Evil

Today in theological reflection we discussed The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, who contends that 1 in 20 people are simply born without a conscience. We reflected on a couple of chapters from this book, and considered the implications for liberal theology in the face of a population—albeit a small one—which could be considered “evil” and unchangeably so. What does our assumption that people have inherent worth and dignity, or that, given the proper nurture, everyone has the capacity for good do with the existence of people who are “outlandish and gratuitously mean” (77)? In TR, no matter what topic we start with—civil liberties, war, racism—we always come around to the question of evil, and we rarely, if ever, have any idea what to do with it...
I’m beginning to think that this may just be a “stuckness” or a tension that we’re going to have to live with, for now. And as much as I’m not sure I like that, I realize also that liberal theology was never about easy answers.
Note: This post originally appeared on Elizabeth's blog, No One Shall Compel Them.

What Torture's Taught Me

I just read “What Torture’s Taught Me,” by Rev. Bill Schulz, who used to be the President of the UUA, and, more recently, the Executive Director of Amnesty International USA.

“…no God worthy of the name is present in a torture chamber…I have talked to dozens of survivors of torture, read hundreds of others’ accounts, and I have rarely, if ever, come across a testimony that it was faith in God that saw them through the night. For when the needle slips under the fingernails and the pliers rip them off, that pain obliterates the very face of God” (Berry St. Essay, 2006)

Whew. Schulz, here, is arguing that the liberal theology that “God is everywhere” is completely inadequate in the face of such profound evil as torture, and that we must be able to account for God’s absence if our faith is to be real and powerful.

If the first question is about the nature of God, the second (related) question asked in Schulz’s essay is about the nature of humankind. The question is, “…can we defend the notion that a torturer is a person of “inherent worth and dignity”. And he concludes that no, that there is nothing about being human that really gives a person inherent worth and dignity, only that we must give each person inherent worth and dignity to maintain ours.

He argues that “…inherency is a political construct…designed to cover up the fact that we are all sinners and that we are not always certain which sins (and hence which sinners) are worse than others”.

If there are people—torturers—who do not have inherent worth and dignity, then “everyone” does not have inherent worth and dignity. And does the opposite hold true? In the end, no one has inherent worth and dignity, and objectively, no one’s life is sacred? In order to explain, or at least recognize the existence of torture, do I need to believe that I do not have inherent worth and dignity? Whew! That’s so close to original sin that I feel the cold breath of the fundamentalist upbringing that soured my mother on theistic religion. And I don’t like it.

If it is neither true that “everyone” has inherent worth, or that “no one” does, we’re left with a sticky “some people do, and no one can tell who”. This seems to be where Schulz is going when he says, “I oppose the death penalty not because I believe that every one of those lives carries inherent worth. In some cases their deaths would be no loss at all to anyone. I oppose the death penalty because I can’t be sure which of them falls into which category…” In other words, who are we to judge? And frankly, that’s also why I oppose the death penalty.

Schulz goes on, “…the use of executions by the state diminishes my own dignity and that of every other citizen in whose name it is enforced. I need, in other words, to assign the occupants of death row worth and dignity in order to preserve my own” (10). He argues that in order to maintain a just society—or any society at all—we have to behave as if everyone has inherent worth: otherwise we’ll destroy ourselves.

I suppose this makes sense, but if the liberal “God is everywhere” theology is too idealistic to stand up to the reality of human cruelty, Schulz’s intentional assignment of worth to each person seems coldheartedly pragmatic. Maybe the world is coldly pragmatic, and this is a reality we all need to face in order to survive and engage with the real world. (Rev. Rob Hardies, in his sermon on “Resilience” argued that optimism and idealism are not only false but dangerous, and that it is “courageous realism” that allows us to persevere.) But, yikes.