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No, “hate the sin, love the sinner” is not in the Bible. You will not find that sentence, or “love the sinner, hate the sin,” in any English translation. The idea goes back to a letter Saint Augustine wrote to a group of nuns around AD 424, where he asked them to act “with love for the persons and hatred of the sin.” The short English version was already a well-known saying by the 1920s, when Gandhi quoted it in his autobiography. So it is an old Christian saying. It is just not a Bible verse.
Almost everyone assumes this one is scripture. It sounds like scripture. It has been said from pulpits and at kitchen tables for so long that it feels like it must have a chapter and verse. It is easy to see why so many of us filed it there.
Where it actually came from is more interesting than a verse would have been. And the history quietly changes who the saying is for.
Where “Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner” Comes From
A letter to a convent in trouble
The trail starts in North Africa, late in Augustine’s life. He was bishop of Hippo, in what is now Algeria. Nearby was a community of nuns. His own sister had once led it as prioress.
Under the leader who came after her, the community fell into a quarrel. Some of the sisters wanted their new prioress removed. Augustine did not go in person. He wrote them a letter instead. Today it is known as Letter 211.
Most of the letter is practical. How to share property. How to pray. How to handle it when a sister does something wrong. In the middle of those instructions, Augustine tells them to correct each other’s faults cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum. In the classic English translation, that is “with due love for the persons and hatred of the sin.”
Notice who that line was written for. Not a crowd pointing at outsiders. It was written to women who lived together, ate together, and prayed together, and who had to find a way to correct each other without tearing their home apart.
The English version: older than Gandhi
The short English phrase is often credited to Mahatma Gandhi. That is half right. In his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, written in weekly instalments in the late 1920s, Gandhi wrote:
“‘Hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practised, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.”
M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, Part IV, Chapter 9
Look at the quotation marks. Gandhi calls it a “precept.” He is quoting something he expects his readers to know already. So he did not invent the English wording. He popularised it. Exactly who first put it into English is a question nobody has settled.
Here is the surprising part. Gandhi wrote that line right after a story about two corrupt government officers in Johannesburg. He had worked hard to expose them for extorting money from Indian and Chinese immigrants. They were later dismissed. Then they had a chance at jobs with the city, and Gandhi agreed not to stand in their way. “Though these officers were so bad,” he wrote, “I had nothing against them personally.”
That is the saying at full strength. Fight the wrong with everything you have. Then refuse to wish harm on the people who did it.
Taught as common knowledge
By the mid-twentieth century, the phrase was simply part of how Christians talked. C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, remembered Christian teachers telling him “long ago” to hate the sin but not the sinner. So the saying was already being taught in English well before most of us ever heard it.
What the Bible Actually Says
The sentence is not in the Bible. But you can see why people thought it was, because several passages sit close to it.
Paul puts love and hatred of evil side by side in Romans 12:9:
“Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.”
Romans 12:9 (KJV)
“Dissimulation” means pretending. Love that is not fake. That is the first half of the verse, and it comes first.
The closest picture is in the tiny letter of Jude, near the end of the New Testament:
“And of some have compassion, making a difference: And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.”
Jude 1:22-23 (KJV)
Jude’s image is a rescue. You are pulling someone out of a fire. You hate what is burning. You grab the person.
And underneath all of it is Romans 5:8:
“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:8 (KJV)
That is the order in the Bible. Love arrives first, while we are still the ones in the wrong. The folk saying often puts the hating first. The Bible does not.
Why This Matters: Who the Saying Was Pointed At
Most of us have been on both ends of this saying. And here is the honest problem with it. When it is said about someone, they usually hear only the first half. “Hate the sin” is loud. “Love the sinner” is quiet. The person on the receiving end rarely walks away feeling loved.
C.S. Lewis admitted he once thought the idea was a silly, hair-splitting distinction. How can you hate what someone does and not hate them? Then he noticed there was “one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself.”
That is the key that unlocks it. We already know how to hate a sin and love a sinner. We do it every day with ourselves. We hate our own temper or our own lying, and we still want good things for ourselves. We still hope to do better.
Jesus said something that points the same direction:
“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
Matthew 7:5 (KJV)
Put Augustine, Gandhi, Lewis and that verse together, and a pattern shows up. The saying works best close to home. Augustine wrote it for a family of sisters. Gandhi lived it toward men he had fought. Lewis found it first inside himself. In each case, the person doing the “hating the sin” also had to do the hard work of loving, out loud, where it could be seen.
If you have ever had this saying aimed at you and felt only the first half, that was not the whole of what it was meant to say. And if you have said it to someone you love, you were reaching for something good. The fix is not to stop saying it. It is to make the love half the half they can actually see.
The Short Answer
“Hate the sin, love the sinner” is not a Bible verse. It grew out of a line in Augustine’s Letter 211, written around AD 424 to a convent in conflict, and the English version was already a familiar precept when Gandhi quoted it. The Bible’s closest passages, Romans 12:9, Jude 1:22-23 and Romans 5:8, all put the love first. If you want more on how the Bible talks about sin itself, this piece on what “missing the mark” really means is a good next read. And if Gandhi’s part in this story surprised you, so might the real story behind “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” For another saying almost everyone files under scripture, see “God helps those who help themselves.”
Let’s Talk
What other sayings did you grow up sure were in the Bible? And has anyone ever shown you the “love the sinner” half so clearly that you never doubted it? We would love to hear about it in the comments.
If you would like to read what Jesus actually said, in his own words and in order, the complete Book of Matthew is free below. The “beam in your own eye” passage is in chapter 7.
Questions People Ask About “Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner”
Is “hate the sin, love the sinner” in the Bible?
No. “Hate the sin, love the sinner” (also said as “love the sinner, hate the sin” or “hate the sin, not the sinner”) does not appear in any English Bible. It traces back to Saint Augustine’s Letter 211, written around AD 424, which asks a community of nuns to correct each other “with due love for the persons and hatred of the sin.” Bible passages with a similar idea include Romans 12:9, Jude 1:22-23 and Romans 5:8.
Who first said “love the sinner, hate the sin”?
The idea behind “love the sinner, hate the sin” goes back to Augustine of Hippo. In Latin, his Letter 211 says cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum, roughly “with love for people and hatred of vices.” Who first put it into short English form is not known.
Did Gandhi say “hate the sin and not the sinner”?
Yes, Gandhi wrote “hate the sin and not the sinner” in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Part IV, Chapter 9), in the late 1920s. But he put it in quotation marks and called it a “precept,” which shows he was quoting a saying that already existed rather than inventing it.
What Bible verse is closest to “hate the sin, love the sinner”?
The closest Bible verse to “hate the sin, love the sinner” is probably Jude 1:22-23, which describes pulling people “out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.” Romans 12:9 is also close: “Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.” In both, love for the person comes first.
Share This
- I always thought “hate the sin, love the sinner” was a Bible verse. It’s not. It goes back to a letter Augustine wrote to a convent that was fighting, around AD 424.
- Didn’t know this: Gandhi wrote “hate the sin and not the sinner” right after exposing two corrupt officials, and then agreed not to block them from getting new jobs. That’s the saying lived out.
- C.S. Lewis said he thought “hate the sin, love the sinner” was hair-splitting, until he realised he’d been doing it to himself his whole life. That changed how I hear it.
