For decades now, official Catholic social teaching has acknowledged that a purely personal understanding of sin in the world is inadequate. Catholic moral theologians and Christian ethicists more generally have striven to describe sin in the complexity of the social world more precisely by beginning with insights from sociology, the discipline that specializes in the analysis of social structures, into how all such structures “work.” Insightful work by Patrick Kerans,Footnote 1 Mark O’Keefe,Footnote 2 Kenneth Himes,Footnote 3 Kristin Heyer,Footnote 4 Conor Kelly,Footnote 5 Daniel Daly,Footnote 6 Emma McDonald,Footnote 7 and others have contributed to a lively conversation about how best to account for the sinful impact of social structures and how to understand personal responsibility in a world where each of us is to some extent complicit in a host of systems that cause harm to near and distant others.
There are many different kinds of social structures, including national economic systems, school districts, scholarly professional societies, county tax assessment systems, Catholic parishes, investment banks, and high school debate clubs. A theological claim that a particular instance of any of these—the US economy, a local school district, or your county’s property tax system—is a sinful social structure entails claims about both the effects of that structure and the causes that generate those effects. Thus, assessing any such assertion requires a choice of a causal account of “how things work” in this social structure. And such choices are often controversial. To take but one example, when assessing the justice of the US economy, neoconservative and liberationist Catholics tend to rely on quite different causal accounts, with neoconservatives tending to rely on more “conservative” economic accounts and liberationists on more “radical” ones. It is helpful to recognize that different moral positions on contested issues in social ethics are heavily dependent on the necessary choice among competing causal accounts.
Yet the first claim of this article is that this oversimplifies what actually occurs. We propose that there is a crucial distinction between two choices about causality in social structures that theologians and everyone else make—frequently only implicitly—at two different levels of analysis. The first is the choice of a general causal account of how all social structures “work,” especially how all social structures influence human agency. Here we recommend critical realist sociology, an analysis that respects human freedom and recognizes the non-deterministic causal impact of social structures on that freedom. The second is a choice of a causal account of how some particular kind of social structure works. This distinction is important in discussions about sinful social structures; the same two choices are involved in describing—without any moral assessment—how things “work” in the local high school basketball league or in your county’s recycling program.
The second claim of this article is that this general-then-specific sequence leads to an improved definition of a sinful social structure that can encompass both oppression (the unjust harms caused to those without privilege in the structure) and complicity (the implicit support provided by the privileged to a system that causes unjust harm to others). The article concludes by displaying the value of analysis of structural change at the first, general level by considering three essential features of social structures entailed in both their ongoing reproduction and potential transformation. These features are stated generically as applying to all social structures but always require further, more-specific analysis in any particular structure: nonmoral cognitive categories, lived bodily practices, and penalties for noncompliance.
Sinful Social Structures, Not Social Sin
The Dutch scientist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek is credited with the discovery of bacteria in 1676.Footnote 8 Since then, humanity has made great strides in understanding how bacteria work, both for good and ill, within the human body. Although experts are now altering bacteria to consume petroleum spills in the oceans, the first advances were as simple as insisting that doctors wash their hands between patients, something that had not occurred to them before. We take these things for granted now, but we know with certainty that, before human awareness of the existence of bacteria, these tiny creatures had an unrecognized but powerful causal impact on the bodies of our ancestors for seven million years.
Social structures are like bacteria in that whether we understand them—or even notice their existence—they have a significant causal impact on how we make a hundred decisions as we each move among a dozen or more social structures every day. This fact of social life has profound implications for how theology understands individual moral agency and the impact of social structures on it, for both good and ill.Footnote 9
From the beginning, Christian theology has recognized the sinful impact that the social world all too frequently has on individual moral decisions. Christina McRorie has employed the New Testament conception of “the world” to helpfully articulate in contemporary terms ways that even human reason is fundamentally distorted.Footnote 10 And Augustine’s The City of God made an eloquent case about the corrupting social practices of the Romans. This traditional skepticism about the social world was significantly advanced in the twentieth century when the notion of “social sin” appeared in the analysis of Latin American liberation theology.Footnote 11 The intention was to move beyond an inaccurate understanding of sin as purely an individualistic phenomenon. Extreme poverty, the absence of schools, the lack of health care—these, liberation theologians argue, are surely instances of sinful situations, even if no individual person in the nation wanted them to occur. The idea was then developed in the official teaching of John Paul II, in which he sought to bring the theological resources of the traditional understandings of sin into conversations about these societal evils.Footnote 12
“Social sin” and the closely related idea of “structural sin” have been challenged on the grounds that they are incoherent because sin requires a conscious agent to commit it, and social structures do not qualify as conscious agents.Footnote 13 In addition, social sin—which no one person is responsible for—seems to undermine the personal responsibility that should accompany any notion of sin.Footnote 14 This was a central concern in Vatican criticisms of liberation theologyFootnote 15 and has been central to individualistic resistance to the theological analysis of social structures. We do not intend to engage in this important debate here. Instead, we provide an alternative.
