How We Stopped Believing in Sin

Monday, November 10, 2025. This is for David and Amy.

When we stopped believing in sin, we didn’t become innocent; we just lost the words for what was killing us.

The air purifier hums softly in the therapy office. A diploma glows faintly in its frame.

Between the couch and the chair, the silence is designed — professional, tolerant, softly-lit. It’s the kind of silence that never accuses, never discourages, never frowns.

Half a world, and sixteen centuries away, a monk sits in a desert cell copying Evagrius Ponticus’s list of eight evil thoughts.

The wind scratches at the cave walls; the candlelight wavers.

He writes the words as if each one could save a soul: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, pride.

Two rooms, two centuries, each one grappling with the same familiar aches and pains of being human.

From Sin to Symptom

In the fourth century, the monk Evagrius (345–399 AD) described those evil thoughts as the raw data of temptation — inner distortions that separated the soul from its purpose.

His student John Cassian carried them west, and by the late sixth century Pope Gregory the Great compressed them into seven, renaming sadness and acedia as sloth and folding vainglory into pride.

These capital sins — caput meaning “head” — were never about hellfire; they were spiritually diagnostic.

Thomas Aquinas called them the roots of disorder, the forces that bend love inward until it devours itself.

Pride begets deceit. Envy breeds gossip. Wrath breeds cruelty.

It was, in its way, the first working model of psychopathology — moral psychology before psychology had a name.

Modern therapy diagnoses the fruit but forgets the root.
A client says, “I can’t stop comparing myself to others,” and the therapist hears maladaptive cognition, not envy.

The word sin once invited repentance; now it invites discomfort. But maladaptive just invites the client to commit to yet another session.

How We Lost Our Moral Nerve

The Enlightenment built the scaffolding for moral neutrality.

David Hume warned we couldn’t derive an ought from an is, and modern psychology took him literally.

When Sigmund Freud arrived, he secularized confession — the priest became the analyst, and transgression became neurosis.

By the time Carl Rogers coined unconditional positive regard, judgment itself had become taboo. To be “nonjudgmental” became therapy’s highest virtue — and its most subtle failure.

Because therapeutic neutrality is an illusion.

Let’s reason together. Every act of empathy hides a moral premise: that suffering is bad, that honesty is good, that love matters. The therapy couch has always been a moral space; it simply became fashionable at some point to stop calling itself one.

Here’s the problem. In rejecting moralism, therapy has embraced moral drift. We replaced the confessional with a mirror, and see our reflection as redemptive. And now Americans are reaping the harvest of moral negligence both clinically, socially and politically. Even our children and teens are no longer safe.

Therapy as Moral Philosophy by Stealth

Don’t Kid Yourself. Every Therapeutic Tradition Carries Moral DNA:

• Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy channels the Stoics — reminding us that right thought leads to right action.

• Psychodynamic Therapy is fundamentally Augustinian — What we deem sinful must be confessed in order to be healed.

• Humanistic Therapy borrows from Aristotle’s eudaimonia — in which human flourishing is ultimately defined as virtue realized.

The problem isn’t that therapy is moral; it’s that it pretends not to be.

When a therapist says, “I don’t impose my values,” they’ve already imposed one — the supremacy of self-expression over self-restraint.

Moral blindness is still a moral choice. Such statements are the very definition of therapeutic mediocrity.

The Case of the Value-Free Betrayal

A woman tells her therapist, “I slept with my coworker. I did it because my husband never really saw me. I feel like I’m finally being true to myself.” The therapist nods, validates her self-described unmet needs — and therapeutic empathy becomes a kind of complicity.

The marriage collapses. Their 3 children begin to act out. Months later, she tells the same therapist, “I don’t know who I am anymore.”

A moral therapist would have asked: “What does your authenticity mean if it destroys the trust between you and your husband, in front of your kids, in real time?”

That isn’t shaming.

It’s the essence of human moral reasoning — the careful inspection of a moment of hunger that rewrites lives. Therapy’s purpose is not to anesthetize guilt, but to reintroduce a sense of conscience as well as personal agency..

The Seven Deadly Sins in Modern Disguise

The old vices didn’t vanish; they just got much better publicists.

• Pride walks onstage as Confidence — the CEO rehearsing humility for a TED Talk believes he’s cured it.

• Envy calls itself Ambition — the therapist scrolling another therapist’s Instagram under the guise of “networking.”

• Wrath masquerades as authenticity — the man who confuses outrage with integrity, burning every bridge in righteous flame.

• Sloth (Acedia) dresses up as Burnout and Doomscrolling — a spiritual exhaustion that Netflix can’t fix, a life quietly leaking purpose.

• Greed reinvents itself as Hustle Culture — the self-help influencer monetizing “authenticity” one e-course at a time.

