Having shed the fear of God, there is no moral to our story

We live in a time of intense public moralising, most extreme in witch hunts conducted on social media. JK Rowling has been just one recent target.

The life of Jesus, the pivotal figure in the history of Western culture, is virtually forgotten today, as is the meaning of Easter. One of the many consequences of this new ignorance is an uncoupling of morality from its traditional moorings.

Jesus died on what we have come to call Good Friday; died, according to Christian theology, in order to take on the sins of the world. On Easter Sunday, he rose from the dead. Christian doctrine, under the influence of Paul, stressed that individual salvation was the only worthwhile goal in life; and it depended on a life redeemed from sin. Indeed, for much of Western history, sin served as the pivotal moral concept, the means for judging all human behaviour. The Jewish prophets had railed: “Sinners repent or be damned!”

The fading of sin occurred during the 20th century, and especially after World War II. Karl Menninger was lamenting Whatever Became of Sin, already in 1972, in a book of that title. Dr Menninger’s concern was misplaced: he should rather have been grappling with the determining factor, the steady Western collapse of belief in God.

Penitent Wilfredo Salvador is removed from a cross after being crucified during Good Friday on April 7, 2023 in San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines.

Sin became obsolete once it was uncoupled from a religious conception of salvation dependent on God’s presence. Bad actions can only be labelled as sins if something of the personal bond with God endures. They are sins when they are believed to be designated, interpreted and judged from above. Once there is no point in sinking to the knees, with head bowed, and lamenting a sinful act, the act is stripped of its theological weighting. Once the bad has no link to some supernatural order of judgment; once there is no God to set the rules, and to pray to for instruction and forgiveness, then the bad exists purely as a secular moral category.

The “seven deadly sins” of medieval Christianity illustrate. Pride, greed, gluttony, lust, sloth, anger and envy are as present in human behaviour as ever. Most of the seven sins today would be regarded as character flaws. Such is the case for people who are vainly narcissistic, gorge their food or get blind drunk, glory in possessions, or are driven by uncontrollable sexual desire; are lazy and idle, hot-tempered or envy the success or superiority of others. These people would not be categorised as sinners; or diagnosed as showing symptoms of some disease; and not deemed to be criminals. None of the categories of sin, symptom or crime fit them. But there is social judgment and condemnation, usually carrying some moral inflection. The seven deadly sins, and other behaviour of a similar cast, contravene the classical Greek virtue of balance or, as the Delphic Oracle decreed, nothing in excess.

Bad behaviour, of course, remains common in everyday life. Children taunt, bully and exclude others. Fraud and theft continue, as does violent assault – the general category “crime” continues unchanged, although the actions it covers are constantly amended. There is cheating within marriage; and, further, lying about it. Parents focus on their careers and don’t spend enough care and attention on their children. Tradesmen take shortcuts in sealing roofs or running electrical wiring. Advertising encourages women to feel guilty at being overweight, not pampering their skin, being under-exercised, eating too much sugar and even looking tired. However, to apply the word sin to any of these cases would sound odd, inappropriate, even wrong. Someone may be referred to as a bad person or a criminal, but not a sinful person.

With the external frame gone, the modern Western individual turned inwards, dependent entirely on his or her psychological resources. Sin had been replaced by existential doubt, inner unease and guilt. Guilt internalised in the individual took over as the reservoir of culpability.

Hamlet is paralysed by crippling guilt, but he has committed no crime. Kafka’s Joseph K. wakes one morning to find himself under arrest. He feels guilty, but there is no crime he is aware of. Neither of these men are sinners. They are born guilty. The problem that follows, illustrated in both cases, is that there is no possibility of remission – that is, relief from their guilt. Prayer, confession, penitential acts and pilgrimages are all superfluous. Joseph K. spends his life exploring the institutions of the law to find what crime he has committed, so that he may be punished, and thereby find some relief from his overwhelming guilt anxiety. But there is no explicit crime; and as a result, there is no relief.