We claim that, with the help of critical realist sociology, Catholic moral theology, and Christian ethics more broadly, can employ a structural analysis of sin in the social world without raising theological suspicions that it undermines freedom, individual moral responsibility, or the traditional teaching on sin. And it accomplishes what liberation theologians aim for when speaking of social sin. We advocate speaking instead of “sinful social structures.”
The phrase itself is not new. Half a century ago, Patrick Kerans wrote a helpful book with that title. We endorse one of the three ways Kerans argues that “a social structure can be meaningfully said to be sinful”: that people “will experience sharp limitations on their effective scope of freedom.”Footnote 16 But what is missing in Kerans’s approach—and in most treatments of the topic since—is an explanation of what social structures are and how all social structures alter our free decisions, for both good and ill.
Using the Insights of Social Science within Theological Reflection
If we accept the idea that social structures have causal impact on human agency, theologians will need to understand these structures prior to making moral judgments about them or about the decisions that persons make within them. Sociology is the discipline that specializes in the study of such structures, yet we immediately face a problem in using insights from sociology because there are different accounts proposed by different sociologists about how agency and structure interact.
Sometimes theologians mistakenly jump over this problem and move directly to a choice of, say, an economic, political, or sociological account of how a particular social structure (the economy, the Catholic Church, a city’s police department) operates. Even though theologians are vividly aware of competing assumptions in their own discipline, they can be uncritical in their use of social scientific insight.Footnote 17 Thus, we need to think carefully about the relation between doing the normative work of theological ethics and appropriating the insights of social science.
Discerning the proper relationship between social science and theology is a complex task. Initially, there is a tendency to oversimplify on both sides. Social scientists are tempted to neglect moral questions, reducing moral issues to empirical debate. Economist Milton Friedman famously did this when claiming that the truly critical issues to be resolved are not normative but instead concern the empirical effects of alternative public policies because we all more or less agree on the goals for improving human life.Footnote 18 Conversely, theologian John Milbank, suspicious of such reductionism, dismisses all social science, saying that, although Christian faith requires narrative and historiography, it “finds no room whatsoever for ‘social science.’”Footnote 19 Meanwhile, some theologians naïvely and uncritically report the findings of social science. One well-known Christian ethicist published a book that presented the following as evidence for the effectiveness of the New Deal: “Thanks to the success of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—currently threatened by Trumpist stalwarts—only one-fifth of families were in the lowest earning quintile by 1949, restoring levels to pre-Depression times.”Footnote 20 But one-fifth are in that quintile every year, by definition.
Thus, like it or not, theologians need to make choices among competing sociological claims about structural causality. These claims embody different assumptions about the human. Once social science begins to tell us “who we are”—which it inevitably must do—it relies on assumptions debated within Christian anthropology and fundamental moral theology. Although social scientists need to strive to prevent their moral convictions from tainting their scientific descriptions, there is no such thing as “value-free” social science.
This article’s most fundamental assertion is that there are two different types of choices that theologians (and others) must make about the causal claims related to social structures: one at a higher, general level, the other at a lower, more-specific level. The first type is a choice of a general account of the relation between every social structure and human agency, an account that can be employed across the political spectrum from conservative to moderate to liberal to liberationist positions. The second is a specific—and often more controversial—choice among competing causal accounts regarding the operation of some specific kind of social structure (say, an economy, a parish, or a city police department). This second kind of choice often leads to one rather than another of various positions. Just as moral theology has long described human agency generally while recognizing that acts always exist specifically, so too we need to understand social structures in general (applying to all structures) as well as understanding how a specific kind of social structure operates.
Moral Theology: Causal Analysis Has Always Been There
Some readers may hope to address sin in the social world theologically without having to enter into debates about causality. But moral theology and social science share an interest in causality. Moral judgments to act in one way rather than another always (often implicitly) include crucial assumptions about what that action will cause to happen. This is true of even non-consequentialist ethics. John Finnis notes that:
When we reject consequentialism as irrational, we are not in the least proposing that sound ethical reasoning ignores or systematically discounts consequences. On the contrary, a basic requirement of practical reasonableness is that one attend to likely consequences of one’s decision.Footnote 21
Thomas Aquinas names foresight as a critical element of prudence since practical reasoning (unlike speculative reasoning) involves “future contingents” that “can be directed by man to the end of human life.”Footnote 22 Moralists cannot ignore causal claims.
