I, along with many other progressive Christian ministers I know, have grown increasingly cynical about our faith. We no longer feel that the faith that we’ve evolved to embrace has much of a bearing on our daily lives or an impact on the world.
Do you consider anything a sin? I once had a minister who told me that sin is anything that gets between you and God.
Dear Reader,
Seriously? In these last few days, as we reel from yet another greed-induced, politically endorsed massacre of school children, shake our heads at the ineptitude and evil of the Southern Baptist Convention’s non-response to its sexual abuse crisis, as state legislatures sprint to pass ever-more-punitive anti-LGBTQ laws and gut reproductive rights, as states revel in their power to execute prisoners, as oil companies make money hand-over-fist while accusing the government of deliberately raising gas prices, as teachers are simultaneously demonized for teaching Critical Race Theory AND put forward as potential armed defenders of their children, as pastors gin-up Christian Nationalist White Supremacist sentiments in their churches, and as politicians consciously frighten and manipulate unsophisticated voters with increasingly deranged conspiracy theories, can you POSSIBLY be serious?
How about a list of sins?
* Facilitating or doing conscious harm to others — especially the vulnerable who can’t defend themselves (including people/animals/creation itself)
* Lying to defend institutional wrongdoing and embracing greed and power as ultimate virtues,
* Killing people to show how much we hate killing people,
* Corporate welfare for the privileged while countless fellow citizens go bankrupt or die without affordable healthcare, housing, & education.
I’d go on but there’s just too much. What breaks my heart all the more is that those who justify harming others (by commission OR omission) often do so through misdirection, namely, blaming the victims. “Women who are seeking abortions obviously got pregnant because they were promiscuous. SINNER!” “People on death row (never mind the racial and socio-economic disparity of those sentenced to death) obviously committed a crime and deserve to die. SINNER!” “Transgender people are perverts seeking ways to groom and assault our children. DANGEROUS SINNERS!”
What is wrong with this picture? Namely, American-style Christianity has been reduced to a narcissistic purity culture of obeying certain rules (no drinking, no dancing, no cards, no movies, no sex!) It’s all about the righteous being promised heaven and sinners threatened with hell. Never mind that, taken as a whole, Jesus seemed to be concerned with the details of individual lives only insofar as they had a bearing on the broader life of the community as a whole. Jesus was striving to bring about the kingdom for ALL of humanity — and that meant calling out injustice in the social order.
As far as sin being defined as “anything that gets between you and God,” that old chestnut just plays into the hyper-individualized propaganda of conventional pop Christianity. Frankly, it’s probably counterproductive to even get God involved in the definition of sin. The Judeo-Christian God is a known and well-documented practitioner of genocide, misogyny, racism, and religious violence. So, I’m happy to “get between” God and those kinds of behaviors. If that makes me a sinner (or the manifestation of sin itself), then hurrah! Somebody needs to stand up for humanity against an obviously inept, often complicit, and more-often-than-not AWOL Divinity.
Look, doing the “not good” or “not right” is part of the human condition. But the time is long since past for us to stop being distracted by an obsession over individual “sin” and focus on the institutional “not goodness” and systemic injustice that is laying waste to our world and its inhabitants. To ignore these evils may be the biggest sin of all.
~ Rev. David M. Felten
Comments