243 - Preaching About Sin in Contemporary Protestantism

Preaching About Sin in Contemporary Protestantism
By Marsha G. Witten

"[W]hile some traditional images of sin are retained in [sermons], the language frequently cushions the listener from their impact, employing a variety of softening rhetorical devices.... Yet, in many of the sermons, judgment against sin is in fact rendered. But it is not aimed at the listeners; indeed, its precise formulations and the nature of its targets may give us pause. This may suggest that, while care is taken not to appear unattractive to actual or potential members of the congregation (seeing them as 'consumers' to be courted), politeness does not necessarily extend into tolerance for those outside the reach of the church."

How is the idea of sin faring in Protestant preaching in the United States today? We might not be surprised to discover that preaching about sin seems troublesome for many contemporary pastors. Of all the theological topics inviting discussion from the pulpit, there is probably none more potentially distasteful to modern sensibilities than traditional notions of sin and the eternal consequences for those not "saved." In contrast to traditional teachings about sin, modern secular ideologies teach people that they can control their own destinies, determine their own characters, and reliably make choices on instinct. How, then, do today's Protestant pastors "sell" the idea of sin in a secular age?

To understand the effects of modern culture on Protestantism-and to investigate how contemporary American churches respond to the influence of secularity-I recently undertook an analysis of the language of sermons preached in American pulpits. The sermons were solicited from a representative sample of pastors of large churches within two denominations: the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Southern Baptist Convention. Forty-seven sermons were used in the analysis, all preached between 1986-1988 and all based on the same biblical text, the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). Using methods of structured discourse analysis, I examined every phrase of each sermon in detail.

Marsha G. Witten is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Franklin and Marshall College. This essay is an abridged excerpt from her forthcoming book All is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism, copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press. It is used by permission of Princeton University Press.

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I investigated the ways in which today's pulpit speech reacts to the norms of contemporary secular culture. Talk about sin is one of the areas in which preachers richly employ what can be called "adaptive strategies" to secular norms. Some of these strategies involve preachers buffering their listeners from direct identification as sinners, while still retaining traditional notions of sin in more abstract contexts or in reference to other people, or transmuting the language of sin into "therapeutic tolerance."

I

The strongest, most direct speech about sin occurs in sermons by Southern Baptist pastors, as they describe the moral character of the prodigal son himself. The son is frequently pictured in the throes of adolescent revolt against the will of his father. Demanding his inheritance before it is due, leaving home to seek his own life, and living riotously in the "far country" are taken as clear examples of sin in its biblical sense of rebellion. One preacher describes the son as follows:

He rebelled against the father and the home. He was saying by what he was doing that home wasn't good enough for him; he was saying by his actions that they [his family] weren't considerate enough of him; he was saying by what choices he made that "I can make it better on my own than I can make it here."[SB]¹

For some pastors, the sin of the prodigal son is the ultimate transgression. They interpret the son's untimely demand for his inheritance as a symbolic act of parricide:

[The prodigal son] goes to his father and he's not only making a request for money, he's really saying, "Dad, I wish you were dead, right now, and I had the money, and I could go on with my life."[SB]

As if rebellion and symbolic parricide were not enough to heap judgment upon the son's head, many of the Southern Baptist speakers elaborate the significance of the younger brother's sin: It is the lever that pries open the lid on the Pandora's box of further sinful behavior. Rebellion against the father is only the beginning of the "career" of sin that it inevitably entails:

It is obvious to all of us why the younger son would be labelled a sinner, for he openly rebelled against his father, wasted his father's money, ran with a fast crowd, fell into every conceivable kind of immorality, and ended up a physical and spiritual wreck.[SB]

In the following excerpt, the sins of the younger brother appear as a series of "steps" away from God. Here, too, one step follows inescapably upon the heels of the other, as after rebellion comes...

¹ The letters appearing in brackets at the end of quotations from the sermons designate the preacher's affiliation: [SB] for Southern Baptist, [P] for Presbyterian.

