Look at all these sinners...
what's there to do with sin?
Thanks for taking the time to open this email! If you somehow were sent it and you haven’t subscribed, I’d love to have you on the email list—I try to not be annoying and then of course you can always tell me I’m annoying and unsubscribe any time you want.
In any case, if you enjoy this post, giving it a ♡ and/or commenting is helpful. It tells Substack I’m worth reading and it tells me what you think about my writing (especially if you comment and tell me what you think about my writing).
A blog about sin, the social kind. I am sorry 🫶🏼
I have to write a short essay response for the unit on “Sin and Grace” in my theology class that’s due today, so y’all are gonna get some thoughts from the rough draft. Take this as something of a trigger warning: I think my use of the word “sin” doesn’t evoke too much fire and brimstone and gnashing of teeth, but I didn’t grow up in an Evangelical church and never much considered hell until I read Dante Alighieri in college.
I enjoyed the reading from our textbook on sin. Listening to it in the uncanny valley version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice, I found myself appreciating the complexity with which the author wrote. Not exactly radical, but more realistic and aware of systems then I might have feared a chapter on “Sin” would be. When I finished, I looked up the theologian, Roger Haight. I learned that he’d been censored and banned from teaching when he was alive. Unsurprising. Most of the theologians I like have been censored, censured, and banned from teaching at least for some part of their career.
The obvious thing to say about sin is that, as a weaponized concept, it’s done more harm than good and we probably can articulate anything it names well using other language, without the baggage. Also, everything you’ve ever been told about it is probably fundamentally “wrong.” As wrong as one can be about a concept of religious dogma that’s become a shared metaphor in common language. This is the theme of my studies so far. Anything about religion that you’ve been told by a man with certainty in his voice is both an oversimplification of doctrine and usually just one side of an open debate.
Still, I’m nothing if not interested in the antiquated, so let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about sin.
I don’t think I had ever really given it much thought, lucky as I was to grow up in a Catholic family that was more focused on the social justice demands of the church than Hell and to attend a Catholic church that leaned more philosophical in the homilies than punitive. I remember as a teen having given myself the internal rule that if they ever preached against “the homosexual sin” I would stand up and walk out dramatically. I never got the chance to test if I’d have done it because they just didn’t talk about sin all that much. Or, they did, but it was sin in the form of not feeding the hungry, of acting violently toward others, and of betraying truth. They talked about what Haight describes as social sin.
Social sin is another way of describing the sin you’re born into, or “original sin.” Haight doesn’t especially like the term original sin, at least for the purposes of his chapter in our textbook, as it’s fraught with all kinds of misogyny and misplaced historical ugliness. But it does describe pretty well the trap of privilege and the harm that comes simply from the “power tier” of society into which we’re born. Haight says, “The sinful aspect of social involvement can be drawn out by a consideration of the phenomenon of social guilt—not guilt for society of the past of which one was not a part, but responsibility for the present and future sin of society.”
Haight goes on to acknowledge that people won’t like to hear this, that no one likes to admit guilt for something they did not “do,” but we should know by now that guilt is more complex than that. I’m not responsible for all that white men have done before me, but I am responsible for fixing it now. Why? Because as much as I wish it hadn’t been that way, things are generally much easier for me because of those “sins of the past.” It doesn’t matter much that you wish you could shed your privilege (your “original sin”), but it does matter what you do with it now.
For what it’s worth, this freedom to choose to act in ways that appear to be against one’s own interests in support of others and the greater social fabric is what Haight calls “grace.” Basically, this is the product of using your free will to act outside of the mechanical life you’re caught in. It’s what happens when you jump the tracks and roll in some other direction than that which social sin would lead you down. You can’t be perfect in this, of course, and Haight acknowledges that. He says we can “react against various aspects of social sin; human freedom can transcend society at any given point and become countercultural. But no one can escape all the aspects of one’s social existence and participation.” For example, you can’t just go live in the woods and disengage. Fleeing the harm you cause (or the harm you didn’t cause but see) could easily be seen as a sin of denying your responsibility.
It’s not sinful to get an abortion, it’s not sinful to masturbate, it’s not sinful to leave a marriage when it’s time to leave a marriage. My opinions, but I think they’re right and easily defensible. There are probably situations where these things might “be sinful” by my definition, which is that sins happen when you move farther away from God, that is, when you reject grace, that is, when you dehumanize and objectify the living world we’ve got right here. I can’t think of very many situations where it would be “sinful” to do those things, but I’m open to the possibility. However, I don’t think it’s very useful to spend time finding the fringe situation where masturbating leads to dehumanization. It is much more useful to talk about the sin we see when we put people in cages, ravage the planet, and hoard wealth. These are very effective ways to reject the grace of connection with others. These are very effective ways to shut yourself off into your own private hell, right here and now.
This idea deserves its own blog (or more), but I also think it’s a boring waste of time to evaluate whether other people are sinning. We certainly don’t need more policing, religious or otherwise. Instead, we cultivate those places in life that systematize grace and get us heading in the direction of the brilliantly humane, the divinely transcendent. We wake ourselves and our friends up from the kind of sleep that keeps us moving toward greater isolation. We do whatever it takes to wake ourselves up so that we can do the same for those around us. It’s scary to be awake and to see just how much social sin is baked into the every day, but it’s necessary. That’s where the language of sin and grace is most useful, I think, as tools that help us build better ways of helping each other, that help us know each other and respect each other.
Thanks for reading! Still figuring out this school/work/blog cadence, all subs are free for at least as long as it takes to do that.
Some things to read/listen to:
This blog about the trans activists who have made inroads with the Vatican. It did make me misty-eyed. When the Pope can respect people’s gender, no one else has any excuse for misgendering, this seems obvious!
It’s the ten year anniversary of one of the best pop albums of all time. This, for me, is spiritual. Carly Rae is both earnest and likable, a hard thing to stick the landing on.
Me and every single other person on The Internet™ have been talking about how they enjoy this album by Audrey Hobert. I endorse. This is now a music blog.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.