Sin is behovely, but all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. (Julian of Norwich)

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)

At dinner the other night I managed to elicit a full-brow furrow from Martin and Thea both. Considering the Kohout talent for growing hair, a full-brow furrow is a fierce and fearsome thing. Two furrowed Kohout brows is enough to send the insecure in search of a blankie, a pacifier, and a nice safe closet. I’m glad Lizzie and Tito weren’t there, because they might have furrowed as well, presenting far more furrowing than any reasonable person should ever be expected to stand up against.

The cause of dismay was my claim that sin is a useful category by which to examine human affairs. “You can’t call people sinners!” said my shocked and furrowed daughter. She was entirely right on one level, of course. We had been talking about the horrifying events in Norway, in which Anders Breivik, a thirty-two-year old radically conservative Christian (or perhaps “Christian”), killed 77 people, most of them children at a summer camp, many of them related to members of Norway’s ruling elite who presumably crafted the weak anti-immigration laws that allowed the recent influx of Muslim immigrants that so unglued the shooter.

History tends to support this maxim: virtually anyone who thinks he’s been given the power to condemn his neighbors for what he perceives to be their sins will be at the heart of a tragic, absurd, and/or evil situation. The track record of self-proclaimed prophets is pretty bleak. Thea’s well-taken point was, I think, that if I call someone a sinner, I’m at the top of a slope slippery with the blood of innocents. To many, calling someone a sinner implies that you’re in a position to judge, somehow not implicated in the fray. If you see sin around you and identify it as such, then somehow you remain outside the fire of judgment. You are rendered innocent so long as someone else is guilty. It seems like a good deal, especially if you’re someone inclined to condemn others (like “Christians”). It seems like a very bad deal if you’re the sinner or if you have any anxieties about absolutist legal codes.

Even so, sin is a concept we’re naïve to dismiss, whether or not we identify ourselves as religious. In the broader culture of the United States, there are two gauges by which we measure perceived or actual misconduct: mental health and the legal code. Misconduct is the result either of mental illness or willful disregard for civic order. While these are necessary ways to gauge human misconduct, they don’t cover the full range and depth of human experience. To imagine that they do creates a story about the human person and human culture that’s missing a bunch of pages in the middle. (I’ve cribbed this analysis from Barbara Brown Taylor’s wonderful book Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation.)

One of the problems in talking about sin is that it’s a word in a technical lexicon. Just as projection is one of those ideas bandied around by people who’ve never studied Freudian theory or its nuances (like me), sin has spilled over its technical boundaries and thereby become diluted, distorted, and generally misunderstood. As far as I can tell, it’s as misunderstood within the Christian community as it is outside of it, in part for the same reason: it’s considered to be a subset of either mental health or the legal system and not its own discrete and rich category.

While Anders Breivik probably has mental health issues and clearly broke all kinds of laws, I suspect that there are many other reasonable people besides Thea who would balk at identifying sin as an important component of his story, although it may be that story’s most salient component. While breaking laws is often a side effect, sin’s primary work is the precarious, discordant elevation of the self above the sturdy, harmonious network of God, self, and neighbor. With that definition in mind, you can be a law-abiding, mentally healthy member of a community and still be a sinner. Indeed, if you’re a Christian, you’re guaranteed to be one; that’s what the story of the Fall is about.

One of the persistent themes in both testaments of the Bible is that God is the only judge of sin because humankind has a severe allergy to identifying sin as sin when it’s tied to self. We have a very long history of pointing a finger at our neighbors and saying, “S/he made me eat it.” In writing the covenantal community’s early history, the biblical writers were uneasy with the idea of kingship. Even when the kings were beloved of God—and most of them were not—the Biblical writers point out time and again that human authority is almost ludicrously unable to judge with any regularity what’s pleasing to God.

I’m exercised about sin because so many critical misunderstandings of it seem to be spotlighted right now, and I’m trying to figure out how it is that I’m right and they’re wrong. The governor of Texas is about to declare himself a candidate in the Republican presidential race, having struggled to discern if he’s called by God to do so. The backdrop of his declaration will be the rally last Saturday in which he and several thousand others prayed for a troubled America. He prayed for the military and political leaders who cannot see the light in the darkness. There was no indication that he thought he might be one of those blind leaders. For all the Bible-reading that went on, no mention was made of the fact that in the Bible God never gives the rich and powerful more power when they ask for it. Instead, God regularly undermines them by granting it to the least or youngest in the community.

