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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?
From a Christian perspective, what matters is repentance and not when it comes. If you truly repent of your sins, even on your deathbed, that's good enough because Jesus paid the price and he forgives you. Notice that wiggle room with the word "truly", though. Christians aren't idiots either, and we know that someone's repentance might not actually be sincere. But that also isn't something we are capable of (nor have the standing for) judging. God has to sort that one out.
From there, it gets more complicated depending on your tradition. From a Catholic perspective (and even some Protestants, e.g. CS Lewis), most people will go through purgatory. This isn't something we know much about, more something that we deduce from two points in the Bible. First, "nothing unclean will enter [heaven]" (Revelation 21:27), and second, "There is no righteous person, not even one" (Romans 3:10 but the sentiment appears many places). So, if nobody is pure, nothing impure can enter heaven, and if we are somehow to be in heaven anyway, that implies some kind of purification that happens. We also have reason to believe that this process is painful, as some people "will be saved, but only as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:15). There are more verses but that's the gist of it.
So, from this perspective the answer to your dilemma about satiated sinners is that those people will not suffer damnation, but there will be consequences for them. They will have to go through the (likely painful) process of being purified from those things before they can enter heaven. Thus it's better to avoid sin (as much as you can), so that you won't need as much purification before you can enter heaven. To use a medical analogy (always a good source of metaphors for sin), the satiated sinner is like someone who has abused the hell out of his body, and then decides to get back into shape. It's totally possible, but it'll be harder and more painful than if he had taken care of his health in the first place.
This tension is noted in the gospels as well. See Matthew 9:
Believers go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince themselves that actually they are indeed super evil and thus deserving of the title "publicans and sinners", as satirized in this Matt & Trey parody of Mormonism where the main character envisions his damnation in hell with Hitler and all the other Bad People because he stole a donut when he was 5.
Of course, actual Protestant theology is even better: you’re condemned not because you ate the donut, but because Adam ate the donut. Err, apple. Well, okay, we don’t know it was an apple, it could have been any fruit (but was probably a fig since Adam and Eve used fig leaves to hide their nakedness). So, let’s say a Fig Newton. Anyway, the point is you inherited this Original Sin by your birth: you were born fallen.
Now that we’ve successfully self-flagellated, we can take our place at the table with the publicans and sinners and Jesus.
——
You can see why actual publicans and sinners find these people a bit insufferable at times.
Speaking of which, can someone turn this water into wine? I’m not a drinker, but I hear it makes these people go away, so that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
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