Thursday, July 08, 2021

Tertiary Sins

I don't know about your church, but I can't see how racism is a top-tier sin in mine, neither the congregation, nor the denomination.  Nonetheless we got all worked up over it last year, and this persists. Denominational headquarters follows the cause-of-the-month, as in getting all worked up over the great danger that Asian-Americans are supposedly in from mouth-breathing racists, because of an incident of a guy with sexual problems shooting up a massage parlor. That will calm down, to be replaced with something or other.  Racism (cue the word "journey") and the environment will continue in the newsletters, I imagine, with a different spin each time.

It seems straight out of Screwtape to get people worrying about secondary and tertiary sins, so that they never notice the simple ones.

2 comments:

james said...

"We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.

Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding”. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey."

Brad said...

Truth