Dear Humbuck: preaching against sin

 Dear Humbuck,

Among some branches of the religious humans, it is claimed that one of the great cures for their various social ills is “Preaching against sin!” For my own part, such rhetoric doesn’t concern me, and I will try to explain why from at least a few different levels or angles.

When one of these people cry out that we must “Preach against sin!” or when they claim to have found a minister who “Calls sin sin!”, then you need to listen to what they are really saying. What they are really saying is “We must preach against their sins!” Who “they” are is rather open; socialist, progressives, red-pilled white men, woke protesters, warmongers, sexual deviants, repressed puritans, selfish capitalists, selfish communists. Pick any or pick all, depending on the people and the circumstances and whatall. 

The point is that “they” are no “we”.

It is important to make “they” the problem. “They” are the reason our society is falling into collapse, “they” are the reason there are riots in the streets and protesters in government buildings, “they” are why our schools can’t teach our children anything worth learning, “they” are why gas prices are so high and why their neighbor plays his stereo system so loud and why rent or house payments are so high. “They”, whoever “they” happen to be, are the great evil in the world, and “they” must be stopped! “They” and their sins must be preached against!

And, of course, if we are preaching against “they” and their sins, then that must mean “we” are better than “they”. “They” are the people on whom the tower fell, or to use more contemporary language, they are the ones dying of AIDS and other sexual diseases, they are the ones huddled in their walled-in burroughs of look-alike people with think-alike minds, they are the people getting high on expensive drugs and they are the people getting drunk on cheap beer, they are the people laying around their houses waiting on government support checks and they are the people working gazillions of hours a day at jobs they completely despise so they can buy a pickup truck that will break down within six months, they are the people having sex and aborting babies and they are the people having babies simply to feed them into their country’s war machine, they are the people rioting in the streets and the people watching hyperventilating videos on the internet in the darkness of their homes in the dead of night.

“They” are the problem. “They” are making everyone else miserable. “They” are the sinners who need to be preached against.

Here is a recent example you should note. Not so long ago, a couple of preachers were talking on the internet, and one topic they spoke about was “Would a black man be welcomed in our church”. These preachers were both white men, and they have their church in a place that is filled mostly with white people. They did say that “Of course” a black person would be welcomed in their church, but they did not stop there. They went on to say that any black man who wanted to be a part of their church would need to repudiate “black culture” because that culture is in their minds very evil.

Needless to say, such words created no small amount of controversy, at least for a time.

I suppose one can easily see the “us vs them” mindset; a couple of white preachers telling black people they must leave behind “black culture” if they want to play the church game by their rules. “Black culture” is the evil “they” that must be repented of, turned away from, left behind.

I hope you can also see the pride in this; we white preachers, or even we white people, have created a culture far superior to “black culture”, and if we may put it rather bluntly, the only black man who is acceptable in our religious clique could more accurately be described as a white man who happens to have black skin. And there is fear: “black culture” is so bad that no one in that culture can be accepted into our church.

And so, to return to what I wrote before, we have pride and fear. Pride, because we are not like “they”; fear, because we cannot allow one of “they” into our little church club.

And now we come to one of our more clever ploys. This kind of one-sided accusing is rather heavy-handed, and if left at that some more sensitive souls might think “Is it really that simple? Can all the blame really be shoveled onto one side only?” So, we have discovered that, yes, there is one sin that “we” can name among ourselves. Keeping in mind that various words can be used for it, I will here call it “apathy”. 

But even this fits with the “we against they” mindset. If you are here now, if you are in this church service or attending this conference or listening to this radio show or podcast or watching this news program, then you are not a part of the problem. You are not the one who has “apathy”, you are a part of the solution, you want to do something, to fix things, to make things rights! No, the “they” who suffer from “apathy” are people who are somewhat like you and me, but they are not committed or dedicated, they don’t share our vision, they are too busy doing unimportant things while we, we are the movers and the shakers, we are the ones who will make things happen, we will change the world!

