As is my wont, I have carried on thinking about the goodness of this article long after I hurriedly wrote about it. There are two more things I want to say.
The first is that the problem of dehumanizing other people is both so deep and so broad that, I would say, it has become the cornerstone of our political and cultural discourse. In order that the world may see my goodness, I have to signal my proper rejection of the evil one, whoever it is at the moment I happen to scroll through Facebook.
At the same time, though, demonizing disguised as virtue signaling is not the least bit new or unusual in human terms. To be human is to deny the humanity of other humans. When Adam looked over at Eve and stuck his young as the world was new finger in her direction, and said, ‘she made me do it,’ he was laying the way for us all to be ‘better than her’ which is to qualify one’s own humanity as better and more worthy than that of the other. What is new for Christians is that we thought we were better than this. We never were but we thought we were, and so now we have to bash social media, which is just the newest expression of our truest humanity.
After reading the excellent article linked above, I ran into six or seven pieces about how it is just and right to pillory various political figures who are, and must truly be, evil incarnate. You must know who I am talking about. Google ‘evil incarnate’ and two faces will appear on your screen–Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, both of whom were joined over the weekend by Jeff Sessions, noted Russian enthusiast.
So let us just take the two most evil people in the world, depending on who you are–Meryl Streep and Kellyanne Conway–and for visual purposes consider their badness relative to each other. If you are on the right, Meryl Streep is overrated and preachy and should know better than to stand up on a glittering stage and tell everyone what is right and what is wrong. If you are of this tribe, Meryl Streep should think seriously of never acting again and should go hide in a hole with her political worldview and be sorry for all her sins.
If you are on the left, Kellyanne Conway should just be taken out and done away with. The lighting with which she is photographed makes this plain. Look at the dark lines of her face and her scraggly hair. This proves she is evil. Plus, the incredible classless uncouth business of taking off her shoes and putting her feet on the presidential sofa, in the presence of many dignitaries whose shoes she is not worthy to untie, surely signals, unequivocally, the blackness of her cold, evil heart.
Now, I would say, if you think that Kellyanne is as pure and righteous as the wind driven snow which is this very moment sweeping itself up and about my window, but think that Meryl is evil incarnate, you are wrong. Likewise, if you think that Kellyanne is the embodiment of Mephistopheles but that Meryl is more like our Lord than any other human person ever, you are also wrong.
They are both evil. But they are not so evil that they should have their essential humanity denied them. There is already a devil and neither of them are him.
More troublingly, the same could be said about you. You are not good. But you are not completely evil either. You probably have some good points. Just like you have a lot of bad points. Moreover, you are not the clever sage walking by to tell all the blind elephant discoverers that while they don’t know what they are looking at, you do. You can see that they are all right and all wrong. Rather, you also are a blind, evil, virtue signaler.
The question of dehumanizing the other should be of anxious concern for the Christian. And this leads me to the desire to tease out the question of love raised in the article. Can we safely say God loves all these people–that he loves Beyoncé and Meryl Streep And Kellyanne and Steve Bannon and everyone in between?
A breezy read through the Bible will indicate what kind of love is at the heart of God. Having created everyone, he sustains the lives of those who still breathe, including keeping the world spinning along in its usual way. But God does hate sin. In so far as we are all evil, he is angry with us all. Who is it that said, ‘the Lord is angry with the wicked every day’? And we are all wicked.
But that thoughtless reading through the Bible would have shown you that God directs his anger over wickedness towards himself, in that he took on the burden of our humanity and endured the wrath we deserve. If that is not love, then nothing is. If Kellyanne and Meryl will rush headlong toward the mercy of the cross, they will discover a love so deep and so broad that the evil they both have will be put as far away from them as the east is from the west. But if they don’t find the time, then they will wish they had found it later.
But consider, and this is where we should all have our studied pause, the dehumanizing suffering that produced this great mercy. Of all the people in the whole world who were, in fact, not the Devil, Jesus was chief among them. Of all humanity, he is the singular individual who made no contract, no quarter, with Satan. He, one might say, knew no sin–that intimate, settled knowledge that keeps everybody so closely and affectionately tied. None. He did not have a workable relationship with evil.
And yet of all people to be stripped of human dignity, to be de-humanized, to be demonized, Jesus is the brightest and best example in the totality of human history–so blinding, in fact, because of his complete innocence.
The cross came about because God orchestrated our peculiar propensity to deny the other person any worth. He used this primordial habit to bring about the forgiveness of the unworthy.
Which means that no one should be so pilloried, so hated–no single person–that we cannot see that he is human, that she is a person.
Kellyanne and Meryl together have become worthless, but while they were yet sinners, bound to death, Jesus died to give them life. They should really think about taking him up on his incredible love.
But we christians, so forgiven and loved, should be really cautious about lightly throwing around phrases like–dance monkey, or most dangerous and evil politician, most worthless starlit, or even most wrong Christian ever who shouldn’t even be allowed to live anymore. No one is so far gone that while life remains God can’t rescue and save, that love cannot beat its way past the calloused, hardened, preachy, badly lit exterior.
Does God love you? Then you must love your enemy and do good to the one who hurts you. That person is a human.
If you don’t see how you can possibly carry such a forgiveness out, go to church and ask for help. Have a lovely Sunday!
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