Sin / guilt
Sin and guilt are the language of doing wrong measured against a religious idea of right, and the motif covers a couple of related senses. One is sacrilege, spoiling something sacred on purpose: in loml the partner is a cinephile who likes to sin, the sinning deliberate, a matter of taste rather than an accident, and in I Can Fix Him she waves off heaven's help entirely, telling herself your good Lord doesn't need to lift a finger. The other is the verdict of guilt itself, desire weighed and judged: Guilty as Sin? turns on the speaker asking how a fantasy she has never even acted on can leave her guilty as sin. Either way the charge is moral and borrowed from religion, and it rounds out the religious imagery alongside Heaven, Hell, Worship and the rest.
At its core this is wrongdoing seen through a religious lens, whether owned or resisted. Sometimes the speaker, or the person she is describing, embraces it, treating sin as a preference rather than a fall, which makes a betrayal feel like a desecration rather than just bad luck. Sometimes she pushes back against the verdict, pointing out that she has been judged guilty for a feeling alone, other people's morality turned into a sentence she never earned. The thread running through both is the idea that desire and harm get measured against the sacred, and named as sin.
Appears in 3 songs
“How can I be guilty as sin?”
The whole song turns on guilt, the speaker asking how a desire she has never even acted on can leave her guilty as sin, the language of transgression applied to a fantasy.
“Your good Lord doesn't need to lift a finger”
She waves off the need for God's help, setting her own will to save the man above any divine hand, a small act of sacrilege in the certainty that she alone can fix him.
“a cinephile who likes to sin”
The phrase introduces deliberate religious transgression, sinning not by accident but by disposition and preference. This connects to the album-wide religious martyrdom imagery in TTPD: dying for someone's sins, the holy ghost, rolling the stone away, crucifixion. In loml specifically it suggests the speaker entered the relationship knowing it was a transgression and chose it anyway.