The Psychology of Evil, Part 2: Moral Development

In part 1 of this series, I introduced psychologist Roy F. Baumeister's five roots of evil: predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology, specifically covering the last two, sadism, and ideology. In this second part, I will discuss the remaining roots.

Predation

This term simply refers to primitive drives of greed and lust. This is evil as a means to an end. I want what you have, so I take it by force. This is the most simplistic concept of crime, dating back to the Ten Commandments (thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet...). It is a concept of right and wrong that any child can understand, and indeed is what children learn in Kindergarten (don't hit, use your words...). In other words, the antidote to this type of harm is the natural process of developing socially--learning to share, cooperate, and so on. 

There is a connection here with social justice. For example the social dynamic in some U.S. inner cities is comparable to a failed state. When the police are not seen as serving and protecting, but are seen as a threat, the idea of "justice" is thus not entrusted to the state, and "gangs" take the role upon themselves. Since there is little hope of economic opportunity, people can feel that the normal social contract has failed them, and thus some feel compelled to take what they want by force. In other words, there is a correlation between individual justice and societal justice. The social contract which motivates a person to be social only makes sense if the society itself is indeed social. So if we want to see individual reform, an important part of this is working for societal reform. Impoverished areas all over the world lead to unstable and thus unsafe environments.

Dominance

Dominance is likewise related to moral development (or the lack thereof) and has a lot to do with one's self-esteem. We often think of a bully as someone with inflated self-esteem rather than low self-esteem. However, really what we have in a bully or egotist is a profoundly fragile self-esteem. They thus feel compelled to put other people down to feel superior. This fragile self-esteem is easily threatened, and the bully responds with acts of dominance -- put downs to belittle you, shame you, and in some cases with acts of violence.

The antidote again is moral/social development. For example, as I explained in Disarming Scripture, restorative justice programs like RSVP work with society's most violent men — wife beaters, murderers, and gang bangers — helping them to become self-reflective, developing empathy, and finding healthy ways of managing their emotions. These violent men learn for the first time how to maintain their own dignity and respect without demeaning or harming others. The results are striking: The RSVP program boasts a staggering 80% reduction of violent recidivism.

Additionally, the RSVP program has seen a dramatic reduction of inmate violence as well, not only making society safer, but making the guards safer as well. Usually in prisons we of course do the opposite. We attempt to teach people not to dominate... by dominating them. This leads to violence in prisons (which endangers both inmates and guards), as well as to a high recidivism rate, leading to a "revolving-door" prison system. That's because our prison system is about punishment rather than reform. It dehumanizes people. Restorative justice programs like RSVP offer some light here, but ultimately the view of society needs to change. As long as we think prison needs to be a place where "criminals should suffer" we will support the perpetuation of this spiral of violence. That brings us to our next root cause of evil, revenge.

Revenge

Revenge is about the cycle escalating retaliation. As humans, we naturally have an impulse for revenge. As Pinker says, "Revenge is an easily pushed button in everyone's brains." In other words, the drive for revenge is biological, related to our self-preservation. 

For me, understanding this biological aspect was tremendously helpful. It meant that when I felt the desire for revenge when I was wronged, this did not mean that I was not really following Jesus, or that I still had "sin living in me" as Paul puts it. This is simply a biological reaction. It is biologically programmed into all of us as a means of self-preservation. The question of moral development, and the question that has to do with me being faithful to the way of Jesus, is what I then do with that drive for retaliation. Am I driven by it, or do I master it? Can I rise above it and look for a better way of resolving conflict? In other words, it's not the impulse, but what I do with it. Simply put, a big part of maturing is learning impulse control.

Of all of these above roots of evil, revenge may be the hardest to overcome for us because it is still seen as a virtue in many societies today. We think of predation as criminal, and dominance as characterizing bullies and tyrants. But we often still equate revenge with justice--especially in American society. So while we generally see predation and dominance as bad, revenge is the one root of evil that is still seen as a virtue. This cultural value is reinforced constantly by nearly every action movie ever made where revenge is made synonymous with justice. It takes a lot of moral imagination to rise above that, because it means rising above the moral imagination of our contemporary society.

