Gove can remind us that we are all allowed to be sinners

So Michael Gove now regrets stabbing Boris Johnson in the back. You may remember the two of them facing the television cameras with shocked expressions on the day the result of the referendum on Europe was announced.

Why did the duo look like rabbits caught in headlights? It was because these two leaders of the Leave campaign hadn't expected to win. They clearly didn't have a clue what to do next.

Not only did they not have a plan B, they didn't have a plan A. After David Cameron resigned it was widely assumed that Johnson would head up the new Tory administration and that Mr Gove would be his deputy.

At the last minute Gove, a practising Christian, morphed into a cunning assassin and announced he would be a better candidate for the job of prime minister than Johnson, a practising opportunist.

As it turned out, the Tory backbenchers didn't support either man – thereby making a clear path for the quietly calculating Teresa May to snatch the prize. It was Game of Thrones without the sex.

So now the smiling Christian knife-wielder has repented of his misdeeds.

What interests me most about this latest episode is the terminology Michael Gove used. He said he was flawed in how he has lived, and added, “I am a sinner and I know it profoundly”.

A sinner. Now there's a term that has gone out of fashion.

A few decades ago everyone would have been familiar with the words ‘sin' and ‘sinner'. Not so nowadays.

Why is that? My guess is that such terminology would be regarded as too negative in today's relentless culture of mandatory self-promotion.

Mind you, it's not entirely the case that the offending words have disappeared: but their meaning has been gutted or trivialised out of existence. ‘Go on, be a sinner' now refers to things like eating expensive chocolates.

Nowadays, in a newspaper headline, the word ‘sin' usually refers only to sex. ‘A night of sin' means only one thing.

This fascinates me. ‘Sin' is actually a theological word. When the Bible talks about sin, the word is not used in a facile way. It refers to a fundamental human tendency to put oneself in the place of God.

One of the most brilliant modern books about Christianity I have ever read is called Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense. It's by a fantastic, award-winning writer called Francis Spufford.

Spufford is a fascinating character. He is a pretty unconventional Christian, one who has written quite a sweary, knockabout book about how he came to faith.

It was written after a profound personal crisis, one which caused him to look closely at the mess he was making of his own life. He talks about what he calls the HPtFtU, the human propensity to – and I bet you know what the ‘F' stands for, especially if you also guess that the last two words are ‘things up'.

It's a great working definition of the word ‘sin'. Spufford is talking about a human capacity for self-harm and the harming of other people.

Anyone doubting the existence of this tendency should simply spend a week immersed in the shadow world of the internet.

Far from being trivial, the trail of sin leads all the way to the Holocaust, and the Auschwitz functionaries who went home to play with their children each evening after committing mass slaughter in their day job.

Now of course there are also nobler human capacities, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

I regret the disappearance, or diminution, of the word ‘sin'. It carries a brute realism that we humans need to face.

Maybe we don't need to go all the way to the gates of Auschwitz to understand it; there are times when a look in the mirror might be enough.

Back to the hapless Michael Gove. I have mocked him here: but in acknowledging that in back-stabbing his devious colleague he has committed a sin – not just, to use a favourite evasive modern term, something ‘inappropriate' – he is saying something of substance.

I like the gritty realism and hope of the Christian faith. I also like the fact ‘sin' is not the last word in the human story – and that forgiveness and new beginnings lie at its heart.

The penitential season that begins tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, is all about that.

I like the gritty realism and the hope of the Christian faith. I also like the fact ‘sin' is not the last word in the human story – and that forgiveness and new beginnings lie at its heart.