Confession: I have a morbid curiosity when it comes to religion … and often read the articles in The Christian Post or Christianity Today suggested by social media algorithms. It’s somewhat akin to highway accidents. As your car crawls in the lane and you see the swirling lights, you know you shouldn’t look, but something compels you; after all, there is something mesmerizing about tragedy and tortured metal.
As a Pagan, I am perplexed by the dynamic of sin in Christianity, which seems to be an admixture of submission, thought-crime and self-hate. From what I read in Christianity Today, Christians are supposed to have no shred of pride or self-love; that’s all reserved for Jesus, through which they are redeemed. One screed along this line involves a condemnation of body positivity, with the ultimate message that we shouldn’t regard any aspect of ourselves with positivity, since we are filthy with sin and only loveable by virtue of our submission to Christ.
Trace the word “sin” back far enough, and you find the Proto-Indo-European root *es-ont, the present participle of the word “to be.” Es-ont is “being” or “becoming.” We sin because we are: The fact of our birth is the injury against God.
In short, the universe would be better off without us. We are intrinsically flawed by the fact of our being; we can aspire to more, but we shall never achieve it because we are rotten eggs, courtesy of a woman snacking on fruit.
A thought experiment
I want you to imagine a person, kneeling on the ground. Perhaps her face is streaked with tears; perhaps his fists are clenched.
I am just filthy, sick, broken. I have absolutely no value to this world. I am worthy only of scorn. I am shit, a fuck-up. Someone should burn me alive in a lake of fire.
If you encountered a flesh-and-blood human saying these things – friend, family, acquaintance, even a stranger – would you agree? Or would you say something like: “No! Please don’t give up. That’s depression and depression lies. Let’s get you some help.”
The scenario continues.
I am human shit, but if I just make him my everything, I can have some value. If I just make him happy, then he will love me even though I’m a piece of shit.
Hand on arm, brow furrowed with concern, you ask: “What happens if you don’t make him happy?”
The person shudders. He’ll make me pay for being a piece of shit. He’ll break me until I obey. I need to make him happy. I have no worth except through him.
In human relationships, this scenario is a glaring, waving, scarlet semaphore of domestic violence. Self-hatred and abnegation alone are symptoms of clinical depression, but they are also symptoms of abuse: Other people, in the effort to control us, want us to believe that we can only find worth through them. Abusers want us to love and fear them.
And sin, according to Christian belief, is more than committing wrong action; it’s thinking the wrong thoughts. Lacking belief – the internal buy-in to the religious precepts and mythologies – is sin, as is thinking in any uncharitable or non-positive manner. To be crude and direct about it, to many Christians, thinking about someone with desire is the same as fucking them. (If that were really the case, I think that incels would be happier people.)
We are broken, according to Christian theology. And if we think the wrong thoughts, we are committing a crime, regardless of how we act in the world. Our good deeds don’t matter at all, only our belief and the “grace of God” – which we earn through submission.
In hoc signo vinces
The Roman Emperor Constantine, marching alongside his army, had a vision: a glowing cross of light, and with it the words in hoc signo vinces.
In this sign, you will conquer.
And he used the sign to slay his enemies, forcing the Roman Empire to convert to Christianity, shuttering the temples, silencing the oracles.
I think it’s telling that the words he saw weren’t “In this sign, you will be saved.” “In this sign, you will find peace.” “With this sign, you shall know God’s love.” No – it was always about domination: the attainment of power, the death of enemies.
The doctrine of sin is incredibly useful as a means of social control. Clinically depressed people often don’t have agency, especially if they become depressed as the result of abuse; they lack the vital energy to fight back. By convincing people of their inherent worthlessness, Christianity has instilled a sort of large-scale societal depression, a culture of self-hate.
Crime exists, of course, as do ethical lapses, bad habits and personal faults. But do we inspire people to make better choices through self-hatred and shame?
Self-hatred and shame are actually more likely to cause ethical lapses, mistakes, personal faults and the like. A person who hates himself is also more likely to hurt someone else.
