Whenever a people sin with their fathers, they are carrying on a tradition. The long practice of tradition gives the disobedience a sheen that it would not otherwise have.
One writer has helpfully distinguished between tradition, which is the living faith of the dead, and traditionalism, which is the dead faith of the living. When the Pharisees went on autopilot, not understanding the weightier matters of the law, that was traditionalism. When Jonadab’s descendants refused Jeremiah’s offer of wine, and all because their ancestor had given them a way of life, that was tradition, and was commended by God. Handing faithfulness across generations is tradition. Handing sin across generations is traditionalism.
In a moment we are going to confess that we have sinned with our fathers. This means that we are going to be confessing generational sin. Not all sin is individual. Not all corporate sin is contemporary. We sin with our fathers when we defend, for example, some practice as “the America way,” which either is, and shouldn’t be, or is an area when our founding fathers were faithful, but our fathers since then have veered from the path. We need to ask if something is the biblical way first.
Our foremost problem in this regard is the pestilence of secularism. Our nation was not founded as a secular republic, but we have sinned with those fathers who try to pretend that is was. But the point is actually because the point—for even if we were founded as a secular republic, that would be an incoherent sin requiring repentance. So either way, we bow before God.