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the natural consequence, and that is ... wickedness.... He became involved in wickedness.... He has devoured your living with harlots."...He became involved in wicked living. There aren't many steps from the time you begin to demand your rights and you begin to want your own and you begin to become covetous and rebellious against authority. There aren't many steps until you find yourself down in the pigpen, down in the far country, down in the place where the world lives in its filthiness.[SB]

Down in the pigpen. This is the final step in the process of degradation. Because no behaviors are discrete or inconsequential, the eventual result of rebellion and wickedness is the destruction of the young man's dignity and self-respect, the degradation of his personality. As they describe the young man's self-destruction, the sermons discuss the depths of the abyss into which sin has flung the boy. Describing the bodily marks of the young man's sinful behavior, one preacher says:

The father recognized [the prodigal son's] step, and even though he didn't look like the boy that went away, even though his clothes were rags and even though he was stooped over and all of the effects of the rebellion were showing in his life, there was something about his step that the father recognized.[SB]

But these portraits of the son's downfall, pathetic as they are, are emphatically not meant to inspire pity. The speakers make it clear that the young man has earned his degradation and punishment. One pastor explicitly names the emotions one should properly feel for the boy:

The boy is in trouble, and he probably is miserable. I want to tell you something. He's only getting what he deserves. And you ought not to waste your sympathy on him. There is something terribly wrong with that boy.[SB]

The younger brother's behavior, then, is so dramatic an emblem of sin to Baptists, not only because it symbolizes the violation of the key relationship of authority-that between child and parent, and by extension, people and God-but also because it leads the son down the slippery slope of sin culminating in the destruction of the human personality. To begin the slide by rebelling is eventually to find the muck of the swine at one's feet.

In contrast, the sample sermons from Presbyterian pastors are less likely to depict the parable characters in terms of sin (only half of them do so, compared with all of the Southern Baptist sermons). In addition, Presbyterian talk about sin is far less vivid and forceful than that of Southern Baptist sermons. For Presbyterians, it is the dutiful, religiously obedient, yet joyless, older brother who tends to serve as the emblem of sin. He is full of self-righteousness about his own dutiful behavior, and he lacks sufficient charity to welcome his errant brother home. As one pastor says:

I believe that the parable is saying that being self-centered, righteous, and unforgiving is just as sinful as waywardness and rebellion....[P]

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Another preacher furthers this theme, and links it to the older brother's unpleasant personality:

The older son comes home, finds a feast going on, begins to pout, and refuses to come in. When we look at sin, not theologically, but in its everyday clothes, we find two kinds. You find sins of passion and sins of temper. The sins of passion are all the forms of lust and selfishness. The sins of temper are all the forms of pride and anger. We tend to judge the sins of passion more harshly. But [look at the] spirit of the older brother, the sulky, self-righteousness of a rotten temperament.[P]

Unlike the Southern Baptists, the Presbyterians portray no slide into sin, no dramatic trajectory. The older brother's acts of self-righteousness and lack of charity are discrete and independent behaviors. The older brother simply remains outside the party, performing his chores with a nasty pout. In these images, his behavior appears to have no consequences for others, nor even, beyond his fixed personality, for himself. In addition, sin here is a matter of temperament and personality. Sin is having the wrong attitude, rather than exhibiting dramatic anti-authoritarian behavior. And finally, the Presbyterians in this group are far less harsh toward the older brother than the Southern Baptists are toward the prodigal son, since the older brother's sin is attributed to a nasty temperament or a "synthetic" self, called an "error," or barely elaborated upon.

II

The preachers do not, of course, confine their comments on sin to depictions of the scriptural characters; they also generalize from these interpretations. One of the ways they do so is to make propositional claims about doctrines.

The large majority of the Southern Baptist speakers, and a small fraction of Presbyterians, state the doctrine of the universality of sin: No human being, with the exception of Jesus Christ, is exempt from sin. "Updating" Paul's theological language, one pastor draws upon the lyrics of country and western music:

The Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That means that we are living our lives away from God and we have committed so many sins that we are like the guy coming home to his girl from prison ... [in the] story of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree..."[SB]

Another preacher ties this principle both to the Parable of the Lost Sheep, which precedes the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and to Isaiah 53:6: "Like the Bible says, 'All we like sheep have gone astray.....'."[SB].

