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sin

Theology

sin is not just a “heart issue”

If you’re a person who has frequented the internet over the last month, you’ve probably heard, seen, or read discussions around whether or not companies or governments should “ban” single-use plastic straws. On one side you have people who believe that we should eliminate– or at least reduce our reliance on– single-use plastics, and disposable straws are their current target. On the other side, disability activists argue that there aren’t good alternatives to single-use plastic straws and that disabled people’s need to stay hydrated without dying due to anaphylaxis or aspiration is more important than the 0.025% of plastic floating around in our oceans, especially when abled people can just stop using disposable straws if they want to.

Another facet of the discussion has tried to point out that if you actually want to tackle the problem of plastic waste polluting our oceans, we should look at elements like industrial fishing methods, since 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is plastic fishing nets and the rest is almost entirely other pieces of fishing gear. Any environmental or climate change concern is going to have similar elements: the bulk of the waste and pollution is caused by entire industries and corporations; altering individual behavior is good but ultimately ineffective. If we actually want to address plastic waste in our oceans, we need to change the behaviors of industries and entire economies, not whether or not Deborah gets a straw in her mocha frappuccino.

Unfortunately, changing the course of an entire industry is much more difficult than telling me, individually, not to litter or use plastic straws– and it is difficult because corporations have a vested interest in making it difficult. Moving away from single-use plastics will hurt their bottom line, so they throw money at lobbyists and politicians and regulators to make sure they can keep strangling our planet with their garbage. Starbucks can announce that they’re going to phase out plastic straws and get plenty of kudos and accolades … and keep on using unrecyclable plastic-lined paper cups to the tune of 4 billion cups per year. They could start using biodegradable, compostable, or recyclable cups, but they won’t.

Industries and corporations continuously point fingers at individual consumer habits so they don’t have to make any substantive changes. Take the “Crying Indian” ad from 1971– it was paid for by a conglomeration of some of the biggest polluters in the country in order to take the focus off packaging and throw-away containers and put that focus on individual consumers. That’s the whole point: make the conversation about Deborah’s frappucino and not how Proctor & Gamble is packaging its shampoo in the Philippines.

***

All of the above functions extremely well as a metaphor for the common American Christian articulation of sin as a “heart issue.” Maybe like me you’ve noticed a pattern of influential Christian ministers referring to racism or sexism as a “heart issue,” and found it as frustrating as I do.

Framing racism or other systemic social problems as a “heart issue” accomplishes a few things. First, it centers Christianity in the conversation. If racism is a “heart issue,” then the solution is conversion or repentance– all the individually racist person needs to do is repent and allow Jesus to change their heart. If a racist person accepts Jesus into their heart and once they’ve done so, follows the Spirit’s guidance away from prejudice and towards acceptance– then racism is solved with the Christian religion. Saying racism is a “heart issue” means that we don’t need affirmative action, we need Evangelical Jesus.

Second, it allows people and their communities to escape any feeling of responsibility or guilt. If racism is truly a single person’s heart issue, and the resolution is for that person to repent, then there’s nothing that Bob or Susie is responsible for when Jim is a racist turd. If Jim is a Christian, then Jesus and the Holy Spirit will handle it. If he’s not, then there’s nothing more for Bob or Susie to do– they just have to continue being Jim’s friend so they can be a “good witness” for Christ in his life. What good would it do to tell Jim that he’s being racist, if it’s a heart issue? No, we just need to “love on him” more and “be the only Bible he’ll ever see.”

Lastly, if racism is an individual’s “heart issue,” then it’s not systemic. An indiviudal’s heart issue does not require a church, as an institution, to change. Heart issues do not ask the Church to examine itself or shift course; in fact, if racism is a heart issue than most Christian churches are doing the exactly right thing by harping on a “personal relationship with Christ” and telling its members to repent of private, individual sin.

If we were to communally acknowledge that racism or sexism or ableism is systemic, then we’d have to commit to a massive undertaking. We’d have to take a hard look at how our seminaries and ordinations and denominations and alliances and conventions operate and be honest with ourselves for the first time in history. We’d have to overhaul power structures, ordination tracks, and hiring processes– and everyone who currently enjoys all the cultural power, who wield all the political influence, would lose their access and prestige. The leadership would have to admit that it’s not God who brought them to the position they hold, not their commitment to the faith, not their hard work, but systemic, structural practices that marginalize anyone who isn’t a cis, white, heterosexual man.

It’s not coincidence that the people who stand to lose the most power, influence, and money are the ones claiming that sins like racism are an individual problem and the solution is to maintain the status quo.

