In evangelical ideology, sin is bad because it separates you from God, not because you hurt another person

Image text: "Isaiah 61:1a. The spirit of the sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor." Image source.

Here's a good post from Sheila Wray Gregoire: Who Is the Real Victim When Men Lust? Every Man’s Battle Says It’s Men! It's about how the book "Every Man's Battle" (a best-selling book in Christian culture) seems to have the assumption that the reason it's bad when a man lusts is that it damages the man's purity. The authors of "Every Man's Battle" don't seem to have any awareness of how men's lust can be harmful to the women who are being objectified/harassed/assaulted because of that lust.

This is a very good point, and I want to talk about how it connects to evangelical Christianity's overall concept of what sin is, and what the gospel is. 

Evangelicalism teaches that this is the main message of Christianity, the "good news" we are supposed to share with the world: We have all sinned, and therefore we all deserve to go to hell. God cannot tolerate any sin at all- only perfect people who have never sinned can be in God's presence. But, fortunately, Jesus lived a perfect sinless life and died for us. This solves the problem of us being separated from God because of our sin (which is the biggest problem we have)- when we believe in Jesus, God forgives our sins, and we can go to heaven.

In this framing, when someone sins, it's bad because it means they have committed a terrible offense against a holy and perfect God, and therefore they deserve to go to hell. They desperately need Jesus' forgiveness. When I was a little kid, hearing gospel presentations in Sunday school, it was all about making us feel bad for how terrible we are because we are sinners and God is judging us.

So when they talk about "sin", as an abstract concept, it leads us to have empathy for the sinner. We feel bad for them because they are in danger of going to hell, and we want to save them. And also, we can't really judge them too much, because we are sinners too.

There's very little concern for the victims of your sin- the people you are sinning against. Actually, the way that I understood the definition of "sin" when I was evangelical, it doesn't even need to have a victim. It just meant I was breaking God's rules. Like if I had a selfish thought, or I didn't prioritize my daily bible reading, or if I dated someone that God didn't give me permission to date.

(The example that really takes the cake is Psalm 51, where David writes, "Against you, you only, have I sinned". Yeah, this is after David raped Bathsheba, then when he found out she was pregnant, he had her husband killed, and married her, then the prophet Nathan came and said that was wrong, and as a punishment, the baby would die. In David's prayer of repentance he says, "Against you, you only, have I sinned" as if the problem was just between him and God and didn't really affect anyone else.)

Reading arguments from gay Christians in support of same-sex relationships, that's where I came across the idea that sin is defined as something that hurts people, and it blew my mind. I had never thought about sin that way before. Upon hearing this, I listed a few commonly-recognized sins- lying, stealing, cheating on one's spouse- and was surprised to find that they did share a common thread of you're doing harm to another person. Was that really what "sin" meant? Well, Romans 13:8-10 says it is:

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

The apostle Paul is saying here that all you need to know is "Love your neighbor as yourself." Similarly, Jesus said the 2 greatest commandments are to love God and love your neighbor as yourself, and "All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." Sin is *not* about reading through the bible and making a list of everything God said not to do, however arbitrary it may seem. Sin is hurting people. 

And the gospel... In evangelicalism, the gospel is good news for people who feel bad about their sin and worry that it means they will go to hell. Evangelicalism claims that this is the main problem that we need to be saved from. But check this out; I believe something completely different now: I believe the gospel is good news for the victims, for the marginalized, for those who are suffering, for those who are suffering the effects of other people's sin.

Sin is not just between you and God, where you did something bad, and so you are deserving of sympathy because now you are at risk of going to hell. No, sin affects other people, and the sympathy should be for the people on the receiving end of it.

The starkest example I have experienced, of these two opposite ways of understanding "sin" and "the gospel", was when I was part of a Christian group in college, and we were planning a series of events we called Human Trafficking Awareness Week. (I wrote about this in 2013: How "the gospel" almost stopped us from fighting human trafficking.) We knew that human trafficking was bad, and we wanted to raise awareness and take action against it. And also, we were evangelical, so we felt it was important to "share the gospel" at our outreach events.

But we couldn't figure out how to get from "let's fight human trafficking" to the gospel. We thought long and hard, and couldn't come up with anything that could work as a natural connection between the two. We believed the message of "the gospel" was "you, as an individual, have sinned against God, and so you deserve to go to hell, but good news! Jesus forgives you!" And that didn't seem to have anything to do with the realities of injustice in the world, and our obligation to take action to fight it.

And now I'm like, really? Seriously? We couldn't figure out how freedom for the captives has anything to do with the main message of Christianity? I guess we never paid attention to how Jesus began his ministry on earth by proclaiming:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

    because he has anointed me

    to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

    and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Proclaim good news to the poor! Set the oppressed free! Freedom for the captives! *This* is what Jesus came to do. It's not about how every individual needs to make a private spiritual deal with God in order to escape hell; it's about transforming this world into the kingdom of heaven, defined by love, justice, and freedom.

That's the gospel. And, I would say, if our Christianity is not "good news to the poor", then it's not good news at all; it's not the gospel. 

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And also, I didn't want to get into this because it could be a whole separate post, but: the power dynamics about what sorts of "sins" result in people being shamed and labelled as "sinners." Why is it that when Christians say someone is "living in sin", they mean a couple who is living together and presumably having sex, without being married? Why don't we say that employers who don't pay their workers a living wage are "living in sin"?

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Related:

Being Right vs Doing Good

"The Big Wide Welcome" (kids' book review) 

Forgiveness for Sins You Don't Know You've Committed

Why did I think David was the good guy in the story of Abigail?

Don't Protect God

Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)

"Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient

Blogaround

 Links not related to the antichrist:

1. 一隻哈巴狗 (2022) In case you are interested in what songs Chinese toddlers are listening to. This is a cute little song about a pug.

2. PHOTOS: Laundry is a chore but there's a beauty and serenity in the way it hangs out (January 10) "Castañeda Lee photographed locals in hopes of appreciating the invisible workers on the other side of Cambodian tourism, who spend hours each day doing the laundry of tourists."

3. Inside a Gaza medical clinic at risk of shutting down after an Israeli ban (January 11) "'I am trying to provide the best care to patients because I know they don't have any access to this kind of care elsewhere,' Harb says, adding there's a waitlist of people trying to get in."

4. Author Philip Yancey Confesses Affair, Withdraws from Ministry (January 6)

The Terrible Takes on Philip Yancey’s 8-Year Affair (January 12) "I don’t want to be married to someone whose only reason for not falling into bed with another woman is that Jesus performed a miracle."

Something I was thinking about this: So, the conservative Christian response to these kinds of scandals is 'don't judge, we are all sinners, we are all equally guilty, it could have been any of us falling to the temptation to cheat on our spouse [or sexually abuse children, or whatever the scandal is this time].' And then the progressive Christian response is like, 'hey, this sin-levelling is not cool, presenting it like the victims and the perpetrators are equally sinful, so we can't judge or hold people accountable. No, in reality we are NOT all just 1 bad decision away from having an affair, okay? That's not normal! You can say we're all sinners, but not like that, gosh. Some sins are way worse than others.'

So it's like... the conservative Christian point of view is that we're all horrible sinners, and the progressive Christian point of view is there are 2 types of people: 

1. Normal people who just sin in normal ways, like, you yelled at someone about something that wasn't their fault because you were in a bad mood. That's wrong, you should apologize for that. But we don't judge people as a Bad Person Forever if they do these kinds of little normal sins. We've all done things like that before.
2. People who do something really bad, that's totally beyond-the-pale. They are a completely different type of person from us normal people; we are very much NOT "all" susceptible to the temptation to do something so terrible. We shouldn't have empathy for these people, or think we can relate to them. They should be shunned from public life and we can never say any good things about them again.

