In the quiet suburban home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on a January evening in 2023, a mother named Lindsay Clancy strangled her three young children—Cora, five years old; Dawson, three; and Callan, only eight months—with exercise bands. She then attempted to end her own life.

The facts are not in serious dispute. What remains fiercely contested, especially in the court of public opinion and across vast stretches of social media, is the meaning of those facts. Many voices, disproportionately female, have rushed to frame Clancy not primarily as an agent who chose a horrific act, but as a victim of postpartum psychosis, medical failure, insufficient support, or the shortcomings of the men and systems around her.

GoFundMe campaigns have raised nearly a million dollars in her family’s name. Online trends declare “Same, Lindsay.” Prosecutors are cast as villains. The husband is subjected to suspicion and conspiracy.

The children’s deaths become a backdrop for a larger narrative of female suffering. This reaction is not an isolated curiosity of true-crime culture. It is the predictable fruit of a deeper theological and pastoral failure that has taken root in many churches: the systematic downplaying of women’s sins.

In an effort to avoid appearing harsh, patriarchal, or insufficiently compassionate, pulpits have soft-pedaled female moral agency. Specific sins common among women—whether relational manipulation, refusal of biblical submission, the consumption of degrading entertainment, or the deliberate ending of unborn life—are treated with vagueness, contextualization, or redirection onto male failure.

The result is a culture, both inside and outside the church, in which women are trained to see themselves as less accountable. Without accountability, there is little genuine repentance. And without repentance, the New Testament is unambiguous about the danger to the soul.

The Bible offers no warrant for this selective mercy. In Genesis 3, Eve is not presented as a passive figure whose transgression is absorbed into Adam’s. She listens to the serpent, considers the fruit’s appeal, takes it, and eats. Only then does she give to her husband. When confronted, she shifts blame to the serpent, just as Adam shifts blame to her and to God. The Lord accepts neither excuse. He pronounces judgment upon the woman for her own act: sorrow multiplied in conception, pain in bringing forth children, and the enduring tension of desire toward her husband met by his rule (Genesis 3:16).

The federal headship of Adam explains the entrance of death upon the race, yet it never cancels the personal history of the woman who chose. Scripture elsewhere reinforces the principle with stark clarity: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son” (Ezekiel 18:20). There is no respect of persons with God (Romans 2:11). Every individual will give account of himself to God (Romans 14:12).

Many contemporary churches reverse this order. Sermons that name men’s sins with precision—lust, pornography, abdication of leadership—often address women’s corresponding patterns only in generalities or with heavy caveats that return the focus to what husbands or fathers should have done differently. Submission texts are quickly balanced by lengthy discussions of male failure, lest the preacher appear unsympathetic.

The doctrine of the Fall is taught in such a way that Eve’s deception is emphasized while her willful taking of the fruit is minimized. The practical effect is an unspoken hierarchy of agency: men’s sins are treated as primary and causative; women’s are treated as reactive or secondary. Over time, this shapes the moral imagination of congregations. Women learn that their transgressions are more understandable, more contingent, more the product of external pressures. Men learn that they bear a disproportionate causal weight for the failures of others.

The Lindsay Clancy case lays the pattern bare. The defense argues postpartum psychosis and a cascade of medical missteps. Those claims deserve careful forensic and clinical examination; mental illness is real, and medical systems can fail. Yet the broader cultural response has gone further. It has often refused to dwell on the moral weight of a mother methodically ending the lives of her children. Instead, the emphasis falls on what was not provided to her—better care, more support, a more attentive husband, a less demanding society.

In this framing, the act itself recedes. The agent who performed it is protected from the full force of moral judgment. Online communities of women identify with her not primarily as a cautionary tale requiring repentance, but as a sister whose circumstances could have been their own. The children’s deaths become evidence of systemic failure rather than the fruit of a personal choice that, whatever the contributing factors, remains hers.

This is the pastoral error scaled to cultural size. When churches decline to speak with equal specificity and gravity about women’s sins, they withhold the very diagnosis that makes repentance possible. The gospel does not begin with affirmation of victimhood; it begins with the recognition that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Repentance requires the sinner to own the act without shifting the decisive blame.

If a woman is taught that her critical spirit is largely her husband’s fault, or that her decision to abort is primarily the result of male abandonment, or that even an act as extreme as Clancy’s can be absorbed into a narrative of medical and relational failure, then the path to confession is obstructed. She is invited to look outward for the root rather than inward. The result is not compassion; it is a form of spiritual negligence that leaves the soul unexamined and unconverted at the point of its deepest need.

The eternal stakes are not theoretical. Jesus warned that without repentance, people will perish (Luke 13:3, 5). The New Testament repeatedly links the refusal to turn from known sin with the danger of final judgment. Churches that create an environment in which women are functionally less accountable are not protecting them; they are exposing them to the peril of unrepented sin. The same selective preaching that softens female guilt while intensifying male responsibility produces a society in which women are less practiced at self-examination and more practiced at contextualization. Over time, this erodes the very capacity for the kind of honest reckoning that the gospel demands.

None of this requires denying the reality of postpartum illness, the genuine failures of medical systems, or the biblical duties of husbands to love, protect, and lead. Headship is real. Support is necessary. Compassion for suffering is commanded. What is forbidden is the transfer of moral agency. Adam’s presence in the garden did not cause Eve’s eating; a husband’s imperfections do not cause a wife’s independent choices; a culture’s shortcomings do not erase the will of the person who acts. When churches treat women’s sins as largely derivative, they teach a doctrine foreign to Scripture and costly to souls.

The remedy is not harsher rhetoric for its own sake. It is fidelity to the whole counsel of God. Preach the specific sins of both sexes with equal clarity. Call women, as well as men, to personal repentance without the escape hatch of perpetual contextualization. Recover the Genesis narrative in its plain sequence: she took, she ate, she was judged for her own deed. Hold the Lindsay Clancy case, and every lesser parallel, under the same light.

A church that refuses this clarity may appear kinder in the short term. In the long term, it risks leaving women unprepared for the judgment in which every soul will answer for itself. The gospel offers forgiveness freely, but only to those who repent. To withhold the call to repentance from one half of the congregation is not mercy. It is a quiet form of spiritual abandonment.