Saturday, October 7, 2017

Nonreligious People And The Concept Of Sin

In a recent panel discussion Rev. Tim Keller was analyzing challenges in communicating the gospel to “post-Christian non-Christian” culture. One problem, Keller said, is that “There is no anxiety about sin in particular. They have no concept of sin. Even to get across the concept of sin is something that is really difficult. You go to China, Africa, almost any other place, there is some concept - but not here.”

Keller’s point requires a qualification that I believe he himself would quickly acknowledge. I think today’s nonreligious people have a robust concept of sin. It is just a matter of where they locate it.

Every day my Facebook feed is filled with expressions of anxiety about sin and angry denunciations of it. Curiously, most of these comments seem to come from “Nones” – that is, atheists, agnostics, nonreligious, non church-going people, fans of late-night satiric news and comedy. Their sensitivity to sin is finely calibrated, and sometimes they are so anxious about it that they lose sleep at night. They research sin, identify it, reveal previously undisclosed evidences of it, and urge all good people everywhere to resist it. Many are so passionately opposed to sin that they are not ashamed to shed tears over it in public. Just watch Jimmy Kimmel.

The rub, of course, is that it is someone else’s sin, not their own. One detects little introspection, just (to coin a term) extrospection. Typically the sins being denounced are those of Donald Trump, or Congress, or the foul unthinking hordes who put them in power. When they decry Trump’s treatment of immigrants or a Congressman’s resistance to gun laws, they do not use the words “sin,” “sinner” or “sinful,” but these are clearly the categories they have in mind. The energies they bring to bear on their pleas are moral in nature. I have never heard them advocate for their positions on the basis of freely acknowledged partisanship or personal taste.

What I mean is this. If I’m a Cubs fan and you root for the White Sox, we may find each other’s loyalties puzzling but never (if we’re grownups) morally loathsome. If you liked the film “Arrival” and I thought it was terrible, we may have a discussion – even a heated one – about the film’s merits and demerits. But neither of us would try to call the other to repentance for the sin of disliking a worthy film or celebrating a bad one. We would just acknowledge that our tastes differ, and charitably keep to ourselves the concluding thought, “Of course, my taste is more refined than yours.”

But the zeal of Nones that I daily witness is moral zeal, righteous indignation. Trump is to be resisted not because his hair is ridiculous but because his actions are bad. And “bad” does not mean “displeasing to me personally, but of course you might have a different view and who am I to judge that?” but rather, “objectively evil.” Sinful. Worthy of reprobation and demanding active resistance.

Two thoughts come to mind as I contemplate these waves of moral indignation on the part of people whose worldview is nonreligious, philosophically materialistic, and sometimes even contemptuous of that “Sky Fairy” faith that simple folk in flyover states cling to.

First, I encourage the indignation. Sin, unhappily, exists, and it is better to acknowledge its presence and hate it and fight it than to sigh and say, “Well, some people think this and some people think that, and there is no independent righteous standard to judge between them. There can be no such standard, because we are, after all, complex bags of walking seawater who arrived at this point through a process of natural selection pruning the output of random mutation. No Moral Spirit constructed us or expects us to behave in a certain way. We are here because the strong ate the weak. Millions of generations of flexible organisms disassembled the proteins of less suitable ones and incorporated them for private use. Even in my individual creation, the brilliant Super Sperm that became me outraced 180 million rivals and then chemically excluded them with marvelous genocidal efficiency. Like it or not, I am Genghis Khan, and Nietzsche explained how it all works. There is no right and wrong. There is only strong and weak. Alive or dead.”

Deeply felt moral outrage tends to give the lie to philosophical materialism, because many find it hard to hold compatible a belief in sin with a belief that matter and energy are all that exist. These dual beliefs speed in opposite directions, and the intellectual strain involved in trying to encompass them both has led many thinkers to jettison their atheism. If there is a Law, there must be a Lawgiver. If there is no Law, if you and I are just competing (and sometimes cooperating) bags of seawater, then why in the world should I let you tell me what to do? And don’t tell me that it is ultimately in my own best interests. I’ll determine what is in my own best interests, thank you. And besides, your moralizing is always telling me to do what is not in my own interests simply because it is the “good and right thing to do.” We’re back at that again. There is no escaping the categories of goodness and badness, holiness and sin. Expressions of moral indignation remind us of this truth. Hooray indignation.

Second, Keller’s point about the secular mindset lacking a concept of sin strikes me as pretty well-taken as long as we are referring to one’s own sin. I agree: people who do not view themselves as sinful will be very hard to reach with the gospel of Jesus. It won’t be relevant for them. Of course, this is an old story. Jesus himself had a devil of a time trying to convert people who focused on other people’s sins but never their own. In the Bible such people go by the cover term “Pharisee”. A Pharisee hates everybody else’s sin but never sees it in himself. He hungers and thirsts for righteousness – other people’s righteousness. He’s already got it. If only everybody else were as good and reasonable as he, then everything would be fine.

These people are almost hopeless. Jesus had better luck with Simon Peter, who said to him, “Depart from me Lord; I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8) than he did with his namesake Simon the Pharisee, who thought, “Depart from her; she’s a sinful woman.” (free paraphrase of Luke 7:39-40). The mindset of a person who is perpetually pleased with himself yet just as perpetually offended by others is reflected in a parable Jesus told about a Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14. This Pharisee lamented other people’s sins, while a nearby penitent tax collector lamented his own. The tax collector was forgiven and (presumably) became a better man.

Though Pharisees ancient and modern can be very hard to reach, they do have this one thing in their favor. They know that sin exists, and they hate it. On the whole, I suppose it is better to have strong feelings about other people’s sins than to have no feelings about sin at all. Better a Pharisee than a Nietzschean psychopath. With a self-righteous Pharisee, one can at least hope, and I will certainly pray, that the finger of accusation can be taught to point in the opposite direction.