The Countercultural Language of Original Sin

By David French
April 24, 2012

Sorry for the excessive religion-blogging, but I can’t resist highlighting the ten-part (yes, ten-part) Slate exchange between Ross Douthat and William Saletan over Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion. I’d urge you to read the whole thing (it’s not as daunting as ten parts would imply), but one aspect of the dialogue stood out. While discussing homosexuality, Douthat brings up the little-discussed but often-dispositive reason why secular Left and Christian Right frequently see the world through fundamentally different lenses:

Homosexuality may be innate, but recall that one of the core doctrines of Christianity is that sin itself is innate—that our innermost being is in some sense broken and fallen and turned from God’s desires for us. What a traditional Christian morality asks of gay people seems impossibly difficult, but the Jesus of the New Testament asks the near impossible of people quite frequently.

Douthat is referring, of course, to the effects of original sin — to what a Calvinist like me thinks of as our total depravity. So when Lady Gaga celebrates being “born this way" (not to equate Saletan and Gaga, of course) the orthodox Christian responds, “Yes, and that’s the problem.” Putting aside homosexuality for the moment, a foundational principle of orthodox Christianity is the concept that we are shot through with sin and that even the best of us is in desperate need of forgiveness and redemption. We’re so far from the holiness of God that the very phrase “the best of us” is a sad joke. As my former pastor once said, a prerequisite to understanding the good news of the Gospel is knowing the bad news — that we are evil. the rest