It's A Sin

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

I was brought up on sin. That’s a sin, adults, usually my mother, would say. If I left food on a plate or used too much paper or threw something out that still had wear in it. There are children starving in [insert name of faraway country]. Do you realise how many trees you’re wasting? Do you think we’re made of money?

In my house, it was a sin to wear jeans, so I didn’t have any until I earned my own money and I’d turn up at non-uniform day in ski pants and tell my classmates that my 501s were in the wash. It was a sin to use a razor, so my knee socks went up to my knees when everyone else’s were at their ankles. It was a sin to go to a disco unless it was in the school hall. It was a sin to have a boyfriend until I was sixteen but that was unlikely considering my lack of access to fashion and a Bic. It was a sin to take the Lord’s name in vain. It was a sin to get my ears pierced. It was a sin to miss anything unless I was dying. It was a sin to eat garlic. It was a sin to tell lies. It was a sin to tell the truth if it didn’t match what everyone else was thinking. It was a sin to ring doorbells and ask the neighbours if they had any old makeup because that was begging and I knew the shame of being a beggar when I had to go back round their doors and apologise. It was a sin to be a borrower or a lender. It was a sin to not be grateful for things I didn’t want. It was a sin to cause accidental damage like the typewriter I broke when I was trying to change the ribbon. It was a sin to talk back. And then there were the sins I was most afraid of. Getting above my station. Getting a reputation. Getting pregnant.

Physically, I was well looked after. I ate lots of sausage, egg and chips. My school blouses, all five of them were starched on a Sunday evening. I was allowed to watch Grange Hill. I had a portable tv in my bedroom. I had books. I had a hobby every night of the week. But I had what I now describe as a religiose upbringing. Sort of religious in that God was always watching. Sort of biblical in that proverbs were often quoted. But sort of not in that it wasn’t mandated that I should read any Bible. We didn’t do grace and prayers at bedtime. We didn’t do forgiveness. We did the rules. And I was terrified of breaking them. And just in case I might, I was sent to church and to every activity it offered to learn a whole other set of rights and wrongs. It was quite simple. No smoking. No tattoos. No alcohol. No gambling. No swearing. No sex before marriage. No yoga. No star signs. No heavy metal. No Jesus Christ Superstar.

In her book, The Exvangelicals, Sarah McCammon tells the stories of a generation (now in their thirties and forties) who grew up in strict evangelical¹ homes where sin and its avoidance informed their behaviour from an early age. Where rules included their modesty, their purity, their sexuality, their finances, their politics. The threat of hell hung over them. Girls were more likely to sin than boys. “Everything was either black or white. Sacred or secular, righteous or unrighteous. We were all either saved or lost,” says Stephanie. Sarah regularly recited the ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ as a catch-all in case she might commit the unforgivable sin, a mysterious idea mentioned in passing in the New Testament. Bethany describes coming home one day and discovering her mum’s comfy white sneaker-looking shoes that she wore as a nurse with her socks still inside them. It was unusually quiet, like she’d been sitting there and just, poof, vanished. She ran around searching for her until she emerged from where she’d been hiding somewhere in the basement. It was an elaborate effort to make sure Bethany was ready for ‘The Rapture’. Her parents were so afraid of falling out with God that they asked Him to forgive any sins they might not be aware they’d committed in case they missed the Second Coming.

Many of those interviewed have now left evangelicalism. When they went to college or into the workplace, they discovered they had a belief system which clashed with any understanding of the outside world. It was rigid and conservative, but also racist and misogynistic and deeply unloving. These exvangelicals mainly use the language of grief when describing the loss of a community and an identity, sometimes even their families. They live with a lingering anxiety about who they are. They can’t measure if they are doing well or not because everything was once viewed through a specific moral framework. “We are the church kids all grown up,” says Stephanie. “Where do we go from here?”

And me. Well, there was a lot I didn’t understand when I was sent to church age four, twelve, sixteen (boyfriend time), forty-seven-and-a-half. But I was completely aware of the end of the world, which was likely to be my fault, and I’d had nightmares about throwing my Baby Alive off the side of a boat when it happened. And I absolutely knew I was a sinner. Eve had given into temptation and eaten an apple she shouldn’t have, and God was furious and threw her and Adam out of the garden, and now here we all were paying for their disobedience. Somewhere along the line I might have heard of the concept of original sin, maybe when Annie Lennox sang about the missionary man, but I never looked it up, so it was a surprise to find it wasn’t specifically mentioned in the creation to fall section and not until the fourth chapter of Genesis when God warns Cain that sin is crouching at the door. It seems St. Augustine of Hippo floated that we were born bad in the fifth century. It was picked up by Western Christianity, and the Protestant Reformers popularised it. We inherited the guilt of our ancestors and lost all sense that we are inherently good but often fail. To err is human and all that. Since childhood, I’ve been on a journey to good. I’ve looked for evidence that I’m worthy. I’ve felt ashamed. I’ve been reticent to trust my own instincts. I’ve always been conscious that there was another me inside me that was trying to get out.

“Cause it’s some kind of sin. To live your whole life. On a might-have-been,” said The Killers.

There is the sin of living life as a might-have-been which is pretty frightening and then there is the sin of collective looking away. A major issue of modern Christianity, says Richard Rohr is that we’ve prioritised individual sin over the much larger systemic reality of evil. By focusing on our naughty behaviour, our minor transgressions, we ignore the bigger picture and allow abuses of power, societal injustices and economic exploitation to flourish. We normalise harm to protect institutions and our own positions. The same people who get hot under the collar about changes to a religious education curriculum have little interest in violence against women and girls. We have rules about what matters most.

They told us to follow the rules so we wouldn’t get hurt, says Sarah McCammon to her husband. We’re not hurting because we broke the rules, he says. We’re hurting because we followed the rules.

Couldn’t not include this song…

P.S. A copy of a recent piece I did on ‘Are Women Leaving The Church?’ is available here:

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1. “The religious historian George Marsden once quipped that in the 1950s and 1960s an evangelical Christian was “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” But when Billy Graham was asked to define the term in the late 1980s, he replied, “Actually, that’s a question I’d like to ask somebody too.” As it turned out, even America’s most famous evangelical preacher couldn’t describe what the term meant”.

“The disparate nature of evangelicalism makes its members difficult to define. They don’t have a single authority like the Roman Catholic pope or Mormon First Presidency, so you can’t just phone a central office and ask for the official definition. Because they span a range of denominations, churches, and organizations, there is no single membership statement to delineate identity. As a result, individual observers are left to decide how to define what makes someone or something evangelical. To the pollster, it is a sociological term. To the pastor, it is a denominational or doctrinal term. And to the politician, it is a synonym for a white Christian Republican”. (From The Atlantic).