Needed: A Sharper Sense of SinNeeded: A Sharper Sense of Sin
When We Lose the Sense of Sin
A 2014 article in the Huffington Post reported that “Miss Kay,” the matriarch of the family on the popular TV show “Duck Dynasty,” had “forgiven” the Duck Dynasty patriarch, Phil Robertson, for the way he had treated her in the first years of their marriage nearly fifty years earlier. The story is a familiar one, at least for Christians: a story of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and conversion of life, a couple sticking it out through the process and very happy they did so.
Huffington Post told the story more or less straight, at least compared with other liberal postings of the “gotcha!” kind. But the hundreds of hateful comments that followed made up for Huffpo’s restraint.
Representative responses:
Why is it that these Christian values fools that keep telling the rest of us that we are wrong for not believing in “their” ways & teachings time & time again are always the ones caught cheating & breaking their own code?
So I guess this makes him a hypocrite and she is another enabler. Typical Christian behavior!
Such hypocrites.
Not all comments were of this kind. The charge of hypocrisy was common, but some pointed out that to have sinned, repented, and changed your life to conform to what you consider God’s will does not make you a hypocrite. As one reader says:
Just in case you don’t know:
hyp·o·crite [hip-uh-krit]
1. a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.
He WAS an alcoholic and he DID commit adultery. Past tense.
The gulf of incomprehension between the Christian and anti-Christian commenters is striking. The story of a sinful man repenting, being forgiven, converting his life to follow God is thousands of years old and repeated many times in Old and New Testaments, from David to Peter, Paul, and countless others.
And yet this Christian vision is incomprehensible to the gotcha crowd who relentlessly judge those they accuse of judging. None of the anti-Christian commenters offers a shred of evidence to show that either Miss Kay or her husband of nearly fifty years is “a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.”
It is said that saints—men and women of heroic virtue—are those most aware of their own sins. But any humble Christian who examines his conscience knows he sins. When asked to describe himself, Pope Francis—himself no drunk or adulterer—said simply, “I am a sinner.” The sinner is the starting place of Christianity. Sin and repentance are elementary.
Of course, there are hypocrites among Christians who, like the Pharisees of old, puff themselves up with virtues they don’t possess. But in this case that is not the charge of the gotcha crowd. The charge they make is that Phil Robertson once struggled with alcoholism and committed adultery. For this, they allow him no forgiveness, no repentance, no conversion of life. For them, those like Miss Kay who do forgive are “enablers” of behavior, even when such behavior, repented of and forgiven, has not actually recurred for decades.
So how do we understand people who acknowledge neither sin nor repentance nor forgiveness? La Rochefoucauld called hypocrisy “the homage that vice pays to virtue.” Sure, hypocrites are liars, but the virtues hypocrites pretend to have are themselves good and worthy, qualities people should want to have. (That’s why some pretend to them, even when they don’t possess them.) But that’s an unpalatable premise for relativists who are anti-Christian. They actually condemn the “Christian values fools” not for pretending now to hold values or possess virtues they once betrayed, but for picking up those values once again, this time trying never to betray them again. It’s a little odd for relativists to fault Christians for their practices. On what moral ground do relativists judge others at all? If there are no objective moral grounds and all moral views are relative, why not let Christians be Christians, on equal footing with relativists? Haven’t relativists given up any ground on which to judge others?
From a postmodern, relativist point of view, the trouble with Christians, of course, is that they insist there are objective moral grounds. To these they hold themselves accountable, and by them they dare to measure others. Relativists seem to suspect that Christians may be right about that, and can’t stand the thought that they may be judged by an undeceivable God—or by anyone else. But if there really is no God, what do they have to fear? Why let silly Christians get under their skin?
Postmoderns seem not to honor the prodigal son for abandoning his sinful ways and adopting a life of virtue. First of all, they do not admit that there are such things as sinful ways. Second, they sense that, if the prodigal son repents of the sinful way of life he once indulged in, he may also be judging their way of life as sinful. And this is intolerable.