We no longer believe human suffering is due to original sin – humans being born sinners – but rather that suffering is simply in the nature of things. We have arrived at an unmoralised view of affliction.

There was an accompanying shift in focus from acting badly to feeling bad. People continued to do wrong to others, but they became more concerned by their own distressed feelings, and the damaged feelings of the other, rather than by the objective fact that they had broken a moral or social law. The feelings were real; the law abstract. The times became less interested in moral culpability than whether a person’s life was empty and without purpose.

The distraught self emerges centre stage, insecure in its identity, and unsure of itself. When afflicted, it is depressed, ill at ease, restless, inauthentic, lost, and anxious. It might well long for the day, once upon a time long ago, when it was a mere sinner, and its sins could be addressed – charted, regretted, repaired, atoned for and forgiven. This is Joseph K.’s dream, imagining the past age of sinning as a lost utopia. Oh, the pleasure of punishment that works; the relief! Soren Kierkegaard referred to one of the joys of childhood as the fact that the smack of the parent actually relieves the child’s unhappiness after a naughty act – the child is freed from all guilt, free to run off happily to play.

As guilt within the individual displaced God, the primary focus of moral attention shifted from virtue to authenticity. Insincerity was replacing sin. But as emphasis increased on being true to oneself – being genuine – more was being required of the troubled inner self, hounded by dark fears of confusion and inadequacy. That self was being asked to be coherent, consistent, aware, vital and confident. Here was a psychic labour of Sisyphus, for the individual was now truly on his or her own, without any equivalent to the mother church to hold their hand, and to advise. The obscure challenge that faced them was formidable, insatiable and often impossible.

Of course, crimes such as assault and theft remained, as did cruelty, and they continued to be regarded and treated in a largely traditional manner – in courts of law and through communal and family sanction. But, the main arena of moral concern had moved away from them, and into a grey zone in which guilt and psychic malaise presided. It was as if these crimes were now being perpetrated within the individual self, obscure crimes that were judged punitively in a secret court, where the identity of the judge was unknown. The punishment meted out was itself without shape or direction, a mysterious affliction manifesting in quakes of discontented tension, nervousness and foreboding.

In parallel, the authority to provide a path to happiness had shifted from the priest to the psychotherapist. Sin had been replaced by symptom. But psychotherapists trade in knowledge of the self, not in forgiveness and redemption.

Therapists have no higher authority to draw upon, to provide an equivalent absolute framework to the priest, one through which to view the patient’s condition. At best, they mobilise the particular psychological theory they have been trained in, to diagnose psychic malaise – to find and label symptoms, and to treat them. But, to ascertain why patients who have been described as the “worried well” – those whose bodies are healthy – are feeling bad is forbiddingly difficult. It is like trying to make out the shape of a mannequin doll submerged in a bog.

Despite this history, and paradoxically, surges of collective moral outrage continue to erupt in the modern secular West. We live in a time of intense public moralising, most extreme in witch hunts conducted on social media. JK Rowling has been just one recent target.

Highly charged rhetoric is levelled, with all the flavour of a Reformation heresy trial, against people deemed to be climate change deniers, racists, misogynists, homophobes, elitists and other exploiters of disadvantage; accompanied by calls for them to be silenced, sacked, prosecuted, stigmatised and socially ostracised. In parallel, and generally from those lower in the socio-economic class hierarchy, there are periodic tirades in favour of tougher law and order measures, of the “lock ’em up and throw away the key” tenor, way in excess of rational fears that a repeat child sex offender may be living down the street.

These inquisitions recur today without any framework of religious belief, or any supporting theological categories of divine wrath, sin and damnation being used to justify them. Hatred directed towards others simply because of their beliefs, hatred to the extreme of wanting them removed from the public communal domain, shamed and shunned – cancelled – seems to be a primal emotion, springing up unprompted from the well of the individual unconscious.

