Addiction and Sin: Recovery and Redemption

Abstract

Many complain that our culture is too beholden to biological psychiatry and genetic reductionism. Much of the discussion on addiction forms part of this cultural background. Thus we inherit, or even construct, different ways of thinking about ourselves, about health and disease, about weal and woe. But not every popular assumption is sober truth. The concern of many Christians, myself included, is the tendency to "medicalize" behavior, such that sin and vice become addiction and disease. This need not be unduly conspiratorial or atavistic. The point is that an older generation was far more likely, on balance, to understand itself and its social world in terms of sin and virtue, vice and godliness. Lack of self-control and weakness of will, for instance, were moral failings to be avoided (with divine help). That sort of language has fallen on hard times. Perhaps there have been attendant gains, but there have also been losses.