It's In the Code, Ep. 10: Love the Sinner Hate the Sin
In this episode, Dan decodes a phrase that A LOT of listeners have contacted him about: the claim that Christians are called to “love the sinner, but hate the sin.” What does this mean? What kind of Christian claim is this? Why does it strike such a nerve among those who hear it? Dan tackles these questions in the episode.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series with our podcast, Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
And as always, I want to welcome anybody who's tuning in, listening to us.
I want to thank those of you who support us.
I want to thank the Kapp Center at UCSB, with whom the podcast is offered in partnership.
Can't do it without you.
I say that all the time, and I thank all of you for that.
And I also want to thank all of you who keep emailing me and contacting me about the series.
Again, I welcome that.
My email is danielmillerswaj.com and I always say I'm sorry I just can't get back to everybody.
I do my best but I really do read the emails and this could be reflected today.
I'm going to talk about a topic in this episode that a lot of people have contacted me about.
I just want to sort of flag there, I, as some of you know, am a trauma resolution practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, and did a group a few weeks ago looking at the kind of, what can be, the traumatic impacts of religious language.
And we talked about some of the same terms, greater depth and a different focus, the same ideas that we talked about in this episode.
And this was one that came up, and I just put that out there because The topic today can be one that really does strike a nerve with people and it can hit some of us kind of hard.
So just to be aware of that and to sort of know that going in.
But it's a phrase that a lot of people have contacted me about.
A lot of people have brought it up.
People who have come out of different kinds of Christian contexts who will say, when I grew up I heard this all the time.
People who are not in those contexts who they've just sort of heard it in passing and they're a little curious what it means.
Or they have people in their lives who talk this way and they want to kind of make sense of that.
And so we're going to dive in.
And it's a big one, primarily, I think, within American evangelical culture, or sort of a conservative Christian culture.
And it is this.
It is the idea that Christians are called to love the sinner, but to hate the sin.
Right?
We love the sinner, we hate the sin.
Or we hate the sin, but we love the sinner.
And as I say, this is a phrase or a slogan or an affirmation, whatever you want to call it, that a lot of people have heard, whether or not they've ever been a part of organized church life.
It was certainly in my time in the evangelical world, it was a phrase that sort of came around a lot.
I think it really sort of took shape in the 90s.
At least that's when I think it became sort of a widespread thing.
And sort of from there percolated to become something that for many is still just sort of like within the evangelical world, nothing all that strange to say.
It's just a sort of slogan or a phrase.
And like a lot of other things that we talk about in a series, it's the kind of surface meaning is plain enough, right?
And so if we're speaking sort of from the perspective of those who might say this, what it does is it expresses their view that while Christians condemn some actions because they're wrong, Their sins, I'm going to talk about that term sin in a minute, because they're wrong.
This condemnation doesn't extend to the people who commit those actions.
And it's intended to maintain and express the conviction that God offers forgiveness to everyone, that God loves everyone, no matter what they might have done.
Or in the parlance of these kinds of Christians, God loves us despite our sins, despite what we have done, and so forth.
And so the idea is that the Christian community should model that same acceptance.
And so we love you, what we're condemning or what we don't accept or whatever are your sinful actions, right?
And so there's a, again, like a lot of the other things we've talked about, there's a kind of positive intention on the part of those who use this.
And if you have people in your life who say this, you probably know that.
You probably know that the cousin or sibling or parent or pastor or whomever it is in your life who says this means something kind of positive or affirmative by it.
We can know that the people who use some of these terms, even ones that we might find problematic in different ways, that they have good intentions, right?
And that it's well-intentioned.
And that's how this is.
And we talked about another one like this.
It's like the affirmation that we talked about a few episodes ago, that no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, you're welcome here.
It's intended to communicate, again, what I call a kind of kinder, gentler, conservative Christianity.
A Christianity that is conservative in the sense that it still holds to certain moral standards or social standards or whatever.
It sees itself as maintaining that conviction, but is more accepting or more inviting or more aware of the need to communicate that God does love people and so forth.
And it's supposed to communicate a kind of Christian expression that isn't marked by condemnation or guilt, but by acceptance.
It's intended to move away from the sort of judgmental attitude that so many have experienced in church life.
And very much, when I was in this world, That was part of why the language arose, right?
It often arose within a more, let's say, a part of the evangelical world that tended to engage more with secular culture and often was, you know, sort of a generation younger, right?
And that felt this need, this desire to communicate with the world or whatever, however the Christians would put that.
And the idea was to show that we weren't just about judgment and condemnation and guilt and so forth, right?
And because of that, because of that intention, because of that assumption or that sense that, you know, this is an affirmative thing to say, Christians who might express this as a kind of conviction, they are sometimes surprised at the pain or anger or confusion that it can arouse in those who hear it.
And it does elicit these emotions.
As I said, in the group I did with The Center, this is one of the topics that came up.
And that's what we would talk about, is the emotions associated with it, how it made us feel when we would hear this, the effect that it still has on some of us when we hear this.
And I know that for a lot of religious folks who talk this way, that can be really surprising.
They don't understand how this could possibly cause pain to somebody else when it's intended to convey divine love and acceptance.
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