Evangelical Cop-Out: “We Hate the Sin but
Love the Sinner”
Stan Moody:
Over the past 100 or more years, the most self-conscious wing of the American Christian Church
– Evangelicalism – has reduced the person and work of Jesus to altar calls, the Sinner’s Prayer,
Republican Party politics and bibliolatry (literary manipulation of the Bible). If you were to ask
the average evangelical what is the most important task of every committed Christian, he/she
would quickly answer, “Leading people to Christ”. Yet, one would be hard-pressed to find
support for that exclusive premise anywhere in Scripture. To “make disciples of all nations” is a
far cry from a course in Evangelism Explosion. Making disciples demands sticking around until
you have earned the right to speak!
Reinforcement of Hypocrisy:
As an American Baptist pastor with deep evangelical roots, I have struggled with two issues that
go to the core of deep hypocrisy within our worship culture:
1. Evangelicals have purposely jettisoned Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom of God into a
conversion experience securing a wholly-future hope of Heaven. Why has this been the
case? It has been the case because of our unwillingness to let go of the American Dream
of Prosperity and Success that stands in contradistinction to citizenship in the present,
dynamic, victorious Kingdom of God. We are told that a Christian is called to be IN but
not OF our physical world but to be OF God’s world – His present Kingdom. Instead, we
prefer to have it both ways – IN the Kingdom as a wholly-future hope but OF the world
with power over our own destinies here and now. God becomes our mere rescue agent at
times when we mess up with our coping strategies. “God helps those who help
themselves” is as far from submitting to the sovereign authority of God as you can get!
2. By jettisoning the Kingdom of God wholly into the future, we are left with picking
through the pieces of what moral precepts are to be expected of a professing Christian.
Having futurized the commands of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (love of enemies; care of
neighbor, etc.), we find ourselves setting up evil strawmen as a means of confirming our
own pseudo-righteousness. We become focused on OPS – Other People’s Sins, rather
than on our own sins in areas such as gossip, lust, and judgmentalism. The easy ones for
us in our present day are folks laboring under sexual and gender identity, advocates for
pro-choice, and Democrats. “All you folks are welcome to visit our churches, but you are
going to have to change your lifestyles and party-affiliation!”. Memo to Christians:
“They hate you as much as you hate them!”
“But we really don’t HATE them, Pastor!” We LOVE them all but just hate their sin!” That is a
load of what makes the grass grow green! It’s a cop-out, permitting us to love our neighbor from
a safe distance, while patting ourselves on the back for our superior righteousness. Our negative
attitudes toward sexual minorities, for example, mirror theirs toward us, and we each are at an
impasse, with neither side demonstrating sacrificial love. We in the church culture have equated
our moral precepts to evidence of God’s righteousness. Those in the otherwise “sin” culture
rightly accuse us of phony love, while gleefully excusing themselves from interaction.
Self-Appointed Guardians of Righteousness:
“Hate the sin, but love the sinner!” becomes the easy cop-out for any perceived moral failure that
finds itself in the crosshairs of the Christian Right. “We love the gays, but we can’t condone their
lifestyle!”, raises the question of who is the “we”. Us and God? In my early life, sin would be
specified as pleasure or enjoyment of any kind – especially dancing. The unspoken exception
might have been making out in the back seat of a ‘54 DeSoto under the cover of night.
When you cop out with “Hate the sin, but love the sinner”, you are setting yourself up as being
obligated to doing God’s job for Him. You are in the same position as the praying Pharisee, who
was thanking God that he was not like other men, including a nearby tax collector, who,
ironically, was beating his breast and praying, “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:10).
We become self-appointed guardians of righteousness, ignoring that Jesus, accused by the
religious right of being a “friend of sinners”, continuously was pointing out sin in the Church.
Loving the Sinner as Yourself:
To that, you might be inclined to say, “But Pastor! You are inviting sin into the Church!” Say
what? I have never worried about sin in the Church, as I have always assumed that it ought to be
an acute awareness of our own sin that drives us into fellowship with other believers. If a self-
righteous person, Christian or otherwise, were to attend our church with the attitude, “God made
me this way, and I’m here to celebrate it”, he/she likely would soon be looking elsewhere for
affirmation. My sermons were focused on assuming that we all were struggling against sin in our
lives, offering the remedy of remaining in a state of “joyful repentance”.
Are we addicted to the self-righteous pride that comes from calling a person or persons outside
the Church a sinner? Is that not another way of labeling who is “in” and who is “out”; who is
“right” and who is “wrong”; who will be “left behind”? Are we masking such labeling with
insistence on our superior “common sense”, or have we convinced ourselves that it is so Godly
as to be self-evident? Is God so impotent that He needs a corps of Sin Police?
Let us embrace this version of the Golden Rule: “Love the sinner as you love yourself”?
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