Unmasking the Structural Tyranny We Hide in Power
In much of contemporary life, “sin” functions less as a profound diagnostic of human brokenness and more as a blunt instrument. It is weaponized to shame, guilt, and police individual behavior, often the behavior of the already vulnerable or those who deviate from prevailing cultural or religious norms. Sexual choices, personal habits, political opinions, or failures of etiquette are magnified into moral crises, while far larger patterns of harm recede into the background. The result is that sin becomes elusive. We obsess over specks in one another’s eyes while beams of systemic violence, exploitation, and dehumanization continue to structure our common life. Civilization pays the price: energy that could address real threats is diverted into endless cycles of personal condemnation and defensive self-justification.
The Apostle Paul offers a different grammar. In Romans 7 he does not describe sin primarily as a list of bad choices we make. He describes it as something that *does* things *to* us. “I do not do what I want but do the very thing I hate.” “Sin dwells within me.” “I have the desire to do good, but not the ability.” “I am at war.” “It takes me captive.” These are not the words of someone tallying private moral failures. They are the words of a person describing an invasive, occupying power.
Paul knew occupation firsthand. He had lived his entire life under Roman imperial control. He had watched legions move through the land, exact tribute, enforce hierarchies, and crush resistance. When he spoke of sin invading, setting up camp where it is not welcome, exploiting vulnerabilities, and enslaving people against their will, he was using the most concrete political language available to him. Sin, for Paul, is not merely personal; it is a state of being inside systems where it is nearly impossible to keep one’s hands entirely clean, no matter how hard one tries.
We do not live under ancient Rome, but we inhabit our own empires, economic, cultural, military, and ideological. These empires were built on recognizable historical foundations: the displacement and destruction of indigenous peoples, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions, the codification of racial and class hierarchies into law and custom. These are not distant memories. They persist in modified forms, through the ongoing violation of treaties and sacred lands, through prison labor that functions as a successor to earlier systems of bondage, through residential patterns, school funding formulas, environmental burdens, and healthcare access that continue to sort life chances by race, class, and geography.
Forces such as white supremacy, unrestrained corporate extraction, and patriarchal control operate as occupying powers. They are embedded in institutions, written into policies, normalized in culture, and sometimes even sacralized in religious rhetoric. They are bigger than any single person. They shape what is imaginable, what is rewarded, what is punished. Even those who hate these realities often find themselves participating in or benefiting from them simply by living inside the system. Good intentions and personal virtue are real, but they are not sufficient to neutralize structures that predate us and will likely outlast our individual efforts.
This is tyranny dressed in the garments of power and respectability. It presents itself as order, as tradition, as economic necessity, as national security, or even as divine will. It hides its violence in procedures, in markets, in “neutral” rules that somehow produce predictable winners and losers. The result is not only spiritual damage but material damage: bodies that are exhausted, sick, or shortened; minds that are alienated from one another; communities that are starved of resources while others accumulate obscene surplus. Civilization is wasted when the moral imagination is trained to scrutinize private conduct while these larger engines of harm continue running.
Twentieth-century theologians living under violent dictatorships, many of them installed or tolerated amid great-power politics recovered this older, more structural understanding of sin. They insisted that sin is not only an individual spiritual condition but a corporate, communal reality with concrete effects on flesh-and-blood people. It creates unholy hierarchies. It denies liberty. It makes some poor and sick so that others may be rich and secure. Salvation, in their view, could not be reduced to the rescue of isolated souls; it had to include the feeding of the hungry, the liberation of captives, and the announcement of good news to the poor. Their message was so threatening to entrenched power that many of them paid with their lives.
One of the clearest voices was Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. He repeatedly denounced government repression and defended the poor and disappeared. He received constant death threats. On March 24, 1980, he was assassinated while celebrating Mass. Weeks earlier he had said: “As a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.”
Paul’s cry echoes across centuries: “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” The honest answer is that we cannot rescue ourselves. The systems are too entrenched, the logics too deeply internalized, the benefits too unevenly distributed for any of us to simply will our way out. Liturgies of confession have long named this reality: “We are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves.”
Yet the same tradition that diagnoses the captivity also proclaims a liberator. The claim is not that individuals should stop examining their own lives. It is that the examination is incomplete and often distorted if it never confronts the powers that organize our common life. Jesus’ ministry consistently addressed both personal transformation and the confrontation of religious, political, and economic structures that crushed human dignity. The promise is not that we will instantly dismantle every empire, but that these powers are not ultimate. They can be resisted, subverted, and ultimately dethroned.
This does not leave us passive. It frees us from the exhausting and often self-defeating project of trying to be personally pure inside an impure system. It invites us instead into the slower, more communal work of building relationships, institutions, and practices that reflect a different order—one in which the hungry are fed, the captives are freed, and the dignity of every person is treated as non-negotiable. We are not asked to save the world on our own shoulders. We are invited to participate in a liberation already underway, one that is larger than our failures and more persistent than our empires.
The weaponization of sin against individuals will continue as long as it serves to distract from the sins embedded in our structures. But the deeper diagnosis remains available. Sin is real. It occupies. It wages war. And it is not bigger than the power that raises the dead and brings down the mighty from their thrones. That is not a reason for complacency. It is a reason for clarity, courage, and the refusal to let the most destructive forces of our age remain hidden behind the language of personal morality alone.
Read more about the author: Philip Kakungulu
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