Sin is not just bad choices individuals make
In Romans 7, sin seems to have at least as much agency as Paul does.
“The focus on the deeds of alleged individual perpetrators,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates following the Justice Department’s Ferguson report, “obscures the broad systemic corruption which is really at the root.” He’s not writing explicitly about American understandings of sin, but he could be.
Last week, Damon Linker wrote a column about sin, in the Pauline sense of wanting what's good but doing what's evil anyways. Linker posits that when it comes to the deeper fault lines underneath culture-war-type debates, there are essentially two kinds of Americans: those who believe (with Paul) that sin is real, and though who (with Plato) do not. And this plays out in how we interpret, among other things, criminal behavior:
When someone commits a crime, do your instincts tell you to blame the perpetrator's upbringing, background, education? Do you think that the best form of punishment would involve rehabilitation? Then you are, at bottom, a Platonist who rejects the idea of sinful depravity.
