Explainer

Confession

Creed

14 June 2023

6 min read

Sorry seems to be the hardest word

We all find ways of not simply saying sorry. Not just former prime ministers. Graham Tomlin unpacks why it’s getting harder to say sorry in our culture.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A politican stands holding a bible, in front of a committee room table. Behind him an audience waits expectantly

Boris Johnson prepares to give evidence to the House of Commons Privileges Committee.

Why is it so hard to say you’re sorry? Over recent weeks we have watched the story unfold of Boris Johnson and the Downing Street parties, his disdain towards the Privileges Committee report suggesting he misled parliament, and his resignation as an MP, insisting he was the victim of a witch-hunt rather than saying he had made a mistake and owning up.

And it’s not just Conservative Prime Ministers. Tony Blair has never quite come clean to say it was a mistake to lead the UK into war against Saddam Hussain on the basis of faulty intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

Church leaders don’t escape either. Too often in the past, abusers have been shielded and moved on, and when the avoidance is revealed, ways have been found to avoid simply saying sorry. And then we all know the kind of apology that goes “I’m sorry you feel that way” which of course is not an apology at all.

Saying sorry has always been difficult, but our culture seems to make it even harder. We may not conduct literal witch hunts any more, but we do metaphorical ones.

Confession is difficult. Try it sometime. Next time you make a mistake, resolve to come clean before your friends, your spouse, your partner, your team at work. Confess your sins. Not straightforward, is it? If you find it as hard as I do, then join the club.

Saying sorry has always been difficult, but our culture seems to make it even harder. We may not conduct literal witch hunts any more, but we do metaphorical ones. If you are found out to have said the wrong thing, admit you have changed your mind, or that you made a horrible mistake, you are likely to get accused of inconsistency, cancelled on social media, sacked from your job, vilified at the court of Twitter. It could mean losing your reputation, your job, your friends and, well, everything.

A line of books have come out in recent times, pointing out that we live in one of the most censorious of cultures. Andrew Doyle wrote a book called The New Puritans, arguing that identity politics and the social justice movement has spawned a quasi-religious form of cultural revolution, driven by claims to moral purity and tolerating no dissent. Similarly, Noah Rothman wrote The Rise of the New Puritans, identifying progressivism as a movement whose primary goal is to limit happiness.

They had a strong notion of divine grace which interrupts normal human processes, unlocks hard hearts and kindles new desires in twisted souls.

Yet perhaps the problem is not so much that we have become too much like the post-reformation Puritans, but that we are fundamentally unlike them. Puritans were a group of Protestants who first emerged in the 16th century, who wanted to ensure that Reformation in England was carried out thoroughly, broadly according to the agenda of John Calvin in Geneva, and not (as they saw it), half-heartedly. The word ‘Puritan’ was in fact invented by the group’s enemies, accusing them of a joyless obsession with purity, an insistence on keeping rules, confessing sins and avoiding pleasures. As always, caricatures tell half, or less than half, of the truth. Of course there were censorious and frowning Puritans, but they also had a profound and ambitious notion of grace and goodness alongside a nuanced moral ecology that we have largely lost.

The Puritans had a strong notion of the nexus of sin, confession, grace, forgiveness, absolution and the possibility of moral reformation. If your conscience tells you that you had done something wrong, you had best confess it sincerely to God (and possibly to other people as well), which would be followed by the promise of divine forgiveness, which in turn had the potential to bring about a deep change of heart and habit, so that the fault was not repeated again. They had a strong notion of divine grace which interrupts normal human processes, unlocks hard hearts and kindles new desires in twisted souls.

Now we have lost most of this. If you confess a sin in public, you are very unlikely to receive absolution in the court of Twitter or public esteem. The passing of time may mean people forget what you did and enable some rehabilitation, but forgiveness? Never. And if you think the likelihood of forgiveness is remote, what is the incentive for confession? You might as well brazen it out, pretend you’ve done nothing wrong, deny all charges, as the alternative is to see your career go down the tubes.

Moreover, we don’t tend to believe moral change is possible. A leopard never changes his spots, we say with a knowing look. Ex-offenders find it hard to find jobs with a criminal record behind them, and disgraced politicians are unlikely to find a way back into public life.

We are creatures capable of deep cruelty, malice and selfishness, but also that we are capable of kindness, grace and true humility - that spiritual and moral change is possible.

Now of course there are good reasons for our nervousness about this. Someone with a weakness for booze, sex or vulnerable children might never lose that tendency, and it’s often better to be cautious than to allow an abuser to abuse again. Yet at the same time, Christian moral theology has always held together in some tension a savvy awareness of the depth of human fallibility and self-deception, with a belief in the possibility of deep spiritual and moral change. Christian faith paradoxically holds at the same time the most pessimistic and the most optimistic view of human nature – that we are creatures capable of deep cruelty, malice and selfishness, but also that we are capable of kindness, grace and true humility - that spiritual and moral change is possible. It’s not always easy to spot the genuinely reformed character from the charlatan, but that is where wise discernment and character judgement comes in, holding the tension between naivete and cynicism.

