Original Sin as Structural Lack

Original Sin as Structural Lack is a concept introduced in Rollins's The Idolatry of God that re-reads the classical theological doctrine of Original Sin through a Lacanian-structural lens. Rather than treating Original Sin as a moral inheritance, a historical fall from plenitude, or a real deprivation of some prior wholeness, Rollins identifies it as the constitutive gap at the core of subjectivity itself. The "sin" (from a root meaning separation) is not a contingent defect but a primordial structural feature: the subject is always-already split, never self-coincident, never complete. The "original" (that which comes first) names this gap as the very condition of possibility of subjectivity rather than as a temporal event. In this reading, there never was a paradise of fullness; the gap precedes and generates the subject rather than being produced by any act or fall.

The critical theoretical move is to insist that this gap is a structural nothing rather than a lack-of-something. Fantasy-objects — consumer commodities, ideological certainties, religious idols — are generated as putative fillers for a hole that nothing can fill, because the hole is constitutive rather than contingent. Both secular consumer culture and contemporary religious worship are thus structurally identical in their misrecognition: both treat the gap as though it were an absence awaiting a positive content, rather than a productive void that drives subjectivity forward. The concept thereby performs a double demystification, exposing the theological and the secular as two faces of the same fundamental fantasy-structure.

Within rollins-peter-the-idolatry-of-god-breaking-our-addiction-to-certainty-and-satisf, this concept anchors the book's central argument: that theology and consumerism are structurally homologous because both are organised around misrecognising the constitutive gap. The concept is therefore the hinge between a theological vocabulary and a Lacanian-structural one, doing the work of translation that allows Rollins to critique both secular and religious culture simultaneously.

In terms of its cross-referenced canonical concepts, Original Sin as Structural Lack is best understood as a theological re-naming of the Lacanian Gap — specifically the gap as "constitutive structural opening" that is "not a contingent absence to be filled but a positive structural feature." It is also intimately tied to Desire (the engine running on an irreducible lack whose "cause" is the objet petit a — not a positive entity but a void) and Fantasy (the frame that papers over the void with a structured fiction, giving desire its coordinates). The concept extends rather than merely illustrates these canonicals: by mobilising the term "Original Sin," Rollins gives the structural lack a historical-theological pedigree, arguing that religious tradition was already naming what Lacan formalised. It is adjacent to Ideology and Jouissance insofar as the misrecognition of the gap as a lack-of-something is precisely the ideological operation, and the drive to fill it is what captures both consumer and religious forms of jouissance. The concept is not an extension of the Drive proper, nor is it directly related to Hitchcock, but it shares with the Drive's topology the idea that satisfaction is never achieved through an object — the loop around the void is constitutive, not accidental.

The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and SatisfactionPeter Rollins · 2013 (p.19)

This idea of a gap at the core of our being has an ancient theological name: Original Sin... 'sin' means separation, and 'original' refers to that which comes first. In this way Original Sin is simply the ancient theological name given to the experience that we have outlined above.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it performs an explicit etymological-structural reduction: "sin" as separation maps directly onto the Lacanian gap/lack, while "original" as that which comes first asserts the gap's priority over any imagined wholeness — making lack constitutive rather than derivative. The phrase "simply the ancient theological name" is the decisive move, collapsing the distance between theology and structural psychoanalysis and implying that doctrine was already articulating what theory now formalises.