One powerful movement away from this is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was was set up in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid in 1994 to deal with the violence and human rights abuses that had occurred from all sides. One of the key elements of the TRC was uncompromising truth-telling. So often our legal system is focused on the opposite. If you admit guilt you are punished, so the accused never admit what they did. A typical condition of a legal settlement is that the corporation makes no admission of wrong-doing. Similarly, there is the constant spin of politicians and corporations doing "damage control" in an attempt to hide wrong-doing. But when we are wronged, we humans desperately need to hear an admission of this. We need this more than we need punishment or payment. If that's true on an individual level, it is even more so on a societal level. That's why governments and corporations fight so hard against it.

Another important principle of the TRC was the idea of incomplete (retributive) justice. There was retributive justice, but not in a way that was proportionate to the crimes committed. In one sense it was just impractical to jail everyone who took part in Apartheid. So in the interest of healing the nation they gave amnesty to most, only punishing the most severe crimes. That may seem shocking to many of us. It can feel like they "got away with it." But I'd suggest the place we need to look is not to our immediate emotional response, but the long term results. As imperfect as this justice may feel, the practical question is whether this allow us to go on as a society. Does this allow us to heal? Does it allow us to move towards repair? Does it lead us away from harm? As Amos Oz, referring to the seemingly never-ending Palestinian/Israeli conflict, puts it,

"Tragedies can be resolved in one of two ways: there is the Shakespearean resolution and there is the Chekhovian one. At the end of Shakespearean tragedy the stage is strewn with dead bodies and maybe a sense of justice hovering high above. A Chekhov tragedy, on the other hand, ends with everybody disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, disappointed, absolutely shattered, but still alive. I want a Chekhovian resolution, not a Shakespearean one."

Conclusion

Commenting on the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the now famous idea of the "banality of evil." Evil is boring and stupid. She applied this to one of the key figures of the Holocaust, and while many have taken issue with her assessment (there certainly were aspects of the holocaust that were sadistic) what we can perhaps agree on is that evil's roots are found in very basic characteristics that all of us are susceptible to. As Solzhenitsyn so powerfully said in The Gulag Archipelago, "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."


The three roots of evil we have explored here, predation, dominance, revenge all have in common a connection to basic human social development. In other words, the antidote to all of these evils is helping people to mature socially. As discussed in part 1, sadism is not actually a root, but rather an outgrowth of evil. This leaves us with the fourth root of evil, (authoritarian) ideology, which is a social framework that endorses harm as good. In other words, (authoritarian) ideology is a morally and socially underdeveloped view of the world which seeks to paint predation, dominance and revenge as good and admirable. We instead need to first recognize that all of us can easily fall prey to these egotistical and immature impulses -- we are not immune.  Second, having embraced a morally and socially mature view of the world, we need to seek growth both as individuals and as a society together, seeking to grow towards helping rather than harming, towards repair rather than revenge.

The Psychology of Evil, Part 1: The Myth of Pure Evil

Hannibal Lecter, Freddie Krueger, Dracula, Darth Vader, Cruella de Vil. We are all familiar with the myth of pure evil in Hollywood movies. It's a myth both because it serves as a literary device for the stories that shape how we see our world, and also because it is not true. It represents a naive cartoon understanding of what evil actually is.

Don't get me wrong, evil is real. People do really horrible, unspeakable, awful things to other people. If we can understand what leads a person to do that, then we can also discover how to move in the opposite direction, how we can grow and develop morally and socially--collectively and individually--towards being move loving, more just.

One of the key tenets of the myth of pure evil is other-izing, de-humanizing. When we refer to a person as a "monster" it is implied that they do not need to be treated as human. That allows us to treat them inhumanly, and then we ourselves commit evil actions, while thinking that we had no other choice, and perhaps telling ourselves that what we are doing is good and just. So we see our enemies as monsters and do horrible things to them, and they see us do that and think we are monsters, and thus feel justified in doing horrible things to us.

The problem with this cartoon depiction of evil is that it does not help us to break out of these cycles, and in fact contributes to keeping us locked in them. It's a fairy-tale world where we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. That's the opposite of being introspective and self-aware. What I hope to do instead is take a realistic and deep look at the reality of human evil that is a part of all of us, in the hopes of finding how we can move towards being good in a realistic and deep way.

