Faith & Spirit Quote by Geoffrey Fisher

Fisher draws a bright line where modern politics loves blur: the difference between what a community can punish and what a soul must answer for. As a senior Anglican cleric speaking in a century newly obsessed with total systems - ideological states, expanding bureaucracies, and moral panics that beg for legislation - he is staging a defense of limits. The opening clause concedes a common intuition: in a society with shared norms, criminal acts will often overlap with moral wrongs. Then comes the pivot: most sins are not crimes, and should not be treated as such. The phrasing is careful and strategic. "Ought not" is moral language used to restrain moralism.

The subtext is a warning against turning the state into a substitute church. When law tries to prosecute the interior life - desire, doubt, private vice, messy human failure - it doesn’t just overreach; it cheapens both law and morality. Crime becomes a catch-all for disapproval, and virtue becomes compliance. Fisher is also protecting the sanctity of conscience, a distinctly Christian argument that paradoxically shores up pluralism: if ultimate responsibility is to God alone, then no earthly authority gets final jurisdiction over the whole person.

There’s quiet realism here too. By admitting that crimes are "likely" to be sins, he avoids the secular fantasy that law can be value-neutral. Yet he refuses the religious fantasy that every moral offense can be purified by punishment. Civilization, in his view, depends on that restraint: a society stable enough to legislate harms, but humble enough to leave the soul unpoliced.