I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me and the cost is more than I can bear.
Mel Gibson, The Patriot
In this tumultuous fall of 2016 we Americans are an unhappy lot. We complain about our government, our laws, our police, and institutions of every stripe. We are appalled by the antics and crimes of our two presidential candidates. We shake our fists at others, many of them decent people, whom we regard as blood enemies because of their religious or political beliefs, smearing them with what are now code words of hatred and disdain: conservative, liberal, progressive, Christian, Muslim. We blame fate and circumstance for the rot we detect in the fabric of our society, twisting the sentiments of Shakespeare’s Cassius to read: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves, but in our stars.”
Mel Gibson, The Patriot
In this tumultuous fall of 2016 we Americans are an unhappy lot. We complain about our government, our laws, our police, and institutions of every stripe. We are appalled by the antics and crimes of our two presidential candidates. We shake our fists at others, many of them decent people, whom we regard as blood enemies because of their religious or political beliefs, smearing them with what are now code words of hatred and disdain: conservative, liberal, progressive, Christian, Muslim. We blame fate and circumstance for the rot we detect in the fabric of our society, twisting the sentiments of Shakespeare’s Cassius to read: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in ourselves, but in our stars.”
In these political and cultural wars, one antagonist has gone largely unnoticed by the combatants. Over a century ago, the Times of London supposedly sent out a letter to writers asking the question “What is wrong with the world today?” G.K. Chesterton responded:
“Dear Sir,
I am.
Yours,
G.K. Chesterton”
It is time, I will argue here, to take a lesson from Chesterton. Instead of hurling imprecations and blame, perhaps each of us in this age of the “selfie” should ditch our cell phones, stand in front of a mirror, and take a cold, hard look at ourselves and our sins.
Sin is a word rarely used these days beyond church doors—and even within the doors of certain denominations the word lies in the back of the attic, dusty and cobwebbed. The religious connotations of sin now preclude its usage in the public square. The more traditional churches still acknowledge sin: here in the South, Sunday morning radio ministers preach against vice, and in my Catholic parish we recite the Confiteor at each Mass—“I have gravely sinned.” (Regarding that general confession, I doubt whether my fellow pew-warmers comprehend the nature of sin, as the lines for confession are quite small and the number of those abstaining from communion miniscule, leading an impartial observer to conclude that my church abounds with saints).
This mothballing of sin yields unfortunate consequences. Its absence from our vocabulary leaves us floundering in a morass of self-created moralities. We turn for our judgments from a higher power and higher laws to powers and laws of right and wrong we ourselves construct, both as individuals and as a society. An example: regarded for two thousand years in the West as a moral evil, abortion is now a “woman’s choice.” Let us ignore the ethical issues here and simply focus on the language. That word “choice” is key to understanding our present condition. Choice by definition implies freedom, and we have become the great supermarket society of self-determination, choosing our personal moralities the same way we pick our groceries from the shelves. “To Each His Own” rather than “In God We Trust” might more aptly serve as our motto on the dollar bill.
Now, suppose we take the ancient and venerable list of the seven deadly sins—pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth—and use them as a measuring tape for what we as individuals have become. Here, by the way, I will define sin as a “twisted good.” To the woman who drinks two glasses of cabernet in the evening, that wine is a positive good, relaxing and perhaps even healthy. To the woman who drinks two bottles of the same wine every evening, the good has become twisted from its intended purpose into a sin, an abuse of the good. (Those wishing to delve into this idea might turn to the books of C.S. Lewis, beginning with Till We Have Faces and The Great Divorce.)
So let’s take out our measuring tape and have a look at the connection between the seven deadly sins and ourselves.
Pride, or hubris, is first on the list, and often apprehended as the worst of these sins. Pride, a warped form of self-confidence, leads to narcissism and dangerous feelings of superiority. From the “I Am Special” programs of elementary school to the smug confidence of university students in their moral rectitude, from our self-absorbed politicians and elites who believe themselves possessed of the wisdom to rule the lives of millions to the antics of our athletes on the playing fields, we see this egotism at play. Surely we all know someone who is openly arrogant or conceited, but if we look in the mirror we may detect a more subtle hubris in our own hearts, that easy self-satisfaction which allows us to condemn without trial our neighbors and acquaintances, to regard with contempt family members who haven’t “measured up” or who hold opinions contrary to our own. When we judge others by the color of their skin or the amount of money they earn, when we demean a spouse, when we gleefully engage in gossip, we have become the slaves of pride.
Pride also prompts us to misjudge our own capabilities. Some years ago, for instance, American students taking an international math examination rated themselves as highly proficient. In this evaluation they received the top scores of any group taking the test. On the math test itself, however, students from several other countries outshone the Americans. False pride deceived them into making too much of their abilities.
