Is It Ever OK To Condemn People?

Wrestling with where safety ends and where confrontation begins

Photo by Hussain Badshah on Unsplash

(A seven-minute read)

As I shared last week, over the last few years, my life and ministry have increasingly prioritized pursuing inclusive community. I have very little appetite to tell people how to live and to point out their sins. I’d rather provide loving spaces for people, allowing the Spirit to grow them in grace at His pace. One of the contemporary buzzwords that I have fully embraced is the idea of “safety.” I want to help people feel spiritually and emotionally safe to be who they are without judgment.

It seems to me that religion in general and Christianity specifically has had an unfortunate track record on this account. This is especially true of so-called “Bible-believing” Christians who are often known more for who and what we condemn than the love that is supposedly at the heart of the Jesus-story. So I almost go out of my way, erring on the opposite side, to steer clear of anything that might hint at a faith that is characterized by condemnation.

But then I read about nineteenth-century chattel slavery.

Over my Christmas vacation I read a short book called Slavery and Sin by Molly Oshatz. She is a scholar of American Christianity and the book details the debates among Protestants in the nineteenth century about slavery. She talks about the staunch abolitionists, who outright condemned slavery and slaveholders, and urged immediate abolition, and then the pro-slavery Protestants, some of whom acknowledged the challenges with slavery but nevertheless viewed it as a sort of “necessary evil.”

What caught my eye the most, however, was the third camp she describes—the sort of via media, whom she calls anti-slavery “moderates.” They believed that slavery was a moral evil and yet they resisted immediate abolition and refused to condemn slaveholders as sinners. They further believed that the only way to truly eradicate slavery was to take a slow, gradual approach, insisting that slaveholders would be won over not by condemnation but by gracious invitation. These moderates thus maintained full Christian fellowship with slaveholders, and insisted they could still be members in good standing in their churches and Christian societies. Slavery was a societal sin, but that didn’t mean slaveholders were automatically and categorically sinners, since they were simply the product of a broken system.

Of course, such an approach didn’t work. As Oshatz points out, there is not a single story of a slaveholder willingly giving up his slaves. It seems that no amount of gentle prodding would have ever led to abolition, and thus taking up arms was ultimately the only—and inevitable—answer.

Which has led to that question of mine: is it ever OK to condemn people? Were the abolitionists right to unequivocally condemn slaveholders? Or was the approach of the moderates more Christlike?

For us, living 160 years later, the answer is quite obvious, I think. And if we have a theology that doesn’t outright condemn nineteenth-century slavery, then something is seriously wrong with our theology—or so it seems to me. (At the same time, we should be extremely humble when it comes to our assumptions about what we would or wouldn’t have done had we been in that situation and weren’t the beneficiaries of decades of hindsight.)

Of course, perhaps some definitions are in order: what do I mean by “condemning people”? I’d say, in its most positive sense and in the context of the slavery question, I simply mean the act of pointing out that a person’s behavior is morally and objectively wrong, that it violates the law of God, and that it must be surrendered and repented of. I would stop short of prognosticating about a person’s eternal destiny if they refuse to give up their morally-reprehensible behavior (e.g., “You’re going to hell if you don’t emancipate your slaves”), yet even this “soft” form of condemnation I’ve described above is something I’m hesitant to do.

But for me, the slavery question clarifies in my mind that there is a time to, in the words of one of my favorite writers, “call sin by its right name.” There are occasions when we need to stop equivocating and confront blatant evil.

So the question is not really whether we should condemn evil and warn people who persist in it, but when we should do so. What are the circumstances that should lead us to shed our commitment to inclusivity and safety and speak out unequivocally against certain behaviors—and those who would commit such behaviors? Furthermore, what are the actions (that is, repeated, unrepented-of-actions) that should lead us to exclude people from community and religious fellowship with us?

This is obviously a huge question and one that I am wrestling with—and I don’t have a clear answer. But it seems to me that there are a few rules of thumb that could provide some guidance as we navigate this landscape:

1. Less is more. If we condemn everything, it’s as good as condemning nothing. It therefore seems to me that we should be primarily known for our gentleness, patience, and forbearance, rather than our condemnation. If people generally view us as loving and kind people, then speaking up on rare occasions about certain behaviors will make all the greater impact. We should, in other words, lead with non-condemning love—and speaking out and condemning certain behaviors should largely be the exception rather than the norm.

2. Only condemn behaviors that directly hurt other human beings. I think the reason that Bible-believing Christians are known for being judgmental is not because we’re outspoken, but because we’re, generally, outspoken about the wrong behaviors. We usually focus on and condemn matters of personal piety that don’t directly hurt other human beings. We thus make a big deal about what people wear, eat, drink, watch, or listen to, but pay little attention to matters that negatively affect people beyond the practitioner themselves. In short, we major in minors, and largely ignore actions that actually do diminish, degrade, or abuse others.

A classic example is condemning religious communities that affirm women in ministry, but turning eerily silent when widespread sexual abuse is uncovered in our own faith communities.

3. Use “we” instead of “you” as much as possible. Even when we speak out about behaviors, we should remain humble, implicating ourselves as much as possible in our condemnation. The Bible makes much of the corporate nature of sin, recognizing that we are all made of the “same dough,” so to speak, and capable of the same behaviors, if the circumstances allowed. We thus see examples in Scripture where the biblical writers and prophets used the first-person plural—i.e., “we”—when condemning sin, rather than “you.” The prophet Daniel repeatedly declared that “we have sinned” when He petitioned God in Daniel 9. He identified with his people when they were in Babylonian captivity, acknowledging that he was a part of the problem when Judah violated God’s covenant, and it was not simply others who had done so.

This does not mean we have to constantly be wishy-washy in our denunciation of abusive and oppressive behaviors, refusing to explicitly call them out. There are definitely times when we need to be bold and be brash, and sometimes people are called to live a more “prophetic” life where they spend significant time and energy turning the spotlight at systemic evils. But such a posture must be aligned with the Spirit rather than stemming from our self-appointed and sometimes self-righteous positions.

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My apologies for getting this week’s column out to you late. If you haven’t noticed by now, I have a harder time getting a column to you on Tuesday mornings when there is a holiday in the US on Mondays. But yesterday’s holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, dovetails with the above piece. I hope you had a chance, like I did, to spend time reflecting on the meaning of the day and how much more work needs to be done. I try to read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” ever year, as it presents a very sobering assessment of what he dealt with—and what I believe, sadly, people of color are still dealing with today. May we never stop pursuing justice.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.