This "2 types of people" perspective also seems bad. (To be clear, I haven't really seen it presented so explicitly like this- this is my own summary.) So I'm wondering what a better perspective would be. 

Maybe something like this: There's a spectrum of bad things that people might do, and at different points along the spectrum, we should respond with different levels of concern for the victims and for the perpetrators. Towards the lower end of the spectrum, it's like, well, that was wrong, but your victims are also imperfect people who have done similar things, so like, you have to apologize, and then all of us work together to become better people. Towards the higher end, our primary response should be to help and support the victims, and we shouldn't spend our efforts on caring about the perpetrator. But hopefully the perpetrator has somebody in their life who cares about them and will try to get them to be a better person. But that's not something that most people should care about- mostly we should care about helping the victims.

So rather than a clear line dividing the "2 types of people", it's a spectrum where the proportions of "how much we want to help the victims" vs "how much we want to help the perpetrator" gradually change.

See also, this post I wrote in 2015: "Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Nationwide anti-ICE protests call for accountability after Renee Good's death (January 11) "At least 1,000 events across the U.S. were planned for Saturday and Sunday, according to Indivisible, a progressive grassroots coalition of activists helping coordinate the movement it calls 'ICE Out For Good Weekend of Action.'"

Photos: Protests grow over the fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis (January 8) 

January 10, 2026 (via) "In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: 'That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,' only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out 'F*cking b*tch' after he killed her."

2. National Park Service will void passes with stickers over Trump's face (January 9) "The use of an image of Trump on the 2026 pass — rather than the usual picture of nature — has sparked a backlash, sticker protests, and a lawsuit from a conservation group."

3. The CDC just sidelined these childhood vaccines. Here's what they prevent (January 9) "Before routine administration of the current rotavirus vaccines began in 2006, about 70,000 young children were hospitalized and 50 died every year from the virus."

4. Tomorrow never knows (January 7) "And then — because their lives are governed by the need for everyone, everywhere to always line up behind every mandatory Proper Christian Stance on everything — they probably would have guessed that you were testing them about their adherence to the PCS on something like melting glaciers and climate change."

Rep. Lieu Says Illegal for Military to Use Force Against Greenland Without Congress Authorization (January 8) "If any military member, including the generals on down...participate in the use of military force against Greenland without congressional authorization, they are following illegal orders."

5. Over 400,000 Transgender People Have Moved States Since Trump's Election (January 9)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Cracker Barrel, Anglican Converts, and Tradition’s Aesthetic (August 25, via) "That draw into nostalgia—even or especially nostalgia for something we never experienced like the rural South of the 1930s or the high medieval English cathedral—can drive us to over-inflate continuities between ourselves and the past and to idealize rituals, expressions and—in the case of church and Cracker Barrel—aesthetics we think capture our imagined communities in their purest form."

Related to this is the idea that white people have a culture. I didn't get that when I was growing up- I thought the way I lived was just the regular way, and other people who ate weird food and celebrated weird holidays did so because it was their culture. The link talks about the misconception that the liturgical rituals in the Anglican church are the same as those from the very beginning of the church- the idea that these rituals are just neutral and normal and the way it always was- no, this is not true.

2. More Drowning Children (March 21) "God notices there is one extra spot in Heaven, and plans to give it to either you or your neighbor. He knows that you jump in the water and save one child per day, and your neighbor (if he were in the same situation) would save zero. He also knows that you are willing to pay 80% of the cost of a lifeguard, and your neighbor (who makes exactly the same amount of money as you) would pay 0%. However, in reality, the river and the drowning children are going by your house, not your neighbor’s house. Which of you should get the spot in Heaven?"

3. AI Companies’ Race for Engagement Has a Body Count (August 28, via) "Instead of providing meaningful safety measures, transparency, age assurance, and data privacy protections, Meta and others have chosen to build platforms that deliberately blur the line between human and machine."

The thing that really gets me about this is, I know that some people will respond by saying, well, that's just how an LLM is, you don't really know how it works internally or what it's going to do in every situation, so this is not anybody's fault, it's just the way it is. But I think this is the wrong way of looking at it- companies should be held accountable for making a product that will respond in unpredictable (and possibly dangerous) ways. There's no guarantee that this is safe, and yet they're selling it.

4. BREAKING: Eurgh, oh God, there’s a texture (August 29, via) "Even when you successfully manage to scrub away the last of the peanut butter, its memory will stain your hands, causing you to experience a level of anguish previously only felt by Lady Macbeth."

This is so real. This is exactly what it's like.

5. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Make Their First Public Appearance as an Engaged Couple—Just a Few Miles From NFL Star’s $6 Million Mansion (August 29) Aww that's great! (I am a Taylor Swift fan.)

6. Un-Reformed history (August 28) "Bai imagines that he’s positioning himself as a reasonable centrist and Serious Person because he’s rejecting “critical race theory,” but what he’s actually rejecting is total depravity and original sin."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention facility to be empty 'within a few days' (August 28) 

2. 2 firefighters arrested by Border Patrol at Washington’s Bear Gulch Fire (August 28) "In a statement Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray slammed the arrests as unnecessary, and demanded “immediate answers” as to why the men were arrested on the job, and what the immigration enforcement policy is during active wildfires."

3. Hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children can stay in the U.S. for now, judge says (August 31) "'In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala,' said Efrén Olivares, a lead attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. 'We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm.'"

Also: A high schooler stays back as his family, separated by deportation, returns to Guatemala (April 26) "Two weeks after federal officials arrested his father, Alex drove his mom and siblings to the airport for their flight to Guatemala. He's faced with finishing his senior year of high school without his mom or dad and finding a way to make it on his own with his older brother. Alex just turned 18."

4. Michigan AG Warns UM Hospitals Not To Capitulate Over Trump's Trans Ban, Calls Decision Likely "Illegal" (August 27) "'This administration draws most of its power from the willingness of its targets to capitulate without a fight, abandoning their own principles and interests, and throwing disfavored populations under the bus,' Nessel continued. 'Despite repeated successful legal challenges to actions by this administration, UM has chosen instead to sacrifice the health, well-being, and likely the very lives of Michigan children, to protect itself from the ire of an administration who, oftentimes, engages in unlawful actions itself.'"

5. Another major medical association breaks from CDC as ob/gyn group recommends Covid-19  vaccines during pregnancy (August 23) "'While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently removed its recommendation that pregnant and lactating individuals receive updated COVID-19 vaccines, ACOG’s recommendations have not changed,' according to the updated practice advisory. 'The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to recommend the use of updated COVID-19 vaccines in individuals contemplating pregnancy and in pregnant, recently pregnant, and lactating individuals.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Court fails transgender youth (June 23) "If the law treats you differently than it treats someone else, there has to be a reason for it. And the reason can’t just be that the people who make the laws don’t like you."

2. Repentance Theater and the Evangelical Closet (June 24) [content note: sexual assault mention] "Let’s be honest. If Tait had come out years ago as a gay man, even one striving to live in harmony with his faith, he would’ve been excommunicated by CCM and booted off Christian radio so fast, his dreadlocks would’ve flown off." Very true.

3. GOP Lawmaker Nearly Dies Due to Abortion Ban—Then Blames the Left (June 24) "But Florida’s six-week abortion ban, which had just been enacted, made those medical professionals hesitant to save Cammack’s life because they feared they’d lose their licenses, or even be prosecuted and sent to jail."

