Talk of sin once played a significant role in colonial America and across much of our history. As America continues to face a crisis of political polarization and a threat to our democracy, perhaps revisiting the traditional religious understanding of the dynamics of sin might be helpful for offering some insight into our country’s current plight.
Across the last few years of former President Donald Trump’s campaigns and presidency, the nation has been forced to consider what legal and constitutional categories help us name certain of his acts, his phone calls and his disregard for the well-being of our country.
The Mueller investigation enshrined terms such as “collusion” with Russia and “obstruction of justice” even as it landed with a thud. The first impeachment charged that Trump “corruptly solicited” Ukraine’s government to find dirt to hurt Joe Biden’s election chances. The second impeachment charged that his actions before and on Jan. 6 constituted an “incitement to insurrection” at the Capitol.
We have learned a lot about “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the “Emoluments Clauses” in the Constitution, the Hatch Act stating that federal employees — say those working in the White House — may not engage in partisan political campaign work and the law holding that all presidential documents must be preserved.
The problem with the process of bringing to justice Trump and his close set of advisers and enablers is that it is too narrowly Trump-centered, too tied up in technical legal categories and painfully too slow. America’s core problem is not Trump, but rather in the failures of courage and basic care for the nation of all those who continue to enable Trump’s goals and his lies.
The category of sin — a traditional religious category — offers an important breadth of focus on patterns of moral negligence and selfish behavior. For many, talk of sin has fallen in disfavor. For nonreligious people, it sounds too churchy. Even for many religious folks, it sounds unhelpfully judgmental and conservative.
Sin talk, for many, seems to refer to a convenient and often conservatively framed checklist of moral “do nots”: don’t have an abortion, don’t be gay, don’t be a liberal or a socialist, don’t teach critical race theory or make students uncomfortable when they hear the truth about the complex history of our nation.
The notion of sin actually across many religious traditions is a critically powerful and expansive category for thinking through fundamental human propensities to place self-interest over the common good, and to ignore long-term mounting threats to the common good.
Sin, to most today, sounds like it is centered in a negative view of human nature. But a recognition of the shared common human capacity of sinfulness most often has served to prompt religious practices of humility and of practices of “examinations of conscience.”
The classic understanding of sin holds that it is a contraction of love, care and concern into a tight circle of self-interest and care only for one’s immediate family or one’s own defined group. It is not an expansive command to love all neighbors, strangers and even enemies, but a constricting energy to prioritize a constricted attention and care for self, family and any who one defines as “us.”
This selfish energy blinds us to the needs and interests of others beyond our circle even as it blocks any caring much about the next generation. Sin names the process of the “corruption of conscience” that occurs as we are pulled by egoism to constrict our moral care and concern only to me and mine. This mobilizes a distortion of the ordering of our highest values and concerns, what religious people might call a corrupted prioritization of loves.
The preamble to the Constitution proclaims an expansive range of care and values on which the nation was founded: “We the people ... union ... justice ... domestic tranquility ... the common defense … the general welfare ... the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Our presidents, senators, representatives and cabinet secretaries all take an oath of office to protect the constitution and accordingly these national values. Many seem to have had their fingers crossed.
George Washington in his farewell address warned us of the danger of “party enthusiasm” that prioritizes immediate interests in election victory over the overall common good of the nation. Washington worried that the powerful drives for party victories prioritize short-term private interests over the long-range commitment to the common good and that of our posterity, our next generations.
Washington does not use sin-language of a “corruption of conscience” pushed by egoism or of a distorted prioritization of loves, but that is the core of his analysis.
Trump is not America’s main threat. His political future and standing could easily have been ended by a few more Republican senators at his second impeachment. Our main threat lies in the calculations of political self-interest of the range of Republican leaders who gave Trump a pass.
Our key threat is the wide range across our society who feel pumped up in enabling Trump and Trumpism and in ignoring the mounting national and global threats posed by climate disruption in the coming decades.
