As human beings we tend to have a select pattern of behaviors that we tend to exhibit more or less consistently throughout life. Some people are very painfully open about the way that they live their lives, and other people are much more private and closed about their perceived flaws and shortcomings. There is a wide variety of complexity when it comes to openness versus secrecy. The reasons why people may be open or secretive often determine whether that openness or secrecy is a good or a bad thing more than the openness or secrecy themselves. Reasons and motives are hard to uncover for people, but are of great importance when determining the sort of people that we are dealing with.

Rather than discuss this problem only in airy generalities, let us get at least somewhat to brass tacks. Throughout the last few decades, there has been a drastic change in the public nature of different sins. Let us take a few sins and comment at how these sins are viewed in society. Let us note, at the outset, lest anyone be confused, that these are all viewed as sins according to scripture, but have been tolerated by certain large segments of population. In many cases, different sorts of sins have a similar sort of base that is often unrecognized, and that a victorious conquest against one sort of sin often leads to a failure in a different case of that same general family of sins. Again, let us discuss some similarities so that we understand what is meant.

In the 19th century, one of the great victories of humanitarian impulse in the Western world was the end of the slave trade and eventually the end of formal slavery in Western nations. Those nations which tolerate slavery in an informal fashion (like Mauritania) have suffered a great deal of condemnation for their sins. Slavery amounts to seeing a human being as the property of another human being, and having no rights of their own that anyone else is bound to accept. This is precisely the same sort of problem that lies at the root of the so-called “choice” of abortion. An unborn child is a human being at his most vulnerable, with his own genetic code, his own heartbeat, even aspects of personality, but being housed in the womb of his (or her) own mother. The same sort of humanitarian impulses that made slavery so abhorrent also make abortion a horror. The same arguments about the legitimacy of cold-blooded murder of one’s offspring (irrespective of the means by which that child came to be) were the same arguments that sought to legitimize slavery. Even the aspect of using selective slave trading [1] in areas of limited resources to provide better care for remaining slaves, or the paternalism of the slave system in general, are the same precise sorts of arguments that are used to justify infanticide [2]. The same sort of guilt remains, leading those who believe in the legitimacy of such wrongs to attack those who point out their moral inconsistencies and errors because to admit wrong would be to give up a claimed moral high ground that is not tolerable.

Nor are these the only sins that carry with them a common root but very different manifestations that depend largely on which sins are tolerated and which sins are not at a given time. In our age, for example, it is increasingly difficult for any sort of lack of sexual restraint to be justified. Whether we are speaking of unbridled lust that is not acted on, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, or pedophelia, the same arguments that justify any one of them allow for alliances between all of those who share the same basic underlying lack of self-restraint, and the same unwillingness to accept that their thoughts or behaviors are blameworthy. Yet while certain sins are increasingly tolerated, with any hostility towards any of those sins stigmatized, other sins that come from the same roots are increasingly stigmatized, such as sins coming from the lack of restraint of the tongue, be it in ill-judged racist or sexist comments. While one sort of lack of restraint is increasingly praised, other sorts of lack of restraint are increasingly condemned.

In a very fundamental sense, we ought to recognize that all sinners are equal, equally under the judgment of God unless they repent and change their ways. We ought not to consider ourselves special or privileged because we have a sin that we consider less evil than others. We are equally in the place as supplicants of God’s grace. Part of the problem of our time is a lack of recognition of the extent to which we need grace, and how we fall short of the standard of righteousness, even as we very selectively judge certain sins while openly accepting others. We have always been this way, only changing which sins we tolerate and which we condemn while never holding ourselves or others to a consistent and fair standard. Ultimately, whether we hide or publish our sins and struggles, we still have to wrestle with the understanding that however much we might try to justify our ways to others, that ultimately, our judge is not of this earth, nor is He susceptible to our own biases. He is merciful, though, to all who wish to repent and walk according to His ways, to be made whole in our own image instead of trying to remake Him into ours.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/slaveowner-guilt-and-the-internal-slave-trade/

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/08/18/youre-no-son-of-mine/