More frequently, speakers ground the proposition, through analogical reasoning, on the behavior of the prodigal son. Since it is assumed the behavior of the prodigal son is obviously sinful, and since it is further assumed that Jesus told the parable in order to make a general point about sin, then it must follow that all are sinners:

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I've wondered if perhaps Jesus knew these two sons; if perhaps He turned a local situation into a parable that says for all time that all men are prodigal sons in some way-all have journeyed into a far country-all have chosen away from the father and have need to draw close to him again.[SB]

Propositional claims suggesting universal sinfulness are not confined to Southern Baptists; some Presbyterians also implicitly mark the behavior of the prodigal son as sinful and transfer this by analogy to all humanity. But the claim apparently causes some trouble for these speakers; it requires a somewhat more cautious approach. One pastor eases into the equation; note the foot-in-the-door approach ("some ... most ... all") that implicitly seeks assent gradually, incrementally, as it builds toward its assertion of universal sinfulness:

The younger son [sinned] because he didn't want to do what was expected of him; he wanted to be free and independent. Doesn't this sound familiar? I'm sure we wouldn't have to think too hard before we could name someone who has this same adventurous spirit. It's probably safe to say that most of us at one time or another have decided that we're going to do something our way. All of us are prodigal sons and daughters.[P]

And another Presbyterian demands that all people see themselves in the behavior of the young man, although he first concedes that this recognition might be grudging and painful:

Helmut Thielicke ... tells of his young son for the first time looking into a mirror. And as he looked into the mirror, the son seemed to show absolutely no recognition at all that the little fellow in the mirror could be himself. Slowly it seemed to dawn upon him that the person moving there was actually a reflection. And so it is with us as we look at this parable. When first we read it or hear it, we may think that there is nothing of ourselves in it. But then we discover the parable is indeed reading us.[P]

In their propositions, then, many of the pastors seem to have retained some of the traditional force of the notions of sin, communicating a sense that human sinfulness is inescapable. But two adaptive devices are already visible here that modify the force of this doctrine-in this case, devices that rhetorically buffer listeners from the harshness of direct identification, as if to suggest that the preacher is saying, "When I talk about sinners, well, yes, you're probably included, but I'm not particularly pointing the finger at you." First is the device of depersonalization, which flattens out and defuses the force of the idea of the "sinner." In naming the doctrine, preachers speak generally of "we," or even more weakly of "all men," instead of saying things that could personalize the accusation of sin. The finger of accusation thus swings loosely and vaguely, far above the head of any individual.

Second, the doctrine of the universality of sin loses some of its bite through the device of rhetorical selectivity, in this case the omission of causality. Specifically, the doctrine is incompletely explained, since little note is taken of the source of human beings' tendency to sin:

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Adam's fall, the generation of original sin. The idea of original sin appears only once here, and there is no mention of anything that directly relates to this doctrine. The notion of original sin might, of course, appear particularly distasteful to modern listeners, as it assumes that human beings lack control over their behavior when it comes to their inherited tendency to sin.

III

But these adaptive devices are only minor strategies compared to another rhetorical device used in the sermons, one which allows speakers to articulate a doctrine of sin while at the same time softening the potential harshness of its application. The device operates as speakers exemplify sin, in little stories that they tell, through characters other than the brothers of the parable. It is the rhetorical device of deflection, and it works by projecting sin away from the listening audience and onto specific groups of outsider others.