How does America stack up in terms of greed? In volunteerism and charity, we are still a generous country, yet if we look to our leaders we find rampant avarice and hypocrisy. The Clintons, for example, have earned billions in speaking fees, false charities, and various swindles, yet members of the press listen straight-faced as this couple speaks of their identity with the poor and their desire to help the downtrodden.
Greed, the enflamed desire to seek more than is necessary for our needs and wants, exists throughout the body politic as well. We judge success by the cars and toys owned by our neighbors; citizens cheat their way into government disability programs, lying about their physical or mental health; the size of families has shrunk dramatically while the homes in which those families live are often palatial compared to the homes of their grandparents. Our national debt and the annual expenditures of our federal government bring howls of outrage, yet private debt in America runs into the trillions of dollars. Some of that debt is legitimate—a mortgage, for example—yet much of it stems from greed, our desire to own more or to do more than allowed by our bank accounts.
Lust? We make mock of Bill Clinton for his sexual philandering and of Donald Trump for his marriages, but some of us have failed abysmally in this department as well. Every statistic compiled over the last sixty years points to a decline in the traditional family, a rise in sexual promiscuity (how old-fashioned that term now sounds), and cultural and biological experiments regarding sexuality and gender whose consequences are still unfolding. The internet has given birth to hook-up websites, including sites for would-be adulterers. In 2013, internet pornography got more traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined, and 64% of American men claim to watch pornography at least once a month.
Wrath, meaning rage and hatred, may be for many of us the least of our sins, yet if we visit sites on the internet or follow the headlines, we see wrath at work in our public arena. When Black Lives Matter, a group purportedly founded to combat police injustice and the shooting of blacks, incites violence against these same police, then we see, as Dante wrote, “a love of justice perverted to revenge and spite.” This rage enters the private domain in the form of abuse of others: the man screaming into his phone as he walked in Downtown Asheville; the husband who routinely berates his wife for inconsequential wrongs; the woman I saw last winter whose cold, bitter anger reduced a salesclerk to tears.
Though gluttony can mean the overconsumption of anything, and is thereby linked to greed, here we will consider gluttony with only food in mind. Despite certain reports, the United States is not “the fattest country in the world.” According to a World Health Organization report, we are 27th, with 66% of us either obese or overweight. By any measure, we are nonetheless a nation of gluttons, with many of us as supersized as a Big Gulp. Fast food restaurants take a lot of the heat for our weight problems, but this is akin to blaming tobacco for disease and death. It is the smoker who invites emphysema just as it is the eater who invites extra pounds.
Just as telling is our obsession with exotic foods, diet, restaurants, and cooking. If we accept the argument of Thomas Aquinas that obsessive concern with delicacies and meals is a form of gluttony, then a good number of us, even the thin, qualify as gluttons. Whole Foods, the existence of the Food Channel, the posting of photographs on Facebook of restaurant dishes, the plethora of diet books: all spotlight our gluttony.
Envy, as Joseph Epstein tells us in his little book on the subject, provides less entertainment than the other deadly sins. Pride, lust, gluttony, and the rest contain some byproduct of pleasure, however abominable, but not envy. Jealousy and spite eat us up from the inside. We envy the rich; we envy a happy neighbor; we envy a couple whose marriage works—or seems to work—better than ours. Schadenfreude—here again I go to Epstein—is the opposite side of the coin: “to delight in another’s failure or defeat.” This emotion often follows in the footsteps of envy. We exult in the fall of a friend into debt; we speak with contempt of an aunt who slips on her path away from drink.
Finally, there is sloth, or acedia. Sloth may bring forth an image of a couch potato, a pudgy man in a sleeveless t-shirt packing away potato chips and watching television, yet the scope of sloth runs broader than that stereotype. Sloth also includes mental or spiritual inactivity or indifference: the citizen who cannot be bothered to vote; the man who insufficiently loves his wife; the able-bodied twenty-five year old who collects welfare benefits; the employee in the cubicle who spends several hours of his work day chatting online or watching pornography. Americans love to bitch and moan about their politicians and disagreeable laws, but we’re too lazy to pick up the phone or write an email protesting these policies.
A national character does not exist independently of the character of its citizens. Voters this year are dismayed that Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump are candidates for the presidency, but the clown and the crook did not pop up from nowhere. We put them where they are. Many of us, perhaps most of us, who voted in the primaries cast our ballots at least in part with one of the deadly sins directing our choices: greed for more public money, wrath with our current policies, class envy, and so on. Those who didn’t cast a ballot were, for the most part, guilty of sloth or pride.
