Repeat After Me: I am Not ‘A Sinner’
You’re actually a force of nature, capable of both construction and destruction
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You may be one of the billions who’ve been taught to call yourself ‘a sinner’. This means that you believe (or believed) you’re innately undeserving, flawed, wicked, wrong, and unacceptable. You have been ‘saved’ only by a deity’s goodness and mercy.
Hey. I’ve been there. I had no idea the toxic effect it was having in my subconscious, undermining all attempts of self-worth and inner peace. I was taught to focus my thoughts on being blessed and grateful that the deity ‘saved a wretch like me’.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe how oblivious I was to how harmful the sinner story is. Of course believing that you’re innately wicked and undeserving is going to make you miserable on a deep, unspoken level. Of course I was always looking for signs of my validation.
Insecure people don’t know how to love themselves, and so they’re not fully capable of loving others with authenticity and emotional freedom. Acts of charity will often come from places of insecurity, striving, duty, debt, and seeking approval. Personality types affect how deep the sinner wound goes. But I’d venture to say that many if not most Christians are deeply scarred by this narrative, and don’t realize it yet.
A large percentage of my Christian friends and family are also taking anti-anxiety or anti-depressants. I wasn’t able to locate stats on Christians taking medication, only Christian websites discussing whether Christians should be allowed to take such medication for their mental health. So often, Christianity inflicts the wound then says only it is allowed to heal it.
In Losing Faith in Faith, Barker writes:
“Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?”
The real good news (in my opinion), is that the sinner story isn’t true. I want to gently suggest that you unclench because the sinner story — along with the entire worldview it is built on — is only mythology.
Here’s why I’m so sure you can relax.
