There's a quiet sickness spreading through our society, and it doesn't always look like sickness. It often wears the language of compassion, of empathy, of understanding someone's pain. But underneath it is something far more dangerous: the slow erosion of personal responsibility.
A Confession Before a Conviction
I don't say any of this from a place of judgment looking down. I say it from a place of having been there myself. Years ago, I chose to have an abortion. I was ashamed of what it would mean to be a single mother, and I let that shame drive my decision. For a long time, I could have told myself a story about why I "had" to do it — about the circumstances, the pressure, the fear. But God, in His mercy, brought me to a place of repentance. Not a place of excuse-making, but a place of truly owning what I had done and accepting full responsibility for it. That was the beginning of healing for me — not excusing the choice, but facing it honestly before God.
That's the tension I want to sit in today, because I believe it's one of the most urgent conversations our society needs to have.
The Excuses We're Making
Look at what's happening around us. Luigi Mangione shot an insurance executive at point-blank range, and a portion of the public rushed to excuse it — he was in pain, he'd been failed by the insurance system, so somehow the killing became understandable. Karmelo Anthony stabbed a fellow teenager, Austin Metcalf, to death, and people reached for the language of self-defense even when the facts said otherwise. And now, as Lindsay Clancy stands trial for strangling her three young children, we're watching women gather outside the courthouse wearing pink in solidarity with her.
In every case, the pattern is the same: pain becomes the explanation, and the explanation quietly becomes the excuse.
Compassion Is Not the Absence of Consequence
I want to be careful here, because I do have compassion for people who are suffering. Emotional trauma is real. Postpartum struggles are real. The weight of financial desperation and systemic failure is real. I'm not asking anyone to pretend pain doesn't exist.
But compassion was never meant to erase consequence. We can hold both truths at once: this person is suffering, and this person is still responsible for what they did. The moment we let one truth swallow the other, we stop being compassionate and start being complicit.
It Started in the Garden
This isn't a new problem. It's the oldest problem there is. When Adam ate the fruit, his first instinct wasn't repentance — it was blame. He pointed at Eve. Eve pointed at the serpent. Nobody wanted to simply say, "I made a choice, and it was wrong." That single unwillingness to own a choice sent the whole of humanity into a downward spiral we are still living inside of.
Every excuse we make for evil today is an echo of that first excuse in the garden. And Scripture is clear about where that road leads: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" (Galatians 6:7). Sowing and reaping isn't a threat — it's a law woven into the fabric of creation. When we try to remove the reaping from the sowing, we're not showing mercy. We're rebelling against the order God built into the world.
Grace and Consequence Are Not Enemies
Here's what I want the Church to understand clearly: grace was never meant to cancel consequence. It was meant to meet us inside of it.
Think about Saul of Tarsus. He wasn't a bystander — he was instrumental in the arrest and killing of Stephen. He didn't get to skip the reality of what he'd done. And yet God met him on the road to Damascus with radical, undeserved compassion and forgiveness. Saul's sin was real. God's mercy was also real. Both were true at the same time. The blood of Jesus can wash away every sin — but that washing doesn't erase the fact that a real choice was made, and often, a real consequence still has to be walked through. Saul ended up being persecuted and stoned even as he had persecuted believers, that is sowing and reaping at work.
That is the model the Church is called to offer the world: not a society that pretends evil didn't happen, and not a society that offers no path to redemption — but a people who say, "You are responsible for what you did, and Jesus can still redeem you."
We Are Not Victims of Our Own Voices
At the root of all this excuse-making is something simpler than we want to admit: selfishness. We convince ourselves that our pain is exceptional, that our circumstances place us outside the rules everyone else has to live by. But there is nothing new under the sun. People have suffered abuse, poverty, betrayal, and trauma in every generation, and still had to reckon with the choices they made in response to it.
No matter what voice is speaking to us — whether it's grief, medication, pain, or desperation — we still have the capacity, by the grace of God, to say no. That truth doesn't minimize suffering. It dignifies us as moral agents rather than reducing us to helpless victims of our own emotions.
A Word to the Church
A society that systematically removes consequences from human action because it feels sorry for people is not a compassionate society — it's a society quietly building the road to anarchy. The Church cannot follow that same pattern. We are called to be a people who tell the truth about sin, who don't flinch from calling evil what it is, and who simultaneously hold out the cross as the only place where real forgiveness and real restoration happen.
We can weep with the broken. We can extend the gospel to the guilty. We can believe in redemption for anyone, no matter what they've done. But we cannot do any of that honestly while pretending the choice itself didn't happen.
Let's be a generation that returns to truth — the truth that we are responsible, and the truth that Jesus is still enough to redeem us when we finally stop making excuses and start making confession.