Based on the work of psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature identifies five roots of evil: predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology. In the first part of this series I will discuss the last two of these, sadism and ideology. When you think of ideology, think Isis. When you think sadism, think Charles Manson. Hollywood and the news media are obsessed with these stories of terrorists and psychopaths. I suspect they do this because it reflects our own obsession. These are the things of our real life nightmares. This is the kind of evil that leaves us baffled, perplexed and horrified. The problem is that the media tells us this story with very little reflection or insight because it’s an easy headline to write. “If it bleeds it leads” they say. This stokes our fear, rather than helping us to gain insight.

Let's begin with taking a look at sadism. Despite its frequent depiction in movie villains, sadism—taking pleasure in hurting and killing others--is actually quite rare. Baumeister explains that sadism is something that one develops into, much like drug addition. Studies have found that, of those actively engaged in violence, only around 5% become sadists. What keeps 95% of people from sadism, Baumeister says, is our sense of guilt.

Whether that sense of guilt is in-built, the product of culture, or a mix of both is not entirely clear. What we do know is that, as mentioned above, only a very small percentage of those participating in violence come to enjoy it. We also know that in the past it was common for people to do sadistic things as a culture. One example is the torture of animals for entertainment. Pinker gives several accounts of how animals, dogs and cats in particular, were brutally tortured as a means of public entertainment in Medieval times. This might indicate that where cultural taboos are absent, more people can develop sadistic tendencies unhindered by guilt.

The idea of someone taking pleasure in hurting others seems to represent what our cliché of pure evil looks like. Think of the Disney villain with his classic mwa-ha-ha-ha! maniacal laugh, and we have the cartoon version of sadism. The “thriller” movie version is only slightly more complex, sometimes it is even less complex. As mentioned previously, this cliché reflects our need to make sense of what seems "monstrous" to us. We watch these “monster movies” to try to process our fears. Unfortunately these movies typically re-enforce our ignorance. To be fair, many Disney movies (for example Zootopia) have actively moved away from that, addressing issues of racism and prejudice in a cartoon. I can’t say the same for action movies.

So what do we do with sadism? First we need to realize that even when the media give us the impression that it’s everywhere – every second headline seems to be about this. We know that it is actually very very rare. It’s also important to note that Baumeister concludes that sadism is not so much a root cause of evil, but rather a byproduct, entering the picture after evil (that is, actively torturing and killing others) is already in progress. It is something that a very small percentage of people have the potential for, perhaps we might even see it as a perversion of sorts. But it is not a root cause, it is not where evil starts. So if we are seeking to find the root causes of evil, the root that it grows from, we will need to look further.

This brings us to the second category: Ideology. Ideology and its connection to violence is something I have discussed at length in Disarming Scripture, and often on this blog. I refer to this as the way of “unquestioning obedience” and have often warned of its potential to lead to violence. As Pascal says, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

One might say that ideology acts as an antidote to moral conscience. It gets us to turn off our brains and hearts, to shut off our compassion and common sense, thinking that we are doing this “for God.” This can lead parents to harm the children they love, thinking that they are doing God's will or being true to the Bible. It has, as a matter of history, led many pious and idealistic people to commit horrific atrocities in the name of their god or political ideology.

It’s easy to look at groups like Isis and think that we would never be like that. However, studies like the infamous Milgram experiment reveal that the average person is disturbingly capable of hurting others in order to conform to authority. Most of us just go with the crowd -- whether that's in the halls of our high school, at our fundamentalist church, or somewhere else where the stakes are higher.

That's why it's so important to learn to think for yourself, to question, and perhaps most of all, to develop moral courage. If we don’t stand up in the little things, will we stand up for the big things? It’s easy to spot the evil of fanatical extremist ideology in another religion or another nation, and I certainly do not want to deny that this truly is evil. The true test however is whether we are able to stand up to authoritarianism and demagoguery when it wraps itself in our flag and claims our religion.

People often ask me how to deal with things like Muslim extremism. I have focused mainly on Christianity because that is my own faith. So I begin with looking at myself and my own tribe. But the answer to how to deal with Muslim extremism is the same as how we deal with Christian extremism. Fundamentalism is the same is any religion. The antidote to this non-thinking non-empathetic ideology is of course to learn how to have a thinking faith, how to be introspective and reflective, how to grow in empathy and moral maturity.

