Christianity’s ‘original sin’ is generational trauma
It’s that simple, folks. Christianity’s doctrine of ‘original sin’ is generational trauma; destructive patterns of behaviour inherited at birth (conception, actually) which originated at the Fall. The whole theology boils down to two simple equations:
The Fall = Neolithic decline
Original sin = generational trauma
When understood as generational trauma, the entire doctrine of original sin makes total sense. Change the slant of the theological explanations from moral admonitions to the mechanics of trauma, and they become startlingly clear and accurate.
Let’s unpack these equations a little.
What is original sin?
Wikipedia’s headline description is that “Original sin is the Christian doctrine that holds that humans, through the act of birth, inherit a tainted nature with a proclivity to sinful conduct in need of regeneration.”
Wikipedia goes on say that “Early Christianity had no specific doctrine of original sin prior to the 4th century.” The idea developed over several centuries with Augustine of Hippo (354-430) a leading proponent.
The biblical basis for original sin comes from three places:
- Genesis 3—the story of Adam and Eve, the two trees and the apple. You know the one.
- Psalm 51:5—“I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
- Romans 5:12—“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”
Only the first of these, Genesis 3, gives an attribution for original sin: the Fall. Which brings us to the first equation, between the Fall and the Neolithic decline.
The what?
Wikipedia: “The Neolithic decline was a rapid collapse in populations between 5000 and 6000 years ago (approximately 3000 BCE) during the Neolithic period in western Eurasia.”
To give you a broad sense of events, the Neolithic age was superseded in fairly quick succession by the Chalcolithic (copper), Bronze, and Iron ages. What did people do with those newly discovered metals? They made weapons of war. This compares with the Neolithic age, which featured only more primitive hunting weapons.
In Saharasia—The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World (note: not bedtime reading) geographer James DeMeo describes how, from sporadic beginnings around 4000 BC, the equatorial belt from the Sahara through the Middle East, Arabia, and central Asia gradually turned into the arid landscape we know today.
Long-term droughts, lasting for centuries, created desertification that in turn caused long-term famines that are amply documented in the Old Testament:
“The Lord will make the sky overhead seem like a bronze roof that keeps out the rain, and the ground under your feet will become as hard as iron. Your crops will be scorched by the hot east wind or ruined by mildew. He will send dust and sandstorms instead of rain, and you will be wiped out.” (Deuteronomy 28:21-24)
There’s your Neolithic decline in a sentence.
Madness
In the appropriately-titled The Fall, psychology lecturer Steve Taylor describes this change as “the main event in human history… a sudden, massive regression—a dramatic shift from harmony to chaos, from peace to war, from life-affirmation to gloom, or from sanity to madness.”
The physical shift from peace to war was driven by a psychological shift from peace to war: to violence, possession, rape, greed, envy, lust, egotism, self-gratification, and all the other stuff categorised under the seven deadly sins.
Famine was the driver.
“The very old and young were abandoned to die. Brothers stole food from sisters, and husbands left wives and babies to fend for themselves. While the maternal-infant bond endured the longest, eventually mothers abandoned their weakened infants and children.” — James DeMeo, Saharasia
DeMeo writes that “a passive indifference to the needs or pain of others manifested itself, and hunger, feeding of the self, became their all-consuming passion.”
This “passive indifference” was the numbing effect of trauma.
Generational trauma
Trauma forms when a person experiences an event that is too extreme for them to fully process at the time it happens. They enter a numbed, paralysed state of emotional overwhelm—and never leave it.
The unresolved trauma becomes embedded in their DNA which they hand down in diluted form to their children. The children are affected by the same event in a similar way to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They will be emotionally affected by the same triggers (overwhelming situations) that caused the original trauma.
Generational trauma is scientifically known as epigenetic inheritance and has been demonstrated in the laboratory.
Thousands of years before modern science, the ancients understood generational trauma. Psalm 51:5, reworded: “I was born in trauma, and in trauma did my mother conceive me.”
The church recognised ‘generational sin’ but failed to understand the (what now seems to me blindly obvious) connection to either generational trauma or the Fall.
Substitute a few words in the Wikipedia definition for original sin and you get this:
Generational trauma is the Christian doctrine that holds that humans, through the act of birth, inherit trauma which drives trauma-based behaviour in need of resolution.
Yep, that holds up.
Responsibility for original sin
Original sin is also debated in Hebrew theology, such as the apocryphal Book of Sirach (25:24): “Sin began with a woman, and we must all die because of her.” Wikipedia notes that “The notion of the hereditary transmission of sin from Adam was rejected by both 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch in favour of individual responsibility.”
In this debate we find some slight confirmation of our equations.
One of the effects of the psychological shift of the Fall was from the holistic, whole-brain thinking of egalitarian Neolithic peoples to the left-brain hemispheric dominance of later ages—down to our own.
Left-brain thinking causes what Cognitive Behavioural Therapy calls ‘black and white’ thinking, the incapacity to see shades of grey. Everything is either this or that: good or bad, left or right, up or down. If you support A, you must be opposed to B.
Here we see an expression of the principle that one cannot fully understand a system of which we are a part. Unconscious of their own black and white thinking, theologians have been unable to agree on the nature of original sin and our responsibility for it.
So, which of them is right?
Both.
Yes, we inherited our ancestors’ trauma at conception. We aren’t responsible for the origins of this trauma—but we are responsible for its replication, both in our own behaviour and for transmitting it to future generations.
When I was younger, the doctrine of original sin—the notion there was something fundamentally wrong and unfixable in me—really bothered me. Now I understand it correctly, I see the church fathers were desperately trying to communicate something of immense importance to humanity—generational trauma.
And, yes, it is fixable. Check out my course Living With Ghosts.
Image: Michelangelo’s Adam and Eve from the Sistine Chapel (Wikimedia)
