Dancing is no Longer Big on the List of Sins

The reason I chuckle when some clergy and their faithful followers rail out against their current favorite sins is because I know from my long life sins run in cycles. Our current sin cycle includes the "sins" of abortion, changes in gender identification, gay marriage, who uses which rest room, co habitation before marriage and you know the others.  Finger pointing at these particular sins will be replaced in time. I grew up in a church that had much sin finger pointing. While I don't recall going to the Sunday evening service in our church, I heard it often morphed into a discussion of sin, what was a sin and who was doing it.

It was all so long ago I had forgotten some of the sins. I had forgotten dancing. That was a sin. I'm not sure about square dancing or what we would call folk dancing--it definitely included ballroom dancing. Those of us old enough remember dance halls or "ballrooms" were popular back then. They were places of sin.

The link says dance was so approved in the 9th through the 15th centuries it was included in Christian rituals. However, five centuries before that a dance was sin. Tertulliam and St. Augustine found dance incited idolatry, lust and damnation. Augustine associated dance with Paganism. Pagans laughed and danced and found "the most volumptuous pleasures maintain perpetual excitement." How could anything be more sinful and unforgiving than "perpetual excitement."

After the 15th century, however, dancing as a sin came back. The Protestant Reformation put the hammer down on it as did Post Reformation Catholics. It began to be seen as associated with witches. Witches danced on graves. This dancing-as-sin went on quite a while. 

Then Africans were imported as slaves. They were forcefully converted. But in their spiritual life dance came easily and dance was reapproved. But there were threads of the faith, like the one I grew up in, that maintained the dance-is-sin belief into recent decades. I recall Concordia College in Moorhead, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, banned dancing until the 1970's.

If history tells us anything, it is that today's current BIG sins, abortion, gay marriage and sexual transitions will be replaced with other sins in time.  Keep your scorecard handy.