4. Microbial evolution…in spaaaace! (June 21) "Anyway, they swabbed the crew quarters and discovered a novel bacterial species, Niallia tiangongensis."

5. Farads (June 23) From xkcd.

6. Zohran Mamdani Beats Andrew Cuomo for NY Mayoral Bid—Without Abandoning Trans People (June 25) "Mamdani is also the only mayoral candidate out of the crowded Democratic pool who appears to have participated in the protests against NYC hospitals complying in advance to Trump’s anti-trans health care legal threats."

7. Journal Club: Asexuality and Birth Order Effects (June 26) "We thought it might be too early read into the particulars of the results."

8. How many kids go to work instead of school? (June 26) "Asia has embraced that philosophy with positive results. The percentage of children who work has dropped from 13% in 2008 to just 3% in 2024 — from 114 million to 28 million."

9. “No War Here”: The Iranian Couple Who Escaped Conflict to Sell Out at China Expo (June 25) "'Everyone simply wanted to help a couple who had gone through so much to come here from a war-torn country,' Sun said. 'They just wanted to make a little money, and we were all willing to help fulfill that wish.'"

Also from Sixth Tone: Second Life: China’s Top Resale App Now Fuels Its Wildest Gig Market (June 27) "For 40 yuan ($6) an hour, Huang Mingyu hired a 25-year-old to roam the streets of a small city in eastern China, asking strangers if they’d seen her missing bird."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. What Should You Do if ICE Comes to Your Restaurant? (June 23, via) "While you’re recording, say all the things like You don’t have a warrant. We don’t authorize you to be here."

2. Stop asking the wrong question. Be a neighbor. (June 25) "Here, as ever and as always, the most important question is the one asked 2,000 years ago by an unnamed Bible scholar talking to Jesus of Nazareth: 'Who is my neighbor?'"

3. ICE is Helping Predators Scam Immigrants (June 18) "In the case of undocumented immigrants who sought out the con artists specifically because they do not – can not – trust American law enforcement officers to abide by the law and protect their rights, how can we expect them to go to the police, or the FBI, or even their local city council meetings? We as a society have abandoned them, and an abandoned person is just fresh meat for the next predator to come along."

4. ICE arrested a 6-year-old boy with leukemia at immigration court. His family is suing. (June 25) "'Hundreds, if not thousands, of law-abiding noncitizens have been arrested in immigration courts in recent weeks, despite a federal court ruling that the new ICE courthouse arrest policy is unlawful and unconstitutional,' she said. 'Targeting children under this policy is simply unconscionable.'"

5. Kilmar Abrego Garcia to stay in jail as lawyers spar over potential deportation if he is released pending trial (June 25) "At bottom, the government asks the court to save it from itself because it may suffer irreparable harm completely of its own making."

ICE and Hell

Sticks. Image source.

While the Israelites were in the wilderness, a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day. Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly, and they kept him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man must die. The whole assembly must stone him outside the camp.” So the assembly took him outside the camp and stoned him to death, as the Lord commanded Moses.

Numbers 15:32-36

What do you do with this passage, if you're a good Christian who believes in biblical inerrancy?

The first time reading it, there's a shock, your conscience jumps up and says NO, this is not fair. But you know you can't listen to your conscience, if it says the bible is wrong about something, if it says God was wrong about something. No, you are a good Christian who believes the bible. So, you have to find a way to believe that it was right that this man was executed for the "crime" of gathering wood on the Sabbath.

The apologetics arguments get trotted out. You see, God's laws were very serious, and people DID deserve to die for breaking them. You see, this man was blatantly disrespecting God, acting like he knew better than God. You see, this was around the time period when the Israelites had just come out of Egypt and were establishing themselves as a new nation, setting up their laws to say what kind of nation they would be- and so it was very important to their national identity that everyone got the message that those laws were serious.

There are 2 choices here. You could continue to assert that this was not fair- the bible is wrong about this, God was wrong about this. You would need to change your whole religion. You would need to change your whole perspective on what the bible is, and what kind of God you follow. You would need to ask uncomfortable questions about why the good Christian role models in your church believe in that kind of a God. Or, the second option, you can just make yourself believe everything is fine. That Sabbath-breaker really did deserve to die. The moral of this bible story is, don't gather sticks on the Sabbath if God said not to. Don't break any of God's laws, no matter how minor, because then you'll deserve to die too. Then it will be right for God to order your execution.

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Most Christians don't know this bible story, about the man who was executed for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Evangelicals talk a big game about how the bible is so important and special and inerrant and we have to devote ourselves to reading it every day, memorizing it, every single verse is inspired by God and authoritative over our lives. They always talk about that, but very very few actually do it. Very very few have read the whole bible. I was one of the nerds who actually did.

You go to any Sunday school class and ask people what they think about the story of the man who was executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath, and the overwhelming majority will have no idea what you're talking about.

In a way, it's the truly devoted bible nerds who have it the hardest- the way we have to kill our consciences. Sure, churches are full of people saying "we believe the bible" but they don't even know what they're saying. The apologetics nerds know. The apologetics nerds know that we have signed on to worship a God who ordered a man to be executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath. We know. We have done the work of killing our consciences so we can continue to be good Christians who worship this God.

Especially the bible nerds who are children. Adults all around them, telling them "wow it's so great that you're reading the bible all the time." Adults who perhaps don't know what's in the bible- and the kids don't know that the adults don't know. The kids hear "it's so great that you're reading the bible" and understand it to mean "yes, we all believe it was right that this man was executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath, and you need to believe that too, to be a good kid."

But even though most evangelicals don't know this bible story, here are some things they do openly preach: Every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God. All of us deserve to go to hell, because we are all sinners. 

Yes, really. When I was a child, I was taught that since I had committed some average sins that children commit, like hitting my sister, that meant I deserved to die and go to hell. But, they said, the good news is, Jesus came and died on the cross to take our sins away- if we believe in Jesus, we can get out of the punishment we deserve, and go to heaven instead.

(Very interesting that when telling this "good news," you don't need to mention anything about the Resurrection...)

How does this make sense? How can someone deserve to be tortured forever in hell because of some little mistakes they made? Well, according to this ideology, "every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God." In other words, because God is so perfect, even if your sin is just a little bit wrong, it is magnified to be this huge, disgusting, horrific crime, when you look at it in comparison to the holiness of God. God is so perfect, and that's why we all deserve to go to hell.

We all deserve to go to hell. But, fortunately, we can believe in Jesus, to get out of it. But there was always the feeling that it was in some sense wrong that we could escape hell in this way. *We* don't deserve it- it's Jesus covering us, covering up who we really are, to sneak us into heaven. Evangelicals literally say that if you believe in Jesus, "when God looks at you, he doesn't see your sin, he sees Jesus' sinlessness covering you."

Sometimes I happen across non-Christians who seem to assume that Christianity is meant to be about helping people and making the world better, and it's always a bit jarring to me because, where did they get that idea, that is very much NOT what I was taught Christianity is about, in the evangelical church. Or I happen across Christians who were raised in progressive churches, who believe Christianity is about helping people and making the world better, and talk about it like it's the most natural thing- this also shocks me. 

(See: Nothing about the Good News Club shocks me)

Because, yes, I'm still a Christian but I'm not evangelical any more; yes, now I do believe Christianity should be about helping people and making the world better. As Jesus taught us to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." But damn, how hard I had to fight to get here. When I was evangelical, I believed that the main point of Christianity is that we're all sinners who deserve to go to hell, but Jesus died to save us, and we need to spread the good news, to help people escape hell. That stuff about helping people and making the world better, sure, that's nice, we should also do that, but not too much- we don't want it to be a distraction that takes our focus away from the main point, preaching about sin and hell and Jesus' death that saves us. 