In understanding ideology as one of the roots from which evil grows, the key takeaway is to recognize that it is therefore not something that we only find in those monstrous bad guys “over there.” It is something that we all, as humans, are susceptible to. Put in the right circumstances we might find ourselves doing the same thing that the people in the Milgram experiment found themselves doing. Denying this does not make us immune. On the contrary, to the extent that we are unreflected about this potential in us, we are all the more susceptible to it. Only by facing these tendencies in us head-on, and actively deciding to move in the opposite direction, can we counter it. In the case of ideology that means, among other things, actively questioning authority and learning to think morally for ourselves. We need to practice it in the little things—among our peers, at school or work or church—if we hope to have the civil courage to take a stand for bigger things.

Evangelicalism’s Two-Faced God

I recently went to a talk with Science Mike (Mike McHargue) where he discussed his memoir Finding God in the Waves, which I’m looking forward to reading (more on that soon). It was a great talk, and I was struck by something Mike said about neurology. He described how neuroscientists have observed that people who contemplate a loving God see changes in their brains, building their prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for things like compassion and moral reflection) and lessening the influence of their amygdala (the part of your brain responsible for impulsive fear-based reactions, which are helpful when you have your hand on a hot stove or step on a snake, but not so great when you are trying to resolve conflict in a relationship).

I related to what he said, and can certainly attest to experiencing this in my own life. I talk about this a lot in fact, in terms of moral development and the brain. In one sense, it’s just common sense that people who focus on feeling loved (religious or not) would tend to become more loving people. However, I found myself wondering how it could be that evangelicals (well, I should clarify, American white evangelicals) can be so focused on experiencing the love of Jesus, and at the same time can overwhelmingly support war, torture, the death penalty, corporal punishment of children, and so on. How can they so enthusiastically support policies that completely lack compassion and care of the least?

So I asked Mike, if it is true that focusing on Jesus’ love makes your brain develop the prefrontal cortex, then why is it that white American evangelicals seem to be so amygdala-driven, that is, driven by fear leading to hurtful reactive responses, as characterized by their overwhelming support for the policies of our current President?

It’s something I am genuinely baffled by. Mike stressed that some conservatives are indeed compassionate which I do not doubt, and that liberals can equally lack compassion, which is certainly true. We all can be jerks, we all can let fear lead us to being hurtful, there is no ideological monopoly on immaturity. However, there does seem to be something about white American evangelicalism that seems especially toxic. There seems to be something about white American evangelicalism in particular that makes it ripe for being unreflected, angry, fear-driven, scapegoating, and an enthusiastic supporter of violence and punishment in the name of the good. What is it?

What I took away from Mike’s response was that he suggested that the problem was their belief in a very different god from the God revealed in Jesus – a god characterized by fear and anger, who threatens eternal punishment, and is characterized by wrath. I was reminded of what Brian Zahnd has described as the “monster god” of neo-Calvinism. In short, Mike proposed that the basic problem is that they have not experienced the love of Jesus, and instead know a god of fear and anger.

It’s important to understand that Mike’s story is one that is deeply shaped by his experience of God’s love in the midst of the pain and rejection he experienced in his youth, as well as his experience of that same life-transforming love as an adult atheist. It's really a classic born-again testimony. I have myself been deeply influenced by that same experience of the love of Jesus in my life as a teen. I was born again, but this was not simply a one time event. I was drawn to knowing God's love relationally, and in that "pursuit of God" (to borrow a phrase from A.W. Tozer) I experienced over and over again a love that completely transformed my life. I write about this in my first book Intimacy with God which I chose to make free because I wanted to share this love with everyone. I realize that for many the idea of a “personal relationship with God” may seem sappy or sentimental, but I cannot stress how profoundly experiencing that love first-hand in my life as changed me. For me it is not sappy at all. From hearing Mike speak of his life, I think the same could be said for him. Mike told stories with tears in his eyes of how experiencing the love of Jesus literally "saved" him from committing suicide in his youth. It was a beautiful testimony.

From that perspective, it makes sense to think “There is just no way a person could experience love like that and be so angry and hurtful. They must experience God as angry and hurtful.” So when Mike said essentially this, my first reaction was to agree. Then the more “science-y” part of me began to kick in. The fact is, people are very capable of compartmentalizing and showing great inconsistency in different parts of their lives. I’m sure there were many people in the 1800’s who were moved to tears at a revival meeting, and then came home and mercilessly beat their slaves – I can even see them thinking that doing so was good. I’m also pretty sure that many of the people who adamantly support things like war and torture today actually do experience the love of Jesus in their lives. It seems really counterintuitive, but we humans are complex creatures. I strongly suspect that if we were to survey white American evangelicals who support these angry and hurtful policies, we would find that a great many could tell moving stories of how they have experienced the love of Jesus in their lives.

