The Madness of Sin

In all the commentary fallout of the assassination attempt in Tucson, I’ve had liberal relatives engage in the blame the right game, and I’ve had friends who have wailed about the left.

What is usually missing is the important truth about this act: it is sinful.  Much of the problem is that the media itself is much of the problem. The negative influence of the mass media has reduced the horrendousness of the concept of Sin.

In his article, “Civil Sin: Evil and Purgation in the Media”article by Quentin J. Schultze, says, “. . .the the eclipse of sin has not reduced the amount of evil portrayed and reported in the popular media. It appears that evil, as a more publicly acceptable concept than sin, is doing more business than ever. News reporting and dramatic narratives are saturated with evil people and evil actions. These stories exist in everything from the nightly news to soap operas, prime-time drama, and movies. However, nearly all of this evil is disconnected from religious faith and from any sense of transcendence. This secular concept reduces evil to morally wrong or bad actions causing harm or pain to other human beings, perhaps resulting in misfortune. In my judgment, if anthropologists unearthed, in the year 2020, the remains of current North American popular culture, they would find very little evidence for the culture's belief in sin, but they would simultaneously be overwhelmed at evidence for moralistic belief in evil.”

The greatest tragedy to be viewed in the news of Tucson assassinations is that most people don’t grasp the magnitude of sinfulness in evil as not “only a matter of human cause and effect,” but “a more egregious matter of willful disobedience of God.”  The media itself in all it’s many portrayals of sin begins to chip away at the first person effrontery of sin.  As voyeuristic consumers of mass market evil, sin becomes “someone else’s problem, confined largely to highly evil people, and best eliminated through ridding society of such people.”  This view of sin deceives people into “objectifying evil  in the ‘other’ rather than seeing it as part of the fallen self.”

Schultze concludes, “it is entirely appropriate to hold the media accountable for contributing to the cultural blinders that prohibit fallen human beings from recognizing their own fallenness. I would also hold theologians accountable for not helping all of us to see this more clearly and cogently. As Ellul wrote, "In order to participate truly in this preservation of the world, the Christian ought to place himself at the point of contact between two currents: the will of the Lord and the will of the world."