As speakers preach about the sins of others, they are most likely to point toward children. For example, a pastor decries the epidemic of adolescent rebellion, a by-product, he says, of children's selfish natures:

I believe the root cause of [sin] is the rebelliousness that young people have against their parents. And the wastefulness of the youth generation that we see, ...it is the result of saying "no" to parents and saying "give me, give me, give me."[SB]

Many speakers have anecdotes to tell of their own childhood sin, as if to emphasize the breadth of the distance between the uncorrected (childhood) person and the corrected (adult) person:

I never forget those times when I got mad at home and decided to run away....I would announce to [my father] that I was sick and tired of the way I was being treated and my rights were being trampled upon and I had no freedom and liberty and I was going to leave home.... Well, there was in this boy a spirit of rebellion in which he turned and walked away from the people who loved him the most.[SB]

Commenting on the empirical obviousness of the notion of children as sinners, and adding fuel to the fire with his own confession, another pastor says:

I don't need the Bible to tell me, I don't need God to come down from heaven to tell me, that boys sometimes become prodigals. I already knew that. I was one, and I had one. And I found that out on my own, and by the way while I'm at it I might as well say that not all prodigals are boys.[SB]

A second category of sinners are those whose outre behavior marks them as members of a diseased secular world. In many cases, this behavior is so outrageous in terms of community norms that it serves more as a symbol to demarcate "us" from "them" than as a practical warning. Drug abuse, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, murder, and

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prostitution are the behaviors most usually cited. As one preacher comments in a diatribe against sin:

Behold them draped over bars, in the cocktail parties, watching the vileness of Sodom in their living rooms, trying to escape reality with cocaine. The consumption of mental and moral hog food is at an all-time high. The hogs who were demon-possessed at Gadara committed suicide. Mankind should learn that swine would rather die than live like that.[SB]

A few sermons also set up as sinful the behavior of very specific social groups. One preacher thus labels the poor and racial/ethnic minorities, through the form of a list that equates persons in these categories with those who are spiritually "sick" (for example, beer drinkers and divorced people):

Who do you visit on Tuesday visitation? Jesus said, "They that be whole need not a physician." Yet most of our time and ministry goes to those who are not sick, while we shy away from the poor, the blacks, the hispanics, the beer drinkers, and the divorced.[SB]

And another speaker clearly identifies a social underclass for whom one should have compassion, namely, "criminals, prostitutes, addicts, homosexuals, the obese, the ugly, and the different."[SB]

A third way sins are displaced onto groups other than one's own occurs around the category of Jews. The context of the parable and other parts of the Gospel texts, hold out invitations to interpreters to construe the Pharisees as wrong-doers. In particular, the character of the older brother offers a "Pharisee" to criticize. But, here, commentaries on Jewish sinfulness are not always limited to the context of Jesus' day.

In a couple of sermons, the idea of the Jew as the incomprehensible stranger stands in the background. In these few sermons, Jews behave in ways that their Christian colleagues find peculiar, alien, and irrational. One pastor tells this story:

I recall taking a Jewish Christian brother out for a meal years ago.... When the food arrived, he was horrified to find that it had bacon in the sandwich. He called the waitress and asked her to take it away. I was somewhat embarrassed, but he explained that even as a Christian he could not escape his Jewish revulsion at eating any part of a pig. Personally I can't stand liver, although there is nothing religious behind my feelings. At least his scruples had a historical basis.[P]

The equation made here between the Jewish dietary laws and personal tastes regarding food sets up the fuss that the guest makes as socially inappropriate and inexplicable. Even the concession that the "scruple" has a "historical basis" trivializes Jewish observance into an arbitrary piece of conduct by not acknowledging the forceful social and religious context of the dietary norms. Further, despite the reference to the guest as a "brother," the story implies, "it just goes to show you-once a Jew, always a Jew," laying boundaries around the category of Jew as other.