In a terrific op-ed piece in the Austin American Statesman, Jim Rigby, a local Presbyterian minister, pointed out the absence of several other key Biblical passages at the rally, like the passage in which Jesus expresses a clear distaste for public shows of prayer. The common thread among the passages Rigby mentions is an awareness of our steady insistence on seeing sin as something “out there” without any indication that it resides ineradicably “in here” as well.

But there’s a problem for those who see sin as residing ineradicably “in here,” who believe that we must struggle constantly to set self-interest under the discipline of a higher and more generous law. Reinhold Niebuhr, whom I always seem to read in the deepest, hottest part of summer, calls these “children of light,” in opposition to the “children of darkness,” the moral cynics who “know no law beyond the self.” According to Niebuhr, the problem is that the children of light are dumber than doorknobs. They fail to account for the power of sin in both individual and collective lives, and even within and among themselves. Children of light tend to think that if they reform, correct, educate, convert, clean house, start over, then human affairs will radically improve. Niebuhr says fuggedaboudit: “no matter how wide the perspective which the human mind may reach, how broad the loyalties which the human imagination may conceive, how universal the community which human statecraft may organize, how pure the aspirations of the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.”

Niebuhr identified Marxists as children of light whose stupidity allowed their creed to become “the vehicle and instrument of the children of darkness.” I believe that Perry and his followers are also children of light. Their creed is that eliminating homosexuality and abortion, giving free reign to business, and insisting on Christianity’s primacy will renew America, a creed as naïve as Marxism and as easily made into the tool of moral cynics. Of course, as a self-confessed utopian, I’m a child of light as well. I’m looking for admission to another group, made up of what I’ll call children of dawn. They know the power of sin, they work to name it in themselves and in the world, and their despair or anger at knowing that they can’t conquer it by themselves is overridden by hope and generosity. I think of St. Paul, that proud Pharisee, who opened the doors of Christianity to the uncircumcised and the eaters of unclean foods and invited them to come in, sit down, and eat. More recently, I think of people like, say, Nelson Mandela, but children of dawn don’t tend to be particularly visible until you bump into them in the darkness. The hospice nurses who helped us through my mother’s death were children of dawn. The friend who tells you a hard truth with great love. The artist who brings new beauty into the world. The teacher who gives his students his best work and requires that they return it with interest. The attorney who works on death row. The director of a no-kill animal shelter who cooks Thanksgiving dinner for all the creatures in her care. The soldier who struggles to treat the enemy with respect.

It’s a long list, thank goodness, and unrestricted by any creed or class. There’s no litmus test for joining it, other than the willingness to do the wretchedly hard work of forgiving each other, ourselves, and the world again and again and again. Most of us would rather sleep in than be children of dawn. But when we wake up and acknowledge sin’s destructive power at work within each individual, corporation, and nation (even and especially the ones we love); when we approach each other with the profound humility that this knowledge engenders; when we move ahead in good faith knowing that we may be wrong and need to change course, this is when the power of sin begins to loosen its grip. Furrow all you want, but that’s why I think sin is behovely, and the acknowledgement of sin is our only hope.

What we’re reading
Heather: Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses
Martin: Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

I’ve been surveying the multitude of leftovers in the refrigerator of my mind. When was the last time this thing was cleaned out? Jeez. Prodded into further examination of my last post by subsequent emails, conversations, and readings, I’ve concluded that my thinking is a little moldy and needs either to have the fuzz shaved off or be thrown out. Caveat lector: slightly smelly smorgasbord on the way.

Fuzzy thought number one: Chiding me for a Band-Aid approach to life-threatening environmental crises, a friend emailed this: “I actually think democratic control of the world through political action must be established. For me that means crushing the power of corporations.” On the one hand, I agree fully. The sheer, concentrated force of most multinational corporations is flabbergasting: the fact that British Petroleum still enjoys reasonable financial health despite the costs of the oil spill cleanup beggars the imagination. That much money is as good as a private militia, if not a private nuclear arsenal. Like anything powerful and willful, corporations need constant skeptical scrutiny.

