Angry confessions

The reason I got a bit harsh and heated up in yesterday’s post is because it was about me as much as it was about anyone else.

The whole Satanic baby-killers thing? I did that too. The bearing false witness against my neighbors. The assuming the very worst about other people. The assuming even worse than the very worst without evidence, investigation, or taking any responsibility for the ludicrous, impossibly inhuman assumptions about their lives and motives that I was swallowing, supporting, and spreading about millions of people I didn’t know and didn’t bother to know. That was me.

I was harming my neighbors. I was sinning against them like it was my job. Because it was my job.

I was the staff writer for a white evangelical “pro-life” activist group called Evangelicals for Social Action. We did some good. We also did some real harm — to others and to ourselves — by promoting the toxic, morally corrosive, prideful, scornful, dishonest, incoherent nonsense of abortion-is-murderism.

We did this, in part, due to good intentions. That also means, of course, that we did this, in part, due to intentions that were not good. We were mostly unaware of those not good intentions, which is to say, again, that we were partly aware of them. If the harm we did was mostly unintentional then it was also partly intentional and deliberate.

So my anger at the willful obtuseness of thought-and-conscience-suppressing garbage phrases like “Tim Walz’s extreme views on abortion” is due to painful, shameful, intimate recognition of the defensive mechanisms at work there — the pride, anxiety, and fear that drives one to avoid looking at the things we have chosen not to look at so as not to threaten the fantastical false witness against our neighbors we’ve come to prefer.

I wind up shouting because I see others doing regrettable things that I personally regret and I want them to understand that they will come to regret it as well.

Or perhaps, worse, they will come to be the kinds of people incapable of that regret, even when what they are sowing reaps pain and harm and death for others.

In any case, this is just to say that yesterday’s post is as much a confession as it is an accusation, less an attempt to direct anger toward others than to express the anger I feel toward myself for my own complicity in a grievous, corrosive, harmful sin.