We may conclude, extrapolating backwards into the past, that the theology used to justify heresy trials in earlier times was mere rationalisation, surface justification and excuse for common psychopathological drives. Envy, resentment and xenophobic fear of difference are dark, seemingly universal passions, pre-verbal in their visceral primacy. Righteous indignation does not need a supporting theory. It may well, in practice, employ one to proclaim its own singular virtue, and justify its crimes, but that theory is no more than decorative icing on the cake of malice.

So, because a society is stable, orderly, and relatively free from violence – civilised – does not mean it has eradicated the dark passions. Visceral envy, resentment and xenophobia may have been more visible in the less inhibited European Middle Ages, and more immediately explosive; yet their power and intensity seem hardly diminished in the contemporary West. Perhaps they have become better disguised, more devious in expression, but no less sadistic in intent, and no less hypocritical in acting behind a rationalising mask of virtue.

Further, the cultural shift from sin to guilt has intensified the modern problem. Heightened levels of guilt and repressed feelings build up inside the self, turning it into a pressure cooker of free-floating anxiety. That highly strung self will do almost anything to relieve tension. It may do so by venting emotion, the stronger the better, and projecting it on to external targets. Thus, tormenting feelings of culpability are projected out on to stigmatised others, where those others have been condemned by public opinion, and thus may be persecuted with a good conscience.

So, where have we reached as a society in terms of good and evil? The demise of sin is one symptom of a fateful change in modern Western focus. Guilt feelings have evolved within individuals, feelings that incline the inner self towards self-punishment, rather than seeking a law that has been transgressed, in the hope of forgiveness. Interest has switched from morals to meaning. Attention has moved to questioning how to live, and what to do in order to make sense of the at times painful life into which the individual has been cast. In the collective consciousness, the ethical domain has been separated off and downgraded.

We may conclude with some confidence that the modern world can do without the category of sin. Its loss has not done irreparable damage to Western societies, which have adapted well to a largely secular understanding of the range of human behaviour. There has been a return to the classical Greek focus on character strengths and flaws. And, more indirectly, a return to focus on virtues and vices where there is preference for some moral approval and blame, although the terminology of virtue and vice, when used, sounds awkward and quaint, and does not carry much righteous sting. To say of someone that they are “not very nice”, while a judgment, is rarely castigating in the way condemning someone as a “sinner” used to be. The desire to be a ‘good person’ remains, and is widely felt, although today it is invested with much weaker moral charge.

God has been replaced as judge by the conscience of the individual, the view of significant others, and a generalised collective conscience. This has occurred without some spiral downwards into individual disintegration and social anarchy. The general sociological fact is that Western societies have become more stable and orderly than ever before in their histories, with lower rates of violent crime, and much less likelihood of going to war with each other. Crime remains crime; and the domain of psychopathology has been expanded, redefining many flaws as symptoms. Crime, symptom and character flaw now occupy the interpretative space once configured by sin.

If we place high value on living true to ourselves and being honest in our reflections on the human condition as we experience it, then we are better off without God and sin. They distorted feeling and perception. There were times when they helped strengthen communal bonds and provided suffering individuals with consolation, but those benefits came at the cost of closing minds and heightening prejudice. In any case, the modern condition is, of its nature, precluded from ready or credulous solutions.

However, all is not well. The poisonous emotions of envy, resentment and xenophobia endure, as do sadistic impulses to triumph, dominate and defeat. Social media has provided a powerful new weapon. Today’s moral causes, lacking a theology of sin and damnation, have weaker authority backing them, but this is offset by the reach and volume of their blaring megaphone voice.

Further, the departure of God and sin served as the most likely cause of the fading of Easter as a religious festival. But that came at the wider cost of loss of interest in the life of Jesus and, with it, the West’s most profound meditation on the meaning of death.

John Carroll’s book The Saviour Syndrome will be released on May 1st.