Do All Sins Weigh the Same?

A fairly common belief among protestants is that all sins are equal in God’s eyes. This idea has two parts. One, every sinful behavior is a violation of God’s law and is therefore fully sinful. Even evil thoughts count fully as sin in God’s eyes. This can largely be derived from Matthew 5. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes clear that looking at someone lustfully is already committing adultery. This certainly establishes that thoughts, intentions, and actions can all count as sin. However, it isn’t necessarily clear that this makes all sins equal. Just because lustful thoughts equates to adultery, doesn’t mean that lustful thoughts also equates to genocide.

The second part is that all people are equally sinners. Perhaps it is easiest to see this in Romans 3:23. Everyone is in desperate need of God’s grace. No one is worthy of salvation on their own merits and by the power of the Law. As such, we should not judge others as worse sinners than ourselves. We should not become arrogant, trusting in our own righteousness to save us, or at least to give us better status among the saved. I would agree with these conclusions. Jesus warns people not to judge in Matthew 7, as does James in James 4:11-12.

Nonetheless, I think we intuitively grasp that something is wrong with looking at every sin in a binary. Either it is a sin or it is not. You are either righteous before God by your own merits—you are not—or you are the most wretched of sinners. There is no middle ground. While certainly, everyone is dependent upon God’s grace, there may be grounds to suggest that not everyone is equal in their sin and status. When it comes to the question of salvation, we are all absolutely dependent upon God’s grace, but when it comes to our individual behaviors, are some worse than others?

I think it is obvious that we treat them that way. Look at the debates that have raged within the church for the last fifty years. Some say that homosexuality is a sin so that people in such a relationship could not get married. Meanwhile, we see no problem with marrying other sinners. Wealthy elites who exploit the labor of millions of people across the world and drive up prices for their own greedy gain are allowed to marry each other and pool their resources, giving them more power and reach to oppress and gain money, but we don’t frown upon such unions driven by money rather than love and dedication to God. Christians will get up in arms about protestors damaging store fronts as they pass through an area enraged by systemic injustice. However, when an oil company plans to tear up land sacred to a Native American tribe for the sake of laying a pipeline, profit for investors, many Christians have no problem with the disrespect to land and community. Of course, I think these views are misguided, and people with different views than me would say that what I choose to emphasize misses the point. Clearly, we may speak intellectually as if we were all equally sinners and all sins were equal, but we do not treat people and behavior that way. As a side note, if anyone tells me that Earnest Jackson remaining in prison is not a terrible sin on the part of the government of Nebraska, I’m not really interested in hearing anything they have to say about sin. With such a poor understanding of sin, I cannot trust them to say anything wise.

Since we already rank sins as better and worse than others in how we talk about them and treat people who do them, we should at least try to show some consistency in how we evaluate sin. As hinted above, some people make this calculation on political grounds, as bad as that may seem. Conservatives may be more likely to excuse, disregard, or downplay those sins that positively correlate with conservative values, while liberals may provide the same treatment to those behaviors their values protect. Frankly, modern political ideologies, especially those poorly constructed ones existing in the chaos of contemporary American politics, probably aren’t good grounds for evaluating sin.

I’ve often turned to questioning which sins do more or less harm. Thinking an angry thought that stays in your head may be a sin, but it doesn’t impact anyone aside from yourself, so it isn’t as bad as speaking an angry thought into the room and hurting someone’s feelings. In turn, that is not as bad as turning an angry thought to violence and causing bodily harm to the object of your ire. If we follow this consequentialist method of evaluation, we might be able to avoid some harm, but it certainly opens the doors to self-righteous arrogance and judgment. But if you think I am out of my mind for even suggesting that there may be a way of evaluating sins, I’m in good company.

In 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Paul argues that sexual sins are special because they are not external to the body. Not only are you violating God’s law but you are also violating the purity of your body, your temple to God. Paul fixates on sexual purity because unlike others, it disrespects the body that God has given us. This gives us a glimpse into the very embodied theology of Paul. While some Christians today seem to treat the spirit as of ultimate importance, Paul recognizes the special place of the flesh and blood God has given us. We need to take care of not only those invisible, immortal things, but also the materials we have. One could argue that this care extends from the body to all of Creation. As such, could Paul be indicating that we should avoid sins that have both a spiritual and physical nature? If Paul were alive today, would he consider pollution a corporate sin on the level of sexual immorality?

Again, we might dismiss the notion that we can evaluate sins and declare some worse than others, but we certainly treat them that way. And it is good that we do. If we truly took it to heart that insulting someone was equal to murdering them, we might have a lot more murder. “Well, I insulted him, killing him is no worse. I might as well finish the job.” And yet, it is also dangerous for us to rank sins because we are likely to dismiss our own and condemn only those we dislike. We are always all dependent upon God’s grace, whether our sins are small or great. We must always give praise and honor and thanks to God for God’s intervention in our lives, saving us from sin and claiming us as beloved children. And with the Gospel firmly in our hearts and wisdom from the Holy Spirit, we can perhaps hope that our evaluating of sins does not interfere with the knowledge that we need God, even if we can say that our little white lies are not equal to the destruction of nations. May God give us the wisdom to understand Sin, our true enemy, and proclaim the good news of salvation by grace through faith to all those who Sin has deceived us into calling our foes.