In matters of personal morality, the causality often seems obviously clear. Telling lies at work will undermine the relations of trust there and thus, according to Aquinas, subverts the social nature of human persons.Footnote 23 Aquinas also taught that it is immoral for a seller to raise the price of a good when the buyer has a special need for it, although it is morally acceptable to raise the price to compensate for the loss when the seller has a special need for it.Footnote 24 He (reasonably) presumed that he understood the causal relations involved here (i.e., that only in the latter situation does a sale generate a loss for the seller). Nevertheless, had he misunderstood what was happening and later came to see “what’s causing what” differently, he would surely have felt an obligation to rethink whether his moral conclusions were well founded.Footnote 25 Moral theology has always depended on causal assumptions about how the world works.
A General Causal Account of the Relation between All Social Structures and Human Agency
The first of the two choices facing theologians concerns a general account covering all social structures. Three major alternatives within sociology describe the causal relations between every social structure and the agency of persons making choices within them.Footnote 26
The first alternative is a holistic account that emphasizes the causal impact of social structures so much that it leaves little room for human freedom. Put crudely, persons are like pawns pushed around on the chessboard of life by social forces. The roots of this sort of collectivism stretch deep into the history of sociology, with Auguste Comte explaining that “society is no more decomposable into individuals than a geometric surface is into lines, or a line into points.”Footnote 27 From this perspective, it is naïve to attempt to explain human behavior by means of the free choices of individuals. Within theology, claims that hegemonic global systems are the cause of injustice are collectivistic. The reality is more complicated. Christian theology requires an analysis of structure that allows for a more robust view of human freedom and the ways that even morally beneficial decisions and structural processes can contribute to systemic injustice.
The second alternative is an individualistic account that recognizes nothing in the social world other than the interactions of individuals and groups. Sociologist Margaret Archer points to Max Weber’s classic claim that collectivities “must be treated solely as the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons.”Footnote 28 Other variations of this view within sociology today abound.Footnote 29 Society is reducible to the interaction of those persons. A similar conviction has also dominated in economics. As John Stuart Mill put it, “Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual man.”Footnote 30 Within theology, Michael Novak’s rejection of the idea of social justice is an example. He asserts that “social justice is a virtue, an attribute of individuals, or it is a fraud.”Footnote 31 Christian, especially Catholic, theology requires an anthropology that locates human freedom within a social world that is more influential than these individualistic scholars envision.
The third alternative is provided by critical realist sociology, a perspective that combines a recognition of the freedom of personal agency with the causal impact of structures, yet without conflating the two.Footnote 32 Although individualist or collectivist accounts may generate certain insights, theology’s incorporation of a general social scientific conception into its reflections should avoid both of these extremes.
A critical realist view of structures conforms to the magisterial teachings on structure and agency better than the alternatives and is additionally rooted in key claims from the philosophy of science. This choice of critical realism has been defended elsewhere.Footnote 33 The point here is that this choice is different in kind from a second choice about competing causal accounts of a specific social structure provided by social science. To understand that difference, we describe the critical realist account first.
How All Social Structures “Work”
From the perspective of critical realist sociology, social structures are ontologically real systems of relations among social positions rooted in material foundations.Footnote 34 For example, the traffic system in your city entails several positions and relations among them for persons who drive vehicles on roads in the area. The most fundamental position is that of the driver of a car, a position you take on when you leave home on your way to work. The position of driver is in relation to the position of other drivers, to the position of pedestrian, to the position of police officer, and to the position of traffic court judge. This social structure imposes several restrictions on you (and on everyone who takes on the position of driver): for example, what fees you must pay, where you are forbidden to park, which side of the street you must drive on, and how fast you can go. There is no determinism. You could choose to park next to that fire hydrant or drive twenty miles per hour over the speed limit, but violating the restrictions brings the threat of a penalty. Usually, we live with these requirements willingly, but when we’re tempted otherwise, this constraint on our freedom is usually sufficient to lead us to choose to comply. Every social structure entails restrictions that penalize decisions that violate “business as usual.”
Many structural restrictions don’t rely on legal penalties for enforcement. In the social structure called a religious congregation, the relation between congregant and preacher entails restrictions, such as not interrupting the sermon or standing up to ask questions immediately afterward. We’re so used to how things work there that the thought doesn’t even arise for most of us. But it does at times for some of us, and the strange looks we would get from fellow congregants is sufficient penalty to lead each of us to choose not to violate those restrictions, even though in other situations, we’d be keen to interact with a speaker.