In other words, one part of the gotcha response seems to be hatred for those who try to live virtuously, and thereby seem to be condemning by their own lives the moral state of those with whom they once cavorted.
What, then, does it mean to cease sinning and to “repent”? Anti-Christians scarcely recognize that way of framing the problem. There’s no place for sin in their philosophy. The whole idea of living virtuously implies that one holds oneself to standards outside oneself. Virtuous habits are acquired through practice, often with considerable difficulty, and they are lost through disuse. Most humans must work hard at practicing virtue but still, discouragingly, sometimes fall short of their own commitments. In short, the classical and Christian understanding implies that there is a moral truth about what is good and what is evil, and there is a higher good toward which it is human nature to aspire.
Yet what repels so many anti-Christians seems to be the very idea that there are grounds for discriminating between good and evil—grounds other than just calling good the life that they now find pleasure in. Like Hume, some seem to believe that reason is passion’s slave, the rationalization of whatever one feels like doing. Some share a boo! versus hooray! method of ethical disagreement. They think morals do not come under the authority of reason but of feeling. They recognize no cognitive grounding for morality, only feelings. Morals, in their view, are not cognitive but emotive. When they hear what purport to be ethical arguments, reason is out of play, so the best they can do is cheer for some moral theories and boo others. For in their view, good is whatever I feel like doing; evil is you pretending to judge me by some so-called standard which not even you live up to.
Better, in the relativist view, to rationalize and justify what we actually choose than to try to aim higher, for that would risk failing. Even aiming for virtue seems like an intolerable judgment on those who do not succeed at it. The best way to escape the charge of hypocrisy is by declining to hold any beliefs or principles. One cannot fail to live up to standards, if those standards are set simply by how one is actually living now.
Relativism may at first seem pleasant. If one wishes one’s conduct to be judged by nobody, and if one insists that there are no universal standards, that may at first seem to take a burden from one’s back. But to that view there is a dark downside. From there, how and on what grounds would one protest against tyranny or torture? If there were no moral truth, who could “speak truth to power”? If someone were to insist that torture is wrong, the easy retort would be: “That’s just your opinion.” Under moral relativism, further, what could stand firm as “social justice”? And why should anyone care? That is why moral relativism (sometimes called “subjectivism”) has often proved to be a sure path to tyranny.
Where did this drive toward relativism come from? Some say that Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned Aristotle’s notion of nature on its head. Aristotle said that nature defined not only what man is but what he should be. Rousseau countered that nature is not an end—a telos—but a beginning. Man’s end is his beginning. Allan Bloom encapsulated this view succinctly: “There are no ends, only possibilities.”1
Like many proponents of the sexual revolution today, for instance, Rousseau had a particular hatred of the family, that most constraining of institutions. He called for the education of children to be taken from the family and given to the state. As Robert Reilly puts it, “Once society is atomized, once the family ceases to interpose itself between the individual and the state, the state is free to transform the isolated individual by force into whatever version of ‘new man’ the revolutionary visionaries espouse.”2
Something like Rousseau’s influence is everywhere today. Recall the Obama campaign ads featuring “Julia,” who from cradle to grave was nothing more than a ward of the state, and in whose life the family is nowhere present, not even when she wants to have a baby. This cartoonish view of reality has long antecedents.
As Mary Eberstadt has discerned more clearly than anyone else, the slow strangulation of the family has brought about the death of God. The family did not decay because of the loss of God. God died once the family decayed and ceased to be bound by love and commitment. Without that bond between loving parents, children missed the look of unconditional love in the eyes of their mother, along with the constant love and close care of a watchful father. Without a representation of God in the family, God disappeared from daily view. How could one think of God as love and compassion if these were not overwhelming realities in one’s daily life at home?
