What Chris Hansen knows about sin that modern culture forgets

“You see how this looks, right?”

That question captures Chris Hansen’s method. He takes a man who believed he was meeting a child for sex and forces him to look at his own conduct from the outside.

We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves. That is how ‘I knew it was wrong’ can coexist with ‘I did it anyway.’

For more than two decades, Hansen’s predator stings — from NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” to later investigations — have offered a grim case study in self-deception. The men know the conduct is wrong. They choose it anyway. Then, when Hansen arrives with the transcripts, they scramble to preserve the belief that they are good men.

In other words, Chris Hansen has given us a