In sophomore year of high school, the English reading list given to us included Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. I was somewhere east of miserable in that class and turned the pages with all the pleasure of chewing overcooked broccoli. A decade or so later, I was an actor hired to play one of the novel’s central characters and read it again, this time with more appreciative eyes.

In light of recent trends, the book came to mind, practically begging to be recommissioned as an analogue for woke culture. Little tweaking is needed. With breathless zeal for prosecuting public sin, our woke warriors emerge from their wardrobe-fitting aptly cast as postmodern Puritans. In this reboot, the sin may have morphed, but, as in the original, the zeal is highly suspect, forgiveness an aching absence.

Hawthorne sets the stage by drawing a connection between the Puritans’ utopian vision and two “institutions” they deem necessary for realizing it, a cemetery and a prison. A little odd, no?

It’s especially odd when you consider that despite the settlement’s religious nature, the Church isn’t presented as one of its pillars. In fact, there’s precious little on this stage save a kind of perilous theological miasma, an ether of religion-as-law. The massive oak door of the prison opens as the story starts, revealing young Hester Prynne. And it’s into this ether she steps.

Sin is the enemy of the utopia. Hester has sinned. Therefore, Hester is the enemy. Led to center stage for the public disposition of her fate, she stands humiliated before a throng of former peers, accused, judged, and sentenced by the unchallengeable act of a pointed finger. Sound familiar?

Now, I’m not a doctor, but I’ve played one on TV (true, at least twice), and one of the first magic words you’re taught in actors’ medical school is “etiology.” Sounds even more dazzling as an adjective, “etiological,” or adverb, “etiologically.” It’s simply the study of the origin of a disease, and it’s pertinent here because, among other things, the woke-warrior complex seems to fall under the category of “disease.”

I’m also an ordained cleric (true, but never played one on TV), and from my experience as a human, sinner, and minister, whatever other factors may be at work, this disease is essentially spiritual. In this context, The Scarlet Letter is surprisingly helpful in tracing the etiology of this spiritual disease, in order to find not a cure, nor a palliative, but a remedy that can be offered preventively as well.

Hawthorne’s framing of the story affords what, in similar instances, has been called “a genetic view of the present.” That view begins with the notion of sin itself; what it meant in Hester’s day, what it means in ours, and the likelihood that the two have more in common with each other than either does with classical, orthodox (there, I said it!) teaching on the issue.

Hester is shown mercy. After all, her life is spared. But she’s permanently marked, shamed, a sinner from first to last — if you will, from prison to grave. In this sense, the cemetery could stand for the living death that is life without hope of absolution.

Hester does step into an ether, but there actually is something in the grim gray between cemetery and stockade, present in its aching absence. It is the fullness of a Christian liturgical life, in which sacramental forgiveness restores the dignity of being, made in the image and likeness of the Creator. The absence of this in Hester’s world is the function of a more fundamental deficiency, one with direct bearing on our increasingly wrought postmodern Puritans.

The classical Christian story can be summed up as “God became human so that humans might become God.” The Church is understood as Christ’s body continued in history. This body moves as one, processing to the realization of its identity. Sin, therefore, is a stepping out of that procession. Thus, in its own way, sin points to the very glory it avoids.

Nicholas Afanasiev’s remark that “there has never been a Christianity without the Church, and never can be” speaks for centuries of experience tempered by fire. If the dreamier claim to be Christian without the Church rings a more recent bell, it should. It’s the stop just before “spiritual, not religious.” The stop after that is Woke Land Station.

For those, like me, whose first impression of a Puritan was Elmer Fudd in a Thanksgiving episode of Bugs Bunny, it was no fun to learn that the reality wasn’t nearly so cute. While Christian in a way traditions of ancient provenance would still recognize had they squinted, the Puritan emphasis on individual salvation was radical, enabling a secular succession that placed the self at the center of its own universe.

Puritan determination to distance yet further from Roman and Eastern Catholicism than their native Church of England had began a slow hemorrhage that’s resulted in the secular attempt to function as what Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood calls “the Church of Christ without Christ.”

A dangerous, lamentable, but I believe correctable gambit. I’ve yet to see it expressed better than by Joseph Ratzinger: “When politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.”

Bitter broccoli, perhaps, but critical for understanding, and responding to, the hunting of today’s witches — or, for the binary-averse, heretix. In an almost seamless cross-fade, Hawthorne’s Puritans fade out, yielding to their postmodern heirs. It seems sin is back in, and for now we’re all Hester Prynne.