Once God had died, sin also died, and there now had to take place a transvaluation of values. In this sense, sin used to be not just the violation of a taboo, a crossing of a line that one should not cross, disobedience to a code written in stone, but a breaking with a friend, the end of a loving relationship, an affront, a tearing away, a rupture with a personal, warm world. Once God died, Nietzsche warned those who were too giddy at the prospect, reason also died. There was no longer one intelligence, personal or not, infusing intelligibility and meaning into every blade of grass, every grain of sand, every lily in the fields. All became alien, unconnected, impersonal. Opposite of human reason, there was no longer a far greater Logos, omniscient, comprehending (and loving, and filling with beauty) all things—as Socrates might have imagined, and Plato and Aristotle, and then Plotinus, and scores of other pagan sages, who wrote intelligently and beautifully of the divine. Now there was only the void. Emptiness of meaning. Alienation from nature and from each other. Consciousness without purpose and without companions.
The once-common ground of the Judeo-Christian ethic—the Ten Commandments supported by family, church and temple, the whole community, the whole education system (the McGuffey Reader), and the old-fashioned patriotic local newspaper—all these have given way to a new kind of inner isolation, the loss of the sacred, a sharp awareness (even by the very young) of the pointlessness of life. Rushing in to fill this emptiness is the sexual revolution, defined by Mary Eberstadt as “the ongoing destigmatization of all varieties of nonmarital sexual activity, accompanied by a sharp rise in such sexual activity, in diverse societies around the world (most notably in the most advanced).”3 Delight in sexual life, once a driving force for family and life and the growth of the human population down the generations, has now become a driving force into relativism and nihilism.
The mediating structures of family, church, and community have virtually lost their role (at least for a time) in defining and shaping sexual morality. These prior institutions, which precede the state both in importance and in time, nowadays increasingly exist on the state’s sufferance. Thus, today, it is the state that determines what marriage is, how many people and of which configurations it may involve, and what kinds of sexual activity outside marriage are not only permissible, but must be enabled by state-enforced morals and promoted among children in schools.
After experiencing Nazism and Communism, John Paul II warned of “the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible.” Indeed, he says, if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated by those few who hold power. “As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.”4
Under relativism, social justice loses all its meaning.
Learning from Reinhold Niebuhr
These confusions of today’s secularists offer the perfect opportunity for Catholic social thinkers to prepare the way for the Church to present an updated overview and more sophisticated teaching on what we Christians mean by “sin.” The first great step here is to make plain that we Christians see the world as through-and-through a personal world, a world uplifted by the most exalted of personal relationships, that between each person on earth and the Creator of all, who knew what he was doing when he created this vast universe, and loves what he has created, and invites all women and men into his friendship. Perhaps no group saw this more directly than the Society of Friends, the Quakers.
Our view of sin, then, lies in ordinary experience, as common as causing pain to those we love, as common as letting down a friend. In daily life we observe that each of us sometimes turns away from what we know is right—turns away from the light—and out of weakness or just plain willfulness chooses what we know (or heavily suspect) is wrong. This view of sin is not to be believed because it is a doctrine of the Church. To grasp it does not take faith. All it takes is a little introspection. Each of us knows times when we have not done what we know we should have done, and when we have done what we know we should not have done.
The founders of the United States knew this. That is why they divided governmental powers and organized a check against each of them. That is why they arranged that rival institutional interests would push back against each other, so that each would check each.
The greatest American Protestant ethicist of the twentieth century, who developed the most detailed handbooks on the ways of sin, saw more clearly and quickly than any other into the aims of Adolph Hitler and Nazism. His name was Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). Born in the Middle West of both Lutheran and Evangelical heritage, he became the teacher of presidents and legions of secular journalists and historians. He laid out the reality of human sinfulness in plain language: Every man sometimes sins. The capacity for virtue in human persons makes democracy possible; the human capacity for sin makes democracy necessary. Without checks and balances, democracy cannot work. As the saying goes, “In God we trust; for everybody else there are checks and balances.”