Wouldn't it be terrible if we helped people have a better life on earth, but then they went to hell for eternity?

Actually, having compassion for "sinners"/ victims of tragedies might be a bad thing, because it might make us lose sight of how serious God's law is, how BAD sin is- any little tiny sin means that people deserve to go to hell. Kill your conscience before it deceives you into believing there's something wrong with God's justice.

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Sometime around 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, and revealed how common it is that unarmed Black people are killed by police. Frequently when this happens, the police and/or random people on the internet come up with all kinds of justifications for why the Black victim deserved to die. Oh, he was a suspect in a robbery. Oh, he didn't comply with the police officer's commands. Oh, he was arrested for using drugs, one time, years ago. Oh, he was wearing a hoodie. Oh, we pored over all his social media and found a photo he posted where he kinda looks like a gang member.

Your conscience jumps up and tells you NO, this is not fair, but then society's anti-black racism supplies you with all these stories you can tell yourself, to get your conscience to calm down and accept everything is okay. Just like with the man in the bible who gathered wood on the Sabbath, wouldn't it be easier to just believe he deserved it? 

Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy have been trained to accept these flimsy justifications for why someone deserved to die for some kind of minor "sin."

(And also, the reason the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is used is to very intentionally NOT make the argument "this specific victim didn't deserve to die, because they were a good person and did things right." To NOT get dragged into arguments about whatever minor things a victim may have done wrong, but instead to say that NOBODY deserves to get shot in the street.)

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When I was in college and really "on fire for God," I had it all figured out. You see, the reason that sometimes bad things happen is that we all deserve to go to hell anyway- this is God's justice. And the reason good things happen is God's mercy- God loves us and wants to give us good things, even though we don't deserve them.

This is actually a pretty Calvinist way of thinking- some evangelicals are Calvinist and some are not- and it's quite a tidy answer to the Problem of Evil. Maybe it's the only answer I've ever heard that holds together logically (besides just not believing in God at all). 

Why do tragic things happen? Why do people die in earthquakes? Why is there child abuse? Well, actually, we all deserve to have those things happen. Actually, we deserve worse- we all deserve to go to hell. So really, you can't complain about this stuff- you deserve worse. 

It's logical, but it's monstrous.

Better to not have an answer to the Problem of Evil, than to believe in this.

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The story about the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath comes from the Old Testament, around the time that God was giving the Law to Moses. In the New Testament, Jesus came along and did things a little differently. He treated people with kindness and love, rather than judging them for their sins. People criticized him for spending time with tax collectors and prostitutes and other "sinners."

Evangelicals believe we should follow Jesus' example. We should also show love to sinners (ie, everyone), rather than being mean to them about it. 

But there's always a sense that there was something a little bit... wrong about what Jesus did. That in reality, these people really were sinners, and they really did deserve to go to hell, and Jesus sort of offered them a temporary oasis of acceptance that wasn't really *right*, from the perspective of God's justice. And when we follow Jesus' example, and we love "sinners", we hope that this convinces them to believe in Jesus and get saved- otherwise yeah they'll go to hell, and they'll deserve it.

The message that evangelicals preach is "God loves you even though you are a sinner who deserves to go to hell." Yes, really, literally, they really say this- this isn't me rephrasing it to make it sound worse- they literally put it this way, and they think it's good news. 

I have also literally heard evangelicals say we need to "love the unlovable." Show kindness toward everyone, but always remember they don't deserve it. But that doesn't mean we're better than other people- remember, we also don't deserve anything good.

The message is not "you deserve God's love." LOL! Oh my goodness, LOLOLOLOL! Of course not! HA!

No, the message is: you deserve to go to hell, but fortunately God is doing something that's a little bit wrong, in a certain sense- to let Jesus' suffering count as payment for your sins, so you don't have to go to hell. Be thankful that Jesus lets you sneak in through this loophole, because you sure as hell don't deserve it.

(The Slacktivist has written [here's one link, but if you know of additional links from his blog, please help me out and leave a comment, I remember he has written other posts about this] about how this is sort of contradictory- how evangelicals believe that people deserve to go to hell, but at the same time, we need to warn them about hell, and tell them the good news about Jesus, so they can avoid hell- and if you're too scared to "share the gospel" with your friends, you should feel bad, it's partly your fault if your friends go to hell. So, it's right for God to send people to hell, but also, we should try to prevent it. What?)

But now, I'm not evangelical, and now, I believe people deserve God's love, simply because we are people. We deserve happiness. We all deserve the opportunity to live a good life. Damn, how hard I had to work to get here.

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Right now, we're seeing a lot of news articles about ICE deporting undocumented immigrants in the US. And what I fear is, evangelicals will say, well, it's fine, they were here illegally, so, they deserve it, right? 

For any small sin we commit, we deserve to die and go to hell. So how can you be upset if someone commits the "sin" of being undocumented, and then they get their whole life uprooted and get deported because of it?

We all deserve to go to hell. We all deserve to go to a prison in El Salvador.

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But you may have noticed, isn't there a double standard? Isn't the president literally a felon- why does he get to be president, while other people's minor "crimes" mean they get deported?

And we see this in the bible too- there are bible characters who were killed by God for some minor "sin," while other bible characters who commit worse sins are held up as heroes and role models. King David raped Bathsheba and murdered her husband, and at the same time, King David is called "a man after God's own heart" and seen as a great follower of God, whose example we should learn from.

I would explain the logic like this: Yes, people deserve to die for their minor sins. If you read about this happening in the bible, and you are sad for the victims and you think it's unfair, well, you're challenging God. How dare you. But at the same time, yeah, God loves us and doesn't want to give us the punishment we deserve. Isn't it great, when we see people not getting the punishment they deserve? Isn't it great that David, though he was a sinner like we are, still got to be the king and was loved by God?

So basically what it shakes out to is: When bad things happen to some strangers far away, it's best if you can convince yourself to not care. Wouldn't it be easier to find some minor thing they did wrong, and to believe they deserved what happened to them? But when something bad happens to someone we can relate to, we care about them and we want to fight for them and help them. And we say, isn't it wonderful that God is merciful and forgiving?

(Hmm, this seems like it might be a little bit racist.)

(And, to clarify, I'm not saying *every* time something bad happens far away, evangelicals believe it's fine. I'm saying evangelicals believe it's fine when they have an incentive to believe that those who did it are "the good guys"- ie, God, the US government, etc.)

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As I've said before, the belief that "we all deserve to go to hell" ruins anything good about Christianity. It can be used to excuse any kind of atrocity. I worry about what's going on right now with immigrants being deported. I worry because I know that evangelicals- who believe in the bible and believe in hell- have been trained not to care.

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Related:

I Deserve God's Love 

Everyone Else's Nadab and Abihu Fanfics 

"Sodom and Gomorrah" is a story about living in a "bad neighborhood" 

"Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient

John Piper Said "There Are No Innocent Children" and I am Not the Least Bit Surprised 

Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)

"The Berenstain Bears: The Very First Easter" (kids' book review)

Book cover for "The Berenstain Bears: The Very First Easter." 

I got this book for my kids: The Berenstain Bears: The Very First Easter. Here's my review of it.

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Summary

This is a book which gives a very basic outline of these events from the bible: Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, praying in the garden of Gethsemane, Judas's betrayal, Jesus being questioned by Pilate, the crucifixion, the angel at the tomb, and Jesus appearing to his disciples again after his resurrection. Each of these events is described pretty briefly, just a few sentences.