The second example is broader in focus but certainly includes Jews

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as prime candidates for its charge. It is a somewhat softened variation on the age-old theme of the culpable stubbornness of Jewish resistance to conversion. In this discourse, Jews, like others who reject Christ, are merely crazy, but craziness is not altogether innocent. In this sermon, a disordered mental state, like that of the prodigal son when he left home, is likely to express itself in rebellion and sin. Speaking of the contrasting qualities of the prodigal son's "mind" before and after his moment of coming to himself, one preacher says, "This is true. It's absolute truth. No person who lives his life without acknowledging and believing in Jesus Christ is of sane mind."[SB]

Other speakers link sin and Jews more explicitly by making an analogy between Jews and the older brother of the parable. With one exception, these connections are implicitly limited to the Jews of Jesus' day, or to those who declined to accept his divinity in the apostolic era. A pastor says, "The parable warns ... how Paul indicated to the Jews who rejected Christ that God had rejected them unless they too should repent."[P]

This excerpt is a bit more ambiguous about limiting the identification of sinners to the ancient Jews, as a connection is again made between the Jews and the older brother:

[The older brother] never saw the significance in the empty chairs at his Father's table-chairs for publicans and sinners.... I often wondered why the brother didn't ask about the empty chair; maybe he didn't ask because he didn't want to look for him; maybe because he didn't want to share the limelight, or the wealth, or the position, or anything else. Israel, God's chosen people, responded in just such a fashion! [SB]

Through the device of deflection, then, pastors are able to articulate a concrete sense of sin by attaching it to the behavior of outsiders. In this way, pastors ensure that listeners are protected from its force.²

IV

For those speakers for whom the adaptive devices we have seen so far do not suffice-a sizable proportion of the Presbyterians in the sample-there is a more extreme strategy of accommodation: Never refer, even obliquely, to the topic of sin. Despite a lack of concern with sin, these sermons do not completely avoid discussion on the behavior of the two brothers. Their behavior is seen as "wrong," inviting commentary, sometimes even negative evaluation. But the predominant tendency is to express an evenhanded attitude toward the behavior of the two brothers, a stance that attempts to understand and empathize with the self-imposed hurts said to result from their misguided actions. Thus, the texts position the listeners-who are invited to identify with the brothers' actions, especially with those of the older brother-as vicarious clients in a mass session of Rogerian

² The topic of the "sinfulness" of the Jews and other outsiders in these sermons is discussed in more detail in the book from which this essay is excerpted.

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therapy, as the preachers model a style of therapeutic warmth, acceptance, and tolerance.

If the speakers are reluctant to judge the behavior of the prodigal son, their sympathetic tone is especially pronounced in these sermons with respect to the older brother (who is, after all, a familiar middle-class type: dutiful, hard-working, and respectful of family obligations. In these excerpts, the attitude toward the older brother is restricted to empathy-the articulation of feelings of regret that his behavior prevents him from realizing the benefits to self that might otherwise ensue. One pastor speaks of the psychological pain that the brother will continue to suffer as a result of his closed and bitter personality, not as a matter of just deserts, but with the empathic and supportive tone of a practiced humanistic psychologist:

The older son is still sorting through truth-trying to make some sense of what he sees happening. If he keeps searching I'm sure he'll be freed. But if he gives in to his resentment, nurturing his bitterness, he will become so calloused that truth and joy will have an almost impossible time breaking through.[P]

As another pastor comments on the older brother, his concern is with the limits on growth that the man's pessimism will earn him: "The older son chooses to look for the bad in life and chooses to place his hurt feelings first and wastes yet another opportunity to grow in the understanding of the power of love."[P]

For this pastor, as well, the problem with the older brother is the psychological pain he causes to himself; the bitterness of his personality keeps him from experiencing the joy of his relationship with God, a point that the speaker makes without a hint of chastisement: "It's a tragic thing to be at a celebration and not be able to celebrate. To be a wallflower at God's party and not be able to dance and sing. To miss the joy: that's to miss everything!"[P]

When they turn to the prodigal son, the speakers reach to the resources of social science to give a sympathetic, or at least neutral, gloss to his behavior. First there is the family systems approach, as we see in this excerpt:

The younger brother [in a family]... cannot manage to find acceptance or approval [through obedience].... They're not big enough, experienced enough, mature enough to compete in such matters with older brother or sister. But there is an alternative: they can at least get some attention by rebelling.[P]