What some might want to denounce here as Jewish and Christian dogmatism, others describe as the lessons of ordinary human experience, sheer common sense. That is the way The Federalist describes human reality, many times over.5
Thus, the reality of sin belongs not to the category of obscure theological refinements but to daily experience. Our reason for turning to Reinhold Niebuhr is that no theologian of the twentieth century wrote more analytically about sin and applied his analysis week by week to practical events through journalistic commentary. No theologian has been more helpful to practical leaders in many fields. No Catholic theologian has done as well. And without speaking accurately of sin, how can one speak credibly of injustice or even justice?
FOR CATHOLIC SOCIAL thought, Niebuhr’s work suggests six specific lines of inquiry to pursue: The rejection of utopianism and a preference for a Christian realism; the more complicated considerations in group behavior than in individual behavior; a clearheaded analysis of the powers and interests at stake in social confrontations; and the often stark differences between distant ideals, proximate concrete ideals, and next immediate steps. In addition, Niebuhr makes frequent use of ancient Greek perspectives on irony and tragedy. All six of these points should figure prominently in Catholic social thought, but at present do not.
(1) The rejection of utopianism: Utopianism is wishfulness that the world would be a nicer place than it is. A “no place,” as Thomas More’s Greek term expressed it. For instance, the utopian pictures a world without self-aggrandizing powers and deeply rooted interests that voraciously seek self-expansion, a world without irony and tragedy, a world without conflict, a world without sin. The Nazis and the Communists used dreamy images of a “Third Reich that will last a thousand years” and a “socialist paradise,” in which selfishness and possessiveness and greed would be banished once and for all. Underneath this dreamy utopianism, with its rosy images and alluring sentiments, was a hard utopianism that required harsh methods for dealing with recalcitrant resisters. Sometimes in Catholic social thought there is an easy way of speaking of peace that is innocent of the lessons taught by Saint Augustine about the deep, deep roots of war, conflict, insurrection, and chaotic disorder—ineradicable roots in the human heart. Saint Augustine foresaw wars and rumors of new wars in every generation. In our world today, there are at least sixty wars in progress.
“Peace and justice” must not be allowed to sound utopian, hollow, pharisaical. Appeals for peace and justice must include a hard-edged awareness of the evils in the human heart and tested methods for checking them and turning their energies, despite themselves, in creative directions. Factions in societies, for instance, as James Madison set forth in Federalist 10, cannot be eliminated, but they can be turned to larger social good.
(2) The greater difficulties presented by impersonal political groups, as compared with the more private, personal circles of family and friends, also need attention by ethicists. In the bosom of the family and in gatherings of friends, one can look into familiar eyes, recall many chains of shared experiences, and know how to read even small nuances of tone, smile, wink, and nod. When dealing with an antagonistic group, one will not have these human resources to draw upon at all, for it is typical of humans to envision social groups they have never met in caricature. Personal experience is narrow. Imagination is limited. Niebuhr was a pastor in Detroit during the severe labor strife of the 1920s and shrewdly noted that the auto executives (Henry Ford and others) tended to picture their workers as thuggish hooligans, while the workers pictured their bosses as cartoonish fat cats. Across group lines, failures of imagination are virtually assured.
Among family and friends, one knows the names and faces of children and grandchildren, spouses and in-laws. One knows their tones of voice, the qualities of their hearts, their points of touchiness. For those shaped by American habits of the heart, it is not easy to imagine the intimate circles and characteristic feelings of members of the Taliban, or Russian invaders of Ukraine, or Syrian supporters of Bashar Assad. Social groups, on account of the limits of human imagination, experience, and mental ability, nearly always deal with one another as cardboard cutouts. Of course, many of us sit down at the Thanksgiving table with family members whose political, economic, and social views we cannot abide, and we can barely speak together of such matters. Much worse is it when we don’t even know the individuals on the other side of the issues. Note how the left in our country imagines the right, and the reverse. Cardboard cutouts. Greedy villains. Shallow souls incapable of learning from experience.
(3) There is a typical avoidance among Christian ethicists of an analysis of the powers, interests, and temporal changes that shift beneath matters of social justice and political relations.
