Why we should be grateful for the concept of sin

It might sound strange to be grateful for the concept of sin, but I am. The idea of any boundary or restriction being positive is hard to fathom for many today, but increasingly I see this as a mercy.
To my kids, things like Netflix and Pop-Tarts are their sovereign right, and making them practice piano is “controlling their life.” But my children have only ever known order and routine. They’ve never had any reason to doubt their safety or place in the world. It’s normal for them to see rules and expectations as irritants because they’ve never experienced the terror of free fall.
By contrast, I remember wishing for my parents to tell me to do my homework and hoping they would impose a curfew. While it might seem like a teenage dream to have so few rules, I didn’t feel free; I felt vulnerable and powerless. Rules and expectations make us feel safe; they tell us that there’s an order to the world, that it’s knowable, and that we can avoid deception and suffering, to some extent, through our choices.
I couldn’t have explained it then, but I also sensed that rules meant you were valued. They were evidence that your safety and future were important enough to someone else — so much so that they were going to go out of your way to encourage you in a certain direction, and away from other options.
In order for our choices to matter and for our life to have purpose and direction, we need some standard outside of ourselves to measure our choices against. This is one reason why it’s valuable to have a concept of sin, which describes higher, divine standards for our behavior. As the Book of Mormon prophet Lehi teaches, “If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness.” In other words, the depressing flip side to the idea that “you can do anything you want” is “nothing you do really matters.”
When I joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a teenager, I finally found a way to orient myself. For the first time in my life, I had purpose beyond my immediate needs and desires. I had right and wrong, and though some of my peers felt these were bars on a cage, for me they were rungs I could grasp to pull myself out of chaos and uncertainty.
But another reason why we need the framework of sin is because without it, we lose the framework of redemption. Talking about sin has been taboo in our larger culture for some time — treated as a relic of a less enlightened, puritanical time. Yet this is increasingly a sore subject even for believers too. I suspect it’s because we equate sin with another word: condemnation. In this understanding, to sin is to be bad.
But for Christians, the opposite is actually true. Redemption — the good news of Christianity — means the wrongdoer is separate from the wrongdoing. Though our sins “be as scarlet,” Isaiah declares, “they shall be white as snow.” To do bad is not to be bad, as long as we choose redemption. The message of redemption is that no one ever needs to be defined by their worst moments.
One tragedy of losing the language and framework of sin and redemption in our wider culture is that this crucial separation between wrongdoing and the wrongdoer is being lost, along with all of the compassion that distinction can generate. We might think that denying the existence of sin takes our condemnation away, but the human impulse to condemn and punish doesn’t go away simply because we no longer frame it in terms of divine law.
Remarking that she was “so over cancel culture,” actress Jennifer Aniston recently asked, “Is there no redemption?” Even as sin and redemption have lost ground as a shared cultural framework, accusation and condemnation have acquired new territory, especially online.
The digital era has made it easier than ever to scrutinize someone’s past, isolate anything potentially offensive and offer it up before punitive mobs. In a 2022 article titled “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” The New York Times found that over half of U.S. adults had censored their own speech out of fear of retaliation and 22% had retaliated against or harshly criticized someone for something they’d said.
In other words, humans know how to keep score; we don’t need the concept of sin for that. To want justice is in our nature, and shrinking away from the concepts of sin and redemption doesn’t get rid of condemnation. It gets rid of mercy and forgiveness. Without redemption — without the belief that the sinner can be rescued from the sin — even minor offenses become unpardonable.
For example, in his book, The Coddling of the American Mind, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses the modern “witch hunt” phenomenon whereby a community seeks to establish ideological purity and group solidarity through denunciations and even violence. Haidt cites research from sociologist Albert Bergesen, who found that one of the features of moralistic violence is that the “crimes” are often “trivial or fabricated.”
”I … began to marvel at the disconnect between the severity of the crime and the gleeful savagery of the punishment,” writes Jon Ronson in a similar vein for The New York Times. Ronson spent two years interviewing victims of online shame campaigns, including Justine Sacco. Sacco boarded an 11-hour flight after firing off a tweet she thought would be understood as a joke. When she landed, she’d lost her job and was told that “no one could guarantee her safety.”
“The people I met,” Ronson says about his interviews, “were mostly unemployed, fired for their transgressions, and they seemed broken somehow — deeply confused and traumatized.”
”Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil,” says Eric Hoffer, quoted in the “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Even in the absence of faith in the divine, evil persists — if not as a departure from God and truth, then as an inexcusable betrayal of our tribal priorities.
Perhaps this is why secular excommunications seldom offer a path back to full communion. Atlantic journalist Helen Lewis, who identifies as a lapsed Catholic, has written about what activists today might learn from the Christian impulse toward grace and forgiveness in this regard. She highlights political movements where “a range of sins” are emphasized, “but we don’t yet have a good idea of what the mechanism is for confessing, repenting, and being absolved.”
Christianity again offers clarity on all of this. The gospel message of sin and redemption is not that harm and injustice do not exist, but rather that our debts of harm and injustice are owed to Christ, who has paid off those debts and will settle every account in time.
While making use of our innate moral judgments to help us recognize sin in our lives, the Christian message explicitly forbids us from withholding mercy and forgiveness toward others who sin. Because God sacrificed Himself to separate the sin from the sinner, believers are reminded that they should do no less.
In a secularizing culture where sin and the sinner are so often made one, it turns out that the oft-spurned adage to “love the sinner, but hate the sin” is a revolutionary departure from the normal course of group morality and merciless justice.
Thank goodness for the idea of sin, I say.