First Things: Sin & Cinema

By Tim Perry
Wednesday, September 24, 2008

People are basically good, right? It’s a truism drilled into us by any number of self-help books, magazines, talk-show hosts, and pop therapy. When, from time to time, people do terrible things to each other or themselves, we are assured that just the right combination of education, medication, and therapy could correct the ignorance, illness, or faulty social conditioning that led to the act. But do we really believe that to be true? Or do we recognize there is something more sinister at work in human nature?

By profession, I’m a Christian theologian and I often have conversations in which these questions arise. They are made more difficult by the loss of vocabulary that has traditionally addressed the problem. In the past, Christians across confessions could use words like sin, evil, and even demonic, taking for granted a broad cultural context that would make those words understandable to all involved. Not so today—even in socially and theologically conservative Christian churches, the language of therapy has replaced the language of sin. Since Karl Meninger’s 1973 exposé, Whatever Became of Sin?, the problem has only intensified. the rest image