And structures can change our decisions merely by presenting opportunities. The boss might offer the sales team a bonus for good results. Many students will choose to do the additional work when offered an extra-credit assignment. And we’ve all bought something “because it was on sale.” We already had reasons to want it, but the sale was an additional causal influence on our decision to do so within the social structure of the market. Social structures affect our choices through both restrictions and opportunities. As sociologist Dave Elder-Vass puts it, social structures are “collective social entities with causal power.”Footnote 35
We moral theologians need to become accustomed to thinking of structures as ontologically real “things” that are not agents themselves but that have a non-deterministic causal impact on the decisions of moral agents. A simple example of a similar sort of non-agential causality concerns your hike in a national park toward a distant hill. You aim for the shortest route, but you encounter a pond. The pond is not an agent, but it does have a causal impact on your decisions. You decide to walk around it. Yet there was no determinism: you do have a choice. You could choose to swim across it, as Theodore Roosevelt insisted when hiking with his children.Footnote 36 You decide not to “pay the price” of the swim, and so you alter your course.
Unlike the pond, which exists even if no one ever hikes by, social structures exist only as long as persons take on the positions that constitute them. Just as water cannot exist without the hydrogen and oxygen that combine to form it, so social structures cannot exist without the ongoing participation of persons within them.Footnote 37 But like the pond, such structures are ontologically real. As Margaret Archer puts it, social structure is “quintessentially relational but none the less real because of its emergent properties which affect the agents who act within it and thus cannot be reduced to their activities.”Footnote 38 That is, like the pond, without being an agent, a social structure has a causal impact on decisions by presenting persons within them with restrictions and opportunities in the face of which those persons make decisions based on their own goals, whatever those are. Sinful social structures work this way, too.
Personal agency does make a crucial difference. A virtuous agent may refuse to make a sinful decision, being willing to face the penalties that follow when one doesn’t “go along” with structural constraints. Both secular history and the Christian tradition celebrate the lives of persons who heroically stood for principle at the price of years in prison or even death. Yet most restrictions in social structures are not so burdensome, and most of us “go along” most of the time with those restrictions we encounter at work, at the grocery store, and in the other social structures within which we find ourselves throughout the day. The choice of whether to go along with an objectionable restriction typically depends on the seriousness of the evil involved, the price to be paid in the penalty, and the strength of virtue of the person making the decision.
The fact of agency should not lead us to individualistically blame sin in the social world on “a few bad apples.” In any structure, there are some truly “bad apples” and some heroic exemplars of virtue. We need an account that can both identify “bad apples” and recognize structural restrictions and opportunities that have causal impact on all the apples.
Further clarifications are helpful. First, although we focus here on social structures, culture is similarly influential in human agency. Theologians have learned much from various analyses of culture, but, due to the constraints of space, we largely ignore it here, as there is much to gain from a more careful analysis of social structures.
Second, beyond the causal analysis provided by sociology, it takes additional work of moral theologians to assess moral responsibility, guilt, and liability. The police officer in a racist police department who doesn’t report racist abuse by his partner may be morally culpable, even if reporting would lead his peers to resent him. Yet few would condemn the single mother in Kolkata if, unable to find a decent job in the social structure we call the economy, she turns to prostitution as the only way to feed her children. Causal analysis contributes to, but cannot determine or replace, assessments of responsibility and culpability.
Third, this analysis reflects that there is probably no social structure so totalizing that it is only sinful. Even a racist police department may enforce laws against drunk driving. This means we can describe even institutions we love (and perhaps work for) as sinful—or “grace-ful”—without implying that this is all they are.
Fourth, the sociological insights illuminating sinful social structures have a wide application across the subdisciplines of theology. Understanding how human agency is and always has been influenced within social structures is useful in Scripture and church history, in ecclesiology as well as liturgy and pastoral theology.
A Specific Causal Account for a Particular Type of Social Structure
Even if a theologian accepts our proposal of critical realist sociology to provide a general account of how structure and moral agency interact causally, a second choice—of an account of the causal relations in any particular kind of social structure—will be required before making moral judgments about any specific social structure. There is immense variety among different types of social structures, including religious congregations, national economies, city traffic systems, universities, and chess clubs. The question “What causes what?” generates vastly different answers for different kinds of structures. For example, an accurate causal account of how things get decided in a military unit, a parish, or a Catholic Worker house will be quite different.
Thus, a complex choice is necessary for theologians (and for everyone else) when inquiring about the causal relationships within any one type of social structure. The answer at this second level of social analysis is often formulated as a causal typology, sorting out the variations within this one kind of structure into two or more subgroups. Some are uncontroversial. Consider a simple example. “In our region, there are two kinds of bridge clubs accredited by the American Contract Bridge League: those run by the owner of the space where the games occur and those run by volunteers who rent a space for the games.” We can imagine a broad agreement among bridge players concerning “what causes what” at a bridge club.
However, when theologians, or others, attempt a moral analysis of a contemporary social problem, the variety of causal typologies to explain “what causes what” can be daunting. Concerning economic justice, neo-conservatives tend to rely on causal accounts of a market economy that stress its beneficial effects,Footnote 39 while liberation theologians rely on those making clear the damaging effects of markets among the poor and vulnerable.Footnote 40 In such a case, one might seek further distinctions, such as the one made by development economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, between “extractive” and “inclusive” economic institutions.Footnote 41 Similarly, when focusing on racial relations or the more-specific problems of race and policing, alternative causal typologies are reasonably debated.