And here, as another pastor provides a family history for the son's departure from home:

We don't know what preceded it, the many family dinners which deteriorated into an intramural contest between siblings, the violent arguments, the incessant challenges to parental authority. Maybe that boy had to go. Maybe there was no way for him to discover who he was and what life is about in the long shadow of his older brother....[P]

Another type of account is given by means of the growth and

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development trope; the son is not sinful, he is just basically immature, as we see in this excerpt:

The prodigal was an immature person who ran out of the resources necessary to sustain his immaturity. So when he hit rock bottom he redirected his life toward worthier possibilities.[P]

Or, as in this message, a bit of a reckless Candide, who ...

... fell for one of these get-rich-quick schemes that await the naive. He was careless of his resources and ran through his inheritance the way water runs through open fingers. His plans and intentions were good, but he didn't have the experience or maturity to carry them out.... There were no real friends, no thoughtful advisors in that far-away country....[P]

But the sermon that is most revealing about the grounds of tolerance in this discourse opens with the following self-reflexive disclaimer:

I discovered that by trying to name the two young men, I was passing judgment on them ... especially the elder brother.... My names for them were really labels, and to label a person is sometimes to be done with that person.... Aren't labels boxes into which we put people? ... By trying to label the prodigal and the elder brother I discovered I was saying something about my likes and dislikes in people, and probably what I like and dislike about myself....[P]

As he leads us through an examination of his thought processes about the two brothers-which, not incidentally, turns out to be more about the subjectivity of the speaker himself than about the objects of his thinking-the speaker suggests that one should not be premature in passing judgment on the brothers, and indeed, one should seek to understand them fully. But as the excerpt progresses, we see the stronger problem here: the speaker's self-doubt that he can be justified in passing judgment upon the boys at all. It is not just that the speaker feels the need to examine all sides of the story or get inside the heads of the brothers or provide accounts for them that diminish the idea of blame; it is that he is questioning the very existence of legitimate grounds for authoritative moral and theological knowledge. When one speaks theologically, the sermon asks, is it possible to know whether one is presenting truths or merely speaking about one's own subjectivity, about one's own personal preferences? If one can not be reasonably sure that one is speaking the truth, then how is it possible to judge? In other words, the sermon poses an essential challenge to the possibility of objective theological speech. Is not all talk-even religious talk, even from an allegedly authoritative speaker-only, merely, about the self? We might wonder if such penetrating self-doubts are not at least partially informing weak Presbyterian notions of sin in general and, specifically, the articulation of tolerance that marks the other sermons in this set.

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V

In these sermons, sin is still a central topic. But a close examination of the sermons has shown the many ways in which the concept of sin has been accommodated to fit secular sensibilities. For while some traditional images of sin are retained in this pulpit speech, the language frequently cushions the listener from their impact, employing a variety of softening rhetorical devices: depersonalization (which renders notions of sinfulness vague and abstract, removed from specific members of the listening audience), rhetorical selectivity (which omits the foundational doctrine of original sin-a doctrine that would make inescapable the charge of personal sinfulness), deflection (through which sin is projected off of the listening audience and onto groups of outsider others), and therapeutic tolerance (in which sin is translated as errant behavior, explanations for misdeeds sought in the social context rather than in the individual, and judgment replaced by empathy). In its most extreme formulation, therapeutic tolerance applied to the idea of sin quashes even the possibility of authoritative religious speech, rendering the speaker silent on any matter except for the musings of one's own subjectivity.

Yet, in many of the sermons, judgment against sin is in fact rendered. But it is not aimed at the listeners; indeed, its precise formulations and the nature of its targets may give us some pause. This may suggest that, while care is taken not to appear unattractive to actual or potential members of the congregation (seeing them as "consumers" to be courted), politeness does not necessarily extend into norms of tolerance for those outside the reach of the church. Here, talk about sin appears more to be setting implicit boundaries around communities-"insiders" who are beyond the reach of evaluation and "outsiders" who are targets for it-than to be articulating theological insights into the depravity of human nature.