Is Lord of the Flies a Better Argument for Original Sin Than Many Theological Treatises?

Faith & Science Conversation
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I just finished watching a recent version of Lord of the Flies and found myself wondering whether the story functions as a kind of modern parable about human nature.

What struck me was not merely the boys’ descent into violence, but how quickly social order, moral restraint, and empathy eroded once fear, tribal identity, and power struggles took over. The boys were not presented as inherently monstrous. In many ways they seemed ordinary, intelligent, playful, frightened, and even well-intentioned at first. Yet under pressure, cruelty and irrationality emerged with disturbing speed.

That raises several questions for me:

  • Does Lord of the Flies support something like the Christian doctrine of original sin?
  • Or does it instead suggest that violence is mainly a product of environment, fear, and social breakdown?
  • If humans evolved gradually rather than beginning with a single historical couple, how should Christians think about the “fall” into sinfulness?
  • Would the earliest morally aware humans have behaved very differently from Golding’s stranded children?
  • Is civilization evidence against original sin, or evidence for how much restraint humans require?

One thing I find interesting is that Golding does not portray evil as arriving from outside the boys. Rather, it seems already latent within them, waiting for the right conditions.

At the same time, the story also contains conscience, loyalty, grief, beauty, and attempts at reason. So perhaps the deeper issue is not whether humans are “good” or “evil,” but whether human beings are internally divided.

Curious what others here think, especially from evolutionary, theological, psychological, and historical perspectives.

  • The 2026 Netflix adaptation of “Lord of the Flies” consists of four episodes. The miniseries, which debuted on May 4, 2026, is a co-production with the BBC and adapts the 1954 novel over four 60-minute installments, with each episode focusing on key characters. [1, 2, 3]
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Thanks for the mention. I put it on my watchlist and will swing back after I have had a chance to watch it. Saw the original and read the book but that was way too many years ago.

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I’ve always wondered how differently that story would have gone if the group had been half girls and half boys. Or all girls.

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I thought that to myself. I’d like to see a version of that one.

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William Golding’s daughter reveals his ‘darker side’ in new book

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Lord of the Flies is a made up story. Somewhere a group of kids did get stranded on an island and they set up a reasonable community that was nothing like L of the F. Just sayin. …Just looked it up – 1965, 6 Tongan teenagers stranded for 15 months on island of Ata.

The daily news tells us about original sin, not to mention the Holocaust or the Rape of Nanking.

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Now really surprise me and tell me you’ve been a middle school teacher in the U.S. or England.

The Tongan castaways were a group of six Tongan teenage boys who shipwrecked on the uninhabited island of ʻAta in 1965 and lived there for 15 months until their rescue. The boys ran away from their boarding school on the island of Tongatapu, stealing a boat in their escape.

Tongan castaways - Wikipedia

Wikipedia
(Tongan castaways - Wikipedia)

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Lord of the Flies is a good argument for unoriginal sin.

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I guess one might also say that it’s an argument for inherent virtue, as at least one of the boys was a bit of a saint.

It’s an interesting parable. I honestly can’t stand to watch or read it, given the anguish.

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Human creativity discourages the notion that all sin is unoriginal. Humans do not merely repeat old evils mechanically; we continually invent new forms of vanity, exploitation, cruelty, propaganda, self-justification, and technological domination. If anything, our creativity amplifies both good and evil. The same imagination that produces art, medicine, music, and compassion can also produce concentration camps, psychological manipulation, financial fraud, and weapons systems.

In that sense, “original sin” may not mean humans endlessly reenact one ancient mistake in identical form. Rather, it may mean there is something persistently disordered within human nature that expresses itself creatively under changing conditions.

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  • That may actually be one reason the story endures. Lord of the Flies does not portray the boys as uniformly depraved. Some resist the descent longer than others, and some retain conscience, empathy, rationality, or courage under pressure.
  • But to me, that raises another question: does the existence of virtue disprove original sin, or merely show that humans are morally mixed creatures?
  • In Christian theology, original sin was never supposed to mean that humans are incapable of goodness, beauty, sacrifice, or compassion. The doctrine traditionally means something more like: even our better impulses exist within a fractured condition. Civilization, conscience, friendship, and moral formation matter precisely because humans are capable of both astonishing good and astonishing evil.
  • The frightening thing in the story is not that every boy becomes savage in exactly the same way, but that the social pull toward fear, tribalism, and violence proves so powerful even among otherwise decent children.
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My first reaction was that this book is fiction. But it is based on the authors real life experiences of how children of this age group behaved. And there is plenty other evidence supporting its portrayal as accurate.