All the characters are depicted as bears because this is the Berenstain Bears universe.

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My take on this book

My son is at the age where he's learning to read. My daughter is at the age where she likes to tear books with her fast little hands. This book is not for her, lol. It's paperback.

I'm starting to teach my son bible stories, but he doesn't know that many of them yet. We don't go to church, and yeah, you know from all my other blog posts that I have a lot of issues with how bible stories are typically presented to children. I want him to know the stories, but I want to avoid all the problematic messages I got from these stories when I was growing up evangelical.

For the Easter story specifically, my 2 main concerns in telling this story to kids are:

1. How much graphic violence is shown when Jesus is tortured and crucified?
2. Does it say "Jesus died for your sins" or anything like that?

The Easter story, as told in the bible, is extremely violent. Jesus is beaten, flogged, a crown of thorns is stabbed onto his head, he is forced to carry his cross, his hands and feet are nailed to the cross, and then after he dies, a soldier stabs a spear into his side. 

It's a lot!

In my experience, Christians are a little bit too enthusiastic about how graphically violent this all was. Making a big deal about how Jesus needed to die the worst death ever, to pay for all our sins. How it was so horrific but he chose to do it out of love for us, and we should feel really really bad about our sins that did this to him.

I don't view it this way any more. I've read stuff from black Christians and/or feminist Christians who do NOT see it as a good thing that Jesus [supposedly] suffered the maximum possible amount of suffering. In the book, "The Cross and the Lynching Tree," James Cone says that Jesus was lynched. American Christians should all read James Cone. I've read articles from feminist Christians about why it's harmful to portray Jesus' suffering as a good thing- this has direct consequences in the way that women are socialized to put up with bad behavior from men, and marginalized people are told to accept their oppression because suffering is good for them and God will reward them in the long run- like, hey, it's not cool to tell people that suffering is a good thing because it makes them like Jesus- how about instead, we make society better so that people don't have to suffer in the first place?

Okay but can we get back to talking about the Berenstain Bears? How does this book portray the violence of Jesus' death?

This book doesn't really show any of the violence at all- it just says Jesus was hung on a cross, and died, and the illustration shows the silhouettes of people on the three crosses, but it doesn't show any violence beyond that. No blood. Nothing at all about Jesus being beaten/flogged.

I think this approach is very good. I want my son to know the basic plot points of the story, but I don't think there's any need to show all the graphic violence to kids.

And for my second concern: Does this book say anything about "Jesus died for your sins"? Because I don't want to teach my kids that.

No, "The Berenstain Bears: The Very First Easter" doesn't say "Jesus died for your sins." It pretty much just gives a simple overview of the story, and doesn't get into any questions about why things happened or what they mean. It doesn't say anything at all about what Jesus' death and resurrection mean for us. Seriously. Nothing. It doesn't say anything about sin. There's no "so we need to believe in Jesus," nope, nothing like that at all. It's actually quite surprising.

I feel that it's really good to have a book like this, which simply tells the story without also presenting an interpretation from some particular brand of Christianity.

My son asked me a lot of "why" questions, while reading this. Why did Judas betray Jesus? Why did people want to kill Jesus? I told him a few different possible reasons, but said we don't really know for sure, and people have different interpretations.

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In which I make a joke about Catholics

In the part about the Last Supper, the book says that Jesus said, "This bread and wine is like my body and my blood." I then remarked, "I guess this wasn't written by Catholics" and then my husband and son both said "what?" so I guess I shouldn't make any clever little remarks that reference obscure debates within Christianity like that. Turns out my household is not the right crowd for that.

(Catholics believe that when Christians have communion, the bread and wine *are* the body and blood of Jesus, rather than being *like* the body and blood of Jesus. I don't understand what that even means. I always went to churches that believed it was a symbol. Note that in the actual bible, Jesus says "this is my body" and "this is my blood"- referring to the bread and wine- so it's an interesting choice to add the word "like" when telling this version of the story.)

And I suppose I could make a lot of little observations about which details this book includes, and how it words things, and what that says about the brand of Christianity it's coming from. But I don't think that really matters- as I said above, my main concerns are the amount of violence, and whether it says we need to feel guilty about how our sin killed Jesus. This book is very good on those two points. It tells the basic story, it doesn't get into any graphically violent details, and it doesn't say anything at all about what it means for us.

I certainly have opinions on what Jesus' death and resurrection mean for us- I'm a Christian, of course I have opinions on that- but let's just teach kids the story first, before getting into that.

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Conclusion

I like this book because it's simple, and therefore doesn't get into any of the problematic stuff that Christian children's books often get into. It gives a brief overview of the bible story of Jesus' death and resurrection. This is what I want; I want my son to know the story. It doesn't say anything at all about what Jesus' death and resurrection mean. I like that. For now I just want my son to know the story. There will be plenty of time in the future to think about what it means. Maybe I'll spend my whole life doing that.

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Related:

Good Friday is R-Rated 

Reviews of Christian Children's Books 

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. In Praise of Links (March 10, via) Apparently there are large subsections of the internet where people just don't link to things, and/or the platform (Instagram, etc) doesn't support it? I am so boggled by this. Links are great. What is the internet without links?

2. AI Search Has A Citation Problem (March 6, via) "Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts."

This study gave AI chatbots quotes from news articles and asked them to find the original article (headline, publisher, date, and url). The chatbots did a pretty bad job of it- but also, this isn't really a normal use case for an AI chatbot/ LLM. Normally you use them to tell you about the general vibes about something, not really to get an exact correct answer.

3. Chinese City Offers Families $13,800 for More Kids (March 14) China's one-child policy ended in 2016. Since then, China has been trying to encourage people to have more kids, by making policies which given mothers more maternity leave, or even in some cities giving families money when they have 3 or more kids. 

Really, though, the issue is that after a whole generation under the one-child policy, the economics around having kids are like, you spend such a huge amount of your income on just 1 kid's education- so for most Chinese people, it's unthinkable to have more than 1 kid. I live in China and have 2 kids, and when the second kid was born, both me and my husband got comments from people asking "Why would you have 2 kids??? Kids are so expensive."

So, I think when some city governments give families money for having more kids, that will help increase the birth rate a little bit, but it doesn't really address the real reason the birth rate is so low.

Also from Sixth Tone: Married Chinese Women Are Buying Their Own Homes. Why? (March 18) An article about gendered expectations in marriage in China- the man is supposed to buy a home. This article is about how there's a trend where a wife's parents will buy an apartment, which will be in the wife's name, so that she has her own property, because the main home is in the husband's name (to clarify, this wouldn't be to live in, this would be for her to hold on to as an investment, and/or rent out). Btw, this is about people who have way more money than the average person.

4. What Even is Gender? (Book review) (March 16) "In place of gender identity, George & Briggs propose an alternate framework that they call “gender feels”. Gender feels are attitudes towards oneself having (or the possibility of having) certain gendered traits. They discuss three broad categories for gendered traits: sexed biology, gendered behavior, and gender categories."

5. Harvard will be free for students whose families make $100,000 or less (March 17) This makes me very curious about the statistics on current students' families' incomes. $100,000 seems pretty high to me- does this mean that such a large proportion of the students come from families with much higher incomes than that, such that the school will still receive a decent amount of income from tuition even though it's free for this subset of students? Or is there some mysterious other source of money?

6. ‘I don’t have a sinful bone in my body’ (March 15) "White evangelicals don’t want to talk about the sin of racism, in part, because it challenges their inadequate, unreal, and unbiblical theology of sin."