Photo by Kish
August 6, 2018 by
Theology

“Lies Women Believe” review: 91-114

I think dividing up the review by the various “Lies” Nancy uses worked really well last week, so I’m going to keep doing that. Sorry for the irregular posting schedule as of late– it’s been an interesting few weeks, but I think I’m back in the flow of things now.

What intrigued me about this chapter– “Lies Women Believe About Sin”– was that Nancy never actually got around to defining what she believes sin is; all through these pages, she just assumes we all know what she’s talking about. In a sense, she’s probably right, as most evangelicals probably share her nebulous understanding of “sin.” I don’t think I ever really examined my definition of “sin” when I was a fundamentalist– it was just this concept that encompassed all the things I wasn’t supposed to do.

However, Nancy does give us some hints to her perspective. She gives us two lists: one includes “worldly philosophies, profanity, immodesty” (94), and the other includes prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, embezzling, wasting time, self-protection, talking too much, gluttony, having a critical spirit, overspending, fear, worry, selfishness, and complaining (99).

It popped out to me that what Nancy considers “sin” is extremely subjective, and not something every Christian thinks of in the same terms. For example, I and many others don’t believe that homosexuality is a sin, and my eyebrows are always in my hairline when I see things like complaining or a critical spirit show up in these contexts, as they’re almost always silencing tactics. Nancy would probably look at my writing and conclude that I am sinning by having a “critical spirit,” but I look at the same thing and think that I’m “exposing the works of darkness.”

I’ve talked before about how my view of sin has shifted from “list of things I’m not supposed to do,” to something broader. Now I define sin by two questions: is this action loving, and could this in/action cause harm? If I read this chapter through that lens, I actually find myself agreeing with Nancy a good bit. I do believe that sin can destroy, produce fear, and break God’s heart (98). However, unlike a list that includes “wasting time” and “worry,” I have one that includes “white supremacy” and “ableism.” I believe Christians are called to a life of repentance and transformation, but I’m no longer bogged down by the pettiness of worrying about “immodesty.”

MY SIN ISN’T REALLY THAT BAD

Nancy’s explanation for this supposed “lie” is what I and some others refer to as “sin-leveling.” A recent example of how some Christians tend to do this is in how a bunch of people wrote about how “we’re all like Josh Duggar.” I even had someone on my facebook page tell me that “no person is better than any other” on my post on the subject. Personally, I believe this concept is one of the more dangerous in evangelicalism: not all sin is the same. Me becoming upset and saying something ugly to my partner, while wrong, is on a completely different scale from rape and abuse.

Some people, including Nancy, try to make this go away by putting it purely in theological terms, like this:

The way to see the Truth about sin is to see it in the light of who God is. When we gaze upon the brilliance of His untarnished holiness, we become acutely aware of the hideousness of our sin. (100)

They’ll try to argue that all sin is the same in God’s eyes, but that while we’re on earth we have to have a “punishment to meet the crime” system that recognizes that some actions have more serious temporal consequences while still asserting that all sin has the same theological consequence: separation from God.

As we can see from the multiplicity of “there but for the grace of God go I” posts about Josh Duggar attacking his sisters and their babysitter, it seems safe to say that this attempt to differentiate between temporal and theological consequences has broadly failed in evangelicalism.

GOD CAN’T FORGIVE WHAT I’VE DONE

One of the common themes I’ve seen woven all through the books I’ve reviewed is that each author seems particularly blind to the damage that Christian culture can wreak on people, like here:

But I think that what many of these women are really saying is that they have never been able to feel forgiven for what they have done. They are still carrying a sense of guilt and shame over their failure. (101)

Passages like these are ironic, because Nancy is blind to how books like hers contribute to this problem: Christian culture is guilt-based. Unlike an honor-shame culture, which controls people through a focus on outward appearances and acceptability, a guilt society gives certain people (like Nancy) power because they are the arbiters of guilt and innocence. For example, sex is always bad except when you’ve been married in the Church. Or, we’re all born sinners, and the way to escape Inherited Sin is to Accept Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Savior, like what Nancy does here:

I often receive notes from women who are wrestling with doubts about their salvation … I believe that is because they have never truly repented of their sin and placed their faith in Christ alone to save them. (110)

According to her, Nancy has the only way to stop feeling guilty. She also gets to decide that these women were “religious” but not “righteous.” She may talk a big talk about not wanting women to feel guilty, but without it, this book wouldn’t have sold a half-million copies.

I AM NOT FULLY RESPONSIBLE FOR MY ACTIONS AND REACTIONS

And by “fully” she really means “solely” (105). This section I’d have a problem with, no matter the definition of sin we’re working with.

