We feel joy when others change their lives for the better, and sorrow when they alienate themselves from God. From the perspective of an expressive individualist, a loving mother will refuse to judge the sexual indiscretions of her adult children. But for a Christian, the mother who weeps when her children commit serious sin is the one who truly loves them. In this view, love is not indifference, and indifference is not love.
We engage in self-righteous judgmentalism when we begin to believe that we are superior to others because of their sins, or that it is our unique duty to make them feel bad for their lifestyle.
But compassion for those mired in sin does not overlook sin — it recognizes it for precisely what it is. We cannot see the Church as a hospital for sinners if we do not see sin as a sickness that needs treatment.
This sort of love is a far cry from the unconditional positive regard of therapeutic deism and expressive individualism. When we genuinely love others, we don’t become indifferent to their sins and shortcomings.
And seeing sin as a sickness that needs treatment implies that there are ways that we should be living but aren’t, standards that we often fail to live up to (and should feel bad at times for it). It implies a capacity for moral judgment.
Today, when often assume that when we love someone, we cannot (or must not) judge their lifestyles. We have come to see judgment as antithetical to love.
Some scholars refer to therapeutic deism (and its sibling, moralism) as a “new American religion.” In this view, God is something like a Cosmic Therapist, whose purpose is to help us feel happy about ourselves and our lives. Unconditional love is seen as God’s only important characteristic. They refer to this as the “new” American religion, because they recognize that, at its core, it is fundamentally different from the Christianity of old, with a wholly different view of God and what He asks of His children.
As one author writes: “The God portrayed in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures asks, not just for commitment, but for our very lives. The God of the Bible traffics in life and death, not niceness, and calls for sacrificial love, not benign whatever-ism.”