This article clarifies two choices at two different levels of analysis—that theologians make (often implicitly) in employing social science to clarify how social structures affect moral agency. The first is the choice of a general causal account of how all social structures “work,” where this article endorses the view provided by critical realist sociology. The second is the choice of some particular causal account of the functioning of a specific kind of social structure. It proposes a new definition that applies to all, not simply the most egregious sinful social structures that accounts for both the oppression of the marginalized and the complicity of the privileged. To illustrate the analysis, we end by examining three features important in the transformation of sinful social structures that have received inadequate attention in the literature of theological ethics: nonmoral cognitive categories, bodily practices, and the penalties for noncompliance.