Fuzzy thought number two: Bill McKibben, environmental prophet extraordinaire, was the first speaker a few weeks ago in a new annual lecture series endowed by my father in my mother’s memory at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. Martin and I were unable to attend, but my sister told me that the evening was beautiful, the talk was inspiring, and McKibben was a passionate and humble witness to the planet- (and therefore self-) destructive path we’re currently running down. (A few days later he gave a more formal version of his lecture at the Aspen Ideas Festival; either version is very much worth the time it takes to watch.)

Likening the scope of climate change to the devastation of nuclear warfare, he says that Americans “have so far failed to imagine that the explosion of a billion pistons and a billion cylinders each minute around the world could wreak the same kind of damage on the same scale.” Contributing to this failure of imagination are national inertia (we like the way we live); the divide between wealthy and poor nations (how do we tell others not to do what we have done when we are so comfortable?); and, unsurprisingly, the defensive position of the fossil fuel industry, which has hefted its mighty bulk directly on top of anything that might derail profits as usual. Imagine the public response to a campaign by the munitions industry downplaying the effects of nuclear warfare; one assumes that most of us would be thunderstruck. We should be as horrified by an industry that uses “the atmosphere as an open sewer for the effluent of their product” and makes more money than any industry in the history of money. But apparently we’re not. Yet.

Fuzzy thought number three: corporations aren’t going away, nor should they. They (can/should) provide the infrastructure that local and sustainable economies need to thrive. The problem comes when mighty corporate bulk squishes the little guys flat, which is what usually happens. Governmental regulations meant to restrain the mighty corporate bulk often squish the little guys even flatter. (That’s about the most sophisticated economic observation I’m capable of producing, so I hope you enjoyed it.)

Fuzzy thoughts numbers four through six, which come from the very back of the bottom shelf: when faced with complex, apparently insoluble problems, my tendency is to go for a walk. Or pull out Band-Aids. Or make a big messy meal requiring lots of cleaning up. (Martin, as chief dishwasher, gets tired of this one.) But having spent the week reading Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, and listening to Bill McKibben, I must sadly conclude that mine are inadequate responses. Writing with the stench of World War II still in the air, Niebuhr rebuked those Christians who had concluded that the only response to evil in the world was pacifism, trusting in power of human goodness to convert evil. Nor did he allow those who act against evil to trust fully in their own righteousness. Rather, he said, we need to be acutely aware that “political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners. [The Christian faith] ought to mitigate the self-righteousness which is an inevitable concomitant of all human conflict. The spirit of contrition is an important ingredient in the sense of justice.” As tempting as it is to preen, when we choose to fight the bully power of corporations, we need to be clear about our own implication in the tangled web of environmental injustice.

Add Niebuhr’s words to these: McKibben, a mild-mannered science writer, published a column titled “We’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” on the TomDispatch.com website this week that immediately went viral. Furthermore, our mild-mannered hero writes specifically about the refusal of our political leaders even to consider climate legislation last week: “So what I want to say is: This is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.” This from a Methodist Sunday School teacher!

The organization he started in 2008 with seven recent Middlebury College graduates—350.org—was a ragtag effort to organize a worldwide response to climate change. The results of that effort were astonishing. It turns out that the term “environmentalist” does not apply just to a bunch of over-educated, effete white Americans; in fact, the rest of the world—most of it brown, young, poor, and powerless—knows something we Americans still aren’t willing to confront: climate change, driven by fossil fuels, has crippled the regularity of the natural order we rely on for everything. Everything. Everything.

Through 350.org, we have an opportunity on October 10, 2010—10/10/10—to tell the powers that be that we’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. We should still walk through our neighborhoods and chat with our neighbors. We should still introduce people to the profound pleasures of eating locally and according to the seasons. Acts like these will give us sustenance for the battle ahead, especially those of us who don’t feel much like fighters, who don’t want to crush anyone or anything, and most especially those of us who don’t want out clean out our refrigerators.

What we’re reading
Heather: Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch
Martin: Warren St. John, Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference