Christianity Is Right About Sin

One thing the Christians got right

Though not a Christian, I find there to be a lot to like about Christianity, both in terms of many of its core doctrines and the presence of several powerful arguments for it. Perhaps its most maligned doctrine, however, is its doctrine of sin, according to which we are all sinners, all capable of profound wickedness. Despite frequent criticism, this doctrine seems to be among the best-attested of Christian doctrines, and failure to understand it has led to egregious errors.

Now, of course, I disagree with Christians about many of the sins that they claim are widespread. I do not think there is anything wrong with masturbation or premarital sex or homosexuality; I also think lying in many ordinary social circumstances is permissible so as to avoid hurt feelings. I don’t think there’s anything particularly immoral about profanity or even insulting others in many circumstances, so long as it is justified. For instance, when I wrote mean things about Nathan Robinson, I do not believe I was doing anything wrong. Similarly, while I think pride might be a vice of some sort, it is a fairly minor vice—I disagree with Lewis, for instance, when in Mere Christianity he calls it “the great sin…the essential vice, the utmost evil.”

I do, however, believe there are many widespread sins. Chief among them is, of course, meat consumption, wherein people sentence an animal to a life of torment in a cage for the sake of a meal. People give staggeringly little to charity, and when they do donate, they typically give it to whichever charity floats their fancy, rather than the charities that have been shown to be effective. If our chief concern was the good, then we’d look carefully into the good done by different charities, just like if our chief concern is our health, we’ll look carefully at the health of different foods, rather than consuming whichever foods sound nice to us.

For this reason, it seems that in charitable giving, most people’s primary aim is not to do good, but to fill some emotional need within them. They want to be—and to be regarded as—the sort of person who gives to charity, and there are particular charities that appeal to them emotionally. Thus, that is where they give, without much concern for prioritization. Few consider the question of where they’d give if, after their death, they’d have the experience of every human who ever lived, and thus would have to experience the deaths of those that they failed to save.

I do not mean to claim that I am above this. Often, when I am considering making some frivolous purchase, I find in myself a conflict between what I know is right to do and what I wish to do. I recognize that the money I might spend attending an exciting conference could dramatically improve the life of a single person or millions of animals, and yet I choose to spend it on myself. The tug of personal temptation overpowers what we—certainly I—recognize we ought to do. As C.S. Lewis writes in a particularly wise passage in Mere Christianity:

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist. Very well, then. The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practise the Christian virtues is that we fail.

For months after knowing that eating meat was wrong, I continued to eat meat, because I regarded giving it up as too great of a cost. When I looked at tasty meat, there was in myself a tug-of-war between what I recognized was right and what would have benefitted me in the short term. For months, I chose what was good for me at the expense of innocent animals.

This is, of course, just one of my many vices. I often fail to do what I know is right. Often when I argue, I do it not to convince but to destroy; to reduce the view of the person who I argue with to dust. Like many men (and here I do mean men) I take pleasure in winning an argument, even when this is at the expense of both persuasion and decency.

I am not alone in this. It’s easy to convince a sizeable percent of people that eating meat is gravely evil—much more difficult is convincing them to stop it. I recall a particularly dispiriting conversation in which immediately after convincing several people that eating meat was an egregious wrong—on the level of savagely tormenting many dogs—everyone I had spoken to immediately ordered the meat meal.

It takes quite intense effort for one’s desire for the good to win out over one’s conflicting desires. It does not happen automatically. Indeed, only rarely does one’s abstract recognition of the worthwhileness of some endeavor convince one to take it up, when doing so would conflict with some other desire they have.

We are social creatures. As a consequence, we are much less willing to engage in actions when they are looked down upon by wider society. One who comes to believe that eating meat is as wrong as murder is far likelier to eat meat than to murder, in circumstances where they bring about similar benefits and carry similar risks.

