Understanding “Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner”

It’s almost a throwaway line.  Actually, it kind of annoys me.  I think people use the phrase “hate the sin, love the sinner” without thinking through the implications of quite what they are saying.  While the phrase can be absolutely true, the way it is applied in the minds and actions of many appears to be highly problematic.  It is often a sort of cover for indifference to sin.

As the priest notes in the video below, this statement really needs to be carefully considered to be understood properly. God does love everyone, regardless of our actions. Even the damned in hell (it ain’t just Adolf Hitler down there) are loved by God.  God’s love is eternal, no matter what we do, but that love reflects not our actions nor the state of our soul, but our nature as human beings.

However, he positively hates sin. We lose our friendship with God through sin.  Or, we can. Venial sin wounds our relationship with God, while mortal sin peremptorily terminates it due to our tragic acts.  God still loves one in mortal sin as a human person, but he hates them as one who has committed such grievous sin.  Mortal sin kills our relationship with God.  Repeated, unrepentant mortal sins of a certain type can get one labeled as in Sacred Scripture a fornicator, an adulterer, a drunkard, a thief, or what have you.  At some point, when one becomes so ingrained in a sinful lifestyle, the sin really takes over our persona and we can even, in a sense, become that sin.  Understanding the degree to which God hates sin, then, should make clear that God’s judgment in such cases will necessarily be severe.

Indeed, some types of sin can cause such perversion of thinking and such a reprobate sense that individuals may even become proud of it, and use the sin as a prideful identifier, like the poor souls lost in repeated acts of perversion.

When one becomes so positively lost in sin and even evangelizes for it and promotes it as a positive good (the fullest possible perversion of truth), while we must love such sad souls as creatures of God, we can clearly condemn their acts and even their person in the degree to which they identify with that sin as “who they are” and in their efforts to lead others to ruin.  This is a close and careful distinction, and we want to insure in our own zeal and loathing for sin we do not become cold of heart and overly judgmental, but that does not mean we have to be overly “tolerant” or accepting of these evils, either.  The overwhelming tendency among most souls who claim affiliation with the Church today is, of course, towards the latter.

I thought it was a pretty good video.  I might have said things a bit differently here or there, but overall I thought it provided a very accurate understanding of a phrase that is often used problematically: