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In 1976, American psychiatrist Karl Menninger gave an unintentional treatise on how concealed sin is killing the West.

He declared, ‘We have lost our sense of history.’

With it, the West has lost any ‘sense of morality’, sin, responsibility, identity, and moral integrity.

Sensing Truth

C.S. Lewis, inspired by comments from J.R.R. Tolkien, called this sense of story ‘true myth’.

In his 1944 essay, Myth Becomes Fact, Lewis described story as a vehicle for principles and meaning.

True myth, he argued, is the ‘partial solution’ to the limits of human knowledge.

For Lewis, we’re throwing the baby out with the bath water if we eject story for fear of myth.

‘It is only while receiving the myth as story,’ he argued, ‘that we experience the principle concretely’.

Without this sense of story, humanity is rudderless; deaf, dumb, blind, and mute.

This is why history matters. This is why our story matters.

Without receiving the myth as story, there’s no way of distinguishing, let alone understanding the difference between truth and falsehood.

Without story, we have no way of distinguishing between true myth, and false ones; no way of grasping true North, or knowing how to use our left from our right.

Lewis might add that, although empiricism has its place, it’s the sense of story that makes empirical principles worth knowing, or, even knowable.

The metaphors “sunset”, “sun-down”, “sunrise”, and “sun-up” help illustrate the point.

Even though they’re empirically incorrect, these mythopoetic metaphors communicate truth through story.

They describe the distinction between night and day, unlike the more precise, heliocentric phrase, “The earth passing on its 23.4-degree axis around the sun.”

The empirical needs a sense of story.

‘To be truly Christian,’ Lewis said, ‘we must both assent to the historical fact, and also receive the myth [become fact — God’s Word Become Flesh] with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths.’

Lewis’ 78-year-old essay emphasises the significance of Karl Menninger’s broader concern.

Avoiding Responsibility

In asking Whatever Became of Sin?, the psychiatrist began by stating that Westerners are not just avoiding the word sin because it’s been used to ‘scare and control ignorant people’ — we’re avoiding the word sin because of the “I” in the middle of it.

Addressing the disappearance of sin, and with it the loss of story, Menninger argued that avoiding the word didn’t negate the truth it conveyed.

Despite its disappearance, ‘there is a general sentiment that sin is still with us, by us, and in us somewhere… it’s a burning sore, a deep grief, a heartache for many.’

At its heart, humanity’s erasure of the word sin is an attempt at self-justification.

Attached to this is an abandonment of a sense of story, and as a consequence, man’s defiant abandonment of God.

As Menninger stated, ‘the disappearance of the word sin involves a shift in the allocation of responsibility for evil.’

‘Sin,’ he added, ‘began to disappear because it was too expensive in terms of the current standards of comfort.’

‘Sin,’ he explained, ‘has simply been replaced with pills, which sponsor the ‘escape from pain, anxiety, boredom, remorse, and other unpleasant states of being… strongly affecting morality, and the moral code.’

The consequence is the creation of a ‘cult of comfort’, ‘rights without responsibility’, and ‘privilege without painful striving’.

Sin concealed doesn’t make sin go away.

Menninger slammed the ‘euphemistic disguise that conceals sin’, labelling it an attempt to ‘absolve humanity from acknowledging a God to be sinned against.’

What lies behind the erasure of sin from man’s vocabulary, is ultimately the rejection of God from man’s story.

Sin is, Menninger said, subsumed into the word crime. Instead of sin being about man’s alienation from God, sin becomes about man’s level of obedience to the state.

This, Menninger declared, marks the final transference of power from God to the Government.

Lewis and Menninger offer an answer to those of us asking how Western governments could go so far, in such a short amount of time, to win approval for their COVID-era overreach.

The West has lost its sense of His-tory.

With it, the West has lost its sense of story, and because of it, the West has lost its way.

The only path back for man, is God’s reach for man, in, by, with, and through true myth.

In other words, myth become fact: Jesus the Christ, God’s Word become flesh.

For, “If,” God said to Solomon, “My people who are called by My name humble themselves, and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.’ (2 Cor. 7:14, ESV)

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