Yet even when an action is socially sanctioned and known to be wrong, we often carry it out. Nearly half the population commits infidelity at some point in their life, despite it being clearly looked down upon. Though charity is widely embraced as a good thing, many do not give at all. People routinely are mean to those they love, routinely get angry, routinely say things they know they shouldn’t. On the internet, where viciousness is not socially sanctioned, it is utterly ubiquitous.

Whether you agree with me that eating meat and failing to give to effective are wrong is besides the point. What matters is many people fail to do things, even as they believe them to be right, and continue to do things they regard to be wrong. Just as one could infer that a man has a defective character from the fact that he slips another a substance that he believes to be poison, even if if turns out to be a harmless substance, we can infer that we are all sinners from the fact that we often do things we think are wrong. Similarly, though I do not agree with Christians about sexual ethics, the fact that many people engage in premarital sex and masturbation, even after knowing it to be wrong, says something rather dismal about the quality of our moral motivation.

Failing to take the right action is just one of many vices. We are—and I think myself more than is typical—all prone to bursts of pride. We underestimate the perceptiveness of others and overestimate ourselves, overestimating our own virtue while underestimating the virtue of others.

Doing the right thing is like remaining calm, rather than angry. With enough effort one can do it, but it requires great strain. Few do it consistently, none universally. Many naively think that they can do the right thing all the time, but this is only because they haven’t yet realized that morality makes any demands of them; when they do, they quickly realize the willpower needed in doing the right thing.

This also rubbishes the common notion that those who are really virtuous are in some way naive. The virtuous, on this view, are those who have not been exposed to the horror of the world. But if one does not recognize the horror of the world and the pull of temptation, they have not exercised any real virtue—it is only genuine virtue if one pulls against the force of conflicting desires.

Doing the right thing is easier if one limits oneself. If one attempts to do the right thing all the time, they will inevitably fail and become burned out. We should instead set ourselves ambitious moral goals, and try to achieve those, as well as perhaps going above and beyond them. Rather than leaving one’s charitable donations to one’s momentary whims, one should set up automatic yearly or monthly donations. Inevitably, we will not donate as much as we should, but we can set ourselves significant goals, and follow through on them. Similarly, one can adopt a consistent and non-arbitrary diet that isn’t subject to their momentary whims by deciding, in the long-term, to follow a vegan diet.

One should not, however, limit oneself to this. You should not merely take the Giving What We Can pledge, and then forget about it. For one thing, the pledge is pitifully small compared to the amount we ought to give. Even after giving away 10% of one’s income, one will still have enough income to spend on all manner of luxuries. Instead, one should set a mandatory baseline—one that they do not budge on—and then try to do more when fancy strikes. In a moment when you feel sad about the fate of desperately poor and diseased children, do not think, “I do not need to give for I have already given my yearly donation.” Just as the federal budget has mandatory and discretionary funds, you should too—and you should both make effective donations part of your mandatory funds and part of your discretionary funds. Quoting C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity once more:

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.

Were we all perfect, we would spare no money for unnecessary luxuries, and instead spend the money as effectively as it can be spent. But none of us are perfect, and as a consequence, we should think of our efforts to do good as a constant war between the better parts of ourselves and the corrupting influences within us. Just as it is difficult to get oneself to study, even when one knows it to be the right thing, it is similarly difficult to get oneself to help others, even when one knows it to be right.

Fortunately, doing the right thing is like a habit. Because I have avoided meat for my last several thousand meals, it is now easier to avoid it again than it was when I abstained from my first meal of meat. When one does the right thing enough that it becomes a regularity, doing it once more becomes easier. Similarly, it is easy to avoid temptation when one has done so many times, whatever the temptation is.

Even the best people are prone to frequent wrongdoing. There are conceivable societies in which even the most virtuous of humans would be regarded as the most wicked of evil-doers. If you do not find yourself struggling with temptation—making an effort to do the right thing, even when it is psychologically difficult—then I fear you are taking morality inadequately seriously.