Sin – Zelophehad's Daughters

Harm by Individuals, Harm by Systems

Ziff28 July 20238 Comments

What makes a particular action a sin? A simple definition might be that it violates one of the two great commandments to love God and love our neighbor. Violations of the first great commandment are harder to see (if my heart is full of hatred for God, how could you tell?), but violations of the second are typically easier. If I do something to harm another person, it’s interpersonal. It’s out there in the world.

Of course this doesn’t capture everything that gets labeled a sin. Why is it a sin for me to drink coffee? I’m not harming someone else. You might say that this must mean that it’s harming my relationship with God because he said not to. This interpretation makes the first great commandment a catchall for any sin where there isn’t harm to another person. They’re wrong because God said so, not because they actually cause harm (making them kind of like the legal idea of malum prohibitum, where an act is wrong because it’s prohibited, not because it’s immoral). Or you could also argue that things like drinking coffee are wrong because they’re doing harm to me, and the second great commandment says I need to love myself too. But I think this boils down to the same line of reasoning. We would call an action self-harming if it’s labeled a sin and it doesn’t clearly harm another person. The old euphemism of calling masturbation “self-abuse” used in some Church talks and publications springs to mind as an example.

In any case, in this post, I’m mostly just thinking about sins that violate the second great commandment, where one person causes harm to another. Our discussion of these sins in the Church typically focuses on the person committing the sin rather than the person harmed by it. I think it makes sense, because harming another person is an action that we can choose to do or not, so we’re at fault if we do it, while being the victim of someone else’s actions isn’t blameworthy. (Of course in some Church rhetoric, the question of who gets harmed gets turned backward, like for example in discussions of rhetoric, where male viewers feel like female clothing choosers are attacking them, rather than the way Jesus had it, where the blame falls on lustful viewers.)

But here’s the question: what if there are sins that have victim without any corresponding person doing the harming? For example, what if someone with diabetes dies because they can no longer afford insulin after the companies that produce it have suddenly and dramatically increased the price? There’s clear harm. But who’s to blame? A company’s salesperson who communicated the new price to the person? A company’s executives? Its shareholders? The head of the government agency that regulates drugs? Middle managers in the agency? The politician who appointed the head of the agency? The voters who elected the politician?

Or consider a less dramatic example. What if your ISP bill gets messed up and you’re double charged? What if you have to chat with an infuriating chatbot for 30 minutes before it agrees to pass you along to a human, and then you’re passed around a labyrinthine organization of call centers before you can get to someone who can fix it? It’s far less dramatic harm, but it’s still harm. Who sinned, that your interaction with the ISP is so painful, the front-line workers or the executives or the shareholders or the regulators or the voters?

In Sin, Statistics

Name Withheld

Ziff21 March 20226 Comments

A few years ago while reading the Ensign, I got to wondering about the reasons an article writer’s name is withheld. For an individual article, it’s typically pretty easy to guess, but I was wondering about larger trends. Even just cataloging the list of reasons seemed possibly interesting, because it’s a list of things that are considered shameful, but not too shameful. For example, a relatively large number of name withheld articles talk about divorce, but none that I’ve ever read talk about, say, bestiality. The articles provide a kind of list of troubling issues that are on writers’ (and editors’ and perhaps GAs’) minds. Also, while I was at it, I thought it would be fun to look at any trends across time and gender differences and a couple of other things.

I initially planned to look at all magazines on the Church website since 1971, but looking at the Ensign alone turned out to be fairly time-consuming, so I didn’t go any further. Maybe I’ll go back and look at the others another time. I found 172 articles and letters to the editor, using the search “‘name withheld’ site:churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign”. (To be precise, a few weren’t labeled exactly “name withheld.” I manually checked all the letters to the editor from the 1970s, after I found their authorship was occasionally noted as “A regular reader” or something similar.)

For each of the 172 documents, I noted the following:

Publication year
Gender of the writer (I was able to figure this out for 121 of the 172, or 70%)
Is the name withheld because of something about the writer or something about another person?
Is the person the actor (e.g., used porn) or the victim (e.g., was abused) in the situation?
One or more reasons for the name to be withheld. (The max for any one document was four. Most documents had one. Three documents had zero, as I couldn’t figure out any reason at all.) I grouped these into 17 different categories, which I’ll list below with results.
The story end type. I classified these into three different categories: perfect (where people end up married in the temple or going on missions), good (where things end up better than they started), and learned (where things don’t get better, but the writer learns to better accept them). I also assigned some documents a not applicable here when there was no story arc. This was the case for a fair number of the letters to the editor, where writers with name withheld often say no more than “I suffer from the same problem as the person in such-and-such an article.”
How much the need to forgive the wrongdoer is discussed. I rated this as high, low (little discussion, or just reference to need to overcome bitterness and anger), or none.

I also tried noting down some other things, like the approximate age of the writer (typically difficult to figure out) or the location (rarely mentioned), but I wasn’t able to get enough useful data for them.

