How sin evades the spotlight.

One of the great difficulties in teaching ethics is something I call “sin-protection bias.” This is the built-in defensive power all sin has to shield itself from the sort of careful scrutiny that might lead to its exposure and eventual expulsion. Sometimes this manifests as anger or outrage at the person raising the questions, especially by fixating on some minor flaw in the presentation rather than dealing with the substantial challenge being raised. But another way it shows up is in the impulse to relativize moral concerns.

The truth is that something might be “mostly wrong” or “usually wrong,” but if you say this instead of saying it’s “always wrong” or “absolutely wrong,” the people who need to hear it most will almost always interpret it as meaning their own circumstances constitute an exception. Sin always wants to wiggle away from a potential moral critique.

An additional problem for some Christians is their distinction-blindness about a third moral category between “absolute prohibition” and “matters of individual liberty.” Many things are mostly wrong (or right), but this doesn’t mean that they are merely matters of individual conscience. It means that the applicable objective moral concerns don’t make the behavior categorically wrong, but situationally wrong, which means there are some exceptions. “But,” they think, “if a generally wrong behavior might sometimes be okay, it must mean it’s really nothing more than a matter of individual conscience.” Thus with a sigh of relief, they just dismiss it as not applying to them.

The sin-protection bias loves abusing or ignoring these moral nuances to excuse itself from being threatened, which is precisely why it’s sometimes more productive to present a “usually” rule as if it’s an “always” rule, at least for now. Nuance and exceptions can wait until after the main issues are taken seriously. A child needs to learn to never lie and always obey his parents before he should ever be allowed to consider times that might not be best.