Is there such a thing as a ‘respectable’ sin?

Question 6041.

A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because Scripture knows nothing of a tier of offences that need not trouble anybody.

Every congregation has its list, and the list is usually invisible to the people who are keeping it.

Where the phrase comes from

The expression was popularised by Jerry Bridges, who wrote about the sins believers tolerate in themselves while condemning them in others. His point was not that some sins are minor, but that some sins have been granted diplomatic immunity inside the church.

The observation is not new. The Puritans wrote at length about secret sins and heart sins, and the Reformers were clear that respectability is no measure of holiness. What Bridges did was give the phenomenon a name that stuck.

A respectable sin is therefore not a lesser sin. It is a sin with better public relations.

Scripture does not grade sin the way we do

Paul’s vice lists refuse to cooperate with our categories. In Romans 1 he places gossips and boastful people in the same sentence as murderers. In 1 Corinthians 6 the greedy and the revilers appear alongside the sexually immoral.

Galatians 5 lists the works of the flesh, and among the sensational items sit enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions and divisions (Galatians 5:19-21). Those are the sins of the committee room, and Paul does not soften them.

That does not mean every sin has identical consequences. Scripture plainly distinguishes between offences in terms of damage and in terms of judgement. What it does not do is give any sin a pass because it is socially convenient.

The usual respectable sin suspects

Ask a congregation to name sins and you will get a predictable list, and it will not include the ones actually operating in the room. Gossip, dressed as prayer requests. Grumbling, dressed as realism. Impatience, dressed as high standards.

Add to that a settled love of comfort, an unwillingness to be inconvenienced, a critical spirit that can find the weakness in any sermon, and an anxiety that never gets named as failure to trust. Each of those is a respectable sin, and each does more harm over a decade than most scandals.

Then there is greed, which is almost never confessed in Western churches. I have heard many confessions in thirty years of ministry and I can count the confessions of covetousness on one hand.

Why the tolerated sins do the most damage

A scandal is dealt with. It is visible, it is addressed, and the church usually learns something. A respectable sin is never dealt with, because nobody names it, and so it works away underneath for years.

Gossip has emptied more pews than heresy. Bitterness has ended more ministries than immorality. The book of Hebrews warns about a root of bitterness springing up and causing trouble, and by it many become defiled (Hebrews 12:15), which describes contagion rather than a private failing.

And these sins reproduce. A congregation absorbs the tone of its long standing members, so a critical church trains critical converts without ever teaching a class on it.

The Pharisees were respectable

Jesus reserved His sharpest words not for the obviously immoral but for the impeccably religious. Clean on the outside and full of greed and self indulgence within. Straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. Tithing herbs while neglecting justice and mercy and faithfulness.

The point of those rebukes is that respectability had become a substitute for righteousness. They had constructed a system in which a man could be scrupulous and cruel at the same time and never notice the contradiction.

Any church can build that system. It requires nothing more than emphasising the sins your people do not commit.

How a sin becomes respectable

It usually happens by consensus rather than by decision. Something is common enough that addressing it would embarrass too many people. Or it is useful, as anger is useful for getting things done, and worry can pass for conscientiousness.

It also happens through vocabulary. We do not say greed, we say prudence. We do not say gossip, we say concern. We do not say cowardice, we say wisdom. A respectable sin nearly always has a flattering alias, and finding the alias is half the work of dealing with it.

And it happens by comparison. As long as I am measuring myself against the culture rather than against Jesus, I will always come out looking reasonable.

Small sins and small foxes

The Song of Songs asks that the little foxes be caught, for they spoil the vineyards. It is a striking image, because the damage is not spectacular. Nothing is knocked down; things are simply nibbled until they stop producing.

That is how a respectable sin operates in a life. It does not produce a crisis. It produces a slow flattening, a gradual loss of joy and power that the person cannot account for and eventually accepts as normal Christianity.

Anyone who has wondered why their faith feels thinner than it did ten years ago should look here before looking anywhere more dramatic.

The heart of every sin is the same

Underneath both the scandalous and the respectable sits the same root, which is the self insisting on its own way. Isaiah says we have turned every one to his own way, and that describes the churchwarden as accurately as the criminal.

That is why God can treat them with comparable seriousness without being unreasonable. He is not primarily assessing social damage. He is assessing allegiance, and a quiet act of self will is still an act of self will.

It also means the remedy is the same. Not a programme, but repentance and the ordinary work of walking in the Spirit.

This is not a call to morbid introspection

I want to guard the other flank. There are believers who will read this and start hunting through their day for infractions, and that is not what Scripture asks for either. Conviction is specific and comes with a remedy. Accusation is general and comes with despair.

The right response is not a permanent audit but an honest openness. Ask God to show you what you have stopped noticing, and then wait rather than manufacturing findings.

And remember that the same grace covers the respectable sin and the disgraceful one. Neither of them is a surprise to God and both were paid for at the same cross.

What churches can do about it

Preachers can stop choosing only the safe applications. It is easy to apply a text to sins nobody in the room commits, and it is far more useful to apply it to the ones everybody does.

Members can stop passing information under a spiritual cover, and can decline to receive it as well, which is the harder half. Leaders can model confession of the ordinary failures rather than only the historic ones.

And all of us can watch our vocabulary, because the moment a respectable sin loses its alias it becomes very difficult to keep. See also the article on secret sin.

God sees what the congregation does not

The Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). That is a warning and a comfort in the same breath.

A warning, because reputation is no protection and the assessment that counts is not the one your church makes. A comfort, because the believer who is quietly fighting something nobody knows about is being watched by a God who does know, and who is not indifferent to the struggle.

There is a further word on the sins we keep hidden in the article on habitual sin.

Anxiety, the most protected sin of all

I put this last because it needs care. Worry is commanded against repeatedly, and Jesus devotes a large part of the Sermon on the Mount to it, yet no church I know treats it as a failing, and rightly so in one sense, because anxiety is often a medical and psychological matter rather than a moral one.

The distinction matters enormously. A believer with an anxiety disorder is not sinning by having a racing heart, any more than a diabetic sins by having an unstable blood sugar. Telling such a person to repent is cruelty dressed as pastoral care.

What is a respectable sin is the settled, chosen refusal to trust God with the future in the ordinary run of life, and the treating of that refusal as prudence. Anyone in genuine distress should seek proper help, and should not read this paragraph as an accusation.

So, now what?

Ask God to name one respectable sin in your life, and then sit with the answer instead of arguing with it. The first thing that comes to mind is usually the thing.

Then tell someone. These sins survive because they are never spoken about, and speaking about them is nearly always the beginning of the end of them.

And check your vocabulary this week. Every time you find yourself using a flattering word for something that is not flattering, say the accurate word instead and see how it feels.

Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!

Psalm 139:23-24 (ESV)