Good Sin / Bad Sin

I had to take a break from reading Freud – he was driving me crazy! (ha?) So I decided to turn to the easy read of Michel Foucault, specifically Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. I’m only two chapters into it so far so I can’t really offer a full response/reaction to Foucault’s work, but so far I am enjoying the book and I don’t think I’m crazy (I’ll have to go back to Freud to see if that is the case).

While reading Foucault’s work I am keeping in the back of my mind the notion of sin in Christianity and how the way sin has been and continues to be used in areas of discipline and punishment. I am curious to see if there are points of correlation or similarity between the discipline and punishment that Foucault outlines and practices of Christianity. I haven’t done any digging to see if anyone else has considered such an approach to sin, mostly because I don’t want to add more things to my reading list right and because I am lazy.

Such an approach to sin is important because Christians and churches have a wonderful history of manipulation and shame around theological terms and ideas. The Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is one of the many works of literature that look at shame in a faith-based society and there are a bevy of others (the 2009 German film The White Ribbon [Das Weisse Band] is another great example). Sin is a construct that has been used and continues to be used to control people, to silence people, to overpower people, and to take away people’s freedom. Various notions of sin continue to be used to demean, dehumanize, and destroy individuals. This is not good… maybe even sinful.

There are those who have excised the word (and notion?) “sin” from their general lexicon. Maybe you attend a softer, gentler church that offers a softer, gentler Christianity and would say that such practices around notions of sin are not a part of your faith experience. Perhaps. Maybe you go to a church/faith community where the notion of sin is never brought up. In your community it may be a sin to talk about sin or to even mention the word “sin.” So the whole question of how sin works in your faith community is moot, right? We don’t need to worry bout that idea and word any more.

Yet I bet ideas of shame and guilt and doing “bad things” are a part of your community. I bet your community comes out of a history that at one time or another did practice naming and dealing with notions of sin in a very public way and those practices may still be a part of who you are. I bet there are people in your softer, gentler community who struggle with shame and guilt and cannot discern where God and Jesus might fit in that picture. I would argue that the construct and concept of sin, whatever that may be, is still a part of your community even if you are tying to hide or ignore it. It is under the rug, but still very much present.

I think we need to keep the notion of “sin” and even the word “sin,” alive in our language, devotion, and practice (that’s right, we need to sin… or maybe I’m talking about acts of penance and cries for forgiveness that come out of an understanding of sin). There are times when we do sin (again, whatever that means). There are times when we fail as individuals or as a community or as a society. There are times when we need to name what we have done as a sin. We may say that we messed up, or that we didn’t do what we hoped to do, but will we say that our actions negatively effected our relationship with God as well as our relationships with others? Are we willing to say that we have sinned?

I think it is important to have a grasp of the word and concept of sin. I think it is important to be able to name brokenness, but we need to do it in a way that does not break or dehumanize the individual. If we are to continue to address sin in the lives of individuals as well as the actions of institutions we need to do it in a way that is humane and compassionate. Churches are human institutions and are prone to sin just as much as any other institution or human. So we need to be vigilant that our churches do not bully and beat people with manipulated ideas of perfection and piety all cloaked around the notion of sin.

If Foucault can’t help me with this, then who can?