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Notes -
How do Faiths and Philosophies Deal with the Convert who is a Satiated Sinner?
We all know Augustine’s famous formulation: Lord, make me pure, but not yet. How should we deal with someone who applies this strategy successfully: they sin for as long as anyone would reasonably like to sin, then with perfect timing they find religion, live an ordered an righteous life, and tell anyone who will listen that their prior life was bad and sinful. And on the one hand, I might agree that they are correct: their prior life was sinful, their current life is better ordered; but on the other hand there’s something annoying about someone “having their fun” and then turning around and telling you not to have yours, or claiming their objectively enviable life as some form of tragedy they were forced to endure rather than a result of their own choices.
The classic, Augustinian example is the born again Christian who sleeps around when they are young and then finds Jesus right around the time that most people get bored of sleeping around anyway. Inasmuch as one can point to anything like a secular liberal life-path it looks something like HIMYM : date and sleep around and party from college through your mid-late 20s, at which point you’ll be ready to settle down and switch your tax light to available. As the joke goes: how do you find your soulmate? Turn 27, it’ll be the next person you date. Most people, even without finding any religion, tend to get tired of sleeping around, and get married. But the difference is that the born-again Christian goes through this process, attributes their change to finding religion, and lectures everyone in range about how they should never do the things they did. And it’s hard to take them seriously and not say: You had your fun and now you want to keep me from having mine.
The feminist example was one brought up by my wife: women who earn celebrity exploiting themselves in ways that they later write oh-so-thoughtful-thinkpieces with all the right feminist verbiage self-victimizing and finding all the ways that the thing they made money off of was horrible; conveniently right around the time when they can’t exploit their ill-gotten hotness anymore. Emily rat-polish-nonsense is trying for a second career as a feminist crusader, starting with getting angry about the modeling career that helped her net a rich man that would enable her to pay to play in publishing. But my wife brought up Callista Flockhart, who has tried to do advocacy around the eating disorder she had throughout her early 2000s acting career, without really reckoning with the damage that starving herself did to girls watching to benefit herself; Bella Hadid who says she regrets her nose job because it took away her Palestinian nose, while living off the results of the plastic surgery she’s gotten; and [the Kadashians]](https://people.com/kylie-jenner-regrets-getting-breasts-done-7565553) of all people try to self victimize about the “pressure” they felt to get Darth-Vader quantities of plastic surgery, pressure they themselves have done more than anyone else to create. And my wife’s feeling is that these women want to have their cake and eat it too: hit “betray” on feminism when their young and exploitation pays, then find Feminism when their career is starting to flag and cry a river of tears about how they were mistreated when they were making money.
The problem in either case being that while Augustine’s plea is deeply human, and fairly normal, the message such a convenient conversion sends is undermined, it’s at cross purposes, it will come across as “do as I say not as I do” to the young, who will take the whole story as permission to sin with an assurance of later acceptance after conversion.
Possible solutions:
There is no problem, they’re probably mostly sincere, you’re just jealous. This might be accurate, I have a teacher’s-pet personality and an autistic focus on fairness in some things. The first time I remember thinking this was as a virginal high school junior-senior, when I went through a weird phase of dating like five girls in a row who all gave a variation on the same story: she wasn’t a virgin, she had lost it to a boyfriend she thought was forever some time last year, but she didn’t want to do it again until she got married, and she was willing to give me a try out for that job. And as an immature seventeen year old boy, I would have probably happily dated a fellow virgin who wanted to wait until marriage, but working toward marrying a girl who had sex with other guys before but made me wait was out of the question. Looking back, I was immature, my analysis of the situation was incorrect, and my jealousy was asinine. Maybe I’m just emotionally wrong about this.
They might not really be sincere, but this is the best case scenario path for them. We want to encourage conversion to our religion, and that means accepting converts where they are. The Prodigal son and all that. Though I find this mostly dissatisfying, in that the Prodigal Son comes home after eating pig slop, rather than having a great time and just sorta coming home one day. His conversion from rock bottom is sincere, it doesn’t tell us what to do with insincere converts.
This is the actual path for converts, growing up. Not everyone is a saint from day one, and really a life path where you have your fun and then mature is the ordered life path we’re aiming for. We don’t actually expect to convert young people, they’re too busy having fun, we just want them to wander back when they’re old. This I find dissatisfying, in that nobody actually preaches this, and accepting it from converts undermines the message to the young by observed example.
Is there something I’m just not seeing here?
This is an interesting question. It’s complicated in subtle ways. You can see the Satiated Sinner Question as a balancing act between justice and mercy. Justice says that errors deserves punishment and righteousness deserves reward. Mercy says that each person must be lovingly motivated to pursue the good regardless of their past, and rewarded in doing so. If you choose justice at the expense of mercy, then a longterm sinner has no motivation to pursue righteousness. The mercy-starved sinner’s future outlook would lack any appetizing reward, and they would be unmotivated in their journey toward betterment. But if you lack justice, then everyone (sinner included) has reduced motivation to pursue the prescribed righteous conduct. Being justice-heavy means that the repentant sinner never obtains the status they otherwise would have had. Being mercy-abundant means that the repentant sinner can easily make up the status they have lost with little effort. The balance is that we must optimally motivate a lifelong sinner to pursue righteousness, and yet optimally motivate the righteous person to pursue even more righteousness!
We can consider a classroom. A justice-heavy teacher allows for no assignment to be made up except for serious and valid reasons. A mercy-abundant teacher allows for poor-performing students to make up an assignment to get them back on track and reinvested in the work. What’s interesting to consider is that the focus with the most utility depends on which student you are dealing with. I can easily imagine a student with a bad home life, dealing with personal issues, who is on the verge of giving up on his class because of how far behind he is. Emphasizing justice does not help him, neither will he “learn” from failure, as his issue stems from motivation and emotional distress. Lovingly allowing him to hand in something simpler, and reducing the standard for him particularly, can result in new motivation in the class, and more importantly a new attachment to the teacher and school generally. A school that cares about him as a particular human with particular issues is a school he can love, which is clearly better for his particular development.