To repeat the opening quotation from The Patriot: Our sins have returned to visit us, and I think we will find the cost of them truly more than we can bear.
A story is told of President Calvin Coolidge who, on leaving church one Sunday, was asked by a reporter what the minister had preached on. “Sin,” Coolidge replied. “But what did he say?” the reporter asked. “He was against it,” the tight-lipped Coolidge replied.
Until we turn against sin in our own lives, until we cast a gimlet eye on our own vices and licentiousness, until we once again venerate the old virtues like honor, respect for others, humility, and kindness, we should expect to find Trumps and Clintons, brigands and scoundrels, sitting in the White House and walking the halls of Congress.
Take a look in that mirror. I did. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
“Dear Sir,
I am.
Yours,
G.K. Chesterton”
It is time, I will argue here, to take a lesson from Chesterton. Instead of hurling imprecations and blame, perhaps each of us in this age of the “selfie” should ditch our cell phones, stand in front of a mirror, and take a cold, hard look at ourselves and our sins.
Sin is a word rarely used these days beyond church doors—and even within the doors of certain denominations the word lies in the back of the attic, dusty and cobwebbed. The religious connotations of sin now preclude its usage in the public square. The more traditional churches still acknowledge sin: here in the South, Sunday morning radio ministers preach against vice, and in my Catholic parish we recite the Confiteor at each Mass—“I have gravely sinned.” (Regarding that general confession, I doubt whether my fellow pew-warmers comprehend the nature of sin, as the lines for confession are quite small and the number of those abstaining from communion miniscule, leading an impartial observer to conclude that my church abounds with saints).
This mothballing of sin yields unfortunate consequences. Its absence from our vocabulary leaves us floundering in a morass of self-created moralities. We turn for our judgments from a higher power and higher laws to powers and laws of right and wrong we ourselves construct, both as individuals and as a society. An example: regarded for two thousand years in the West as a moral evil, abortion is now a “woman’s choice.” Let us ignore the ethical issues here and simply focus on the language. That word “choice” is key to understanding our present condition. Choice by definition implies freedom, and we have become the great supermarket society of self-determination, choosing our personal moralities the same way we pick our groceries from the shelves. “To Each His Own” rather than “In God We Trust” might more aptly serve as our motto on the dollar bill.
Now, suppose we take the ancient and venerable list of the seven deadly sins—pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth—and use them as a measuring tape for what we as individuals have become. Here, by the way, I will define sin as a “twisted good.” To the woman who drinks two glasses of cabernet in the evening, that wine is a positive good, relaxing and perhaps even healthy. To the woman who drinks two bottles of the same wine every evening, the good has become twisted from its intended purpose into a sin, an abuse of the good. (Those wishing to delve into this idea might turn to the books of C.S. Lewis, beginning with Till We Have Faces and The Great Divorce.)
So let’s take out our measuring tape and have a look at the connection between the seven deadly sins and ourselves.
Pride, or hubris, is first on the list, and often apprehended as the worst of these sins. Pride, a warped form of self-confidence, leads to narcissism and dangerous feelings of superiority. From the “I Am Special” programs of elementary school to the smug confidence of university students in their moral rectitude, from our self-absorbed politicians and elites who believe themselves possessed of the wisdom to rule the lives of millions to the antics of our athletes on the playing fields, we see this egotism at play. Surely we all know someone who is openly arrogant or conceited, but if we look in the mirror we may detect a more subtle hubris in our own hearts, that easy self-satisfaction which allows us to condemn without trial our neighbors and acquaintances, to regard with contempt family members who haven’t “measured up” or who hold opinions contrary to our own. When we judge others by the color of their skin or the amount of money they earn, when we demean a spouse, when we gleefully engage in gossip, we have become the slaves of pride.
Pride also prompts us to misjudge our own capabilities. Some years ago, for instance, American students taking an international math examination rated themselves as highly proficient. In this evaluation they received the top scores of any group taking the test. On the math test itself, however, students from several other countries outshone the Americans. False pride deceived them into making too much of their abilities.
How does America stack up in terms of greed? In volunteerism and charity, we are still a generous country, yet if we look to our leaders we find rampant avarice and hypocrisy. The Clintons, for example, have earned billions in speaking fees, false charities, and various swindles, yet members of the press listen straight-faced as this couple speaks of their identity with the poor and their desire to help the downtrodden.
Greed, the enflamed desire to seek more than is necessary for our needs and wants, exists throughout the body politic as well. We judge success by the cars and toys owned by our neighbors; citizens cheat their way into government disability programs, lying about their physical or mental health; the size of families has shrunk dramatically while the homes in which those families live are often palatial compared to the homes of their grandparents. Our national debt and the annual expenditures of our federal government bring howls of outrage, yet private debt in America runs into the trillions of dollars. Some of that debt is legitimate—a mortgage, for example—yet much of it stems from greed, our desire to own more or to do more than allowed by our bank accounts.