I’m white. That means in the culture I was born into, I benefit from and unconsciously contribute to the systematic enforcement of white supremacy. It is my responsibility to do everything I can to dig out the racism I’ve been steeping in since infancy and that when I do or say something racist I am to blame, but I am not solely to blame. I did not single-highhandedly create a system of institutions that give me advantages while enslaving others.

However, people like Nancy don’t like thinking in terms of community, culture, or society. Christianity in America is a cultural product of the Scottish and American Enlightenments, which place an undue emphasis on the needs and responsibilities of the individual. Many evangelical leaders are comfortable believing that we are responsible for our individual, separate lives, and that it’s possible to think of ourselves that way: as unique, as separate. They don’t want to recognize the reality of systems that affect us– systems like patriarchy and white supremacy, largely because the vast majority of Christian leaders directly benefit from those systems.

I CANNOT WALK IN CONSISTENT VICTORY OVER SIN

This is the last place where Nancy gives us a hint about what she thinks of as sinful: she frames all sin as an interplay between the flesh and the spirit. Giving into the flesh is sin, while ennobling the spirit is good, like so:

The Spirit says: Spend some time in the Word and prayer.
The flesh says: You’ve had a long day; chill out in front of the TV for the evening. (107)

Unfortunately, the logical outcome of this framework is asceticism. “The flesh,” in evangelical parlance, is an umbrella term for anything that feels good, and this concept is from Gnosticism or dualism, both of which are usually condemned as heresies. The false dichotomy between “flesh” and “spirit” that Nancy is advocating for here is one that has plagued the Christian church for centuries and seems unlikely to die anytime soon. I’ve written about overcoming this duality, and learning to recognize that my body is a part of the Imago Dei has been one of the most important steps in my healing and recovery.

So, not the most infuriating chapter I’ve read so far, but still… damaging and dangerous. Good news, though: we’re over a third of the way through the Lies Women Believe review!

September 1, 2015 by
Social Issues

repentance and transformation as a progressive Christian

I read two articles today that helped me crystallize something that I’ve been struggling to articulate to myself. Handsome and I have had a few into-the-wee-hours-of-the-morning conversations about “but what does it mean to be a Christian? What’s the point?” I’ve taken a radical departure from “being a Christian means you get to go to heaven when you die,” and yet I haven’t been able to put into words what I’ve replaced it with, especially since I came to the realization recently that nothing about my life would significantly change if I stopped believing in Jesus as God.

So, what does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean for me to follow the teachings of Jesus?

Well, interestingly enough, my answer peeked out at me from “Here’s How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel” by Chelsen Vicari, in a description of “Cafeteria-Style Christians” (which I’m almost certain I fall into):

This group picks and chooses which Scripture passages to live by, opting for the ones that best seem to jive with culture. Typically they focus solely on the “nice” parts of the gospel while simultaneously and intentionally minimizing sin, hell, repentance and transformation.

I understand where Chelsen is coming from with this. I no longer believe in the doctrines of Original or Inherited Sin, and I do not believe that hell exists. Without those, the evangelical understanding of the Gospel evaporates rather quickly. I no longer “witness” to “the lost,” and I’m am very much unconcerned with whether or not those around me are “saved.” For the evangelical Christian, this is probably the worst form of heresy. According to many evangelicals, I have probably forsaken anything resembling Christianity.

But, the second part of my answer came from another article critiquing progressive Christianity, this time from an insider– “The Purity Culture of Progressive Christianity”:

For progressive Christians moral purity will fixate on complicity in injustice. To be increasingly “pure” in progressive Christian circles is to become less and less complicit in injustice. Thus there is an impulse toward a more and more radical lifestyle where, eventually, you find yourself feeling that “everything is problematic.”  You can’t do anything without contaminating yourself.

That paragraph stood out to me because while I agree with the general truth of this statement– I think “becoming less complicit in injustice” is one of the goals of progressive Christianity– I disagree with Richard’s conclusion: this impulse isn’t a problem. It’s where the repentance and transformation that I believe is absolutely central to the Gospel comes into play for us heathen liberals.

One of the questions Handsome asked me this weekend was if I’d convert to another religion, like Buddhism. I said no, because of all the theologies I’ve studied I still find Christian theology the most fulfilling … however, that doesn’t mean that I particularly enjoy every thing Christianity espouses. Say, for example, “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” I hear that and my gut reaction is uh hell no. No way. That teaching right there is hard.

(Note: Some scholars, like Walter Wink, have made convincing arguments about the radical implications of “turn the other cheek” and “give him your coat also” and “go the second mile”– that Jesus meant these to be forms of non-violent resistance to oppression.)

