The last article I published in this series was back in June. This one arrives almost three months late. And since the subject before us now is Sloth, I can almost hear the easy joke writing itself. After all this talk about the seven deadly sins recast as modern virtues, perhaps the series itself has finally succumbed to one of its own themes.
But in truth, sloth is not the reason for the delay.
If anything, of the seven deadly sins—or, as I have been calling them in this series, the 7 Deadly Virtues—this is probably the one to which I have been least susceptible. That is not to say I am innocent of it, only that if I were drawing an honest map of my own life, sloth would not occupy the central territory. Lust, yes. Greed, yes. Pride, certainly. Envy in its subtler forms. Wrath, when baptized as righteousness. Gluttony, not only of appetite but of experience, stimulation, and the desire for more. These have all had their innings in me. But sloth? That has never been my most natural way of falling.
Perhaps that is why this article took longer to write.
It is easier, in some ways, to write about the sins that have left scorch marks you can still trace with your fingertips. Sloth is more elusive to me personally, not because I think lightly of it, but because my own life has more often been marked by excess motion than by stillness, by overreach than retreat, by striving than passivity.
Given the delay, let me briefly reset the frame.
This series has been exploring the old seven deadly sins—lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride—and the strange genius of modernity in transforming them into socially rewarded postures. Lust became liberation. Greed became ambition. Gluttony became self-care. Sloth became boundaries and disengagement. Wrath became moral clarity. Envy became aspiration. Pride became identity. The burden of the series has been that we have not outgrown sin so much as rebranded it, aestheticized it, and wrapped it in the flattering language of virtue.
In that sense, the whole project has also been autobiographical.
If People of the Sign, The Hardness of the Heart, and The Rod of Iron have a common thread, it is not that I stood above these things, diagnosing them from a safe theological perch. It is that I lived them. Wrestled with them. Rationalized them. Suffered through them. Sometimes inflicted them on others. And then, by grace, was forced to look.
Lust, for example, was never merely a doctrine to be analyzed. It was bound up in broken relationships, failed marriages, ego, hunger, fantasy, and the perennial male temptation to confuse longing with love. Greed, or at least covetousness in its many respectable forms, wound through ambition, business, performance, and the modern addiction to significance. Pride has perhaps been the most persistent thread of all—the assumption that one sees clearly, that one is exceptional, that one’s motives are purer than they are. Wrath can masquerade as conviction, and for anyone serious about ideas, religion, justice, or truth, that temptation is never far away. Even gluttony, as I wrote in the previous article, is not merely about food, but about overconsumption more broadly: of stimulation, success, comfort, novelty, and emotional anesthesia.
These are familiar roads to me.
But sloth has worn a different face in my life.
I have not, generally speaking, been the man asleep in the field. Mine has not been a biography of chronic idleness. If anything, much of my life reads as the opposite. I have been driven, searching, overcommitted, restless, productive, entrepreneurial, theological, relationally entangled, spiritually ambitious. The pages of the trilogy bear that out. Whatever else may be said of me, it is not that I lacked movement.
And yet movement is not the same thing as obedience.
That, I think, is where sloth still reaches me, and where it may reach many who, like me, are temperamentally industrious. Sloth is too often imagined as mere laziness, when in fact its older and more dangerous meaning is something closer to spiritual refusal. Not simply inactivity, but avoidance. Not simply rest, but drift. Not simply doing nothing, but failing to do the thing one is called to do.
By that measure, perhaps I am not as far from sloth as I might prefer to think.
There were seasons in my life—and they show up in the trilogy—when I was immensely active and yet unwilling. Willing to build, but not to submit. Willing to search, but not always to surrender. Willing to pursue meaning, but not always to accept the painful disciplines required by meaning. In that sense, sloth can hide even inside momentum. One can be busy enough to avoid the deeper call.
That may be one reason this vice is so difficult to diagnose in modern people. We think the opposite of sloth is busyness. Often it is not. Often busyness is just sloth’s more socially admired cousin. It can function as a shield against silence, repentance, repair, and the kind of sustained attentiveness that real vocation requires.