(4) The difference between the ethical analysis of the end time and the ethical analysis of the “not yet.” The difference between political and social ideals and the next concrete, practical, prudent steps. The difference between the abstract common good and practical discernment among competing attempts to describe and identify it most realistically, the necessity of choice among practical routes to get there, the vital lesson that courses of well-intentioned action often have evil consequences, and the surety that the common good now in view is time-bound and movable—and may be a deviation from the fruitful path toward human flourishing.
Niebuhr treats all these matters under the rubric of the commandment of Christian love, which he refers to as appearing in history as an urgent drive toward the “impossible possibility” of a civilization based on love. He insists that it is necessary to move forward and keep striving, even within the always incomplete, sinning, and faulty world that we inherit.
(5) The age-old persistence of irony in human actions. Since Catholic educators embrace the classics so much more than most of their secular counterparts, it is surprising that Catholic moralists have not made as fertile use of the classic concept of irony as Niebuhr has, say, in The Irony of American History, and in almost all his writings. For it is a matter of common experience that human actions nearly always have unintended consequences, which often sharply contrast with best intentions. Within the buzzing, blooming, chaotic field of contingency in which all humans act, humans walk less in light than as blind men. We cannot possibly foresee all contingencies, nor take account of them in our plan of action. Thus, with absolutely no intention of doing so, we often defeat our own purposes. Ironically, good intentions are no shield against self-destruction.
(6) The tragic element in human actions. Often in the Greek and Roman classics we are shown how the very virtues of a human agent often lead to his undoing. A man’s oft-proved courage may on one occasion lead him to take a step too far, which ends in his fatal wounding. A woman’s famous cunning and wit may suffuse her with a conceit that blinds her to a tiny detail that on this occasion betrays her into downfall. Tragically, human strengths often bring human defeats. The seemingly iron-clad law sometimes makes us feel—to use a classic expression—like playthings of the gods.
In brief, human moral action is far deeper and more complex than most moralists today portray it. Far too many, in the very moment they take pride in their exquisitely refined moral distinctions, utter false simplicities.
How is it that Catholic moralists, above all, so systematically overlook the power of irony and tragedy in moral reasoning and moral action? This is not the place to develop a whole schema of these elements in human action. The aim here is solely to stir others to deepen the sophistication of Catholic social thought on these points, grounded in the wisdom contained in long, humble, historical experience.
To end with one down-to-earth example: How is it that the most Catholic continent of all, South America, with an open field for continuously implementing Catholic social thought ever since 1891, should come into the twenty-first century with the second-largest population of truly poor persons on the planet? With so many structural deficiencies? For all its strengths, Catholic social thought carries within it far more false turns, inner irony, and even human tragedy than its partisans (ourselves included) typically address.
The Problem of “Structural Sin”
Saint Augustine warns that even after a human being has been, by the grace and mercy of God, healed of the consequences of a fall, a once-fallen soul is like a knee that has popped out of joint from a hard fall in sports. Even after it is healed, that knee remains acutely vulnerable to going lame again. For this reason, the human race needs institutional checks and balances against human weaknesses and repeated falls. At the same time, it also needs institutions that do not smother personal responsibility.
Modern progressive movements, including the Wilsonian progressivism of the early 1920s, shifted its focus away from the acts of individuals in order to lavish its attention on social structures. They turned morality inside out: forget the individual heart and individual action; judge morals by social activism and structural changes. The source of evil lies not in man’s heart, progressives judged, but in the traditions that constrict his future and sometimes crush him. The most humane thing, they opined, is to break the hold of these oppressors and to replace them with perfectible human institutions. The most philosophical of progressives held that history itself—some forceful, predirected push—created a tide that irresistibly moved the world in a progressive direction. And “more progressive” here means stronger government, more scientifically managed bureaucracies, and more tightly regulated individuals. The progressive task is to be “on the right side of history,” to hold the correct political and social opinions, to go with the flow.
In short, progressives were convinced: History always flows in the progressive direction. Historical determinism as a kind of religion. Ideologues who insist that their systems were protected by historical determinism—the Nazis and the Communists, most obviously—regularly slide down into disgrace.