I believe that the story arch of Scripture is one bent toward liberation. I believe that Jesus came to set the captive free, and that I am morally compelled to dedicate my life to that task. If I am participating, furthering, or aiding any system that oppresses and harms, then I am not doing what Jesus has asked us to do.

This is where I disagree with Chelsen: the “new Christian Left” is not minimizing repentance and transformation. In fact, since I’ve become a liberal, I have found that following Jesus’ calling has become even more transformative and demands constant repentance and renewal. Personally, I see the sort of repentance that I tried to live out before as petty. I felt remorse for such small-minded things– trivial, meaningless things. Things like wanting to look fashionable, or saying curse words. Today, when remorse comes, it is because I just realized how my internalized misogyny caused a friend of mine to sink deeper in self-hatred, or how my clueless racism made the office a hostile work environment for a black colleague.

I believe that Jesus asks us to be transformed, to be renewed, because of how deeply entrenched these systems are in our lives. It takes nothing less than sorrowful and soul-achingly-deep repentance to overcome racism and bigotry, and I believe that striving to undo the countless lies we’ve been steeped in is the single most transformational act we can accomplish.

The love, grace, and compassion required of all Christians isn’t easy, as Richard’s article and the article he quotes from highlights. Everything becomes problematic because everything about our world– ourselves, our cultures, our government, our policies, our relationships– urgently calls for a metamorphosis that can only be accomplished when we dedicate ourselves to the daunting task of beating our swords into plowshares. We are all, every moment of our lives, complicit in one form of oppression or another, and changing that reality will happen over generations, not moments.

I understand feeling burnt out, which is something we should all do our best to guard against. But I am hesitant to embrace criticisms of liberal Christianity that accuses us of being “fundamentalist” or those that paint the movement as one of “outrage” or “mobs with torches.” Occasionally I feel the anger we feel can be misdirected— we are a movement composed of flawed human beings, after all– but I disagree with those who look at progressivism and see a “Crusader mentality.” Having people point out the things we all do as oppressive, as harmful? It’s unpleasant. I understand the desire not to have our faces shoved in the brutal ugliness of the bigotry that still lives inside of us. Yes, self-care is needed. Yes, the “everything is problematic” situation is exhausting.

But I think that Jesus’ message is challenging. I don’t think it’s going to be comfortable, or pleasant, or anything less than the most difficult thing we’ve ever done. Taking up our cross and following him is a gruesome picture, not one filled with bunnies and rainbows and unicorns. I die daily and sell everything that you have are radical, mind-bending declarations. We have a commitment to seeing justice run down like the waters, and sometimes that’s going to ask hard things of all of us.

Photo by Dave
March 9, 2015 by
Feminism

is it possible to be a sex-positive Christian? [part one]

If you’ve spent any time in feminist circles, you’ve probably bumped into the term sex-positive. It gets thrown around a bit, and one thing I’ve noticed is that it can occasionally be difficult to nail down what the writer/speaker means when they use it, so I’m going to offer a definition for what I mean when I use it.

To me, being sex-positive means that sex can be a good and healthy part of human experience. Not everyone wants sex a lot — or at all — and that is also good and healthy. Being sex-positive means I believe in educating people about sex, about safe sex, about contraception, about STIs, about how to give and experience sexual pleasure, and I believe in removing stigmas and myths from sex (such as “virgin women bleed the first time“). Being sex-positive means that I believe in seeking enthusiastic consent, and that consent is the most basic, fundamental, necessary part of sex, as it is the only thing that separates sex from rape. I believe in educating people about being a responsible sex partner, giving young people especially the tools to make complicated, nuanced decisions regarding sex.

It also means that I don’t shame, judge, or condemn those who are (or are not) having sex, regardless of their life circumstances.

Including whether or not they are married.

And that is where I and probably most Christians part ways. To many Christians, the only conversation to be had about sex is in the context of heterosexual (and, in same cases, such as Matthew Vines, homosexual) marriage. The gold standard in evangelical conversations about sex is abstinence, and it is typically the only information and encouragement unmarried people receive.

However, just because I disagree with many (if not most) Christians about this doesn’t mean that I don’t have access to either Christian tradition or the Bible to make my argument. I’m going to lay out my argument in a few posts, with today’s focusing on laying some groundwork.

A note before I begin: I am a progressive Christian, and that does mean I interact with Scripture differently than an evangelical who believes in inerrancy and takes a literalist approach. I don’t want to hash that all out, so if you’re curious about how I see the Bible, Peter Enns’ The Bible Tells Me So is a good book to start with. For more controversial reading, Forged by Bart Ehrman was interesting.

