines of Original Sin and societal disciplinary practices of shame have contributed to misunderstandings that not only confuse people but also harm us. If we believe that people are fundamentally and irreparably flawed, we create the conditions for hopelessness and abuse. If we thinking that the only way to encourage positive behaviour is to shame people, at best we get well-intentioned compliance. 

Performative goodness doesn’t come anywhere close to choosing life-giving action with full freedom and love. Jesus challenged religious leaders of His time to let go of the hypocrisy of holding up external compliance with the law while hearts rotted beneath the surface. It is not enough to appear to follow the law – God wants our whole hearts set free to love.

Advertisement

Of course, we all have the capacity to do great harm (with and without intention), but the heart of humanity is built in the image and likeness of a God who is good. At our core, we are good; that goodness means that no matter how destructive our thoughts, words, actions, or decisions have been, we can always choose something life-giving, constructive, and positive now.

I am not suggesting that we are naïve about how dangerous people can be. Even while we set boundaries and trust what people tell us with their words and actions, I think we must always hold fast to the conviction that at the deepest level, bad is not a thing that a person can be.

(Leah Perrault is executive director at Mount St. Francis in Cochrane, Alberta.)

A version of this article appeared in the November 01, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "God does not create bad humans".