This graph shows the total number of documents in five-year periods across the history of the Ensign. Note that there’s no adjustment for possible differences in length of the magazine at different points in time.

Even with my extra combing through the 1970s issues, the prevalence of “name withheld” documents really didn’t take off until the latter half of the 1980s. It’s also interesting that it has dropped so dramatically in the latter part of the 2010s. I wonder if this is a change Russell M. Nelson has made, because even the 13 in the 2016-2020 period can be broken down into six in 2016 and seven total in the four following years.

In Christ, Depression, Grace, Guilt, Mental Health, Sin

“The Hardest Thing There Is”: Turning to Christ in the Midst of Sin

Lynnette15 April 201720 April 20175 Comments

In his writings, the great reformer Martin Luther, who turned the theological world of the sixteenth century upside down, returned again and again to a very basic problem: how do you believe in the atonement, or grace, or the saving work of Christ, on a personal level? How do you really take in that those things apply to not just humanity in general, and more to the point, not to some category of “good people,” but to a sinner like yourself? “I have often experienced,” he wrote, “and still do every day, how difficult it is to believe, especially amid struggles of conscience, that Christ was given, not for the holy, righteous, and deserving, or for those who were His friends, but for the godless, sinful, and undeserving, for those who were His enemies, who deserved the wrath of God and eternal death.”¹ Luther noted that when he found himself consumed by the forces of sin, it was nearly impossible to turn to Christ for rescue and forgiveness. He attributed this at least partly to the work of the devil, whose voice constantly whispered in his ear, reminded him of his unworthiness, and informed him that Christ would surely damn him. He described his experience of being frightened of Christ: “even at the mention of the name of Christ,” he recounted, “I would be terrified and grow pale, because I was persuaded that He was a judge.”² Luther also observed the inexorable and unforgiving logic of the conscience: “You have sinned; therefore God is angry with you. If He is angry, He will kill you and damn you eternally.” He went on to even suggest that as a result, “many who cannot endure the wrath and judgment of God commit suicide by hanging or drowning.”³

The only way to quiet these condemning voices is, of course, to throw yourself utterly on the mercy of the Savior. But Luther was well aware that this is much easier said than done. To turn to Christ, to look for grace, while being assailed by the forces of judgment and condemnation, he observed, was enormously challenging: “to do this in the midst of struggle is the hardest thing there is. I am speaking from experience, for I am acquainted with the devil’s craftiness . . .”⁴

Luther’s Works Volume 26: Lectures on Galatians, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1963), 36. [↩]
Ibid., 178. [↩]
Ibid., 150. [↩]
Ibid., 38. [↩]

In Atonement, Christ, Good Friday, Sin, Theology

Death on a Friday Afternoon

Lynnette14 April 201714 April 20172 Comments

Selections from Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross (Basic Books, 2000).

“Christians call them the Triduum Sacrum, the three most sacred days of all time when time is truly told. The fist, Maundy Thursday, is so called because that night, the night before he was betrayed, Jesus gave the command, the mandatum, that we should love one another . . . The second day is the Friday we so oddly call ‘good.’ And the third day, the great Vigil of Resurrection Conquest. Do not rush to the conquest. Stay a while with this day. Let your heart be broken by the unspeakably bad of this Friday we call good . . . let your present moment stay with this day. Stay a while in the eclipse of the light, stay a while with the conquered One. There is time enough for Easter.” (1-2)

“Good Friday brings us to our senses. Our senses come to us as we sense that in this life and in this death is our life and our death. The truth about the crucified Lord is the truth about ourselves . . . The beginning of wisdom is to come to our senses and know that fearful truth about ourselves, that we have wandered and wasted our days in a distant country far from home.” (4) Read More

In Feminism, Gender Issues, Pride, Service, Sin, Theology

The Sins of Pride and Self-Negation (or, How I Learned to Lighten Up a Little About Service)

Lynnette9 April 20179 April 20176 Comments

In 1960, a thinker by the name of Valerie Saiving wrote an influential article which is often considered the beginning of modern feminist theology, critiquing traditional models of sin which were centered around pride. Since such perspectives considered pride or excessive self-assertion to be the most basic sin, they understood the process of overcoming sin as necessarily involving a move toward greater selflessness. Love was defined in such approaches as being “completely self-giving, taking no thought for its own interests but seeking only the good of the other.”¹ Saiving raised the objection that these models ignored some basic differences in the self-development of women and men, and arose from an essentially masculine perspective. The crucial point that these formulations overlooked, she argued, is that there is danger in the other direction as well, as it turns out that too much selflessness, far from producing someone in an idealized and virtuous state, leads to the development of a kind of “chameleon-like creature who responds to others but has no personal identity of his [or her] own.”² Saiving saw this as a temptation to which women are particularly vulnerable. Read More

Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” in Womanspirit Rising (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 26. [↩]
Ibid., 41. [↩]