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I. Sin

The question that I have to start with, as a Christian, is “is pre-marital sex a sin?”, but the most relevant part of that question is our definition of sin. In many Christian conversations about what sin is, it seems to be assumed that “sin is a transgression of the law of God.” In a sense, I agree with this definition, but it’s because I believe that “the law of God” can be summed up in “to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.” Where I disagree with this definition is in its common application: many Christians preach and act as though “sin” is “doing something that God says you’re not allowed to do.”

That application is non-sensical to me because the Bible doesn’t cover that much ground, really, and there’s a whole lot of things we can do that is never addressed– so how are we supposed to know God’s stance on it? Especially when what we do have in the Bible has God apparently telling people to commit genocide and infanticide … repeatedly. I think we’d all agree that genocide is a moral evil, but the Bible shows God commanding it, which is disturbing. Personally, I believe that either a) the people who wrote the Old Testament believed that God told them to do that, regardless of whether or not he did, or b) they said God had commanded it to justify it. “B” makes the most sense to me, as people have used their deity to justify all sorts of evil things through history.

This is why I believe that it’s important to have a more consistent sense of ethics than my deity (dis)approves of this action. Personally, my ethics and morals are guided by the question could this action or inaction cause harm? This aligns with my understanding of “love your neighbor as yourself,” and “they shall know you be how you love one another.” This question allows a lot of room for nuance and complexity, as not every situation and person is going to require the same response from me. Does my deity approve of this action? is very black-and-white and does not allow for circumstance, but could this cause harm? does.

So, for me, the question “is pre-marital sex a sin?” becomes “will having sex cause harm?” It’s extremely important to note that this question applies inside of marriage, as well as out of it. This is not a question we can stop asking just because we signed a piece of paper.

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II. Rejecting the Premise

The Bible is a very old collection of books. I wish that’s something that didn’t need to be mentioned, but it is. It is very old. Ancient, in fact. Directions in Deuteronomy about stoning women who didn’t bleed on their wedding night are from 700 BCE, possibly. Conversations about “fornication” or “sexual immorality” from the Pauline epistles are from the first century. These facts mean that there is some historical context we have to situate ourselves in before we can even begin having a biblically-based conversation about sex.

On its face, it seems as though the New Testament consistently condemns all forms of extra-marital sex, but I think it’s important to ask the question why? It’s also important to address the problem that what the New Testament writers had in mind may not be a 1-for-1 correlation to our modern-day situation, and for us to seek the “eternal principle” that can apply to us. I believe that the consistent morality presented in Scripture is rooted in love and not causing harm to others, and I’ll get to why I believe that specifically applies to sex on Friday.

For today, the most important idea to keep in front of us is that the New Testament does not reject the practice of owning people as property. Property law, it can be argued, was the foundation of Roman society (and, by influence, Western civilization. See: white police officers being more concerned with the destruction of property than the destruction of human life in places like Ferguson). At the time St. Paul was writing, the paterfamilias, the head of the household, was able to order his life and by extension society because he owned people. He owned his wife, he owned his children, he owned his slaves. We see this in the way that several biblical passages are organized around the Greco-Roman Household Codes.

Paul doesn’t directly challenge this system in his epistle to Philemon, although he doesn’t exactly endorse it, either. Owning people as property just … existed. Paul might not have been happy with it, but it was there. The NT almost seems to shrug it off in some ways– explaining to Christians how to live in this system while practicing love and doing no harm. Paul even made the shocking suggestion to the paterfamilias that he was morally obligated to take good care of his property. For its time, these letters were progressive. However, we’ve gone farther. Most of us have decided that slavery is a moral evil and that, specifically, women are capable people and are not possessions attached to their husbands.

In this system, in a society where women are either the property of their fathers, husbands, the government, or religion, we could be damaged. If we “lost” our virginity, we were quite literally worth less, and, as such, had been harmed. The fathers who owned us were also harmed because they’d lost their ability to sell us for an ‘unsullied’ price. Because of this, it’s easy to see why the NT seems to so roundly condemn extra-marital sex. When a woman’s value is directly attached to whether or not she’s had sex with or been raped by a man, having sex with her is harmful, and should not be done.

However, that’s not where we are today. Today, women aren’t property. Marriage isn’t about a sale. We don’t care about things like dowries and ensuring the existence of legal heirs. The context has changed, although the basic question (“would having sex be harmful?”) hasn’t.

Photo by Sarah Reid
January 21, 2015 by