But history is not predetermined. Free women and free men again and again redirect it. Christian realists detect no sinless structures in this sinful world—not in any culture, not in any state, not even in the Church; not in past history, not now, not in the future. Human life is not like that; nature is not like that; reality is not like that.
Nonetheless, the term “sinful structures” was first given prominence among liberation theologians in Latin America. No one denies that Latin America has for some generations been desperately in need of new institutions. Three systemic changes, for example, would be of immense practicality in raising up the poor of Latin America (and elsewhere). First is better education: In some Latin American states less than half the population has an education that goes beyond sixth grade. Further, this education normally does not emphasize invention, discovery, and enterprise, but rather passive acceptance. Perhaps as a consequence, Latin Americans have invented few products, medicines, or household appliances of their own, and instead must use many invented on other continents. Latins are only beginning to restructure their schools so as to promote invention and know-how and enterprise—as John Paul II wrote, the main causes of the wealth of their nations.6 Latins are extremely good at creativity in the fields in which it is much supported: the novel, dance, music, and others.
Secondly, most poor people in Latin America (of whom there are large majorities in almost every nation) find it far too cumbersome—and expensive—to protect their own small business with legal incorporation. Hernando de Soto has found that it can take 6,000-plus hours of delays and visits to government offices, and handfuls of bribes and fees amounting to well over $8,000—five times the average worker’s annual income—in order to gain legal incorporation.7
By contrast, in Hong Kong, it takes something like $30 and an application sent through the mail. The government is required to provide a timely response, within six weeks. After all, government does not create small businesses; it merely lists them on its official rolls as incorporated. That registration allows these small corporations to operate legally, to borrow money in the name of the corporation, and the like.
Thirdly, the poor need cheap and easy access to credit, that is, the opportunity to borrow money to launch a business, at a low, reasonable, stable, payable rate. Before a business can sell its products, it has many start-up and production costs. To pay these, it needs to borrow money. Borrowed money is the mother’s milk of new businesses.
These three simple reforms alone would greatly improve the present and future prospects of the poor in Latin America. They correct three pervasive “sins” in the Latin American approach to political economy. No doubt, these are not the structural sins spoken of by the liberation theologians. But they are easy to grasp and do show how the term has some validity, even though the use of the term “sin” here is merely metaphorical.
In fact, the term “structural deficiency” seems more empirically accurate than “structural sin.” Do structures go to hell or to heaven? Personal responsibility is required for sin, which is a reflective, deliberate personal act. Most people in the world today (and in all prior centuries) live under structures that do not protect human rights or honor human dignity. In the light of full human flourishing, virtually all social structures in history have been seriously deficient.
Can anyone think of a perfect social structure anywhere on earth?
A Still Deeper Difficulty
A far deeper difficulty with the concept of “sinful structures” is that it allows individuals to escape personal responsibility. If a structure “sins,” which agents are responsible? Who repents? Who leads the way to better practices and outcomes? As then-Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out in 1986, in his Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation, “sin” is a category that is properly used only of persons, who knowingly and willingly choose to turn away from the will of the Lord and to violate his friendship and his laws. Ratzinger writes:
The priority given to structures and technical organization over the person and the requirements of his dignity is the expression of a materialistic anthropology and is contrary to the construction of a just social order. On the other hand, the recognized priority of freedom and of conversion of heart in no way eliminates the need for unjust structures to be changed. . . . It remains true however that structures established for people’s good are of themselves incapable of securing and guaranteeing that good. The corruption which in certain countries affects the leaders and the State bureaucracy, and which destroys all honest social life, is a proof of this. Moral integrity is a necessary condition for the health of society. It is therefore necessary to work simultaneously for the conversion of hearts and for the improvement of structures. For the sin which is at the root of unjust situations is, in a true and immediate sense, a voluntary act which has its source in the freedom of individuals. Only in a derived and secondary sense is it applicable to structures, and only in this sense can one speak of “social sin.”8
In his earlier Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” (1984), Ratzinger had already clarified this point:
To be sure, there are structures which are evil and which cause evil and which we must have the courage to change. Structures, whether they are good or bad, are the result of man’s actions and so are consequences more than causes. The root of evil . . . lies in free and responsible persons who have to be converted by the grace of Jesus Christ in order to live and act as new creatures in the love of neighbor and in the effective search for justice, self-control, and the exercise of virtue.9
In other words, it is persons who must do penance, reform their conduct, and straighten out their lives. The structures that most impede personal responsibility and reform are those of the bloated state, whose sheer size crowds out the liberties and sources of creativity inherent in every able-bodied human person. Too enlarged a state sucks the oxygen out of personal responsibility.
