We simply cannot ignore theology when looking at social problems. For Christians, the notion of sinful structures is based on the difficult but ultimately liberating admission that the existing social positions we occupy are often not in conformity with the order of God.
The online journal The Public Discourse has collected together a series of intelligent reflections on racism in America. I particularly want to call attention to David Clouthier’s article from 2019 about what the Church does and doesn’t mean by the phrase “structures of sin.”
As the Protestant theologian Al Mohler explains in a separate essay in the series:
“The terminology of structural or systemic sin is in the foreground of our cultural conversation these days. News headlines, political commentators, and activists use the language.Is this just evidence of ideology, or is systemic or structural racism real? How would we know it if we saw it? How do we confront it? How is it justly rectified? How should Christians, in particular, think about this? Sin is an essential category in our thinking, but are we thinking about it rightly?...
The idea of structural sin should be in one respect uncontroversial:
“Sin corrupts every institution and every system because, one way or another, sinful human beings are involved. This means that laws, policies, habits, and customs are also corrupted by sin.”
But, as Mohler goes on to argue, it’s frequently used by people who, inspired by a Rousseauian or (more commonly) Marxist analysis, deny the notion of original sin and instead claim that all sin is the result of sinful structures. It follows from this view that if a violent revolution rids the world of these sinful structures, the natural goodness of people (or at least, of the oppressed peoples) will manifest itself and the civilization of love will break out. A (straw-man) version of this in contemporary life would be someone who thinks that the police or policing is a structure of sin that causes criminality, such that removing the police from society would eliminate crime because it eliminated the sinful structure.
A theologized version of this more extreme view of structural sin became known as liberation theology or a theology of liberation. It was used to persuade Catholics in Latin America to support Marxist revolutions. And so in 1984 and again in 1986, the team of Pope St. John Paul II and the future Pope Benedict XVI published two instructions that cast suspicion on liberation theology and its central concept of structural sin divorced from personal sin.
Clouthier’s article is interesting in that he tries to rescue the idea of structural sin from its banishment under the previous two popes by...appealing to the previous two popes use of that very idea!
Though the concept originated in Marxist-inspired Latin American liberation theology in the late 1960s, Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI also relied on the term. While it is often misunderstood, the concept can help us to understand the theological dimensions of social problems. It emphasizes our individual responsibility to confront the reality of the social structures within which we live, choose, and act.
Clouthier, a professor at Catholic University of America, is trying to rebuild Catholic moral theology’s ability to criticize the economic and social arrangements of modern society. I really liked his The Vice of Luxury, which does a nice job of updating the Church Fathers’ critique of the rich in ancient Rome so that it can withstand the typical responses from modern economics. Couthier’s project makes him hard to pigeonhole ideologically, and makes him pick unusual topics. For example, he wrote a blog post on whether Twitter could be a structure of sin, a topic I’d never thought about in those terms.
Clouthier’s article, as well as the encyclicals Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (esp. ##37-40) and Caritas in Veritate, do point a way for Catholics to make important moral distinctions as we debate the racism and other injustices in modern society.