An analysis of how best to make such choices among these more-specific causal accounts is immensely important but lies beyond the scope of this article. But it is important to note: specific accounts that overstate the causal importance of either individual choices or structural constraints may mislead the moral analysis of a theologian (or anyone else) who uses them. Scholars working with critical realist insights have ample work to do in describing how an aversion to both individualistic and collectivistic causal accounts affects these more particular choices.
The point here is that this second kind of choice by theologians when employing the insights of social science is different in kind from the first one. This second choice is a lower-level, more-specific choice than the adoption of critical realist sociology to understand the relation of moral agency and structural influence in all social structures. Theologians who make a second choice without prior reflection on the first choice will simply be importing the first-choice assumptions of whatever social scientists they have chosen to rely on.
The arguments concerning economic life provided by both Catholic liberationists and neo-conservatives will be stronger if they recognize this distinction and employ a critical realist account of moral agency within social structures. And this ability to agree on a general way of looking at complex social problems that attends to both structural and personal causality might even engender a more constructive dialogue among groups that have often dismissed each other as ideologically driven.
How the Two Choices Affect the Definition of a Sinful Social Structure
The fact that there are two distinct choices in the use of social science by theologians has important implications for the very definition of a sinful social structure. The definition should be rooted in the first choice of a general causal account of all social structures. It ought not to be conflated with the second choice. It should apply to all instances of sinful social structures and ought not to be accurate for only some structures to the exclusion of others.
Plenty of well-intentioned authors concerned with large-scale social evils conflate these two levels that need to be distinguished. For example, the early work of Latin American liberation theology understandably focused on large and pervasive forces, such as the globalization of trade and the centuries of colonial oppression. As Daniel Daly has shown in some detail, these theologians “convinced many ethicists of the importance of using the social sciences” but “were not as interested in producing substantive theoretical accounts of social realities … as they were in naming the actual structures that dealt death and misery across the continent.”Footnote 42 This naming was absolutely necessary at the time and still is.
What we propose in distinguishing two levels of analysis is a proposal to improve these projects. The point is to realize the multiplicity of kinds of social structures in which agency is shaped, for good or ill. All social structures affect human agency within them, whether that structure is a national economy, an international NGO, a regional hospital, a city council, your parish, or the local garden club. And any of these can be sinful. We all know well how economic life can be unjust, but hospital policy can also treat the poor unjustly. The power invested canonically in the office of the pastor of a Roman Catholic parish can facilitate the abuse of employees and parishioners. And the structure of the garden club can allow an overbearing president to manipulate the club’s proceedings.
What counts as sin depends on the social structure under examination. The moral character of self-interested deception depends on whether the social structure involved is a car dealership, a poker game, or a Nazi interrogation room, all of which are social structures. We need a definition of a sinful social structure that can apply to all social structures, not simply those most serious, society-wide injustices frequently in mind when theologians address sin in the social world.
For example, consider the definition of a sinful social structure by Conor Kelly, who has been a leader in creatively employing critical realist sociology to help Catholic social ethicists think more adequately about evil in the social world. Still, his definition exhibits the problem we address here. Kelly argues that a structure of sin is “an institution or collective practice that either socially idealizes or economically incentivizes actions seeking exclusive self-interest(s) at the expense of the common good.”Footnote 43 We are concerned about this definition for two reasons.
First, Kelly limits idealizations to the “social” and incentives to the “economic.” But idealizations can be economic. Critics of neoliberalism have identified various ways that economic success, especially profit, has become enthroned ideologically as the goal of economic life.Footnote 44 And incentives can be social.Footnote 45 The police officer who does not report the unjust behavior of a partner aims not for financial advantage but to maintain status among peers in the department.
Second, self-interest at the expense of the common good may be the most frequent motive behind sins committed in some social structures, for example, the economy. But many sins that are incentivized by social structures arise not primarily out of self-interest but often from broader goals, as for a suicide bomber in the social structure of a radical Islamic cell or an agent within the structure of a national security service who tortures prisoners to extract information about terrorist plots.
Kelly’s proposed definition obscures the two separate decisions about causality that must be made; he has incorporated the characteristics of some particular sinful social structures (e.g., the economy) into his general definition of a sinful social structure. Getting specific about what qualifies as sin typically requires attention to the particular kind of social structure involved; the definition of a sinful social structure should apply to them all.
Thus, we propose a broader definition:
A sinful social structure is one that generates restrictions and opportunities that, through their causal impact on the choices of persons within them, undermine human flourishing in two distinct ways, complicity and oppression.