If you hate yourself, there is no reason to put down the gun or the needle, for example. Fat-shaming is extremely common in our culture, and has actually been correlated pretty strongly with weight gain rather than weight loss. And while there may be some few people who consider themselves success stories for conversion therapy, it mostly has proven unsuccessful in changing sexual orientation (although pretty successful in driving people to suicide).
The language and doctrine surrounding sin ultimately normalize abuse. Rather than a crime, domestic violence becomes a holy act, the duty of a stern yet loving father (and it’s almost always fathers who are called to do this in Christian literature). Witness, for example, the books and manuals authored by evangelical preachers on how to administer corporal punishment to children, starting – and I am not making this up or exaggerating – in infancy. One dude even marketed flexible plastic tubing for use in holy child-beating.
The proponents of this “spare the rod, spoil the child” strategy say that it produces well-behaved, obedient children who evince happiness. To which the rebellious Pagan says, “Well, of course! You’ve proven to your kids since they were in the high chair that they will be beaten for pretty much any lapse. Those aren’t happy smiles, parents. Those are ‘North Korea smiles.’”
The goal, ultimately, is to reproduce dominator society, in which the lesser gives unquestioning obedience and authority to the greater. Children owe complete obedience to their parents, wives owe complete obedience to husbands, husbands owe complete obedience to God (often via pastors and religious leaders). You do what you’re told and everybody’s happy, right? See, they’re all smiling – just like the good citizens of North Korea, or Roman citizens under the Emperor.
Servitude tends to be rebranded as “humility.”
I prefer to think of humility as “right perspective,” and it’s usually a good thing: To recognize one’s smallness in the universal scheme of things, to recognize our kinship with insect, tree and the addict on the street-corner. However, in excess, the focus on our smallness develops into despair, depression, apathy. Believing in our own lack of power, virtue and significance, we give our agency over to someone else – to the Emperor and his army.
To have right perspective, we need to know more than our smallness; we need to know our largeness, too.
Let there be mirth and reverence
Like many Pagans, I started my religious path in Wicca, although I’ve since found Druidry a better fit. That being said, I have always had a special place in my heart for the wonderful piece of liturgy known as “The Charge of the Goddess,” originally written in the 1950s by Wiccan priestess Doreen Valiente. There have been other versions, but they largely retain the general sense. Here is the link to Starhawk’s version, which is the one I have always preferred.
In college, I memorized the Charge and recited it to myself as a kind of prayer. I can’t recite it off my head anymore, but I still consider it a good guide for life and religious practice. Sometimes, I toy with doing my own exegesis of it here on the blog; maybe I’ll get around to it.
At any rate, thinking about sin and humility, I am drawn to these words near the end of the Charge:
Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals. Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you. And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.
Love and pleasure – done with consent, of course – aren’t sins; they are gifts, sacraments, including the love of one’s self. And to be whole, the self should strive to live in balance.
We don’t just require the harshness and austerity of strength, but the gentleness and joy of beauty. We should aspire to power, the ability to enact our will on the world, but also to compassion – the deep feeling for others and the awareness of vulnerability. And humility is balanced by honor – pride.
We have power, honor and strength; we are proud. We have compassion, gentleness and right perspective; we are humble. And we have both mirth and reverence: We love the Gods, but not with fear. We praise but we also laugh – a real laugh, not a cardboard laugh because we’re afraid that we’ll be hit if we don’t join in.
Christianity, at its core, is a religion out of balance; the goal of hierarchical dualism is, after all, to subjugate and destroy the Other. Desert-born with its harsh lights and shadows, it imagines a yang world of masculine light, of force and strength, but without the yin waters to balance it with night, merging, the mud-and-stuff of mortality.
We make mistakes because we are mortal beings living in a complicated world with a complicated set of forces. We’re not Platonic archetypes or painted saints. We make mistakes because it is the nature of the living to make mistakes. That doesn’t mean that we’re hot garbage.
The seeds of flourishing – of joy, empathy, compassion, wholeness – are within us already, although sometimes they need a little help from others to help them grow. We won’t find flourishing through unquestioning submission to someone else; we will never find it by discarding our inherent worth. Have right perspective, but be proud and hold your head high.
For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.
White Cat Grove 
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