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Bumper sticker that says "Pray for Trump / Psalm 109:8" Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trans People are Under Attack and We Must Help Them (March 8) "Guess how many people in Germany were Jewish in January of 1933? Less than .8%. Half as many. Were their lives inconsequential? And did the Nazis stop with them?"

2. Columbia University Obeyed In Advance, Why Is That Not Working Out For Them??? (March 15) "This is what you would call a threat. Or, as the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia accurately interpreted it, 'We’ll destroy Columbia unless you destroy it first.'"

3. ICE Detention: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (March 10) 24-minute video

4. Where Is The Line? Democratic Budget Capitulation Foreshadows LGBTQ+ Fights To Come (March 16) "If protecting Medicaid and democracy isn’t their line, what does that mean for the issue I have dedicated my life to—reporting on efforts to protect LGBTQ+ people? If faced with a budget that guts transgender healthcare, bans gender-affirming care for youth, and strips funding from any organization or study that even mentions transgender people, would these same Democrats not offer the same excuse?"

Also from Erin in the Morning: Arkansas Bill Would Make “Contributing To Social Transitioning” Of Trans Youth Against The Law (March 18) "The ACLU also notes that any legal cases brought under this bill would be 'extremely unlikely to hold up in court,' calling the suits frivolous and warning that they could target anyone—from cashiers to teachers to hairdressers. 'The bill’s intent is to scare people into silence and deter them from providing respect, dignity, and care to LGBTQ youth,' they add."

5. Judge seeks sworn declaration from Justice Department in deportation case (March 17) "A federal judge Monday ordered the U.S. Justice Department to provide a sworn declaration by noon ET Tuesday with details on how planeloads of alleged members of Tren de Aragua were deported despite his order to turn the planes around."

And related to that: Trump invoking Alien Enemies Act to deport is 'a threat to everyone,' lawyer argues (March 17) "This is not normal and it's not OK."

Also from npr: Pentagon website removes, then restores, page honoring Black Medal of Honor recipient (March 17) Yeah what exactly is going on with this anti-DEI removal of web pages, etc? It's coming across like they think any time there's a person who's not a white man in a position of leadership, or receiving an award, it can't possibly be because that person is actually good at what they do- it must be because of DEI. This boggles my mind because it's just so blatantly racist/sexist- is that really the position that these MAGAs are taking? Really? I mean, I grew up hearing that we should be "colorblind" and affirmative action was bad because it gives certain groups an advantage, but we are all equal and should simply judge people on their actual merits. This "colorblindness" is its own kind of racism, but whatever's going on with this backlash to DEI is something different.

"The Big Wide Welcome" (kids' book review)

Book cover for "The Big Wide Welcome."

Last time I was in the US, I borrowed this book from the library: The Big Wide Welcome: A True Story About Jesus, James, and a Church That Learned to Love All Sorts of People, by Trillia Newbell. This post is my review of it.

This is a children's book based on James 2, a bible passage about not showing favoritism. It's from the series "Tales That Tell the Truth," a series which includes the books Jesus and the Lions' Den and The Storm That Stopped, which I have also reviewed. The idea behind this series is to use bible stories which aren't necessarily about Jesus, and connect them to bigger concepts about who Jesus is.

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The main message of this book is very good

This book teaches us that we should not "play favorites" with people. We shouldn't treat some people better than others based on how much money they have, or their abilities, or skin color (these are some of the examples given in the book). In James 2 in the bible, the example is about how church members might react differently if a rich person or a poor person comes to their church.

The book says that all throughout history, people have treated each other like this- "playing favorites." On that page, there is an illustration of ancient Egyptians, with the ruler being carried on the backs of other people, possibly slaves. Also there is a bus with white people sitting in the front and black people in the back. I think it's good that these illustrations hint at how real and harmful this "playing favorites" is. The book doesn't comment on these pictures- the language of the book is really kid-friendly, about how this makes people feel sad... It doesn't actually say anything about systemic injustice, but the illustrations show an awareness of how that's really what it's talking about, when the bible talks about "favoritism."

The book says that Jesus talked to all kinds of people, and Jesus loves everyone, and we should welcome everyone. And I'm like, YES!

But then...

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It takes a sharp turn into some we're-sinners-who-deserve-to-go-to-hell content

This was so sudden. You get whiplash from this. The book is just going along, talking about how Jesus loves everyone (Yes! I am totally on board with this!), and then:

Because Jesus loves all people.

He didn't only want to be friends with rich people, or clever people, or famous people. Jesus knew that everyone was in trouble because they had decided not to live with God as their Savior and Friend. Jesus knew that everyone needed him to rescue them.

Jesus didn't play favorites...

... Jesus chose to LOVE!

[turn the page]

In fact, Jesus loves people so much that he chose to die on the cross so that all people could be friends with him. Jesus welcomes as his friend anyone who asks to be his friend.

Rich people can be friends with Jesus.

Poor people can be friends with Jesus.

People whose bodies work different or look different can be friends with Jesus.

People who speak French or Korean or Spanish or Swahili or English can be friends with Jesus.

O_O

Like, WHAT JUST HAPPENED? The book suddenly veers off into talking about "everyone was in trouble" and how Jesus died on the cross so we could "be friends with him." 

I speak evangelical, so let me tell you what this means: Jesus loves everyone, and doesn't believe that certain groups of people are superior to others, because all people are sinners who deserve to go to hell. All of us are the worst, all of us are the same in this regard, so that's why it doesn't make sense to discriminate. All right, come along now and pray the sinner's prayer and ask Jesus into your heart and become a Christian, then you'll be saved from going to hell.

I gotta be honest, this took me completely by surprise, the first time I read this book. I was all excited about "we should welcome everyone" and "Jesus loves everyone", and then I turn the page and get this we're-all-going-to-hell ideology.

To be clear, the book does NOT say the words "hell", "sin", "ask Jesus into your heart", etc. All it says is that section I quoted above. This leaves me even more at a loss for how to explain this to my son- the book says "everyone was in trouble because they had decided not to live with God as their Savior and Friend." Where do I even begin, telling him what that means? It means hell. But *I* don't believe in hell- and I don't really want to be the one to bring it up, when this book uses indirect "kid-friendly" language which makes it easy for my son to just move along without having any idea what this page is talking about.

The books in the "Tales That Tell the Truth" series are written from an evangelical perspective. I strongly suspected that from the first time I heard about them; there's something about their taking-these-bible-stories-very-seriously-and-learning-deeper-truths-about-Jesus approach which reads as very evangelical to me. Unfortunately for me, I am a bible nerd who is also enamored with the idea of taking bible stories very seriously and connecting them to Jesus, though I'm no longer evangelical and I no longer believe the bible is inerrant. Honestly, I'm not surprised this book has evangelical ideology in it. I'm just surprised at how fast it went from "Jesus loves and accepts everyone" to "everyone is going to hell." (Again, that's not an exact quote. The book does not use the word "hell." The exact quote is "everyone was in trouble because they had decided not to live with God as their Savior and Friend.")

I borrowed this book from a library and only read it to my son once. I don't know what I would do about these pages if I had bought the book and was reading it to him frequently. Obviously, this is a reason why I would definitely NOT buy this book. I feel this is harder to deal with than the part I objected to in "The Storm That Stopped". In that case, I could just tell him I disagreed with the book. But in "The Big Wide Welcome," I can't just tell him I disagree with it- I would have to first explain what the book is saying here, about sin and hell, and then tell him I don't believe that. It's just... I don't want to get into all that. I just want to tell him Jesus loves everyone.