On the one hand, consider complicity. Like every social structure (recall our example of the traffic system), a sinful social structure generates restrictions that penalize decisions that would undermine the normal functioning of life within that structure, and it presents opportunities that encourage decisions that support that functioning. Thus, persons of privilege within a social structure don’t need to intend the underprivileged status of others; their ongoing decisions to comply with “things as usual”—rather than facing penalties for resisting the usual—help to sustain a social structure that undermines the flourishing of others. For example, an employee in an organization may not report the sexual misconduct of a superior toward a third person to avoid the penalties (being branded a troublemaker, a negative performance evaluation) he himself might face if he initiated a complaint. The sexual abuse crises in a dozen different organizations in the United States are vivid examples entailing the quiet complicity of many who “knew what was going on.” Or, to obtain a lucrative government contract, a business owner may take up the opportunity available in a corrupt political system to offer a bribe to a government official. Even buying a shirt or washing machine made by workers treated unjustly half a world away makes us complicit (part of the cause, to some degree) in the injustice because “going along” helps to sustain and reproduce the social structure of the market.
On the other hand, the oppression problem is that those who are marginalized in a social structure face so many structurally generated restrictions and so few structurally generated opportunities that it is excessively difficult to achieve a flourishing life. It is the multitude of restrictions and the dearth of opportunities that together marginalize and impoverish. For example, low-income parents in the social structure we call the economy face severe economic restrictions and may have to spend so much on rent and food that they cannot afford medicines necessary for their children. Or people with characteristically African-American-sounding names may have fewer job opportunities due to discrimination in hiring. Although we might not use the word “oppression,” even junior faculty members in an academic department may be treated unjustly, given the restrictions and opportunities they face compared to senior colleagues.
Making a distinction between complicity and oppression enables us to recognize that the causal impact of sinful social structures on flourishing works in different ways for different agents. Of course, when traced out, complicity and oppression become intertwined; and as intertwined, the flourishing of all agents involved is harmed when “going along” with the sinful structure. But “going along” looks one way (complicity) to a clothing shopper looking for the lowest price and another way (oppression) to an Asian seamstress treated unjustly.
Applying This Analysis of Two Levels of Causal Account
It may seem that this general definition is simply an intellectual nicety and that all the work for social change will have to come at the specific level. True, the specific level will always be involved, but like the generic analysis of action in traditional moral theology, the generic critical realist account of a social structure can also offer insight into how structures work in practical ways that illuminate pathways for change. We illustrate this interaction of general and specific levels by utilizing three (generic) insights from critical realist sociology about how structures change and point out how such insight can illuminate specific sinful structures in need of change.
Nonmoral Cognitive Categories
Critical realist sociologist Christian Smith points out that no social structure exists without ideational elements.Footnote 46 After all, social structures are not machines. They are relationships among social positions held by persons who are responsive to ideas. Understandably, the ideas that receive the most attention in Christian social ethics are the moral valuations that help to legitimate social structures. And there is much for theologians to do in clarifying the distorted valuations that predictably stand behind sinful social structures. However, the role played by primarily descriptive cognitive categories is often overlooked in ethical analysis.
Every social structure is supported by a network of descriptive ideas—a set of cognitive categories. This is a general insight from the critical realist notion of social structures. Moving to any particular kind of social structure, we see that different social structures rely on different cognitive categories.
Every worker at the social structure called a cabinet shop knows the difference between ripping and crosscutting a board. In the classroom, such fundamental notions include teacher, student, assignment, podcast, grade, and final exam. The social structure of a duplicate bridge club depends on a shared understanding of a contract, slam, and match points. City councils, bowling leagues, national diplomatic corps, the markets for agricultural products, and every other kind of social structure—each relies on a set of cognitive categories without which it could not function. Shared cognitive categories within a particular social structure make everyday life possible and form a substructure on which both a causal analysis (what causes what to happen) and moral judgments in that social structure are made.
Applying this general insight about the importance of cognitive categories assists in analyzing particular sinful social structures of oppression and complicity. Every employee in a corrupt city hall knows that “confidentiality” is a good cover for kickbacks. Racist police departments can point to “officer’s discretion” as a way to avoid accusations of racial profiling. The use of torture by the CIA at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was legally and morally justified as simply “enhanced interrogation techniques.”Footnote 47 A similar logic lay behind Vladimir Putin’s insistence that his war in Ukraine be called a “special military operation,” a cognitive category less offensive than “war” or “invasion.”Footnote 48
When ethicists think of a transformation of sinful social structures, the importance of a transformation in moral commitments comes immediately to mind. But critical realist sociology reminds us that a change in cognitive categories is also a fundamental part of such structural change. New categories facilitate structural change, even though the old ideas do not immediately disappear.