Still, if I am being candid, the dominant pattern of my life has not been passivity but striving. I have more often erred by charging ahead under the influence of my own intensity than by failing to move at all. If lust says, “Take,” and greed says, “Accumulate,” and pride says, “Exalt yourself,” then much of my life has been lived under some admixture of those imperatives. The trilogy is, among other things, the record of what such mixtures do to a man, to his marriages, to his children, to his faith, and to his sense of self.
Why, then, write about sloth at all?
Because it remains one of the defining pathologies of our age, even if it has not been my own chief temptation.
In fact, I sometimes suspect my relative impatience with sloth comes precisely because I have spent so much of my life in motion. I find myself disoriented by a culture that increasingly mistakes disengagement for wisdom, irony for intelligence, emotional self-protection for maturity, and perpetual postponement for peace. Ours is a civilization that has become remarkably adept at looking concerned while remaining unavailable. We scroll, react, opine, repost, and curate ourselves as thoughtful people, all the while sidestepping the difficult, unglamorous work of showing up—consistently, sacrificially, incarnationally.
That is sloth in one of its modern forms.
Not the refusal to be busy, but the refusal to be truly present.
And because we have clothed it in flattering language, it is hard to confront. We call it boundary-setting. We call it protecting our peace. We call it opting out of toxicity. Sometimes those things are real. Sometimes they are necessary. But sometimes, if we are honest, they are ways of making our evasions sound therapeutic.
Here again the seven sins overlap.
The slothful modern self is often also proud, because it does not wish to be corrected. It is often gluttonous, because it has become accustomed to comfort. It is often envious, because it resents the demands placed on it when others seem freer. It is often wrathful, because irritation is easier than service. And it is often greedy, because it wants to preserve its own time, its own energy, its own emotional space, without interruption.
This is why the sins are best understood less as isolated offenses than as a network of mutually reinforcing tendencies.
If I look back over my own life as narrated in the trilogy, I can see places where this network was at work even when sloth itself was not center stage. There were times when pride made me unavailable to counsel. Times when lust narrowed my field of vision. Times when greed or ambition justified a disordered allocation of energy. Times when wrath dressed itself as righteous clarity. In all of those, something adjacent to sloth was also present: a refusal to fully yield, to fully listen, to fully submit to what love, truth, or God might have been asking.
So perhaps that is the right way for me to write this article—not as a confession that sloth has been my principal vice, because I do not believe it has, but as an acknowledgment that even the restless, driven, and industrious are not immune to it. We simply meet it in more respectable clothing.
For some, sloth looks like a life wasted on the couch.
For others, it looks like a life spent running in the wrong direction.
For still others, it looks like endless commentary standing in for costly action.
What all these have in common is not laziness, but a failure to answer.
That strikes me as the heart of the matter.
God calls.
Life calls.
Love calls.
Truth calls.
Duty calls.
And sloth, in its deepest form, says: not now.
I have said many sinful things in my life, in many accents and under many disguises. Sometimes “not now” was among them, even if I was saying it while moving quickly.
Perhaps that is why this article had to wait until now. Not because I was slothful in the obvious sense, but because I wanted to speak honestly, and honesty takes longer when the subject is not one’s clearest wound but one’s more elusive shadow.
For those who have joined this series late, or who want to explore the fuller personal and spiritual terrain from which these essays emerge, my trilogy—People of the Sign, The Hardness of the Heart, and The Rod of Iron—remains the larger canvas on which these themes are painted:
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In the next article, I’ll turn to Wrath, which is in many ways the extroverted cousin of several of the sins already discussed—and perhaps one of the most publicly rewarded of them all in our age.
For now, perhaps the prayer is this:
Lord, where I have been restless, steady me.
Where I have been driven, humble me.
Where I have mistaken motion for obedience, correct me.
And where sloth still hides in delay, avoidance, or a failure to answer, call me again.
—Wade Fransson