Let me stress here that I don’t mean at all to be critical of Mike’s answer. He said it off the top of his head, and I think it was a great answer with a really important insight. My goal with this post is to help further develop the idea, after having the chance to reflect on it for a while.

There is something going on, and it does have to do with an angry God, but this picture of a God of anger and fear seems to co-exist alongside the experience of the love of Jesus. It’s an odd mix of the love of Jesus for those on the inside of the church, with a simultaneous focus on anger and hellfire for those on the outside – including you, if you “fall away.” The “monster god” is thus not a god who is only angry, but a god who is deeply loving to those on the inside and full of wrath towards those on the outside.

This “two-faced God” (to borrow a phrase from Michael Hardin) means you can go to church and sing songs about the love of Jesus, and then hear a sermon by a very angry white dude about how we should fear our nation being corrupted and destroyed by [insert name of scapegoated minority group here]. In short, we experience love and compassion on the inside, but are taught that those on the outside should be feared and hated. They get wrath. This reinforces people’s natural tendency to feel love for their own family, race, nation, and religion, and to demonize, criminalize, and dehumanize those outside the boundaries. That’s why evangelicals can experience love themselves, and yet lack compassion for others, being instead driven by fear and anger towards them.

People in that environment are therefore not meditating on an angry “monster God” alone. The picture of God they have somehow simultaneously consists of the experience of the love of Jesus (which I do not doubt is genuine) mixed together with week after week of cultivating anger and fear to those perceived as enemies from the pulpit. Sitting in that atmosphere week after week, year after year, shapes your brain. It essentially stunts a person’s moral development. The course of moral development is supposed to go from being loved, leading one to extend that same love towards others, developing socially. This toxic theology however keeps people inwardly focused in a sense of fear-based reactionary self-protection. The neuroscience phenomenon Mike mentioned of building the social and compassionate part of our brain thus does not happen, because this preaching of fear and anger towards outsiders strengthens the reactionary fear-based part of our brain, the amygdala. To put this in more theological terms, while they experience the love of Jesus, they do not follow the teaching of Jesus. Jesus had hard words for people like that, 

I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ (Matthew 7:23)

Jesus links faithfulness to how we treat others, and this is most seen in how we treat those who we regard the least. John echos this when he writes,

"Whoever says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person."

These are hard sayings, and I hope we are able to hear them. What is being expressed, in the strongest of terms, is that our experience of God's love is not worth much if it does not translate into showing compassion to others. It's like a flower that is planted, but does not grow out of the dirt.

This understanding of evangelicalism’s two-faced God is especially important for the “nicer” evangelical churches to recognize. Here I do not mean the churches where the pastor wears skinny jeans and a soul patch, but underneath still preaches the two-faced God. I mean the genuinely nice churches who only talk about grace and love, the churches that you and I would want to go to. Because evangelicalism is so fluid, those nice churches are filled with people who come from churches that preached the two-faced God. Almost never is it acknowledged in those nice churches that there are people in the congregation who are still carrying wounds from that past church experience. When it is acknowledged, it is almost always in the context of the person having misunderstood. You must have gotten the wrong impression of who God is. It’s always your personal problem, as opposed to us recognizing that this two-faced God of love and hate is very widespread within white evangelicalism, and addressing that. 

In other words, the problem is not simply that the person has gotten an angry picture of God, and now simply needs to hear of the love and grace of Jesus. They have experienced a God who is both loving and hateful, and as a consequence they have been damaged by that. To the extent that they have preached this non-gospel of “God hates you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” they have hurt others. Perhaps a father severed his relationship with his gay son because his pastor told him that was tough love. Whatever the specifics, many live with the fallout of relationships that they have severed because of this toxic theology when it is lived out.

Simply preaching God’s love is not an antidote to this, because they have been taught that there is no contradiction in God being both loving and hateful, nor is there a problem with their being both loving (to insiders) and hateful (to outsiders) themselves. Instead of their experience of God’s love leading them to follow the teaching of Jesus and caring for the least, this two-faced God theology has taught them to ignore the love they experience, and instead be driven by fear and anger which is pounded into people’s psyches by what they hear Sunday after Sunday, not to mention their diet of angry pundits and media that they consume 24-7.