In describing the epoch-making shift away from European feudalism, Christian Smith explains that “political and economic structures are changed when people stop thinking in terms of lords, peasants, and knights, and imagine life instead in terms of burghers, citizens, traders, and entrepreneurs.”Footnote 49 Contested understandings of Vatican II correlate with different cognitive categories: Is the church best described by “communio” or “people of God”? Is the church most authentic when it is “synodal” or “hierarchical”?
Consider racism. The existence of concepts such as redlining, white flight, “Jim Crow,” and even King’s famous admonitions against “white moderates” did not ensure the success of the civil rights movement. But they helped to name the structures of complicity that would otherwise have gone largely unnoticed by most Americans, as have newer phrases like “Central Park racism,” “driving while Black,” and “militarized policing.”
The struggle to transform the sinful structures threatening the health of the Earth—and even the economic development of poor nationsFootnote 50—is made possible by a collection of ideas, many of them unheard of a century ago, such as acid rain, carbon footprint, fossil fuel, and ecological debt. Confronting corruption similarly relies on descriptive cognitive categories: transparency, accountability, whistleblowing, tax haven, shell companies, and offshore accounts. In hopes that Christians will be more effective in confronting sinful social structures, one of the motives behind this article is to encourage moral theologians to employ cognitive categories such as relations among social positions, general and specific causal accounts, and even the notion of a cognitive category.
Realities that are overlooked are more likely recognized once named. Sinful social structures are more likely to be challenged when resonant cognitive categories are widely used. The insight applies to all social structures, leaving work to be done on each kind of structure specifically.
Lived Bodily Practices
Christian Smith observes that one of the fundamental insights arising from the general commitment to critical realist accounts of the social world is the importance of the regular bodily practices that are expected of participants within social structures.Footnote 51 This general insight has quite different concrete implications in different kinds of social structures.
Catholic understandings of ritual in liturgical theology and of the embodied person in Christian anthropology make recognition of the descriptive importance of bodily practices within social structures more intuitive than would be true in an individualistic belief in God. The social structures we call parishes are expressed and reinforced by the weekly in-person attendance of the faithful. The move in business to greater use of remote work after COVID-19 will have implications for the cohesion of work groups that are still being lived out. The bodily tradition in many police departments that everyone attends the funeral of an officer killed in the line of duty builds mutual trust and coherence among police officers.
Similarly, bodily practices play a constitutive role in sustaining social structures of oppression, where restrictions on activities, and severe penalties for violating those restrictions, press the vulnerable to do what they don’t want to. For decades, African Americans daily decided to avoid “whites only” water fountains, sat at the back of public buses, and attended segregated schools. Analogously, facing greater opportunities within those same structures, white Americans embodied and maintained the structures of racism by corresponding daily bodily patterns. Racist police departments today rely on the nearly universal bodily practice of compliant posture when a citizen is questioned by a police officer. And around the globe, many members of minority groups and even majority Indigenous groups regularly engage in the bodily practice of “taking the longer route home” to avoid walking past a police officer likely to harass them.
Because social structures are expressed and reinforced through lived bodily habits, changes in those practices can disrupt, undermine, and even transform those structures. Consider the effects of the changes in bodily practices brought on two centuries ago by migration from rural areas to the cities of England during the industrial revolution. After generations of ancestors had been baptized, married, and buried at the same local church, farmers moved to distant cities to become factory workers living without communal ties in overcrowded slums, generating a transformation of structures in both town and city. More recently, the absence of face-to-face interaction due to COVID-19 disrupted bodily patterns in schools, churches, and a host of civil society organizations, something vividly brought to awareness by the downturn in church attendance after many months of COVID-19-induced absence.Footnote 52 Not only were students “behind” when they returned to classes, but their commitment to education was weaker.Footnote 53 The long-term effect on civil society is still to be seen.
Sinful social structures are similarly vulnerable to changes in bodily practices that publicly challenge the complicity inherent in business as usual. In April 1919, Mahatma Gandhi called for a one-day general strike to resist British colonial abuse. The simple but costly act by African Americans to sit in forbidden seats on buses and at lunch counters was a vital part of the success of the civil rights movement. Following the death of George Floyd, protesters in Minneapolis and around the nation held rallies on interstate highways, blocking traffic (and the usual movement of bodies on highways) to get attention for their resistance to racist policing.Footnote 54
All social structures depend on a pattern of lived bodily practices. This is the insight at the general level. Yet the implications of this insight of critical realist sociology play out differently in different kinds of social structures. Any particular bodily practice—for example, sitting quietly when stopped for speeding or sitting quietly at a forbidden lunch counter—will vary in its meaning and causal impact, depending on the kind of structure within which it occurs. There is no guarantee that strategically altering bodily practices will transform sinful structures, but it remains a promising response to injustice.
