Are bad actions always bad?
When researchers asked adults to evaluate twelve behaviors traditionally viewed as sinful, only six were still condemned by a majority: lying or manipulation, taking God’s name in vain, idol worship, sex outside marriage, pornography, and the use of illegal drugs. On the rest, the moral consensus was divided.
Abortion, sexual fantasies, and cheating on taxes now divide the nation almost perfectly in half — a fifty-fifty split that reveals not moral apathy, but moral disunity.
Meanwhile, behaviors that were once commonly understood as transgressions — drunkenness, gambling, and ignoring the rest day — are now dismissed by most as harmless, or even irrelevant to morality altogether.
The generational and religious divide is striking. Among young adults and the religiously unaffiliated, traditional notions of sin are often viewed as outdated or oppressive.
Among older generations and the devout, particularly those with a biblical worldview, moral categories remain far more stable.
Baby Boomers and seniors are consistently more likely to describe lying, sexual immorality, and irreverence toward God as sins.
The study suggests that the real story is not simply a loss of faith, but a growing moral pluralism — a society in which ethical boundaries are drawn from a thousand different sources: personal preference, social consensus, identity politics, or psychological well-being. The result is that we no longer speak a common moral language.
For those who continue to realize that morality is grounded in divine revelation, this trend is deeply unsettling. “If sin can mean anything or nothing,” said one of the report’s researchers, “then redemption also loses its meaning. A culture that no longer recognizes sin cannot easily talk about forgiveness, responsibility, or grace.”
But for others, the shift represents liberation — a breaking free from inherited guilt and religious constraint. To them, morality is evolving toward empathy and authenticity rather than obedience and dogma. The line between sin and choice, they argue, should be drawn not by theology but by harm: does it hurt others, or oneself?
This is Consequentialism, which claims that the morality of an action depends exclusively on the merely foreseeable consequences resulting from the choice of action (a technical way of stating that the end can sometimes justify the means).
A related moral error is Proportionalism, which maintains that the morality of an action can be measured solely by weighing the values and goods being sought by the doer and comparing them with the merely external resulting bad effects.
Both Consequentialism and Proportionalism maintain that it is impossible to establish a series of actions that are morally wrong in every circumstance and in every culture.
Still, the cultural consequences are hard to ignore. When the concept of sin collapses, so too does the sense of shared accountability that once bound communities together.
This redefinition of sin may reflect a deepest spiritual paradox: a people that remains fascinated by faith but uncertain about truth, yearning for meaning while suspicious of authority.
Do I believe in moral gravity? In the idea that some acts, regardless of current fashion or feeling, fall short of something higher than myself?
Some excerpts from Tim Daniels
Nov 19 Wed