(Oh and since we're talking about the evangelical slant on the "all are welcome" message, I will briefly mention that the issue of queer acceptance in the church is something that evangelicals certainly have some opinions on. This book doesn't go anywhere near mentioning that, but I probably wouldn't like what it had to say, if it did. A church that says "all are welcome" is very different from a church that says "all are welcome" and hangs up a rainbow flag.)

So uh, yeah, I don't recommend this book, because of that. Let me just hit a few more points from my list and finish up this review.

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Elementary school level

I would say the language in this book is right for elementary school kids.

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Also I laughed really hard at this part

So there's one page that says, "See, James's brother was..." 

And then you turn to the next page: "Jesus!"

And I just found that hilarious, like James and Jesus being brothers is this REALLY SHOCKING PLOT TWIST OMG. I laughed so much.

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Conclusion

This book started out so well. I was really into its message about loving and welcoming everyone, about not discriminating, about how Jesus spent time with all different people. I love that. I definitely want to teach my kids that. But then there were a few pages where it suddenly started saying the kind of things you say when you're telling people that they are sinners who deserve to go to hell and they need to get saved by praying and accepting Jesus... I can't recommend this book, because of that.

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Related:

Reviews of Christian Children's Books

"Jesus and the Lions' Den" (kids' book review) 

"The Storm That Stopped" (kids' book review) 

"Maybe God Is Like That Too" (kids' book review)

"Who Is My Neighbor?" (Kids' Book Review) 

"When Helping Hurts" (I wanted to like this book but it didn't work out)

Fake Documents

Kids playing outside at a kindergarten in China. Image source.

So, my son recently started kindergarten. In China, kindergarten (幼儿园) is 3 years long, and it starts at age 3. When I was a kid in the US, I had 2 years of preschool (starting at age 3) and then 1 year of kindergarten (age 5), but in China this is combined together and called "kindergarten." The public school system in China starts with kindergarten at age 3 (though as far as I know, kindergarten in not compulsory; compulsory education in China starts at age 6). (Whereas in the US, the public school system starts at age 5, and preschool is kind of optional.)

Anyway, getting him registered for kindergarten was A Whole Thing. In China, the bureaucracy is ridiculous, and also parents are very competitive about getting their kid into "a good school." The one-child policy contributed A LOT to this competitiveness, because if you only have 1 kid, you have to really really really make sure you do everything you possibly can so that kid is successful. Parents spend a lot of money sending their kid to all kinds of extra tutoring and extracurricular activities, and kids don't have any time to just play and have a childhood. (That's my opinion...)

So anyway, we are in Shanghai. Shanghai has a bunch of different districts, with varying levels of how hard it is to get your kid into a public school. In some districts, parents were told not to even bother applying if you're not a Chinese citizen and you don't own your home, because you'll be so far down the list that you definitely won't be able to get into a public kindergarten. (Have to do private instead.) But where we live, there are (comparatively) less people, so we didn't have to deal with any restrictions like that.

Because, yeah, there's a whole hierarchy. A whole priority order of which kids get into public school. It goes something like this:

1. Kid has a Shanghai hukou for the district the school is in
2. Kid has a Shanghai hukou, but the address on the hukou is a different district (for example, if you own property elsewhere in Shanghai, and your hukou address is registered there, but that's not where you actually live or where you want to send your kid to school)
3. Kid has a hukou from somewhere else in China (not Shanghai)
4. Kid is from another country or Hong Kong/ Taiwan/ Macau

Basically it's like that. I didn't check that the details are exactly right, so don't take it as literally true, but this is the basic idea. There's a hierarchy, based on your hukou, and people with a Shanghai hukou have more rights to get into Shanghai's public schools. Also I think whether you own an apartment in Shanghai is a factor in this hierarchy.

Ah, now I have to explain what a hukou (户口) is: It's an official document that all Chinese citizens are supposed to have, which lists the names of all the members of your household, and your address. Ie, this document says what city you are "officially" a resident of. In Shanghai, tons of people come from other cities to work, and their hukou is still registered in their home city. (Apparently if you meet certain requirements- like you work for a certain number of years, pay taxes in Shanghai, have a high enough salary- you can transfer your hukou to Shanghai.) Anyway, for accessing public services like medical care and the public school system, people with a Shanghai hukou have more rights than people without.

Anyway, yeah, this is a problem in China, the inequality between big cities vs small cities vs countryside. But people say the hukou system is "necessary" because the population is so high, so you have to put limits on who can access public services. Or something. 

(And I've heard that in the countryside, some families had multiple kids even though they were under the one-child policy. [Note that the one-child policy ended in 2016 and now China is trying to encourage people to have more kids.] The kids who were born after the first kid weren't able to get a hukou or ID card or documents like that. Which is a huge problem.)

ANYWAY, my kid has US citizenship and a US passport, and also has Chinese citizenship, but doesn't have a hukou because... okay it's so complicated and if I explain the whole thing, I'll never get to the actual point of this blog post. Bureaucracy! China doesn't recognize dual citizenship, but the reality is that my kid has both Chinese and US citizenship, so what does that mean? It means more bureaucracy!

So that was a big problem, trying to figure out what category Square Root would fit into when applying for kindergarten, and which documents he needed to submit. Because for each of the categories in my list above, there's a set of documents that you're supposed to bring, and he doesn't have the complete set for *any* of the categories. International kids are supposed to submit their foreign passport, and their Chinese visa which is in that passport. Well, Square Root has a US passport but he doesn't have a Chinese visa because he's a Chinese citizen so he doesn't need one (and China won't issue him a visa anyway because he's a citizen). 

So we called various officials from the school, education department, and immigration office, to ask them how to handle this situation, and they don't know. Like, isn't it their job to know? Seems like it would be! But nope, they are all totally confused by the existence of a half-Chinese kid. 

Eventually we came up with a set of documents that was acceptable, to register him under the "international" classification. So, thank goodness, but wow that was really stressful.

But then there was a second problem, which is what I actually want to blog about there. I titled this post "Fake Documents"; this second problem is where the fake documents come into play.

See, our second problem was this: You need to have some document proving you live at the address that corresponds to the school you are applying for. There is a public kindergarten right across the street from our apartment complex, and we really wanted him to go to that one, because it's right there. So convenient! Anyway, each public school has a specific geographical area assigned to it (this is called 对口 in Chinese). Our apartment complex is in the designated area for this public school. So far so good, right?

For some reason, I thought that since we live here, we would have no issue fulfilling the "we live here" requirement. I don't know why I thought that; that's a real rookie mistake. In China, it's often much more complicated than that. Turns out that, to prove that you live there, you need to either have a property ownership document (if you own the home) or you need some "rental agreement" document issued by some certain government office.

Now, silly me, I thought that since we signed a contract to rent this apartment, that contract would be the document we would use to prove we live here. LOLOLOL! Nope! It's more complicated than that!

No, you have to go with your landlord down to some certain government office, and they will issue you a document that says you and your kid live at this address.

(Note: The landlord owns 1 individual apartment, not the whole building. I was confused about this when I first came to China.)

So, my husband contacted our landlord to say we need him to come and bring his ID card and property ownership document, and do this for us.

The landlord says he "can't."

And there was some back-and-forth between my husband, the landlord, the apartment agent, and the government office that issues these documents. Trying to work through the reasons why the landlord supposedly "can't" and make it work somehow.

Because, in China, a lot of times when people say they "can't" do something that you need them to do for you, it actually means "they can, but they don't want to, but if you inconvenience them enough about it, then they will do it." (Reminds me of the parable of the persistent widow.)