I know that it is hard to face this, which is perhaps why these nice evangelical churches so often avoid it. But I really hope that the grace-focused evangelical churches can find the courage and humility to address this toxic theology head-on, and help people kick-start their hardened hearts, and move towards growing in compassion. Sometimes to find healing, to find what is good and beautiful, we need to first face the ugliness in ourselves and in our communities.

Worlds Apart: Maintaining Personal Relationships as Political Opposites

Photo credit: AP

This election cycle has been characterized by an unprecedented amount of polarizing discourse and outright hostility. There are strong feelings of alarm and moral outrage on both sides of the political divide. Many have reported getting into a fight with a friend or family member over the election.

From the perspective of relationship experts, the turn our political discourse has taken this election can be seen as a case-book example of exactly how not to speak if you value your personal relationships. Marriage researcher and therapist John Gottman famously identified four styles of interpersonal communication that his studies revealed as key predictors for divorce, ominously dubbing them the “four horsemen of the apocalypse.” They are criticism (of a person, rather than a behavior), contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, and of the four, contempt has been found to be the greatest predictor of divorce.

As examples of contempt, the Gottman Institute lists “sarcasm, cynicism, name-calling, eyerolling, sneering, mockery, and hostile humor.” That kind of contempt is plain to see in one particular Presidential candidate who frequently calls people invectives like “disgusting” and “pigs.” But that spirit of contempt has spilled over into how people commonly characterize those on the other side of the political fence as well. It’s easy to see why speaking to your spouse with that kind of ugly animosity would not be good for a marriage. At the same time, this begs the question of how you can speak with a loved one when you find their political views deeply troubling and hurtful.

For some, the best policy seems to be avoiding the topic altogether. This is a matter of setting healthy boundaries that both respect, with the aim of setting aside these differences for the good of the relationship. Talking through these differences is a lot harder, and requires a good deal of moral maturity on the part of both partners. Those who do not possess that maturity, sensitivity, and sophisticated communication skills may need to go with the wisdom of “don’t try this at home.”

For those who do want to venture into talking about these things with a loved one who is a political opposite, it’s critical to be able to speak in a way that is not condemning, disrespectful, or degrading. That is not a matter of agreeing on the issues, but on how you speak with each other, even when there is strong disagreement. When we feel anger or anxiety – two strong feelings that this election has brought up in many people – our brains go into alarm-mode, making us cling to our beliefs, doubling-down on them, shutting ourselves off to the other.

The antidote to this is creating an environment of respect, where you both feel socially safe and connected. A debate is not a place where the two parties change their views, it is an atmosphere where each side becomes all the more entrenched and polarized. Change can only happen in an atmosphere where both feel safe, respected, valued, understood. That entails how you speak with each other, but it also will likely mean at first that you need to get behind the issues, and seek to understand the vulnerable feelings (such as feeling threatened, wronged, or afraid) behind them. In other words, you genuinely try to understand the other, while also expressing how you feel.

That’s hard to do, because it means both of you managing your reactivity. However, if the goal is to come together, if the goal is to resolve conflict... and even if the goal is to win over the other, the only way to get there is through this type of vulnerable and respectful dialog. If one instead has a diet of rage, resentment and contempt fed to them through their favorite liberal or conservative news outlet, the result will be a continued polarization – moving further and further away, fostering fear, anger, and otherizing.

The End of the World As We Know It - Part 1: Growing Up

 A reader asks,

“Both Jesus and his followers seemed to believe his return and the last days were imminent. Yet here we are 2,000 years later and no Jesus in the flesh or end of the world. Was Jesus wrong? Is our record of what he taught wrong? If I am honest I can see how people can dismiss Jesus as an end times prophet anticipating a soon-coming final judgment that has not come soon. Growing up shaped by Pentecostal emphasis on the second coming I have heard many explanations of this that just seem to ignore the simple conclusion that Jesus was wrong. And if so, was he in fact divine like no other? And if he was wrong should I treat his teachings as authoritative?”

