the Empathy List #62: Desire Isn't Evil

What the Evangelical Church Never Taught Me, Part 2

Hey friend, Liz here.

Where does desire come from?

I have thought long and hard about this question. When Evangelical Christians consider this question, we often turn to the philosophical treatise of Romans 7 in the Bible, where the brooding first-century apostle Paul considers the matter of freewill at length: he says, “…what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.”

I believe that anyone who’s ever made a New Year’s resolution or signed on to a whole30 plan understands the dilemma Paul is describing:

I had the best of intentions, but I just couldn’t make it happen.

Evangelicals have flattened this treatise into the black and white “good versus evil”, “spiritual versus the flesh.”

While flattening such an argument is problematic, what we do get right is the futility of the human will.

Freud expounded upon humanity’s weak willpower in his theory of “conflicting psychological forces,” which examines the tug of war …