Following previous posts from the writings of Timothy Keller, in his book, The Reason for God (and one before that “The Personal Consequences of Sin” and * But Also if We Do. . .)
The Social Consequences of Sin
Sin does not only have an internal impact on us but also a devastating effect on the social fabric. In the wake of World War II the English writer, Dorothy Sayers saw many British intellectual elites in despair about the direction of human society. In her 1947 book Creed or Chaos? she proposed that their hopelessness was due to their loss of belief in the Christian doctrine of “original” sin, that is, humanity’s inherent pride and self-centeredness. “The people who are most discouraged,” she wrote, “are those who cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment.” To them, the genocide in totalitarian states and the greed and selfishness of capitalist society “are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe.” Christians, however, are accustomed to the idea that “there is a deep interior dislocation in the very center of human personality.” She concluded:
The Christian dogma of the double nature in man—which asserts that man is disintegrated and necessarily imperfect in himself and all his works, yet closely related by the real unity of substance with and an eternal perfection within and beyond him—makes the present parlous state of human society seem less hopeless and less irrational. 13
In The Nature of True Virtue, one of the most profound treatises on social ethics ever written, Jonathan Edwards lays out how sin destroys the social fabric. He argues that human society is deeply fragmented when anything but God is our highest love. If our highest goal in life is the good of our family, then, says Edwards, we will tend to care less for other families. If our highest goal is the good of our nation, tribe, or race, then we will tend to be racist or nationalistic. If our ultimate goal in life is our own individual happiness, then we will put our own economic and power interests ahead of those of others. Edwards concludes that only if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life center, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races and classes, but to the whole world in general.
How does this destruction of social relationships flow from the internal effects of sin? If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is really not about politics, it is about us. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we must despise and demonize opposition. If we get our identity from ethnicity or socioeconomic status, then we have to feel superior to those of other classes and races. If you are profoundly proud of being an open minded, tolerant soul, you will be extremely indignant toward people you think are bigots. If you are a very moral person, you will feel very superior to people you think are licentious. And so on.
There is no way out of this conundrum. The more we love and identify deeply with our family, our class, our race, or our religion, the harder it is to not feel superior or even hostile to other religions, races, etc. So racism, classism, and sexism are not matters of ignorance or lack of education. Foucault and others in our time have shown that it is far harder than we think to have a self-identity that doesn’t lead to exclusion. The real cultural war is taking place inside our own disordered hearts, wracked by inordinate desires for things that control us, that lead us to feel superior and exclude those without them, and fail to satisfy us even when we get them. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (Penguin Books: 2008, 2018) p. 174-75
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
