Love the Sinner but Hate the Sin
Growing up surrounded by hatred disguised as love. Part 3 of…
--
If you grew up in a religious household, how many times did you hear, “Love the sinner but hate the sin,” (or some variation) growing up?
“God hates sin.” That’s another one I heard, and it was spoken sometimes with anger and other times with a tone of regret or sadness. The emphasis was always on the hate, but it was often so subtle one would hardly notice. Hate whispered into the ear 100 times is more powerful than if it was screamed 1000 times from a pulpit.
When I was a teenager in the early 90s, religious folk liked to refer to homosexuals just as people who did homosexual acts, and those acts were against God. In their minds, those were people who were sick and liked to do sick things. At best, they were good people led astray by evil impulses — being gay (having homosexual thoughts or urges) was just Satan trying to get you to sin by doing gay stuff. I wasn’t inferring this…depending on who was teaching the lesson, they spelled out these things exactly so there was no question about their message.
This sin-hating wasn’t reserved only for gay people, but also included anyone having sex outside of marriage. Love the girl, but hate that she’s having sex with her boyfriend. Sexual activity outside of marriage is a sin, after all. This is purely anecdotal, but when this concept was taught about straight sex sins, it was spoken about more mildly than for the gay sex topics. Then even more mild rhetoric came out when it was teenage boys having sex with teenage girls.
Hold on hold on…I’m seeing a pattern here. Do you see it? It’s steps. At the top you have hate for gay activities, but not gay people. Take the hate down a notch and direct it at straight-women sin. Then take it down another step when talking about men sinning sexually with women.
I guess hate is on a sliding scale here.
