Redefining Sin as Suffering

My take on the harm of using the terms “sin” and “spiritual warfare” comes from my experience of understanding addiction based on my lived experience with an eating disorder, extensive research, and clinical practice. When I say addiction, I am referring to emotional eating/"gluttony," substance abuse, sex addictions, and a variety of other process addictions.

Recovery from an eating disorder only comes with a solid relapse prevention approach to normalizing the struggle with relapse as a part of the process to recovering, addressing guilt and shame with compassion, and treating the addiction in a multifaceted approach (psychology, psychiatry, support groups, spirituality, etc). I have treated and known a multitude (thousands) of people with eating disorders, and I don’t know a single one who has achieved solid recovery via reliance on prayer, spiritual practice, and “giving it to God” alone. I have only seen this method fail and cause more suffering. This is because it’s not a simplified sin.

People with addictions are SUFFERING, first from the pain (trauma, underlying mental health brain based illnesses) that drives them to addiction, and then by the addiction itself. I like how Sonia Waters (PhD) discusses redefining sin as suffering. She states:

"The Gerasene Demoniac in the Gospel of Mark reveals a valuable lesson about addiction. In this particular scripture, Jesus encounters a man who is possessed by a demon. His condition is “Legion,” the result of various sources of suffering, and the consequences are both personal and social: he harms himself and is rejected by others. But Jesus knows the difference between the voice of the man and the voice of the Legion. “I use this scripture to emphasize the difference between the person and their addiction,” says Waters. “The person is not evil; they’ve been invaded by a disease that causes spiritual pain.”

In eating disorder work, we use the term “ED” to separate a person from their eating disorder thoughts/urges. This separation of the person from the illness is vital especially with food (you can stop using a substance, but you can’t stop eating food). I usually encourage an individual to imagine how they would feed a child (no restriction, no over indulgence, no shaming about having a dessert in moderation). They can then use this to separate ED based thoughts/feelings/actions from the thoughts/feelings/actions of their healthy self and begin to recover.

Shame and calling this “sin” or “spiritual warfare” promotes a white knuckling will-power approach to recovery that will eventually fail and result in more shame. Struggle and suffering are ubiquitous to the human experience, but society and humanity classify certain suffering (sexual behavior, substance abuse) as worse even though God has said “all sins are equal.”

We need to be doing a better job within the system of religion if our aim is really to alleviate human suffering, encourage relationship with God, and promote behaviors consistent with the teachings of Jesus. We need to be normalizing that everyone suffers and no one's suffering is any worse than anyone else's. What is being threatened by your suffering is not your "morality" or being "good" vs. "bad," but rather your relationship with God...And that is what he cares most about! 

Kohlberg's model of moral development demonstrates how we teach children about morality first using punishment at the lowest level of understanding and growing into "principle" at the highest level - understanding that morality is complex and as adults we have an internalized sense of ethics (not relying on punishment and reward). We teach children about the devil and angels, "good and bad," sin and pleasing God because it is understandable for children and for the masses of people to understand, but I think similarly we need to advance in our understanding of religion as adults. We need to grasp that suffering (what we term "sin" for children) is a universal path that draws us closer to God as we try to avoid temptation of things that will provide temporary joy and distract us from God's will. The human brain for everyone will be drawn toward some type of relief from suffering (finances, over indulgence in something - even if it is work, alcohol, food, phones). 

Relational Frame theory (RFT) can provide a context on why these words of "sin" and "spiritual warfare" are harmful. RFT is a behavioral theory of language and cognition that explains how humans learn to relate words and concepts to each other through arbitrarily applicable relational responding. 

(Below I used ChatGPT to give you a full flush out explanation on RFT as a context for understanding my suggestion that the words sin and spiritual warfare are harmful to individuals in the church attempting to recover from addiction...I'd do it myself, but I'm tired and going to bed)

For someone recovering from addiction, words like “sin” and “spiritual warfare” often sit inside dense verbal networks that automatically evoke guilt, shame, and self-condemnation. The word “sin” is typically coordinated with: “evil,” “wrong,” “unclean,” “unworthy,” “separation from God,” etc.

When a person who struggles with addiction frames their behavior as “sin,” that relational network can instantly bring the beliefs: “I am sinful, I am unworthy of love, God is disappointed in me.

Under RFT, these derived relations don’t require conscious choice — they are automatically entailed through prior learning histories, often from early religious conditioning.

RFT shows that words and thoughts can function as stimuli controlling behavior as if they were real events.
So, when someone fuses with the thought, “Using again means I’m sinning,” their behavior may become rigid — guided by guilt rather than by values or workable actions.

Through derived relational responding, a neutral event (e.g., craving, relapse, or even attending a recovery meeting) can take on the emotional functions of “sin” or “evil” if it’s linked verbally:

“Craving = temptation = evil = I’m bad.”

Thus, normal recovery experiences (like urges or lapses) are transformed into evidence of moral failure, increasing avoidance and self-criticism — both major relapse risks.

Although scripture might assert that “all sins are equal,” relational framing is a social learning process, not a purely theological one.

• People derive comparative relations (“sexual sin” > “lying”) from cultural and social reinforcement histories.
• These derived relations persist automatically and can shape internalized shame hierarchies.

So even when an individual knows doctrinally that all sins are equal, their learned relational network still makes some feel worse or dirtier than others — a process RFT predicts and explains.