Back in the day when more people went to church, they at least once a week had an occasion where they were invited to reflect on their sins of the past week, to confess them and receive absolution. That pairing is perhaps the key to the whole thing, and why saying sorry is so hard in contemporary life – because we have not only lost the ability to say sorry, we have also lost the ability to forgive.

Of course, it’s possible to go through the motions in church of saying you are sorry for your sins. It can be a means of ‘cheap grace’ as the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to call it. But we are creatures of habit. Being forced to think back over the past week, the time you spoke to your kids in a harsh way, told a white lie to get out of trouble, or forgot to phone someone who needed help because you were just too busy, somehow alerts you to your own inner mess. Add to that the promise that a heartfelt confession will be met with the pronouncement of genuine pardon, then it makes it just a little easier to say an abject apology to someone else when you need to, not evading the truth, not excusing yourself, just saying you messed up and got it wrong, because you know what’s coming afterwards – forgiveness.

The dynamic of confession, forgiveness and the possibility of moral change doesn’t take away the need for shrewd judgement of character, but its loss arguably makes it much harder for us to say we are sorry, and are truly repentant.

Politicians, pundits and other public figures may find it hard to say sorry. And we are perhaps right to expect them to do so. But unless we learn how to forgive, then we will reap a harsh society where ‘sorry’ is not just the hardest, but the rarest word.

Explainer

Creed

Seven Deadly Sins

Sin

10 July 2023

7 min read

Sin: explained

From rottweilers to North African bishops, Graham Tomlin kicks off the Seven Deadly Sins series with an introduction to the unpopular idea of ‘sin’.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Illustration generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney.

A little while ago I went for a health check. They took a blood test, weighed me on the scales, poked me around a bit. Soon afterwards, I got a printout of my general health. It told me that my blood pressure and liver function was pretty good, but I ought to watch my cholesterol, my calcium levels could be a bit higher, and my folate result was not great (whatever that is).

It told me a lot about my physical health. What it didn’t tell me was anything useful about my spiritual and moral wellbeing. I began to wonder where I could get a spiritual health check? Is there a way of telling whether I am in danger of diseases that might affect my soul rather than my body?

As it happens, the Christian church has long had a spiritual health check - a kind of ticklist for spiritual and mental wellbeing – it’s called the Seven Deadly Sins. And over the next few weeks, here on Seen & Unseen, we’ll be running a series on it – think of it as a chance to check out your own spiritual wellbeing.

Of course, the word ‘Sin’ has a chequered past. Peccatio, Pèche, Sünde, Sin – whatever language it came in, it was once a terrifying word – a word that struck fear into the heart of almost every European. It had the same kind of emotional effect as words like ‘Nazi’, or ‘cancer’ do for us today. It was something you wanted to avoid at all costs, something dreadful and dangerous.

Now, it has changed from a rottweiler into a poodle. ‘Sin’ has been calmed down, domesticated, neutered. The word is now usually spoken with a smirk, or a heavy dose of irony. Describing something as ‘sinful’ usually means you think it is naughty but nice, or even seductive. We get perfumes called ‘My Sin’, or even a bakery called ‘Sinful Cakes’. Po-faced people who denounce something as ‘sinful’ seem to just want to stop other people enjoying themselves.

They waged a constant, subtle and undermining war against the inner self – they were the deadly enemy of the soul.

Yet there were reasons why the word ‘sin’ had such a ghastly aura about it in the past. Sin was not harmless transgression of some random moral code invented by repressed and frustrated medieval clerics. For our ancestors, ‘sin’ described a pattern of life that was quite simply destructive. Each of the seven deadly sins were a sign of spiritual poor health just like a raised PSI count might be a sign of prostate cancer, high blood pressure a sign of the risk of a heart attack and so on. Sins like greed, anger, lust and pride could destroy families, friendships, happiness, peace of mind, innocence, love, security, nature, and most importantly, our bond to our Creator. They wrenched us out of our proper place in the world, which is why it’s worth knowing whether you’re suffering from them or not.

A passage in the Bible talks of “sinful desires, which wage war against the soul.” That captures it well. These impulses or patterns of behaviour were not just arbitrarily wrong, but self-destructive. They waged a constant, subtle and undermining war against the inner self – they were the deadly enemy of the soul. Sin was a like a virus that got into everything, so that although life carried on, it never quite worked in the way you felt it ought to. Life always had that grit in the oyster, the nagging soreness of a shoe that doesn’t fit, the reminder of a dark secret that wouldn’t go away.