So, this is why a vast majority of “preaching against sin” does not overly concern me. All it does it feed the pride and fear of the accepted and acceptable “we”.

Yet the instinct we have to be concerned about “preaching against sin” is also valid, and I will try to explain when we should be concerned, and also the ways we have found to deal with it when it happens.

Let me return to the two pastors offering their opinions against “black culture”. The truth or falsehood of what they said (and since they said so very much, we may say that there is a mix of both truth and lies in what they said) is unimportant to this topic, the important thing for us is that they sought to make “black culture” into a “they” so saturated with sin and evil that no acceptable Christian can remain in “black culture”.

Now, let us pretend that someone came to them as they were speaking and said, “What about white culture?” I can easily imagine them looking very puzzled and answering with completely honest, “What about it?” To their minds, “white culture” is not the problem. The most you will get from them would be an answer that would go rather like this; “Yes, white people aren’t perfect and maybe we’ve done some bad things in the past, but…”

We must maintain this imbalance, this injustice. We must make sure the scales are never level. We must always insure they have a “but” in the middle of such a sentence.

The time when we must be most concerned is when someone says something like this, “Perhaps you are right to call out the sins of other people’s culture, but you are wrong to ignore the sins of your own culture. Your own European and white culture has a long history of violence; you have coveted your neighbor’s lands and gold and natural resources, and you have dealt treacherously with them to take those things from them; you have treated your non-white neighbors scornfully, you have gained treasures through wicked means; you used the name of Christ to justify treating black people as things meant merely to work to make your rich; you have even used the gospel as justification for your violence and grasping; you condemned the Aztecs for their human sacrifices to their gods even as you sacrificed their lives to the god you were most devoted to, the god of gold; you became so proud of the accident of your white skins that you created eugenics to rid your country of anyone you judged to be inferior; you Christian Nationalists dare to lament the Civil Rights Acts even though your people had 100 years where you failed to treat your black neighbor with justice, compassion, dignity, honor, or even the lowest form of respect. You tell the black man to leave his culture, but it is you who should also repent of your culture and its many and terrible sins! You strode across the earth and left it staggering in blood and misery, you gained the wealth of far-away lands while the people born in those lands were left in poverty and starvation! You, oh white preacher, should consider that unless you repent of you and your people’s sins, you will also perish!”

If someone were to come with a message such as that, then we should be very alert. But we should not panic, for we already have things in place to deal with such a man.

If nothing else, we can simply kill him.

And yes, I do mean physical death. Like any of us, I would greatly love to see a good heretic burning, and whether it happens in Times Square, Trafalgar Square, Red Square, or in the parking lot of these pastors’ church in Utah, it would be very satisfying.

But almost as effective would be to dismiss such words: “All of that happened long ago, we had nothing to do with any of it, stop trying to make us feel guilty over things we had nothing to do.” “We have much more important problems to contend with today, so dredging up sins of the past simply isn’t helpful.” “You’re just wanting reparations, aren’t you? You’ve never been a slave, and I’ve never owned a slave, so what you want is unfair to me!” “Things weren’t as bad back then as you make them out to be. Slavery in the United States was a good thing, black people had it better here than they had would have had it anywhere else including Africa. The Indians were violent and worshiped demons so we had the right to take their land from them. The Chinese didn’t try to assimilate to our culture, so we had to kick them out. The best day in the history of any black and brown nation was the day ships filled with white people showed up on their shores, because those black and brown people were doing nothing but living in grass huts and then white people showed up and made their lives a lot better, and most of all they came with the gospel, and that was something of infinity good no matter what other bad things may have happened! And, anyway, we all know the Holocaust wasn’t really as bad as everyone says it was, so can I interest you in this book, a collection of Hitler’s speeches, that we had for sale at our recent conference?”

So, again, don’t underestimate the effectiveness of pride and fear. Such men as these preachers are arrogant of a virtue they played no part in gaining, and they are terrified to see themselves and their forefathers as they really are. They are great fun for us, and go far in giving the one we left a bad name among our more unstable followers.