On the other hand, we can imagine a student who ought to have more justice and not more mercy. This is for a student who is lazy and uncaring without excuse, and especially for a student who violates important rules in a selfish deceptive manner. The failure is important so that he learns his behavior is truly punished, so that hopefully he doesn’t repeat it again. Showing him mercy would be counterproductive, whereas in the distressed student it may be productive. My intuition is that this difference is deeply tied to an individual’s health, IQ, spirit and status.
So how do we solve this universal problem?
One solution is to know them, in that “subjective” sense of having a long conversation and trying to determine whether they are an earnest repentant or a satiated sinner. I do believe that human intuition can tell us this. LLMs and AI show us that the most sophisticated technology available to us is often no match to human intuition. While judging someone is a subjective judgement, it’s probably the closest we can get to an objective judgment, because everything else can be gamed, but human intuition is hard to game. Do we give our significant other a test if they violated our trust, or do we instead trust our intuition? Intuition rules over everything here. If it is impossible to fake, then the motivation to be a satisfied sinner is reduced: “what if I can’t fake it when I’m done?”
Another solution is to reduce the reward for their lifestyle and also love them mercifully. This is actually a crucial part of the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son did not recover the full status of what he previously lost! After his profligate spending and ruin, he aimed to become a servant in his father’s household. He remembered that even the servants were well-fed with bread (not exquisite meats). The father embraced his prodigal son with fatherly love (mercifully wishing for his good and loving him), and he celebrated his return with splendor. But the son no longer had a share in his father’s wealth. To his well-behaved son he says “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours”, meaning that the remainder of his wealth goes to the good son — the prodigal son does not deserve to recover the wealth which he wasted. (The word used when the prodigal son demanded his share of the “wealth” is actually “ousia”, which means property or being, and is used in the mysterious epi-ousia, the “super-substantial” or “above-being” bread of the Lord’s Prayer, translated somewhat retardedly as “daily bread”. How many of God’s hired servants have more than enough bread?).
I think this trusty old parable actually sheds a lot of light on this problem. Sinning should always reduce status; the righteous should be greater status than the recently-forgiven. But the return of every sinner onto a Godly path should be greatly celebrated, almost absurdly celebratory. They should be maximally hyped up about it, because that’s for their good. Because “it is fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” But, hyping up and loving a homeless person who cleaned himself up is a lot different from seeing the formerly homeless person as equal in status to some longstanding community member who lived well. The longstanding community member must be respected and honored more in day to day life. (If the former vagabond lives very well for years, then his status should be greatly increased, but never to the height of what his status would be had he not vagabonded. But maybe close to it. I think that’s correct).
The deeper meta pattern of how to socially-prescribe reinforcement for previous defectors comes up a lot, I think. Someone used to say the N word? OnlyFans girl goes trad? Amber Rose speaking at the RNC? I think there’s an instrumental case for quickly rehabilitating defectors, but I think America screws up in how it valorizes and honors the returning defector. If you were a druggie profligate and then became an evangelical pastor, your previous life as a sinner should not be used to enhance your reputation. You can still be a pastor if there is no one better, but speaking about your past should make you feel nauseous, not excited and nostalgic (what it seems like for these people sometimes).
The rub is that hyping up and celebrating the repenter is also part of status. Ask anyone who was a well-behaved and diligent kid with a layabout sibling how they felt when their sibling was praised and hyped up for merely measuring up for once, while their own constant diligence was taken for granted and any lapses were punished much harder than the constant inadequacy of the sibling.
Intentional or coincidental, you’ve hinted at a plot point of the parable:
In our parable-world, the obedient brother never receives a celebration like this, but he did receive other things: the constant connection to his father, the share in his ousia (interpreted either as wealth to inherit or, spiritually, his nature), and lastly the return of his lost brother (and he gets to eat the calf too). Your experiences are somewhat different as you’re describing an over-strictness to the good sibling and an under-strictness to the bad sibling. But, it’s probable that our parable-patriarch was a loving father to his obedient son, advising him and hyping him on many matters. And it is probable also that if the layabout had stayed in his father’s estate (as opposed to defecting away from his whole “kingdom” so to speak) that he would be criticized or at least advised regarding his errors, in a loving fashion. Our layabout son had instead alienated himself from paternal authority altogether: true defection and true sin. And the celebration upon his return shows us the community’s greatest value: not in industry and correctness but in saving the lost and raising the dead (metaphorically), something better for the communal whole and better for emotional wellness. A spiritual social safety net. [you could, plausibly, tie this discussion to the “slack” topic you find in SSC and elsewhere… and how miserable a place like South Korea is, with their emphasis on industry and rank and not spending money lavishly on genuine welfare — competition of brother, not love].
But I don’t think that the parabolic celebration actually confers status on the profligate. It is a costly signal of the love they have for him as a human (and brother) despite his transgressions. And that love is best for him to have, and best for him to associate in his heart with his family, so that he can resume brotherly duties without shame or ill-will. After this celebration, he is not going to take over the estate of his father, and he has no more inheritance. So his status is effectively permanently lower in re wealth and role, but restored completely in re humanness. Today with our homeless crisis, how many profligates refuse to get help because there is no loving paternal figure to meet them halfway and memorably celebrate their return? Instead there’s efficiency bureaucracies, and competition, and status and status and status and status… cultures which promote family over everything have much lower rates of homelessness and drug addiction.
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