Lust? We make mock of Bill Clinton for his sexual philandering and of Donald Trump for his marriages, but some of us have failed abysmally in this department as well. Every statistic compiled over the last sixty years points to a decline in the traditional family, a rise in sexual promiscuity (how old-fashioned that term now sounds), and cultural and biological experiments regarding sexuality and gender whose consequences are still unfolding. The internet has given birth to hook-up websites, including sites for would-be adulterers. In 2013, internet pornography got more traffic than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined, and 64% of American men claim to watch pornography at least once a month.
Wrath, meaning rage and hatred, may be for many of us the least of our sins, yet if we visit sites on the internet or follow the headlines, we see wrath at work in our public arena. When Black Lives Matter, a group purportedly founded to combat police injustice and the shooting of blacks, incites violence against these same police, then we see, as Dante wrote, “a love of justice perverted to revenge and spite.” This rage enters the private domain in the form of abuse of others: the man screaming into his phone as he walked in Downtown Asheville; the husband who routinely berates his wife for inconsequential wrongs; the woman I saw last winter whose cold, bitter anger reduced a salesclerk to tears.
Though gluttony can mean the overconsumption of anything, and is thereby linked to greed, here we will consider gluttony with only food in mind. Despite certain reports, the United States is not “the fattest country in the world.” According to a World Health Organization report, we are 27th, with 66% of us either obese or overweight. By any measure, we are nonetheless a nation of gluttons, with many of us as supersized as a Big Gulp. Fast food restaurants take a lot of the heat for our weight problems, but this is akin to blaming tobacco for disease and death. It is the smoker who invites emphysema just as it is the eater who invites extra pounds.
Just as telling is our obsession with exotic foods, diet, restaurants, and cooking. If we accept the argument of Thomas Aquinas that obsessive concern with delicacies and meals is a form of gluttony, then a good number of us, even the thin, qualify as gluttons. Whole Foods, the existence of the Food Channel, the posting of photographs on Facebook of restaurant dishes, the plethora of diet books: all spotlight our gluttony.
Envy, as Joseph Epstein tells us in his little book on the subject, provides less entertainment than the other deadly sins. Pride, lust, gluttony, and the rest contain some byproduct of pleasure, however abominable, but not envy. Jealousy and spite eat us up from the inside. We envy the rich; we envy a happy neighbor; we envy a couple whose marriage works—or seems to work—better than ours. Schadenfreude—here again I go to Epstein—is the opposite side of the coin: “to delight in another’s failure or defeat.” This emotion often follows in the footsteps of envy. We exult in the fall of a friend into debt; we speak with contempt of an aunt who slips on her path away from drink.
Finally, there is sloth, or acedia. Sloth may bring forth an image of a couch potato, a pudgy man in a sleeveless t-shirt packing away potato chips and watching television, yet the scope of sloth runs broader than that stereotype. Sloth also includes mental or spiritual inactivity or indifference: the citizen who cannot be bothered to vote; the man who insufficiently loves his wife; the able-bodied twenty-five year old who collects welfare benefits; the employee in the cubicle who spends several hours of his work day chatting online or watching pornography. Americans love to bitch and moan about their politicians and disagreeable laws, but we’re too lazy to pick up the phone or write an email protesting these policies.
A national character does not exist independently of the character of its citizens. Voters this year are dismayed that Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump are candidates for the presidency, but the clown and the crook did not pop up from nowhere. We put them where they are. Many of us, perhaps most of us, who voted in the primaries cast our ballots at least in part with one of the deadly sins directing our choices: greed for more public money, wrath with our current policies, class envy, and so on. Those who didn’t cast a ballot were, for the most part, guilty of sloth or pride.
To repeat the opening quotation from The Patriot: Our sins have returned to visit us, and I think we will find the cost of them truly more than we can bear.
A story is told of President Calvin Coolidge who, on leaving church one Sunday, was asked by a reporter what the minister had preached on. “Sin,” Coolidge replied. “But what did he say?” the reporter asked. “He was against it,” the tight-lipped Coolidge replied.
Until we turn against sin in our own lives, until we cast a gimlet eye on our own vices and licentiousness, until we once again venerate the old virtues like honor, respect for others, humility, and kindness, we should expect to find Trumps and Clintons, brigands and scoundrels, sitting in the White House and walking the halls of Congress.
Take a look in that mirror. I did. It wasn’t a pretty sight.