Moving From Policing Bodies to Resisting Powers

For generations, much of Western Christianity has been shaped by a particular way of thinking about sin. We have been trained to imagine sin primarily as a matter of individual behaviour: the choices a person makes, their private moral conduct, especially around sex and sexuality. The result has been predictable and tragic. Churches have spent extraordinary energy policing people’s bodies while neglecting the forces and systems that break bodies, diminish lives, and destroy communities.

The consequences are visible in the ways Christianity has been weaponised against LGBTQ people. Homophobia and transphobia have flourished under the banner of moral righteousness, while the deeper and more destructive sins of racism, economic injustice, ecological devastation, and the violence of empire have gone unnamed and unopposed. Our moral lens has become so narrow that it misses the scale of the sin that scripture is most concerned about.

The Bible’s grammar of sin is corporate before it is personal

The dominant biblical witness does not begin with individuals breaking rules. It begins with whole societies ordered around injustice.

The prophets preach not against private immorality but against public wrongdoing:

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed” (Isaiah 10.1–2).

Biblical Israel’s relationship with God stands or falls on whether the community protects the widow, the stranger, and the orphan. Sin is revealed in systems, laws, and economic arrangements. A righteous society is one in which the vulnerable live securely.

Even the New Testament does not allow us to retreat into the private sphere. When Paul speaks of “the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this present darkness” (Ephesians 6.12), he is naming the social, political, and economic structures that organise the world away from God’s justice. To be saved is to be liberated not only from the guilt of individual wrongdoing but from the grip of these dehumanising powers.

Jesus confronts systems of exclusion

When Jesus challenges the Sabbath laws, welcomes the ritually unclean, stands with the marginalised, and overturns the tables of the temple economy, he is not urging people simply to be nicer. He is confronting the mechanisms that define who belongs and who does not, who is deemed pure and who is cast out. His ministry consistently restores people whom a moralistic religious system has condemned.

The cross is not the punishment of an individual transgressor. It is the public execution of a political dissident. The resurrection is not simply forgiveness for sinners; it is God’s dramatic declaration that the powers of violence, domination, and empire will not have the final word.

A Pauline ethic: freedom for the sake of love

Christians are often quick to quote Paul when sexual ethics are being policed, and slow to listen when Paul calls the whole conversation into question.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul declares, “All things are permissible for me, but not all things are helpful.”
This is not a licence for chaos; it is a refusal to reduce Christian ethics to rule-keeping. Paul insists that Christian freedom is shaped by love, by what builds up the community, and by what brings life rather than harm.

This is a very different moral framework than the one many churches have inherited. Rather than beginning with prohibition, it begins with relationship. The question is not “Is it allowed?” but “Does it heal? Does it liberate? Does it reflect the life of Christ?”

Sin is real at the personal level — but it is not where the battle is won

We all know that there are personal actions that diminish humanity. Greed, cruelty, deceit, betrayal — these are not illusions. But they do not come from nowhere. They are shaped by cultures that reward domination, economies that sanctify exploitation, and national identities that feed on fear of the outsider.

To focus only on individual wrongdoing while ignoring the structures that generate it is like treating smoke and ignoring the fire.

A person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is not sinful. But the church’s participation in systems of exclusion, its willingness to wound people made in the image of God, and its refusal to challenge the social forces that deal death — these are sins that require repentance.

The calling of the people of God today

The great biblical hope is not the escape of individuals to heaven, but the transformation of the world into justice. The people of God are called to stand together against the powers that deform and destroy life:

• To resist racism, nationalism, and imperialism
• To challenge economic systems that profit from poverty
• To confront environmental destruction fuelled by endless consumption
• To dismantle patriarchal systems that silence and endanger women and queer people
• To build communities where all have dignity, safety, and belonging

This is holiness. This is discipleship. This is what it means to follow Jesus.

We will never understand sin rightly until we see it as something bigger than personal failure. And we will never understand grace rightly until we realise it empowers us not simply to behave better, but to stand together against the injustice of the world and to enact the alternative: the reign of God.

If Christianity is to have a future worth offering to the world, this is the path. Less policing of bodies; more resistance to the powers. Less obsession with individual purity; more solidarity with the crucified peoples of the earth. Less fear of one another; more courage to love.

The world is crying out for a church that takes sin seriously — not by shrinking the category to sexual respectability, but by widening the category to everything that crushes human life.

It is time to repent of a small gospel and live a bigger one.