Although it is clear that class structures, laws, or environment can have a significant influence on human behavior, it is not at all clear that they can be called “sins.”10 Here we can take a hint from John Paul II, who takes up the language of “structures of sin” in his Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliation and Penance. While he allows that some structures can institutionalize injustice, even promote further injustice, the pope clearly affirms that structures themselves, although they can abet it, are never the cause of social evil. In Reconciliation and Penance, John Paul II traces social evil back to its source, the sin or sins of individuals. There is always a human will behind the actions, and that human will is responsible for the evil: “A situation—or likewise an institution, a structure, society itself—is not in itself the subject of moral acts. Hence a situation cannot in itself be good or bad. . . . At the heart of every situation of sin are always to be found sinful people.”11
John Paul II carefully separates the three senses in which “structures of sin” can be understood. First, every sin, no matter how personal, always spreads its effects and leads to societal evil: “To speak of social sin means in the first place to recognize that, by virtue of human solidarity which is as mysterious and intangible as it is real and concrete, each individual’s sin in some way affects others.”12 The effect of one individual’s personal sin can be so pervasive and strong that it damages the entire community.
The second sense of structural sin that John Paul II refers to those sins which are particularly against one’s neighbor, and therefore always have an immediate and obvious impact on the community members:
They are an offense against God because they are offenses against one’s neighbor. These sins are usually called social sins, and this is the second meaning of the term. In this sense, social sin is an offence against love of one’s neighbor, and in the law of Christ it is all the more serious in that it involves the Second Commandment, which is “like unto the first.”13
These sins are always an infringement on the freedom of other individuals, and so not only harm them, but also take away the freedom which was given by God.
The third sense of social sin regards the relationship among the various human communities, and is a structure of sin only by analogy. The leaders who make decisions set processes in motion, without knowing in advance the total results. Small decisions can inadvertently lead to massive social structures, which become a force of their own: “The term social can be applied to sins of commission or omission on the part of political, economic or trade union leaders, who though in a position to do so, do not work diligently and wisely for the improvement and transformation of society according to the requirements and potential of the given historic moment.”14
The large structures which are created by bureaucratic bodies play a significant role by their effect on individual lives, yet are not always traceable back to a distinct cause or person. Since it is not easy to identify the origin of these changes, the pope states that these structures can be called structures of sin only analogously. He adds that this does not remove the responsibility of transforming society with new structures: “However, to speak even analogically of social sins must not cause us to underestimate the responsibility of the individuals involved. It is meant to be an appeal to the consciences of all, so that each may shoulder his or her responsibility seriously and courageously in order to change those disastrous conditions and intolerable situations.”15 Both John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged the weight, force, and influence of certain unjust structures within society, but strongly asserted that the true origin of the evil lies in personal moral choice. Ratzinger wrote:
Being necessary in themselves, [structures] often tend to become fixed and fossilized as mechanisms relatively independent of the human will, thereby paralyzing or distorting social development and causing injustice. However, they always depend on the responsibility of man, who can alter them, and not upon an alleged determinism of history.16
The danger in theories that emphasize the role of structural or environmental factors in social evils is that they significantly lessen personal responsibility. This lessening can lead to the assumption of a kind of determinism, in which the environment is responsible for the acts of individuals.
John Paul II warned against speaking of structures in ways that ignore personal responsibility:
One must add at once that there is one meaning sometimes given to social sin that is not legitimate or acceptable even though it is very common in certain quarters today. This usage contrasts social sin and personal sin, not without ambiguity, in a way that leads more or less unconsciously to the watering down and almost the abolition of personal sin, with the recognition only of social guilt and responsibilities.17
In sum, there is a valid way to speak of “sinful structures.” But materialistic assumptions must not be smuggled into that term. There is no such thing as “on the wrong side of history.” All-determining fate is an illusion. Personal liberty is the one fundamental reality on which the whole ethic of Christianity depends. The primacy of personal responsibility is central to human action, and thus also to the struggle for social justice. Catholic social teaching is personalist. It emphasizes the primacy of the person over structures. Even when structures were spoken of as “sinful” by liberation theologians, these theologians did not have to think like Marxists. That is a responsibility they unnecessarily took upon themselves.
Conclusion
The conviction of Catholic social thought that individual liberty trumps the “dialectic” of materialism is one more reason to hold that social justice is not a program for the Leviathan state—more spending and more regulation—but the virtue of personal responsibility for the common good, via the large and small associations formed by free men. As Leo XIII was the first to diagnose, the best alternative to impersonal materialistic socialism is the free person and his or her free associations and self-governed communities. Between the Leviathan state and the creative human person, Leo stood with the free person—not the free person alone, but in associations of many sorts with many others. It is in that space between the state and the individual that social justice must flourish—or fail. Social justice is a practice learned and lived by free persons in their associations large and small. Its practices spring from the habits of individual citizens, working in unison with many other free persons, sometimes in international associations that circle the entire world (the Catholic Church, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders).
In the Christian vision, while all are called to practice social justice, some are likely to turn away. That is the prerogative of free persons. The theological definition of sin (deviatio a Deo) actually is an act that turns away from the Light, from the Good, from Justice, from the Person of our Lord. In this context, social justice is the virtue of free persons in their free associations, achieving the common good together, in a higher measure than the Leviathan state alone can reach. Free associations are more likely to act more respectfully of the dignity of human persons than the secular state. For one thing, free associations can preach the gospel, pray with those they wish to help, teach virtuous behavior that leads to social flourishing, and in other ways enter into moral and religious dimensions of human action forbidden to the secular state.
Social justice is not inherently hostile to the state. In fact, its organizations and energies are often focused on stimulating the state into action on behalf of the public good. But social justice does include within itself deeper reservoirs of devotion, love, wisdom, and nimbleness than the Leviathan (the huge, blind dinosaur) is permitted to exercise. It would be a fatal mistake, Leo XIII warned, for the human race to entrust all aspects of its flourishing to the collectivist government, as socialists were at that time demanding. That is why he called for Christians to summon up the strength to develop a new virtue, appropriate for the new world of the rerum novarum of his time. The state is neither equipped for achieving the full common good, nor fully trustworthy in its methods of envisioning it. The state is a guardian of certain important goods, but it has limited vision and limited purposes. It is neither flexible enough nor virtuous enough to be entrusted with the full treasure of human flourishing.
A more complete, more complex, and more penetrating understanding of sin, worthy of our greatest playwrights, novelists, and poets, is a very important part of achieving social justice. For we are all sinners. No use designing a republic for saints. There are not enough saints to fill a republic. (And saints are difficult to live with.) Republics must be built for sinners. That’s all there are.
That is why, as Charles Péguy wrote, “the sinner is at the very heart of Christianity.”
We now turn to Paul Adams, without whose determination this book would not exist. After reading every essay I had ever written on social justice, Professor Adams insisted that they be rewritten as a book, everything thought through anew and written in proper order. He made a plan showing how this could be done. What fascinated him, he said, was how uncannily the theory of social justice I developed coincided so neatly with the “best practices” that had evolved in his own field of social work.
So now that we have seen the theory, it is time to consider the practice.