When Wrong Feels Right
Week of Monday, June 4, 2001
How can normal, everyday people do unspeakable acts of evil?
The Holocaust, Rwanda and the like come to mind. Here is an example from
the former war in Yugoslavia, taken from Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion
and Embrace.
I am a thiry-five year old Muslim. To my second son who was just
born, I gave the name “Jihad.” So he would not forget the
testament of his mother—revenge. The first time I put
my baby at my breast, I told him, “May this milk choke you if you
forget.” So be it. The Serbs taught me to hate. For the last two months
there was nothing in me. No pain, no bitterness. Only
hatred. I taught these children to love. I did. I am a teacher of
literature. I was born in Ilijas and I almost died there. My
student, Zoran, the only son of my neighbor, urinated into my mouth. As
the bearded hooligans standing around laughed, he told
me: “You are good for nothing else, you stinking Muslim
woman...” I do not know whether I first heard the cry or felt
the blow. My former colleague, a teacher of physics, was yelling like
mad, “Ustasha, ustasha...” And kept hitting me. Wherever he could. I
have become insensitive to pain. But my soul? It hurts. I
taught them to love and all the while they were making preparations to
destroy everything that is not of the Orthodox faith. Jihad—war.
This is the only way.
Here the innocent victim is well on her way to becoming the new oppressor.
Christians are not immune from these dynamics. Sometimes we not
only do horribly evil deeds, but we actually call these evil deeds
good. Note the double movement. First, we do evil: “My people are shrewd
to do evil, but to do good they do not know” (Jeremiah 4:22). But then,
we name this evil good: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil”
(Isaiah 5:20). I used to think Isaiah was speaking figuratively, but now
I think he is expressing a simple, literal statement, that God's people
sometime construe an act of evil or immorality into an act of piety. What
we have done is “for the Lord.”
Here is an example from the church that I have been thinking
about.
The Spaniards came to America for both gold and glory, but they
also came for God, to spread the Gospel. In a letter to Pope Alexander
VI, February 1502, Columbus wrote of his goal in the new world: “I hope in
Our Lord to be able to propagate His holy name and His Gospel throughout
the universe.” The natives they encountered were deemed pagan and
subhuman, as their cannibalism and human sacrifices proved. Oviedo, a
16th-century conquistador and historian of the five volume work Natural
History of the West Indies, describes the solution to the problem of
Indians who did not want to convert:
God is going to destroy them soon...Satan has now been expelled
from the Island [Hispaniola]; his influence has disappeared now
that most of the Indians are dead...Who can deny that
the use of gunpowder against pagans is the burning of incense to
our Lord?
The results of these evangelistic efforts? Todorov estimates that the
Spanish conquest of the Americas killed 70 million people, about 90% of
the population, by murder, maltreatment such as slavery, and disease. In
this example, wholesale genocide is construed as wholehearted piety.1
Another example I have been thinking about is Jim and Tammy Faye
Bakker. I had seen the excellent film The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2000),
seen Jim on Larry King Live, then as a result read his memoir entitled
I
Was Wrong (1996). Although here again we see similar dynamics in which
wrong was called right, in this case, despite the wake of destruction,
there is at least a slightly happier ending.
On October 6, 1989 Bakker was convicted on all 24 counts of fraud,
and 19 days later sentenced to 45 years in prison. At that time their PTL
ministry had annual revenues of about $170 million, 3,000 employees, and
television programs that were aired in 52 countries around the world and
seen in 13 million homes each day. His conviction was appealed twice but
never overturned. His sentence was reduced twice, first to 18 years, then
to 8, but even an early parole was denied and Bakker served almost 5 years
in prison.
To the end Bakker has denied the charges that he defrauded and
deceived his “partners,” and at least one person, law professor James
Albert of Drake University, believes that Bakker might have been legally
innocent of the charges.2 But as the title of his book suggests, Bakker
now admits that he was terribly wrong on a number of important matters:
lavish living, abandoning his family in favor of ministry, preaching the
prosperity Gospel, and other numerous and glaring mistakes of judgment.
But for most all this time, except for his 20 minute tryst with Jessica
Hahn which he says he always knew was wrong, until he went to prison and
God spoke so very deeply to him, he always felt the call of God on his
life and thought he was right.
The words “I was wrong” do not come easily to me. For most of my
life I believed that my understanding of God and how he
wants us to live was not only correct but worth exporting to
the world. One reason I have risked putting my heart into print is
to tell you that my previous philosophy of life, out of which my actions
and attitudes flowed, was fundamentally flawed.
Here is a man who had been in a far country, badly in the wrong but
thinking he was right, who finally “came to his senses” (Luke 15:17). On
July 1, 1994, the day of his release from prison, Bakker read a formal
statement to the public in which he humbly asked for forgiveness for “my
sin and arrogant lifestyle.” He thought he was right, but as he writes
time and again throughout his book, “I was wrong.”
We need not demonize Columbus, this Muslim woman, her Serb
torturers, or the Bakkers.
As Solzhenitsyn once
remarked in his Gulag Archipelago,
it would be nice if we could neatly
divide the world between the insidiously evil and the apparently good,
but in fact
“the line dividing good and
evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
That is
me. That is you. In his book Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The
Dynamics of Torture, John Conroy makes this very chilling point. We tend
to think of a torturer as a sadistic monster. But “there is ample evidence
that most torturers are normal people, that most of us could be the
barbarians of our dreams as easily as we could be the victim.” Torture,
he concludes, is “something most of us are capable of,” it is done by
“people like us.”3
How can otherwise normal people do evil and call it good? To
explain it fully might be impossible, and runs the risk of legitimizing
it. But some description is needed. Denial and rationalization play a
large part. So does isolating ourselves from those who would speak the
truth to us. We need to pray that God moves us from denial and
rationalization to self-awareness and confession, from isolation to
accountability and community. John's words give us both a warning and a
promise: “If we claim to walk in fellowship with Him yet walk in the
darkness, we lie...If we claim to be without sin we deceive ourselves and
the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and
just, and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness”
(1 John 1:6–9). Even when our sin and evil abound, thank God His grace
abounds “all the more” (Romans 5:20).
-
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Meaning of the
Other (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), pp. 10, 133, 151.
-
James Albert, Jim Bakker: Miscarriage of Justice? (Chicago: Open
Court, 1998). The third key book on the Bakker saga is by the
Charlotte Observer reporter Charles Shepard, who won the 1988
Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim
Bakker and the PTL Ministry (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989).
-
John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of
Torture (New York: Knopf, 2000), pp. x, 88.
The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself
Copyright ©2001 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.
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