{"id":3963,"date":"2013-05-09T01:30:41","date_gmt":"2013-05-09T05:30:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=3963"},"modified":"2013-05-09T01:32:28","modified_gmt":"2013-05-09T05:32:28","slug":"evil-evil-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2013\/05\/evil-evil-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Evil, Evil, Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Evil has seemed everywhere over the past several weeks. The Boston bombings. Gruesome murders of babies who survived failed abortions. The kidnappings, forced rapes, and forced miscarriages of the women in Cleveland.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I\u2019ve found that my students \u2014 often steeped in relativism \u2014 have to be prodded to consider \u201cevil.\u201d The word has religious connotations. It sounds judgmental (unless applied to the Religious Right, I\u2019ve noticed, because it\u2019s evidently fine to judge judgmental people). It invites self-righteousness, because if some \u201cother\u201d is \u201cevil,\u201d than we are \u201cgood.\u201d Most of my students are willing to label the Holocaust evil, but some hold back because, they say, who are they to judge? By whose standards is something evil? I suggest that they use their own standards.<\/p>\n

What about Soviet communism, I then ask them? Most of my students are unwilling to condemn communism, because it\u2019s an economic system. I tell them to set economics aside and consider gulags, show trials, returned Soviet POWs, the imposition of dictatorships across Eastern Europe, etc. Most students then agree that those things are evil, if by evil we simply mean profoundly immoral. But it\u2019s very uncomfortable for them to say so, because to label America\u2019s Cold War enemy \u201cevil\u201d suggests that America was\/is \u201cgood.\u201d What about Jim Crow, for instance? I encourage them to forget about the United States. Regardless of whether the United States was\/is just as evil or less evil or pretty good, was Soviet tyranny evil?<\/p>\n

I do this exercise partly because many of my students seem to lack the courage to make moral judgments. Making moral judgments invites accusations of hypocrisy or self-righteousness. I\u2019ve always found Reinhold Niebuhr\u2019s thoughts on such matters to be extremely helpful: \u201cOne of the most terrible consequences of a confused religious absolutism is that it is forced to condone such tyranny as that of Germany in the nations which it has conquered and now cruelly oppresses. It usually does this by insisting that the tyranny is no worse than that which is practised in the so-called democratic nations, and however serious may be their failure to conform perfectly to their democratic ideals, it is sheer moral perversity to equate the inconsistencies of a democratic civilization with the brutalities which modern tyrannical states practise.\u201d The quote is from Niebuhr\u2019s 1940 (I think) essay \u201cWhy the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist.\u201d I want my students to make moral judgments with a clear sense of their own subjectivity, but I still think it\u2019s necessary for us to be able to name evils in the world.<\/p>\n

Then I have them apply Niebuhr\u2019s reasoning about tyranny to more recent events. Should Christians have opposed \u201cevil\u201d in Rwanda? Tyranny in Iraq? Should they oppose tyranny in Syria? Niebuhr makes a strong argument against pacifism, but he is less helpful at helping Christians assess the wisdom of any particular opposition to tyranny or evil. Clearly, it\u2019s dangerous to throw the \u201cevil\u201d label around too lightly.<\/p>\n

Reading Kelly Baker\u2019s excellent piec<\/em>e for the C<\/em>hristian Century <\/a>and at Religion in American History<\/em><\/a>, I wondered about the wisdom of the above exercise. Baker cautions us from applying the label \u201cevil\u201d to religious episodes such as the Jonestown mass suicide or the Branch Dividians:<\/p>\n

The common assumption follows that these religious groups can be marked as evil because they are imbricated in violence, death and destruction. We can cluck our tongues sympathetically at the supposedly brainwashed people deluded into joining these movements, and we can rest easier at night by assuming that our religious commitments must be the safe kind\u2026. Marking religion as good or bad might reassure us about our own choices, but it doesn\u2019t explain anything about how religion functions in the lives of people. What\u2019s more, it often obscures the complicated place of religion in our historical and current worlds. False or true, evil or good\u2014these are normative claims, not analytical ones, and they simplify the fraught complexity of human lives that are often mired in violence.<\/em><\/p>\n

Baker\u2019s caution reminded me of what Robert Orsi wrote in Between Heaven and Earth<\/em> about Dennis Covington\u2019s Salvation on Sand Mountain<\/em>. Covington immersed himself in the world of Pentecostal<\/a> snake-handling, only to draw back in horror when he encountered views about women he considered repugnant. Once he drew back in repulsion, he could no longer pursue understanding. In short, once we label any religious group evil, we can no longer easily seek to understand its members.<\/p>\n

There are stark differences between historical \/ scholarly investigation and ethical inquiry or moral reasoning, and there is perhaps a also difference between judging actions and judging movements or even people. Judgment belongs to the Lord, in any event. I have no problem with labeling murder \u201cevil,\u201d including the murders that took place at Jonestown. But our job as historians is to understand. And as Christians, we must recognize the humanity of all of those we encounter, in the present and the past.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evil has seemed everywhere over the past several weeks. The Boston bombings. Gruesome murders of babies who survived failed abortions. The kidnappings, forced rapes, and forced miscarriages of the women in Cleveland. Sometimes I\u2019ve found that my students \u2014 often steeped in relativism \u2014 have to be prodded to consider \u201cevil.\u201d The word has religious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1008,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[500,8,1],"tags":[852,854,853],"class_list":["post-3963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-american-religious-history","category-john-turner","category-uncategorized","tag-evil","tag-gosnell","tag-jonestown"],"yoast_head":"\nEvil, Evil, Everywhere<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Evil has seemed everywhere over the past several weeks. The Boston bombings. 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