• Gluttony moves from table to touchscreen — doomscrolling at 2 a.m., crumbs on the pillow, hungrier than before.

• Lust hides behind Consent Culture — the endless swiping, the counterfeit intimacy, the ache without communion.

What the monks called sin, we now market as self-care.

The Moral Countertransference

Therapists aren’t immune.

Pride appears as professional detachment, envy as jealousy of colleagues, sloth as compassion fatigue.

Wrath shows up as disdain for “resistant” clients.

Greed hides in the overbooked calendar.

Gluttony feeds on conferences and credentials.

Lust lingers in emotional over-involvement — that was Carl Rogers’s own moral blind spot, over which he suffered and pondered greatly.

When therapy loses its moral vocabulary, even the healers start to sicken.

A marriage and family therapist lacking a moral imagination becomes a mere technician — a therapist who manages despair, but never brings any redemptive energy to it.

Our job as therapists is not to normalize dysfunction; it is to, as often as we can, act as a midwife to virtue and a cheerleader for moral clarity..

The Moral Revival of Therapy

The tide is slowly turning.

Fowers & Richardson (1996) on virtue ethics, Viktor Frankl on meaning, and Wright (2010) on character all signal the onset of a modest return to moral sanity.

These thinkers remember what Evagrius knew centuries ago: you cannot emotionally heal a human being without helping them to reorder what they love.

A Morally Awake Therapist does 4 Things Well:

1. Names reality without shaming.

2. Distinguishes guilt from personal responsibility.

3. Treats conscience as an ally, not as a distraction, or pathology.

4. Sees the pursuit of virtue as treatment, not ornament.

The purpose of therapy is not to make people happy but to make them whole — honest, humble, and more fully capable of love.

FAQ

Isn’t this moralism dressed up as therapy?
No. Moralism condemns the person; morality restores the person. Therapy without moral realism doesn’t free the client — it abandons them to drift.

Can therapy be ethical without being religious?
Of course. Moral realism isn’t a doctrine; it’s a fact. You don’t need heaven to know betrayal destroys, or that humility heals.

Isn’t nonjudgment essential to therapy?
Yes — but “nonjudgmental” means compassion without cowardice: seeing clearly without cruelty, but naming what is, and calling attention to consequences.

What’s wrong with unconditional positive regard?
Nothing — until it becomes unconditional affirmation. Empathy without moral guidance is permission disguised as love.

Isn’t this just religion in disguise?
Not at all. Religion borrowed moral language from reality, not the reverse. Neuroscience now finds what the monks intuited: conscience is neurological architecture for meaning.

How can therapists reclaim a moral vocabulary?
We can start by thinking and reading philosophically again — Aristotle, Aquinas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor. We need to clinically reflect more on virtue, because it is in such an alarmingly scant supply.

Remember that virtue ethics was the original trauma-informed care — the science of healing fractured souls through disciplined love.

Final Thoughts

Therapy is never value-free; it’s only value-blind. And blindness is not compassion — it’s squishy cowardice dressed as care. It’s the best that one-size-fits-all clinical mediocrity has to offer.

If the therapist is the modern confessor, then the confessional must be rebuilt — not as a chamber of shame but as a modest workshop for developing personal virtues.

The point is not to feel better, but to become better: to live truthfully, to love rightly, to bear the full weight of freedom.

The Seven Deadly Sins were never about punishment.

They were diagnostic warnings — reminders that the human spirit is both fragile and accountable. We ignore them not because they’re outdated but because they still work.

We are not made for neutrality. We are made to choose.

Every hour in therapy rehearses that choice: between the false peace of self-approval and the hard freedom of moral truth.

Healing begins the moment neutrality dies.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger Bros. (Original work published 1274)

Cassian, J. (1997). Conferences (E. C. S. Gibson, Trans.). Christian Classics Ethereal Library. (Original work published 420)

Evagrius Ponticus. (2003). The praktikos & chapters on prayer (J. E. Bamberger, Trans.). Cistercian Publications. (Original work published 395)

Fowers, B. J., & Richardson, F. C. (1996). Why psychology needs morality. American Psychologist, 51(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.51.1.1

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

Gregory the Great. (1997). Moralia in Job (M. Adriaen, Ed.). Brepols. (Original work published ca. 590)

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage.

MacIntyre, A. (1981). After virtue: A study in moral theory. University of Notre Dame Press.

Rogers, C. R. (1961). On becoming a person: A therapist’s view of psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.

Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.

Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The narcissism epidemic: Living in the age of entitlement. Free Press.

Vitz, P. C. (1994). Psychology as religion: The cult of self-worship (2nd ed.). Eerdmans.

Wright, N. T. (2010). After you believe: Why Christian character matters. HarperOne.