Deliver Us From Evil

Welcome to the Faithful Resistance

What is evil?

Last January, after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, I intentionally broke my algorithm. I clicked on links that I disagreed with because I wanted to understand what other people were being fed.

Friends, it was dark. I stayed in that hole for about a week, but I may still be recovering from what I witnessed.

If you had asked me a few years ago if I believed in evil, I would have said, “sure.” Actions are evil but these are choices that people make. There are no “forces” of evil.

I was in youth group during the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 90s, around people engaged in something called “spiritual warfare.” I read This Present Darkness when I was in college and was taught that abortion was evidence of “evil” having spread into our society.

If you’re unfamiliar with spiritual warfare, it’s the idea that there is a great cosmic battle being fought between angels and demons in the spiritual realm and the way we join the fight is through prayer and by surrendering our will to God’s will.

When I rejected the idea that Dungeons & Dragons was turning teenage boys into demons, or that abortion and homosexuality are evidence of evil winning the war, I also rejected the concept of evil as a spiritual force.

Then, I spent the last few years studying the rise of White Christian Nationalism. To understand this phenomena, I listened to the people who justified slavery, who took their children to watch the lynchings, who thought the Jews must have deserved what happened to them.

There is good reason why we don’t often put their words in museums or in textbooks.

What scares me about White Christian Nationalism is how much it sounds like movements from the past. Evil isn’t stopped by our prayers and certainly not by our surrender.

It is not teenage boys playing a board game in the basement or fictional stories about wizards. Nor is it people who think they shouldn’t have to mortgage their home to pay for cancer treatment or migrants in search of a better life.

It’s something that creeps into society and transforms decent humans into people who willingly participate in genocide.

Despite my disavowal of spiritual warfare, I find that spiritual language is the best way to talk about evil because what I’ve learned over that last few years is that, given the right conditions, most people, good, decent people, including you and me, will become Nazis.

That is the lesson from history that some people want to keep hidden and why I think spiritual language is the best way to describe how that happens.

I wonder if the ancients saw the same thing we do, that normal people can be so transformed by fear and manipulated by lies, that they embrace violence. Maybe they saw entire communities consumed with rage and needed an explanation.

Maybe they assumed that evil was transmitted the same way disease was: by evil spirits (demons).

The ancients believed that anything that was contagious had agency, we know that’s not true. Viruses and bacteria do not have agency.

Maybe evil is not spread by evil spirits, but by the exploitation of fear.

As I pondered this with the imagery of light and dark, I remembered that darkness is simply the absence of light. Maybe evil grows in the absence of agency. Maybe that’s why injustice and oppression are often seen as fruits of evil.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

What if we imagine the consolidation of power almost like the accumulation of other people’s agency, as if it’s an energy that could be measured in units?

A tyrant, then, is one who takes power - agency, autonomy - from other people and wields it as they see fit. There is no accountability, because once we have surrendered our agency, whether willingly or by force, we lack the agency to stand up.

Once people have surrendered enough agency, they become unable to judge for themselves the difference between right and wrong and end up committing horrible atrocities, believing they are doing what is right.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how I think that much of Christianity has been hijacked, not so much by an ideology, but by a process that has stripped millions of Christians of their agency.

Churches created the conditions that allowed decent people to become filled with animosity toward their neighbors and open to participating in abuses against entire people groups.

That makes me angry.

Christianity is supposed to be the “force” that resists evil, the light in the darkness. People actively being formed as disciples of Jesus should have a built in resistance to this kind of formation.

I am not willing to give up on Christianity. After looking at where formation practices went wrong, we need a plan to do better.

What if we rethink the “Armor of God” as a means to counter the techniques of thought reform? That’s what my next series “Welcome to the Faithful Resistance” is about. I hope you’ll join me.

Someone asked me once what we were resisting. My mission is to help you “to accept the freedom and power that God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression, in whatever forms they present themselves.”

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