But evidence for original sin?

Not really.

I think there is an accurate portrayal of many things in that story. Some of it being examples of primate behavior particularly in the human-chimp branch. But other things are more uniquely human – attributable the misuse of important human ideas.

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Nature vs. Nurture

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I remember it less as a commentary on original sin/fallen human nature and more as a commentary on enculturation and education. “Nature” and “Innocence” was represented by Piggy, who was a sympathetic character eventually destroyed by Jack’s corrupt form of civilization. The children didn’t actually “revert to their nature,” they enacted the tribalism, cruelty, and unquestioning hero-worship that they had learned from corrupt adults, because those are what human societies and power structures are built on, no matter what kind of “civilized” or “moral” veneer you put on them. I thought the point was that when the guardrails and deterrents of “civilized” society are removed, we find people have not actually been encultured to be good, which is an indictment of modern institutions of education, religion, and government more than it is a theological nod to original sin.

I mean, I guess you could say the perspective that all human societies are ruthless and cruel and run by the powerful at heart is “an argument for original sin,” but you could also say it’s a rebuttal, because I think Golding was trying to show that these negative things are taught and modelled to children (no matter how polite or moral the official teaching is), not that children are born corrupt. It’s human society that is the corruptive force on children’s innocence.

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Like the church elders who decided no more overnighters in the church because some boys broke a microphone – despite the fact that they took it to be fixed and when they found out it couldn’t be they bought a new one.

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Violence breeds Violence. The was a Star Trek episode that so say put evil against good but there was no non violent answer. It only takes one to set it in motion.

This is not Original Sin, just human dynamics.

Richard

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Civilization and humane behaviour is a thin layer on the basic human nature.
External models and condition can strengthen or weaken the ‘civilized’ layer, as well in children and adults. When the role models and people around act in a selfish, tribal and cruel way, that affects strongly young persons who try to fit into their social environment, be accepted by their leaders and peers. It demands a strong and independent mind (or great mercy of God) to be and stay as a good example in a dark surrounding.

Does that support the doctrine of original sin? Probably not, at least if we think of original sin as the consequence of the fall of the first human pair (A&E). The phenomenon can be explained at least as well with the evolutionary history of humans than with the theological doctrine.

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:raised_hand: That would be me.

Have you heard of the “T” in TULIP? Allow me to introduce you to Calvin and “Total Depravity.”

From an evolutionary perspective, we evolved from apelike creatures with no sense of morality other than the norms of social behavior expected in a small group (troop or pack). It’s cultural learning.

Chimps and Bonobos (pygmy chimps) are our nearest living relatives. Both form subgroups within the troop. That’s shared behavior with middle school students. Chimps are exceedingly violent compared to other mammals. Females don’t let infants out of sight for the first two years of life because males will kidnap and cannibalize any untended infant. For @Laura, Bonobos are a female-dominated social group that uses access to sex (instead of male violence) for social control. They’re also characterized as peaceful, but that’s only in comparison to chimps.

The key change in our social behavior was involving males in feeding infants. Sarah Hrdy outlined the process in her book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cooperative parenting among female relatives and male fathers meant the mother alone was no longer responsible for feeding and caring for her baby. Chimp females only breed every three or four years, after their previous baby is old enough to be left alone. Even though human infants take much longer to mature, human females could have twice as many children as other primates thanks to cooperative parenting.

Oh, and the same process led to things like empathy and conscience.

Like @Bill_II , it’s been many years since I read the book (never taught it) and I haven’t watched the Netflix version yet. I trust your summary that the novel is a condemnation of society, not human nature itself.

Addendum: I said long ago that human culture is the vehicle for the transmission of sin (original and otherwise), not some silliness like genealogy or physical inheritance. I still stand by that statement.

On the theological question,

The pull toward fear, tribalism and violence is the product of our inheritance from evolution, both cultural and natural (biological). So is the pull toward empathy and cooperation to bring children to maturity to survive a hostile world. If God has guided evolution, we have an in-built choice that everyone, except Jesus, has eventually failed. Choose selfishly or choose the greater good?

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A meaty post.

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  • I had, perhaps Marge hasn’t.
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“Total Depravity” is supposed to mean “Humans are tainted in every part and every action, and by nature opposed to God and to anything good apart from the action of grace in us.”, not that we cannot do anything containing goodness, that unbelievers cannot do anything good (they are capable of such because of “common grace”), or any other such claims which only appear among heretical hyper-Calvinists or in arguments against Calvinism.

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