Here's what "sin nature" means to me. Its patterns show up everywhere, including in me, and especially in religious groups.
- Dominance. Men over women, rich over poor, "spiritual" people (pastors, missionaries) over laypeople or businessmen, straight married couples over isolated gays. Something inside us compels us to constantly create pecking orders. That's not the deepest way, though. "The lion will lie down with the lamb" is the goal. My hope is that theology built on dominance will continue to die out over the next few hundred years. (Watch for it with people who are constantly talking about "Our Powerful Mighty God" who "we're not worthy to serve" - militant language signifies stuck-in-power-structured psyches.)
- Dogmatism. Black and white thinking about rules, hedged in on every side by fear. Families or groups can be dogmatic about faith, vegetarianism, making money, music, you name it - it's the same fundamentalist manner of being; at its most benign it's limiting, at its worst it's destructive. Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh, almost every megachurch pastor - each group (political, religious, scientific) has figureheads who smear the reputation of the whole by being negative, divisive, polemic. Dogmatism destroys.
- Tribalism. In/out, us/them, Christian/"non-believer" (what an offensive label to place on someone else! everyone I know believes in love...). It's natural for us to group up, it's even a healthy human and animal need that must be filled, but the deeper truth is that the tribe is everyone, that I am you and you are me. Yes, we have families, which exist within friend or church tribes, which exist within nation tribes. Okay, you're proud to be a Titans fan and proud to be an American. (Thank goodness for professional sports, where we can take that natural tribal aggression and channel it into benign competitions in lieu of wars between cities or states or even countries.) The next step is to see with the heart and find the unity with whoever is in front of you, to look for "common ground" (interesting phrase). It's not easy; there will be certain people I really struggle to do this with for the rest of my life, in my case dogmatic fundamentalist Christians. Whatever tribe wounds you, you will pattern against and associate with more pain; Americans do this with Muslims, gays with almost all Christians, many feminists with men, Democrats with Republicans and vice versa. But we gotta at least try to use the force and do a Jedi love-trick on ourselves and others. "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind;" try to love your neighbor... who often becomes your enemy somewhere along the way. It's possible, to varying degrees, depending on where you're at in your healing and where they're at in their self-awareness.
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