I loved the curious story last Sunday of the concubine-hunter who has been snooping around people’s letterboxes and depositing warnings of God’s zero-tolerance to cohabitation.

It rather reminded me of the fabled monkey-man of Delhi, except our candidate has clear handwriting and impeccable spelling, and probably walks on two legs.

He or she is well-informed too. Their position is, in fact, not too different from that of the Catholic Church. Extramarital sex was listed as a grave sin last time I checked, and one assumes cohabiting couples keep themselves entertained.

But that’s where the similarity ends. I imagine most readers will have been moderately shocked by the story. That’s because they, like the Church, tend to draw a line around people’s private spaces.

The time when priests asked awkward questions during their annual door-to-door ‘house blessing’ tours is long gone.

This then looks to be an exceptional case of someone who, shall we say, needs the doctor more than the divine.

There’s something of a William Gladstone about them too. The four-time British Prime Minister had a keen interest in ‘rehabilitating’ prostitutes and was wont to spend his nights walking the seedier streets of London.

Nothing risqué about that, except he usually went home and took a whip to his back.

Our concubine hunter is more prize specimen for a cabinet of natural curiosities than typical God-peddler therefore.

But the temptation to read further into the case is strong. Like Gladstone, I’ll take the risk.

That’s also because sin and hell and damnation and the rest have of late tended to come up rather regularly in the local news. They sort of hover around the whole divorce business, what with judges being told of the eternal consequences of applying the law, billboards in Żebbuġ, and so on.

There is a sense in which the handwritten letters and the billboards are not about cohabitation or divorce at all. It could have been abortion or not going to Mass. The point is, it’s all about sin and people’s religious understandings and expectations.

The first thing about these media avatars of sin is that they are culturally very loaded indeed.

It works better in Maltese. The words ‘dnub’(sin) and especially ‘dnub mejjet’(mortal sin), when applied to public debate issues, have historically come to represent the cross-currents between religion and politics.

The idea that religion and politics are two different worlds that must be kept separate at all times is seriously off-beam. Partly because religion usually involves some sense of groups and relations between them, it must always be in bed with politics.

These clichés take on different positions according to the historical context, among other things.

Irrespective of its theological baggage, the word ‘dnub’ has become one of the most powerful markers that Maltese people use to think and talk about the entanglements between religion and politics.

So when columnists flare up because some churchman says that voting for divorce legislation is a sin, I know it’s not really divorce they’re furious about.

The funny thing is that the collective weightiness of dnub comes at a time when the notion has lost much of the individual import it had, say, 30 years ago. I well remember a time when we were ‘encouraged’ by priests, parents, and other well-wishers to keep a sort of balance-sheet of the soul.

We would distinguish between the red and the very red ink. There were such things as ‘venial’ sins which set you back but not by much.

Then there were ‘mortal’ sins which, unless confessed, would send you straight to hell, no passing Go or collecting £200.

My feeling is that there has been a reappraisal of anatomy. I bet that if I asked a teenager what the words ‘cloven hooves, horns, scales, and tails’ brought to mind, they’d say ‘biodiversity’.

Sin and its eternal mongerer are on the way out.

I have some rather strong evidence (some might say circumstantial) for this. Confession, for example, has declined dramatically. And even when people do go to confession, they like to call it something else.

The old confessionals at Notre Dame de Paris, for example, have given way to glass cubicles called ‘Meet a priest’(for spiritual counselling and/or the sacrament of pardon)’. I doubt those glass panes hear much talk of venial and mortal.

I’m not talking about the power of the Church here. (In fact, I quite believe that in Malta today it is more powerful than ever.) Rather, the point is that there have been some rather important changes in religion as a set of beliefs and practices.

Enzo Pace, a sociologist at the University of Padua, has this to say:

“The Catholic Church is learning to act as a symbolic system capable of interacting with a highly varied social environment by accepting its complexity.

“Instead of trying to reduce that complexity and impose stable and definite norms, it has adopted a modern way of being a Church.”

I suppose he has a point, whatever he means by ‘modern’. And this is exactly where our concubine-snoopers and billboards come in; add to these phenomena like Borġ in-Nadur and Radju Marija.

It seems unfair to bunch these together. It so happens I have no problem with Radju Marija or Anġelik Caruana. The reason I mention them here is that they represent helpings of a different religion than the one Pace is describing as ‘modern’.

They regularly talk of sin, of hell, of ranks of angels and demons, and so on. They are the Kenneth Zammit Tabonas (the paintings I mean, not the man – and this is not an artistic judgment) of contemporary religion. A world in which the view from the window is unfailingly impeccable, the family portraits hang exquisitely, and people dress according to their estate in life.

In other words, a nostalgia for a ‘lost’ world in which sin was sin and religion was vertebrate, clear, and easy to transmit into bulettini and nicely-balanced accounts.

And names on letterboxes came clear and unequivocal.

mafalzon@hotmail.com