Penalties for Noncompliance
Margaret Archer notes that “all structural influences … work through shaping the situations in which people find themselves.”Footnote 55 That shaping entails generating restrictions and opportunities that tend to move decisions in particular directions and tend to sustain those very social structures, investing them with existence through time. In particular, the penalties for not complying with restrictions, even when such penalties remain mostly in the background, lead most of us to comply most of the time.
Social structures have great durability, a stability without which daily life would be chaotic and conflictual. The predictability of daily life depends on the mail being delivered, the cell towers working, the grocery stocking what we’re shopping for, the police enforcing laws, and the light by our favorite chair coming on when we flip the switch. All of these taken-for-granted parts of our lives rely on what other people have agreed to do within social structures. And these depend on their willingness to do it and the penalties in the background if they don’t follow through. The IRS audits few tax returns, but without IRS audits, there is little doubt that taxpayer cooperation would decrease. In a well-functioning social structure, people willingly cooperate, but we’ve all been tempted to avoid an inconvenient obligation. Yet, the activity flows in the structures we participate in are powerful. They are enforced by a range of penalties, from mild to severe, with that range varying in different kinds of social structures.
Critical realist sociologists point out that the penalty must be enacted by persons; it is not like gravitational force or a pond in our way. If you skate the wrong way on the ice rink, you will have to resist the contrary advice coming from the disapproving glares of the other skaters—and eventually, the skating rink monitor will approach and tell you to turn around or get off the ice. Structures always have various levels of enforcement, starting with the subtlest, often extending to rejection, and sometimes to fines or imprisonment. Thus, the reduction of enforcement is a powerful, though often overlooked, way that personal initiative can lead to structural change in sinful social structures. Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church in Germany has had a history of less stringent enforcement of universal liturgical normsFootnote 56 than has, for example, its US counterpart. This fact likely contributed to the German bishops pressing for greater lay authority in church synods than Vatican rules allowed.
At times, key leaders resisting their own complicity in social evils can reduce the frequency or severity of the price to be paid for violating structural restrictions. For example, in 1937, the United Auto Workers labor union pressed the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, to stop using the police to support the anti-union actions of large automobile manufacturers. When General Motors realized the government would no longer enforce existing rules, it agreed to negotiate with the union.Footnote 57 The actions of the labor union Solidarity led to the peaceful transition from communism to democracy in Poland in the late 1980s. Yet this would not have occurred if Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had chosen a military response, as his predecessors had in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968. And many protestors who blocked streets and interstate highways in protest of George Floyd’s killing escaped serious legal repercussions; government prosecutors have considerable discretion in choosing whether to prosecute.
Thus, in addition to the denunciation of evil by moral and political appeal, people confronting sinful social structures who understand how structures operate and change will be on the lookout for places where the will to enforce penalties against resistance has weakened and can press more forcefully amid these opportunities. The insight is a general one, arising from an understanding of how all social structures work, even though the causal analysis of the penalties for noncompliance varies with the type of social structure within which they are threatened.
Conclusion
This article has built on previous efforts to further explicate the work theological ethicists must do when analyzing and seeking to transform social structures. Critical realist sociology’s analytical distinction between structural causation and human agency, though not neglecting either, leads to the analysis of “sinful social structures” as the best approach to the problems often referred to as “social sin” or “structural sin.” Further, critical realism’s analysis of how structures operate invites ethicists to distinguish between a generic account of the relation of a social structure to human agency and accounts of how this occurs within particular social structures that are sinful.
Critical realism becomes to social ethics what philosophical action analysis has long been in moral theology; a general account that illuminates but must always be applied to specific contexts. Such a general account of how structures and agency work can provide common ground for theologians who differ widely in their political perspectives to articulate their own positions. In so doing, we believe that they will also have to make clearer the second, more-specific account of particular structures on which their analysis rests. This generic definition of social structures is not merely a matter of intellectual interest but can also usefully illuminate how structures change.
This article also clarifies that the definition of a sinful social structure should apply to all such structures, and not simply to a most egregious subset of them. And it should address the situations of both those marginalized within them (the problem of oppression) and the privileged whose decisions help sustain those structures (the problem of complicity). Thus, we propose that a sinful social structure is one that generates restrictions and opportunities that, through their causal impact on the choices of persons within them, undermine human flourishing in two ways, complicity and oppression.
There are numerous limitations to this article due to the constraints on the length of a single journal article. Importantly, the article largely ignores culture and leaves unaddressed the essential assessment of moral responsibility for sinful social structures and all judgments about guilt or liability. It addresses only a small portion of the issues we face. There is much more work to be done in unfolding insights arising from this critical realist description of the social world.
Yet, even theologians who will not immerse themselves in the sociological literature can profitably employ the insight that social structures alter decisions by the restrictions and opportunities they generate for persons taking on positions within them. These insights ultimately can assist theologians to move their readers and students to more accurately understand the problems we face and more creatively identify constructive paths toward a more just world.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