This is a question I have struggled with too. At its heart is a desire to see suffering and injustice come to an end, to see things made right. Those are good desires. However, it’s pretty hard to deny that 2000 years is by no definition “soon.” So what do we do about that? What do we do about the seemingly unavoidable conclusion that Jesus and his early followers’ hopes and expectations were apparently wrong? This brings us to the broader question of what do we do when we find that any part of the Bible is wrong. Does this cause our entire belief to collapse? Does this invalidate everything else?

If we have a faith rooted in authoritarianism and the way of unquestioning obedience, then the answer is, yes, it does. Because of this, many fundamentalist Christians convert to being fundamentalist atheists. That’s one possibility. Another possibility is to double down and argue that we are misunderstanding things and that everything is fine, and the Bible and Jesus are never wrong. That’s another possibility that is widely taken. I’ve heard lots of attempts at doing this in relation to eschatology, and I have to say they all left my heart still longing for a better answer. What my heart wanted was to see the world made right, and so somehow all explanations of why I should accept things as they are just rang hollow.

The way I see it, on a deeper level, this is an issue of growing into adulthood, and that is a painful and difficult passage. As children we idealize our parents and teachers. We place child-like trust in them. When we become parents ourselves, we are faced with the staggering responsibility of taking care of our children. We take on that seemingly god-like role in their lives, all the time painfully aware how inadequate and unprepared we are to live up to that. We try the best we can to keep them safe, but we know we cannot shelter them from everything. We try to do our best, but we know we will fail, we will make mistakes. It’s hard to know that our kids will get hurt in this world, but it’s harder to face that we will hurt them, we will fail them.

The same is true of anyone who is a position of authority in our lives, teachers, managers, mentors, politicians, and pastors... no matter how much they try not to, will all fail us. That can be devastating. Many people, when faced with the moral failings of their pastor, walk away from their faith altogether – just like many people do when they find that the Bible is not a flawless book.

Note that "authority" and "authoritative" are not the same as authoritarian. Adults have people in authority over them, and exercise authority themselves within their lives as parents and professionals. Adults also regard things as authoritative when they deserve to be regarded as such.  But authoritarianism is synonymous with a child-like and developmentally immature approach to life. To the extent that we are nurtured in an authoritarian church, people are conditioned to remain developmentally immature. We need to have a faith that allows us to be morally responsible intelligent adults.

So the question becomes, how can we come to terms with our own imperfections and failings, with the imperfections and failings of those we look up to, and the imperfections and failings of scripture, and still hold on to what is good in ourselves, in our mentors, and in the Bible? That is the core question of what it means to move from childish faith to an adult faith. An adult faith is not one that has all the answers. It is not a faith that is rooted in certainty. That is what a child imagines it is like to be a grownup. Those of us who are adults and parents know full well that the reality of adulthood looks very different.

This new perspective of adulthood does not have the perspective that says if someone is wrong about one thing, therefore we must reject everything. After all, you are wrong sometimes, and that does not mean you are always wrong. The same goes for me, and the same goes for the human Jesus (it’s important that we hold that Jesus was not just divine, but both human and divine!). That means that you cannot blindly and without thinking accept everything I say, or accept everything anyone else says for that matter, including Jesus. We need to seek to understand so we can follow well, not blindly obeying without understanding – which means we will (because we do not understand) follow wrong, leading to hurt.

From what I can see, Jesus was wrong about the timing of the end. He was also wrong in his understanding of medicine, which he (like everyone else at the time) attributed to invisible demons rather than invisible germs. I put all of this to the limitations that Jesus experienced in being a human being, and to be fair, Jesus himself does say “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mt 24:36). In the same way that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, the Bible as a whole is also both divine and human, too. It is possible to encounter God in its pages, to encounter a love and goodness that puts us in direct contact with the divine, the eternal, and the holy. The challenge for us as adult believers is to learn how to find and embrace the good parts so we can get to the holy, so we can get to the heart of Jesus.

Just because Jesus was misinformed about medicine does not mean that there is nothing for us to learn about how Jesus treated the sick. In fact, there is immense, profound, life-changing moral insight that we can learn from how Jesus sees and treats the sick. Similarly, just because Jesus (and Matthew) were wrong about the imminence of the end, if we dig a bit deeper to look at what the Gospels, and in particular the Gospel of Matthew, has to say about the end time, what we find is a life-changing message that we desperately need to hear in our time, right now. I’ll discuss that in detail next time.