Evil
“Silence in the presence of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Remember when evil was evil and good was good? Bonhoeffer wasn’t confused about evil; box cars of Jews being transported to extermination camps was evil. Isn’t it interesting however, how many German Christians didn’t think so? This blindness, or confusion, or ignorance wasn’t unique to mid 20th century Germans. Lovely Americans who were highly educated, and part of the ruling class defended Joseph Stalin and Communist ideology from the 1920s to the 1960s. Both Nazism and Socialism are utopian in nature, they insist on purity of thought, cannot abide dissent, and require the control of the state to manage. People finally catch on when the body counts get high and corpses start piling up in the streets. But evil isn’t what it used to be, it now often appears as a fiery angel of light; he, she, or it is fast, and is expert at inhabiting humans minds, institutions, and communications.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 to report for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolph Eichmann. Eichmann was the Nazi bureaucrat who organized the transportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps, a project called the Final Solution. Arendt found Eichmann an “ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. She published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil 1963. Her term banality is still being debated today. The left didn’t like her conclusion because they like to explain evil as not present in most people, but only resident in a special few who should be excised from our societies. A mutation that must be cast off on humankind’s grand accent into enlightened morality. This is what some mean when they say a conservative minded person is on the “wrong side of history.” Once again, this aversion to Arendt’s interpretation is the secular left’s flight from personal sin, human fallenness, and great potential in each person for great evil. She said, and it remains a thorn in the liberal side,
“I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [i.e. Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer - at least the very effective one now on trial - was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”
In other words, given the right circumstances, any one of us could have done it.
Evil isn’t primarily located in systems or societies, evil actually resides in every heart. It is through individuals that it escapes human restraint and then multiplies and metastasizes among families, neighborhoods, institutions, and societies. That is why German Christians could sing hymns louder to cover the cries for help from Jews as their trains passed by their churches on Sunday mornings. We humans have a way to protect ourselves from harm, to support the systems that provide protection, and rationalize the reasons. We’ve heard it all, “I was just following orders,” “I didn’t know about it,” “I trusted my government,” “I believed the propaganda.”
The church needs to stay out of politics and preach the gospel. Bonhoeffer put it well, “Not to speak in the presence of evil is itself evil.” It all seems so clear looking back to Nazis, Germans, and Jews. But it gets a bit stickier when we start talking about Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, media bias, abortion, same sex marriage, trans women competing against women, et al. Where is the evil? Who is most evil? More importantly, how do you choose good from this pile of evil? It is always more difficult when you are up to your eyeballs in it. The only recourse for the Christian is the Bible itself. How does the Bible define evil?
BIBLICAL EVIL
The bible separates moral evil from physical evil. Moral evil is what people do, physical evil is what nature itself does - earthquakes, floods, disease, death, mudslides, fires, hurricanes, tornados, etc. Physical evil is because of the fall which includes the entire realignment of a fallen earth verses what was a pre-fall earth. Human evil or moral evil when carried out is considered a sin. The Ten Commandments are addressed to human decision and will. Idolatry, misusing God’s name, keeping the Sabbath, honoring your parents, and not committing murder or adultery, not giving false testimony, and not coveting anyone’s house, spouse, or property (Exodus 20:3-11). It is also sorted out for Israel’s daily life and religious life in the moral law and the ceremonial law.
The Ten Commandments and the Law of Moses defined good and evil. Jesus summed it all up when he said,
“Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.”
Matthew 22:37-40 NLT
GETTING MORE SPECIFIC
A baseline has been established. Our human consciousness, factory installed by God, agrees with its Creator’s moral design. The basis of law in western civilization is built on the biblical narrative as experienced by humans for thousands of years. But a deeper dive into the New Testament on contemporary practices is needed to answer our question.
As a people, we are separated at birth from God. We are made in his image, but that image is effaced. The remainder of life is the restoration of that separation, the goal is reconciliation with our Creator (Ephesians 2:1-10, 2 Corinthians 5:15-21). Every person is capable of evil, the degree to which we enter into evil is determined by how far away from God we stray. The New Testament provides several general lists of evil for our understanding.
Wickedness, as it is called, is a category of behavior that is knowingly practiced by the violator. Here are a few selections:
“Their lives became full of every kind of wickedness, sin, greed, hate, envy, murder, quarreling, deception, malicious behavior and gossip. They became backstabbers, haters of God, insolent, proud, and boastful. They invent new ways of sinning and they disobey their parents. They refuse to understand, break their promises, are heartless, and have no mercy.”
Romans 1:29-31 NLT
This reads like a political party’s unofficial playbook. Do we know any political party that is free of these sins? The candidates themselves swim in the same moral cesspool. Here are some more for your reading pleasure:
“When you follow the desires of your sinful nature the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have said before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”
Galatians 5:19-21 NLT
The thought that immediately comes to mind is “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23). Is anyone actually qualified to lead our country, our city, our county, our churches, our schools, our industries, or even our homes? Whomever is chosen to lead a church, or a country is a sinner and has a checkered past. Their lives will have inconsistencies, mistakes they have made that will be published and accentuated. Everyone now get vetted, there is opposition research, and of course, much of our lives are now recorded. A compromise must be made, we must use our best judgement and common sense.
What is the decision then? Is the person the right fit? And what do they represent in person and policy? Calling a pastor to your church is very different than choosing a mayor or school board superintendent. A Baptist church will not call an Episcopal Priest to be their pastor or a Jewish Rabbi. A really nice man who runs the hardware store might be a good fit to be the part time mayor of a hamlet of 300 people, but not your leader for General Motors. Whomever is selected as President of the United States will be flawed, the question really comes down to what is best for the United States. The word evil is thrown around a lot by partisans when describing the candidate they are against. I don’t believe either candidate is evil, they both, however, have committed a number of the sins named in the aforementioned scripture. As Bonhoeffer said, “It is better to do evil than to be evil.” By the time you read this article there should be a newly elected President of the United States. I would suggest that after you digest the result, as a Christian, pray for that person, support them when you can, and remember that evil is resident in all of us. As Jesus said,
“And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye, when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”
Matthew 7:3-5 NLT
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either-but right through every human heart… even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of hearts, there remains… an uprooted small corner of evil.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
