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Not
Born Bad:
The Catholic Truth About Original Sin
from a Thomistic Perspective
Introduction
According to James Boyce, Westerners have typically
“believed that they were ‘born bad’ because they had inher-
ited the sin of the first humans.” In his recent book
Born Bad:
Original Sin and the Making of the Western World
, Boyce
argues that Christianity in the West “stood alone [among
the religions] in seeing the eating of the forbidden fruit in
the Garden of Eden as the original sin—not only the first
sin in human history, but also one that subsequently became
innate to the human condition.”
1
Boyce is probably right
that, whether or not they are Christians, many people do
seem to believe that they were born bad. What lies behind
this situation, however, is not an authentic Catholic doc-
trine of original sin, but a deeply flawed understanding of
this doctrine—in some cases spawned within Christianity
itself—according to which human beings are born with an
essentially corrupted human nature along with an innate
inclination to evil.
This misunderstanding is seriously in need of correc-
tion. “[O]f all the religious teachings I know,” writes the
Evangelical author Alan Jacobs in his book on the cultural
impact of the doctrine, “none—not even the belief that
some people are eternally damned—generates as much
hostility as the Christian doctrine we call ‘original sin.’”
2
Not only hostility, but loss of faith and separation from
the Church are among some other consequences of this
misunderstanding.
1 Boyce, 3
2 Jacobs, VIII