In many people’s minds, ‘sin’ means simply ‘breaking the rules or the law’. The difficulty with this idea is that it fails to get to the heart of the issue. An insistence on rules alone is often a sign of a shrivelled, arid moral vision. It’s what makes disapproving busybodies and prudes. Laws exist to protect things that are more important than laws, like human lives, families, marriages, reputations, communities and peace. They are not ends in themselves. Rules and laws are vital for the protection of goodness, but do not itself go to the heart of goodness – they simply try to ensure its survival.

Life would be simple if things that were bad for us were ugly and things good for us were beautiful.

One traditional way of thinking about sin was to classify it into types. Our ancestors were shrewd enough to know they needed to know their enemy. The idea of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ emerged from the early centuries of the Church as a neat way of remembering the some of the chief ways in which this deadly pattern of behaviour manifested itself.

A glance through the traditional list of the seven deadly sins raises an obvious issue for anyone with any sense of contemporary life and morals: these are not the ones we’d identify as the chief causes of evil in our world. If anything, our culture tends to admire these qualities, not avoid them. Lust is a sign of a healthy sexual appetite, Pride a perfectly valid pleasure in our own achievements, and Greed an essential motor for the economy. Lust, envy and gluttony sell porn websites, cars and food, so naturally there are powerful forces dedicated to encouraging these habits to grow as rampant as possible in our souls and societies.

Of course, our forebears were not all as innocent as we might think. Of course they didn’t all detest sin because it has always carried a very real and powerful attraction. And unless we grasp this, we will never understand it. Life would be simple if things that were bad for us were ugly and things good for us were beautiful. But life isn’t like that. As the great St Augustine said of his own younger tendency to steal just for the sake of it: “It was foul, and I loved it”.

The great works that have dealt with sin in the past had a simple aim, to uncover the ugliness of sin, and unmask the veneer of attractiveness that it wears. Dante’s great Divine Comedy did it by showing what these patterns of behaviour led to. It showed how each received its fitting punishment in a vision of such elegant symmetry that it seemed so obvious. In Dante’s imaginary hell, the angry are condemned to fight each other for eternity; the slothful or indolent are condemned to running constantly and breathlessly; gluttons are made to lie in mud, exposed to constant rain and hail just like pigs, and end up eating rats, toads and snakes, as a parody of their excessive greed.

Illustration by Jennifer Strange Keller

Yet strangely, each sin always has at its heart something good. Medieval artistic depictions of sins portrayed them as misshapen and deformed versions of some good quality. The reason is not hard to find. Lust takes the delights to be found in sexual desire and satisfaction and distorts it into an uncontrollable, damaging enslavement. Gluttony twists the pleasures of succulent roast beef and a glass of dark red Beaujolais and turns them into bloated, sickly over-consumption.

There is always something of the grotesque about sin. In old fairgrounds, there was always one stall where you would place yourself in front of odd-shaped mirrors, which would exaggerate parts of your body and shrink others. The result was on the one hand funny but at the same time, slightly frightening. Sin does the same thing. It takes something beautiful and makes it ugly by twisting it out of shape, so that it bears enough resemblance to the original to retain its attraction, but when seen in its full light, is as ugly as… well, sin. On one level, it’s funny. Most of our jokes revolve around the grotesque - things out of place, misshapen, strange. Yet there is a dark side as well and it is that that these medieval imaginative poems tried to unveil. Theologian Cornelius Plantinga says: “a sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life.”

A woman in a hall of mirrors, circa 1935.

Although it can seem a monstrous and terrifying power that threatens to overwhelm everything, in the end, evil can only ever distort something that is at its heart good. Evil cannot create anything, it simply twists, caricatures, or destroys. Sin is always a parody, a type of behaviour that often looks vaguely like goodness, and often likes to pretend it is, and it sometimes takes some moral and spiritual discernment to tell the difference. Yet a difference there surely is, and the ability to tell good from evil is a real sign of human and personal maturity. But the reason why it is often difficult to tell is that sin always has at its heart something good. A fit of temper against a brother or sister or child usually justifies itself by the behaviour that provoked it in the first place, which probably was out of order; jealousy or envy persuades itself that it is really proper outrage against the deep injustice that has given to someone else what I really deserve.

This means of course that however monstrous sin or evil are, in the Christian view of the world, they are ultimately trivial and pathetic when compared to real goodness. St Augustine struggled all his life to understand the nature of malevolence. Towards the end of that life, the reality of evil began to recede from his attention, to be replaced by something much bigger. As Cambridge historian Gillian Evans put it:

“Where first he had been aware of (evil’s) perverseness and emptiness, its huge darkness, its hopeless entangled knottiness, now at last perhaps he had come to feel its essential triviality in comparison with the light and power of the Good.”

In the coming weeks, here on Seen and Unseen, we will be asking some of our regular contributors to write on each of the Seven Deadly Sins, analysing how they work their deadly poison, both in the past and in contemporary society. Keep an eye out for each article as they come – it might just be the spiritual health check you need.