The
phrase "love the sinner, hate the sin" is often used to explain how Christians
should relate to wrongdoing. But beneath this slogan lies a complex and
troubling tension—one that raises serious questions about love, justice, and the
true nature of sin. This essay explores that tension and its implications.
The Christians say that we must condemn our sinful acts and those of others.
It says to deny this is to take an "anything goes" kind of attitude.
The Church and the Bible say that sin has caused all the evil and suffering in the world, at least indirectly. The Church says humanity broke with God when Adam and Eve, the first humans, sinned against God. Adam and Eve made the break for the human race, and we keep it up.
The Church sees sin as very serious.
It offends such a good God.
It is a Pandora's box. Evil is disorder.
It deserves everlasting exclusion from enjoyment of an eternal love
relationship with God.
It does severe damage to the personality.
It demands punishment. If you do what is evil, you are asking for retribution. If you don't suffer just for doing wrong, then that is really saying that the wrong is no big deal. There would be no law.
So this all seems pretty horrible. It is as if Christians hate the sinner.
Their reply might be that they love the sinner but hate the sin. They say God does this too. You wouldn't expect them to admit to hating.
The Christian is to hate sin, whether in others or himself. The Church teaches that this is loving the sinner when your intention is to see the sinner cast out the sin. Love means to try and do whatever is right for the other's wellbeing, but sin means crime or that which should be punished. Punishment means opposing one's well-being.
"Love the sinner and hate the sin," if interpreted as meaning saving the sinner from the harm that sin does, implies that God will punish all unrepented sin. Many sins do no lasting harm. And doing good sometimes involves some harm too, so sin causing harm is not always a big deal. Thus, if a sin of, say, masturbating a few seconds is something to be saved from, it must be because God is waiting to punish.
Anybody can have a delusion—that is, a belief that
should be seen as wrong, and yet the person still accepts it. For example, a
person should accept that his wife is dead when he saw her in her coffin and
being buried. He is deluded if he argues she is still alive and never died.
The Christian lives and moves under the delusion that he loves sinners. The
Church inflicts and conditions its victims to develop a mental illness.
The Church has no genuine concern for people. The Church condemns hating people not out of love but out of its desire to give orders.
If you really love sinners and hate their sins, you should be glad when people accuse you of sin wrongly, as long as they say they hate the perceived sin, not you. You should not care, for it is not personal. But you do care, for it's not true that hating your sin is not personal. It is easy for you to delude yourself that when the sins of others are hated and condemned, those people are not being hated but loved. When you are on the receiving end, you soon change your tune.
Jesus condemned the Jews for the delusion that they were righteous and holy when, in fact, they were not but only acting it. Catholicism teaches that you must be free from serious sin to be saved. Protestantism says this is wrong – it says that you must have Jesus being punished for your sin in your place. At least Protestantism should not lead to such nauseating self-righteous hypocrisy as we see in Catholicism.
Jesus roared, “Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” He said they were their own sin of hypocrisy. If he agreed with "hate the sin and love the sinner," he would have said, “Scribes and Pharisees, you are tainted with hypocrisy.” That still leaves room for seeing good in them. Calling them hypocrites does not.
Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion would have done better if it had put forward the following reasoning:
God is a good being. He must love sinners and hate sins. But this is impossible. Belief in God is based on the delusion that it is possible. Therefore, belief in God is a delusion.
Richard Dawkins said that belief in God is a delusion.
The God belief is worthless without the idea that we must love sinners. Some
say, "It seems to be more accurate to say that belief in God may not necessarily
be a delusion but it is necessarily dependent on one." If so, then belief in God
is a tool for making a delusion deeper. But as we have seen, God is more than
just based on the delusion. God, by definition, must embody the delusion.
More honest Christians reject the hypocrisy of those who claim to love
sinners while detesting and wishing evil on sins. They teach, "Sometimes it is
said that God hates sin (impersonal) but loves the sinner (personal), but this
attempt to mitigate the wrath of God is not really faithful to the biblical
witness.
Wrongdoing in the Bible is never disassociated from the wrongdoers, who are fully responsible for their actions. Retribution cannot be shifted to an impersonal level without it ceasing to be what it is. We cannot imagine a judge excusing a murderer who says he is sorry and offers to clean up the mess, as if the crime were all that mattered. However sincere his repentance might be, the murderer would still be held responsible for his sin, just as we are held responsible for our sins before God." (page 222, The Doctrine of God, Gerald Bray, IVP, Illinois, 1993).
A God who treats sin as if the sinner had nothing to do with it is refusing to admit the dignity of the sinner as a responsible agent.
And a God who hates sin as if it were a thing and as if there was nothing personal about it might as well torment himself over a block of ice. His hate shows self-hatred, for it ruins his happiness. Self-hatred makes you a threat to other people.
Punishing sin but not persons is really not punishing at all. It's not retribution. It's anti-justice. If you separate the sin from the person and make the person suffer for the sin, that is intended to be revenge, not justice. Those who hate the sinner could be better people than you.
No truly good person holds that it is the crime that matters, not what the crime says about the person. Indeed, it would be evil to condemn an action and risk upsetting the person if it is only the action that matters. Those who believe in "love the sinner and hate the sin" are worse than those who admit that to hate the sin is to hate the sinner. They do justice great harm and make a laughing stock of morality. While they claim to love the sinner, they show intolerance to the person who judges the sinner and who demands justice! What hypocrites they are!
The utter failure of "love the sinner and hate the sin" shows that belief in God is harmful and peppered with malice.
The atheist does not believe in sin. The atheist believes that the wrong we do does not offend God or break his law.
The atheist should, in principle, be able to encourage people to live better. To make people see their weaknesses and so-called sins as worse than what they are only deters them a bit, at least, from doing good.
"Love the sinner and hate the sin" is irresponsible, for we have enough problems trying to love insane and troubled people. And those of us who don't believe in sin believe that people still do wrong. "Love the sinner and hate the sin" gives us an interpretation of evil that is too strong and that is evil considering it is possible not to know if you hate the person or love them.
"The language you are using about God
being on the side of love and not on the side of hate seems like a binary or
polar understanding of how these two emotions exist. From a psychological point
of view, can't the emotions of love and hate sometimes seem indistinguishable?
As a psychologist, how does your psychological understanding of feelings inform
your theological or Christian understanding of those concepts?"
— Fraser
Watts: "Well, I agree about the psychology ... we tend to go for a too nice, or
anodyne view of God ... we need to recover some sense of the wrath of God as
part of his majesty" (page 148, Conversations on Religion, Continuum, London,
2008).
Christians are to love God for being what he is and not what they think he should be. God, by definition, is the being who knows best and does best. Loving sinners is supposed to be about loving them for what they are and not for what you think they should be. In other words, you ignore the sin and even tell yourself that there is no sin in them at all! This is contradicted then by your calling them sinners and calling them opponents of holiness and the law of God and the perfect love of God. So you love them for the perfect people they are. If you partly hate the sinner and claim to mostly love them, then you do not love them at all. You fail to love the persons for what they are and not for what you think they should be. "Love the sinner and hate the sin" only impresses those who do not really understand love. Those who preach the principle are propagating saccharinised evil.
The "love the sinner, hate the sin" brigade want to delude the sinners that they are loved. Believers say sinners are deluded that they can sin against God and be okay. Sin is allegedly caused by the delusion that it is okay to commit it, and so it is not really a sin. Deluded people project their madness unto others, and Christians are no exception. The deluded point the finger at the deluded.
"Love the sinner and hate the sin" is good training in false virtue. Those skills will be called on when the religious person decides to wage war in the name of faith and Church and God.