Eventually it came down to this: If the government office issues this document, they will not issue another one for the same address for the next 5 years. This (supposedly) is to prevent property owners from letting all of their relatives and friends pretend to live at their address, just to get into a good school. So the landlord felt like, what if in the future, he has a grandchild who is going to live in this apartment and go to public school? (I don't even know if he has a grandchild or not.) So that's the reason that he refused in the end.

So... then what? If you don't have this document, then you just can't go to public school. Do we have to move...? My husband and I spent a little bit of time searching for legal avenues that we could use to force the landlord to do this for us. (Some of the moms in the WeChat groups suggested threatening to report your landlord for tax evasion- because it's common that landlords aren't paying taxes on the rental income, even though they're supposed to.) But we couldn't come up with anything workable.

At this point, you should be thinking "wow this system is really broken." Yes! You're right!

So anyway. Then the apartment agent said he found a different landlord who owns an apartment in our complex. This landlord is willing to go with us to the government office and pretend we are renting his apartment. For a fee, of course! The fee that this landlord was asking was less than the price of 1 month of private school. 

So that's what we did. We got this document with a fake address on it (still in our same apartment complex though) and used that to register Square Root for kindergarten. And it worked, now he attends the public kindergarten across the street, and it's going well.

So what I actually want to blog about is the ethical questions about this.

When my husband and I were discussing whether to use a fake address, my concerns were these:

1. Are we going to get in trouble?
2. Are we going to have to use this fake address on other documents, and it's going to be a pain trying to keep track of which documents have our real address and which ones have our fake address, and will lead to further bureaucracy headaches in the future?

I wasn't like "no, this is out of the question because it's unethical to bribe a landlord and submit a document that claims we live at an address that's not our real address." I wasn't concerned about the ethics of it, because I could see how broken the system was. A system that broken is not the arbiter of right and wrong.

Maybe in Shanghai, if you rent your home rather than owning it, you just don't have rights to send your kid to public school. You don't have that right, you can only send your kid to public school if your landlord deigns to allow it. Is that the way it's supposed to work?

(My favorite quote from my husband during this process was "I have paid taxes in Shanghai for 10 years, and my landlord decides whether I can send my kid to public school?")

Sometimes I almost say we "had to" get this fake document, but the reality is we didn't "have to." We could have said, "oh, okay, our landlord has decided that Square Root can't go to public school, and that's just the way it is" and then either moved to a different apartment with a different landlord, or paid tons of money for private school and spent a lot of time every day dropping him off and picking him up from the private school (which is not across the street from our apartment).

So, you see we didn't "have to", but we were very very strongly incentivized to do it. And I've heard of a lot of situations in China where, because the bureaucracy is so huge and ridiculous, people are strongly incentivized to lie to the bureaucracy, like we did. Not because people are trying to cheat and steal or whatever, but because we are just trying to live our normal lives and do completely reasonable things, but the system is heartless and nonsensical, and we feel we deserve better than however things happen to shake out when we follow the rules.

My husband told me this isn't a China thing, this is a "this is what the real world is like" thing. I don't know; I have spent almost all my adult life in China, so there are often things I never was aware of before, which feel to me like "this is how it is in China" but perhaps are actually "this is what being an adult is like."

It's an example of privilege, though. If you're able to live your life and you never get into a situation where you need to lie to a giant heartless bureaucracy, just to get the same rights that everyone else has- that's an indication that you are relatively privileged.

What's interesting to me, though, is that it seemed like nobody actually cared if the address on our document is indeed the actual address of the apartment we are actually renting and living in. The teacher at the school who was helping us seemed to have an approach like "as long as you come up with some configuration of documents that the system will accept, you're good"- like, not caring if those documents were true, just that we had the documents. And also, at another step in the process we needed to get a different document from our apartment management, and my husband told them "we live in building X, but we are using an address in building Y for this, see, we have a contract in building Y" (which was the fake contract from our fake landlord), and the apartment management just totally did not care at all. They asked 0 questions about "why are you using this address if you actually live in building X?" All that mattered was that their policy says they can issue this document that we need if we show we have an apartment contract, and so, that's what they did.

And my husband told some friends about this whole thing, and when he got to part about "the fee that the fake landlord was asking for was less than the price of 1 month of private school" they were like "oh that's great!" like so happy to hear how well this worked out for us. Nobody was like "uh isn't this a little shady?" Like it's just a funny story and thank goodness it all worked out in the end, and there's no, like... ethical questions about it...?

It seems to me like, in China, the bureaucracy is so extensive, and so focused on little tiny details that have to be exactly right or else they can't accept the documents you submit, that everyone has run into absurd problems with it. (Which is one of the reasons I'm glad I didn't change my last name when I got married- can you imagine always having to explain that to random government employees? "Yes my name is different than on my old passport/ diploma/ etc but I am the same person" NOPE their system does not have an option for that [though I've heard you can get your consulate to issue a document officially stating that you are the same person- perhaps that will work].)  Everyone has been in that situation where you just don't have the right fapiao (which is a specific type of receipt you need if you're going to get reimbursed for something) so you're just out of luck. And therefore there's sort of this awareness that these bureaucracy rules are not the definition of "right" and "wrong." Instead, you do what you have to do to make it work for you. 

My view is more like, these systems are set up to benefit society as a whole, and it's not good when people decide "the rules shouldn't apply to me because [reasons]." But here in China, when you see enough little nitpicky bureaucracy headaches, perhaps it's not possible to believe that those rules "benefit society." And yes, I am sort of saying "the rules shouldn't apply to us because we really do live in this apartment complex and we really should have the right to send our kid to the public school across the street, it's just that our landlord is being a jerk- and the fake address is in the same apartment complex as our real address so what difference does it make?" I realize I am "making an excuse", and you don't have to agree that it's ethical to do what we did.

But, I want to tell you, there's more to it than just "well you shouldn't use a fake document, that's just completely out of the question, because it's unethical." It's not right to view the situation in such simplistic terms. If you view it that way, you're saying that this system has the power to define what's ethical and what's not. This system, which allows landlords to refuse to let renters use their address to get into public school. Really? That system? That's the one you need to obey in order to be "ethical"? 

Back when I was evangelical and "on fire for God", I definitely believed lying was a sin. (Though conveniently omitting certain facts- in order to give the impression that something false is true- I thought was okay depending on the situation. Because it doesn't technically fit the definition of lying.) I thought if I was in a situation where it seemed like the best option was to lie, that would be an example of "temptation." And, the bible says, "No temptation has seized you except that which is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out, so you can stand up under it." So, because lying would be a sin, I needed to "trust God" and not lie, even though everything about the practical reality of the situation screamed that it was a bad idea. Somehow, God would work things out.

I don't believe that any more. I mean, just to name 1 example, we have a God who allowed millions of people to die of covid. You really think a God as hands-off as that is going around carefully making sure that no one is harmed by their naive conviction that "lying is a sin, regardless of the situation"?

So. Yeah. We registered our kid for kindergarten using a document that had a fake address on it, because our landlord refused to give us a document with our real address. I won't say that we "had to", because we did have other options: move, or send our kid to a private school which would be way more expensive and far from our home. I think it's okay that we did this, even though it's lying- because the system is set up with so many layers of bureaucracy, which often trips up people who really are trying to follow the rules and do the right thing.

And, you don't have to agree with me, but at least I want you to know that you can't view it like it's as simple as "lying is wrong, and that's that." You have to recognize that there exist systems and societal structures which are so broken that sometimes the right thing to do is to lie to them.

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Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Me

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