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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?
As some of the other comments have already pointed out, it's not man's place to determine whether someone has truly converted and repented, it's God's.
In the Gospels, there are two parables (that I can recall of the top of my head) that deal with this issue - The Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), which is relatively well known even to non-Christians, but also the perhaps lesser known the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20) where, abridging siginificantly, the workers who were recruited later and did less work on the vineyard were paid the same who were recruited earlier.
Regardless, there certainly should be a degree of prudential judgement and healthy dose of scepticism about a convert like the one you are describing. That is, someone who seems to be converting merely because it is convenient and beneficial for themselves and not a genuine conversion. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be welcomed by the community broadly, but that they're not necessarily going to get 'benefit' of finding a tradional spouse.
The Catholic perspective on this (I don't have time to go find the supporting sections in the Catechism/other sources) is that God will forgive you of your spiritual sin, but that doesn't mean you're immune from the temporal consequences of your sin. This is fairly obvious when talking about a sin like murder. You still have to serve your prison sentence (and Catholics would broadly support that even if you repented), and when you are released and try to integrate back into society people would rightfully be wary of you even if you became a Christian.
Similarly, a formally promiscuous man or woman may struggle to find an always traditional, virginal woman or man to marry. That's just a temporal consequence of their sin. Maybe if they are sincere then someone may accept them and marry them regardless (perhaps even someone who was in a similar situation!). But quite possibly not. In some sense, it may effectively be penance for their sin. They're not guaranteed marriage, it may not be their vocation.
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