Over the Edge + February 2, 2011 opinions 3 Sin in the Twenty - First Century An personal essay on life and one’s place in our changing world PAUL STRICKLAND CONTRIBUTOR | suppose one definition of sin might be the sense of not being right in the world — the feeling there is something wrong with me. Strengthening this feeling is the doctrine, in the more conservative Protestant churches, of the total depravity of the human race. | understand that Catholic doctrine in this area, while still based on Original Sin, is somewhat less harsh, although some Catholic friends tell me they also have trouble with an ingrained sense of guilt. Amessage posted last summer on the sign outside a Baptist church in northern B.C. read something like this: “At the heart of the word ‘SIN’ is the word ‘I’”. It seemed to say that any personal self-respect or pride in legitimately earned achievements is inappropriate. Maybe what was meant is the kind of self-centeredness that leads to pushing people out of one’s way, bullying one’s employees or acting like Kaiser Wilhelm I] around the office, or controlling one’s spouse. Too often, in my experience, though, any kind of high-spiritedness, creativity or reasonable assertiveness is attacked as sinful selfishness. Maybe this is the reason so many young people go down the wrong path of Ayn Rand’s philosophy or extreme libertarian movements. While | was living in Lexington, Nebraska, from 1953 to 1955, and again during the summers of 1956 and 1957, Rev. Sam Weller of the First Baptist Church on Monroe Street did his best to inculcate a sense of sin. He was an old-fashioned hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. During much of a sermon he would speak at an ordinary or even low voice level, but then, from time to time, he would suddenly raise his voice to shouting and yell, “THAT ELECTRICIAN WORKING ON THAT TRANFORMER WAS HIT BY LIGHTNING, AND BECAUSE HE HADN’T BEEN SAVED, HE WENT STRAIGHT TO HELL!!” That seriously frightened a boy between the ages of five and seven. | was terrified during Prairie electrical storms that | would be hit by lightning and go to hell myself because | still wasn’t quite right with God. In fact, as a little boy, | could never be acceptable to God. One learned quickly from family and members of this conservative Baptist church that there was something wrong with being male. These are just the impressions of a small boy in the years well before, or, on turning seven, just touching on the boundary of the age of reason under St. Thomas’s doctrine, as | understand it. In his preface to his novel, Each Man’s Son, the Canadian novelist and essayist Hugh MacLennan provides a clear description from an adult perspective of this feeling of being wrong in the world: To Cape Breton the Highlanders brought more than the quixotic gallantry of and softness of manner belonging to a Homeric people. They also brought with them an ancient curse, intensified by John Calvin and branded upon their souls by John Knox and his successors — the belief that man has inherited from Adam a nature so sinful there is no hope for him and that, furthermore, he lives and dies under the wrath of an arbitrary God who will forgive only a handful of His elect on the Day of Judgment As no normal human being can exist in constant awareness that he is sinful and doomed through no fault of his own, the Highlanders behaved outwardly as other men do who have softened the curse or for- gotten its existence. But in Cape Breton they were lonely. They were no part of the great outer world. So the curse remained alive with them, like a somber beast growling behind an unlocked door. It was felt even when they were least conscious of it. To escape its cold breath some turned to drink and others to the pursuit of knowledge. MacLennan’s biographer Elspeth Cameron, quoted by the journalist Robert Fulford, said MacLennan recalled a nightmare in which he was wrestling with Calvin but wasn’t quite able to kill him. According to Cameron, MacLennan also once said he believed Calvin was likely the most evil man who ever lived. Today | still don’t feel | am right in the world. If | assert myself and make significant decisions, | seem to hurt people in ways | never intended and friendships and family connections fall like dominoes across the whole western part of this continent. If | don’t assert myself, | get walked over and taken advantage of by people of both genders who | sometimes overhear calling me “soft” or “a wimp.” One hears, from counsellors or advocates of New Age philosophies, “Be yourself, and do and say what you really believe in.” WIKIMEDIA COMMONS This in my experience has been a quick way to career-limiting moves or losing my job outright, or of being suspected of awful things and beliefs. Actions to help others are often seriously misinterpreted. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut said he’d heard that only heroin gets rid of the sense of being wrong in the world, but I’m not willing to try that experiment. | covered the court beat for a cumulative total of more than seven years, and | know the results of going down that path. | feel like a spy in a foreign country. It's not just conservative and fundamentalist Protestant preachers who have made me feel |’m not right in the world. Political conservatives say I’m a member of a spoiled, over- privileged generation that is a drain on the nation’s resources and will bankrupt medicare and CPP, and these conservatives also don’t tolerate my views about relationships or the need to limit authoritarianism in the workplace. Progressives, much like the Nebraska Baptists of the 1950s, say that because I’m male there’s something wrong with me that | can never get rid of—guilt by anatomy, so to speak. This is made worse by the fact my ancestors, five generations ago, came from Europe. Although no European country will consider me a citizen and no known relatives still live in Europe, progressives, when not denouncing me as a ‘white male’, call me ‘European’. In other words, | can never legitimately belong in North America. The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons down to the seventh generation, | suppose. There is an overwhelming atmosphere of always having to walk on eggshells. How to resolve this? Maybe, in my own mind as a writer, | can pretend to be the ambassador from a country that no longer exists, like Danzig or Atlantis, whose credentials are still politely accepted at formal social occasions but who has no weight in current politics or foreign affairs. But with the Industrial Revolution-style work ethic returning under the pressures of globalization with a vengeance after the brief respite of the Sixties and early Seventies, | have doubts we'll ever get over the impacts of the sense of sin and the doctrine of the total depravity of man.