One of the funniest things about modern secular culture is that it absolutely still believes in original sin. It just refuses to call it that because theological language makes educated people uncomfortable.
Listen to how modern institutions describe human beings. We are governed by unconscious bias, shaped by childhood conditioning, manipulated by algorithms, trapped in dopamine loops, distorted by social incentives, blinded by ideology, and mostly incapable of seeing our own motivations clearly.
yes, exactly...
Any Catholic that ever went through Catechism...
The modern secular person often imagines Christianity taught some uniquely dark view of humanity. But elite secular culture frequently sounds even more pessimistic. At least Christianity says fallen people can pursue truth, repentance, virtue, and grace and eventual re-union with god. Modern secular culture increasingly describes human beings as permanently programmable animals trapped inside systems they barely understand.
A medieval priest warned about pride, greed, vanity, tribalism, lust, and self-deception. A modern academic warns about cognitive bias, motivated reasoning, status incentives, trauma responses, and ideological capture.
Different vocabulary. Same evils.
The interesting part is watching aggressively anti-religious people reinvent Christian anthropology while insisting they escaped superstition. Christians say human beings possess a damaged nature inclined toward selfishness and error. Secular culture says humans are psychologically compromised by evolutionary wiring, social conditioning, and subconscious traumas.
Even the structure still looks religious. We confess privilege. We examine implicit bias. We undergo workplace ideological purification rituals. Entire professions now exist to uncover hidden corruption operating beneath conscious awareness.
Christianity noticed this problem a very long time ago. The real difference is that Christianity pairs human brokenness with redemption. Secular society increasingly offers diagnosis without forgiveness. You are conditioned, biased, psychologically fragmented, historically implicated, unconsciously complicit, and shaped by systems you cannot fully perceive. Good luck.
That is probably why modern culture keeps creating substitute religions through politics, therapy, wellness culture, and identity movements. Human beings apparently cannot function without some explanation for why we are dignified, damaged, guilty, self-deceptive, and still somehow capable of change. Christianity already had one.
But modern society would rather rediscover it slowly through neuroscience podcasts and HR seminars than admit the Church may have understood something permanent about human nature.