Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
The Nature of Evil
First Unitarian
Church of Duluth
January 30,
2005
This year's worship theme
is the second of the seven sources from which the living tradition of Unitarian
Universalism draws inspiration, namely ,"Words and deeds of prophetic
women and men that challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil
with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love".
In the early part of this
year we been challenged by a number of prophetic women and men, people who are
engaged in the community and in justice seeking and in teaching about ways to
understand racism and violence.
What we have not done is to
consider the underlying conditions that feed the need for justice seeking,
namely “the powers and structures of evil.
In recent weeks we have had
plenty of reminders of the scope and breadth of what is referred to as "evil".
This past week people all over the world celebrated the sixtieth anniversary
of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp; this past week, the
death count following the Tsunami reached in excess of 180,000 with editorial
debate raging over whether or not this was the wrath of God or natural evil
or just natural phenomenon. While I was in California last week one serial
killer was put to death and another this week has had a temporary stay while
the court determines if this killer's willingness to accept the death
penalty constitutes a state assisted suicide; at the same time that in the
middle East suicide bombers are being trained as weapons. A torpedo to the
U.S. Embassy in Baghdad kills two; a Marine from Minnesota dies just a month
before his twenty third birthday. How many will die today trying to vote or
protecting others as they do? My friend Judy, who I visit in Chico, California
works as a foster care social worker. She is exhausted by the twelve years
of constant sorrow of families lacking the financial, emotional and physical
resources to raise their own children. News of beatings and stabbings and
shootings abound in the press while novels and films and television cop shows
provide graphic and abundant evidence of the human fascination with the themes
of hurting people hurting people.
And yet, I find that as a
person of privilege, a Unitarian Universalist living in the relative safety
of Northern Minnesota, that I do not often think of myself as initiating and
perpetuating and participating in much that passes as evil. I have, it would
seem, fallen into the what William James refers to in The Varieties of Religious
Experience as healthy mindedness which he says is inadequate as a philosophical
doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for
are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to
life’s significance , and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest
levels of truth. Does this mean that if I am willing to forego the deepest
levels of truth that I can go keeping my knowledge of evil at a distance?
Unitarian Universalists have
been taken and have taken themselves to task for avoiding a clear doctrine of
evil. Edward Frost, longtime minister of The Unitarian Universalist
Congregation of Atlanta Georgia does it with this story:
Neville Chamberlain, Britain's
Prime Minister as the nightmare of World War Two began to form, came from
a long line of British Unitarians. He inhabited an age bristling with pride
in all things human. Nature was going to be controlled by human engineers,
including human nature. Reason, once laid out richly and beautifully in the
presence of our enemies, would bring even the most brutish to the table, finding
their place, minding their manners. Chamberlain went to Germany and sat down
with the devil. "Look here old man," he said, and proceeded to sweet
reason with Adolph Hitler. Then back he went back to England and announced
to cheering crowds that he had achieved an agreement with Hitler that guaranteed
"Peace in our time."
Poor Mr. Chamberlain. He didn't
have a clue about evil. England would have been better off sending a Lutheran.
Chamberlain could not penetrate the depth of the evil. All smiles, polite,
with proper demeanor the devil danced him about and led him into eternal shame.
Unitarians and Universalists
have never had an adequate theology of evil. The Unitarians have thought it
something individual, amenable to reason, to "doctoring," to social
engineering. Good people do bad things, we thought, because they are hungry,
angry, sick, ignorant, or stupid. Feed them, soothe them, teach them and cure
them, and evil will disappear from society. It's as if we never saw all the
over-fed, happy, brilliant people who spread evil over human beings like a
pall over coffins.
The Universalists lived in
the care of an eternally-loving God. They have believed that, since God is
good, God will not forever allow humankind to suffer evil. Evil does exist,
they admitted, but God uses evil to teach us and the more we learn, the more
we will be free of it. The soul-splitting denouement of all this miscalculation
and denial of evil was, of course, the Holocaust. The Holocaust turned the
naivet of liberal theology and of early 20th century social optimism on its
ear. Such evil as this could not be absorbed as if it were another heaven-sanctioned
learning experience. So foul, so thick and bottomless, was this evil as to
suck forever beneath the surface any notion of the natural progression of
goodness.
I confess that in some ways I
feel taken to task by this analysis of our faith tradition.
But where does this leave us?
Do we abandon social optimism and live in mistrust and fear of the potential
for evil lurking in every questionable act of self interest? Do we project foul
motives on everyone who does not agree with us? Do we accept that suspicion and
mistrust are the only ways to protect ourselves from the malice that inevitably
drives human behavior? These are the questions that spring up in opposition to
such a cynical view. They become mired in our concern that human beings do not
thrive and flourish when they are driven by fear and guilt and hostility and
revenge and mistrust and suspicion.
I am not as cynical as Edward
Frost, though I do agree that we need to take seriously the potential for
genuine evil illustrated in his examples and as defined by James Poling,
Professor of Pastoral Theology and Counseling, Colgate Rochester Divinity
School. Evil, he says is abuse of power that destroys bodies and spirits,
produced by personal actions and intentions which are denied and disassociated
by individuals. I might say, for which they are unwilling or unable to take
responsibility, organized by economic forces, structures, institutions and
ideologies but mystified by appeals to necessity and truth
This definition does, in many ways, sound like a definition that would fit with the use of the word in the Unitarian Universalist Statement of sources. It acknowledges that evil is a consequence of human actions and institutions. It is a view of evil as initiated, perpetuated and participated in by persons and that responsibility for evil must be kept in human hands.
Our hands. Our hands.
What does it mean to keep
responsibility for evil in human hands? Well first off, I think it means that
we don't get to blame it on God or the devil. But in the second place it means
that what we do and don't do about evil matters. It matters that we recognize
abuses of power. It means that we need to be conscious of power in ourselves
as well as in others and of how its use can harm as well as enhance life.
It means we need to be responsible for the consequences of our actions both
intended and unintended. It means we need to be aware of economic and institutional
forces that organize in ways that are hurtful to those they are designed to
serve. I means that we need to examine our motives and our actions when confronting
injustice and that we need to be humble in the face of complexity. I think
it also means that we need to be creative and expansive in our approaches
to what appears to us as evil.
I think that Frost would
agree with this. What I am not clear about is whether it should be the main
text or the sub text of my life. How does one balance an awareness of the
possibility of evil with the joy of living? How do we understand our own
actions and the meeting of our own needs in the context of the remote evil embodied
in the Holocaust; the reality of serial killing; the ongoing violence that
results from economic injustice in our country and abroad; the vicarious evil
that permeates our entertainment and our media; the apparent indifference of
our government to the effects of inadequate health care and underfunded
education? At what cost to our sense of personal and communal well being do we
engage the powers and structures of evil? Is any action better than none or do
we need to focus our energies on effective intervention? To what extent do each
of us participate in ways unconscious, unintentional and unaware that enable
those bent on destruction to destroy bodies and spirits?
Clearly there are no simple
answers to these questions and the seemingly inexhaustible list that gets
generated when we take seriously the issue of evil. But I depart from Edward
Frosts way of doing so in that I cannot abandon notion of the natural progression
of goodness. Whether or not like the early Universalists you believe that
humans live in the care of an eternally-loving God, who uses evil to teach
us and the more we learn, the more we will be free of it, I find some thread
of truth there too. And I also find that though not a sufficient antidote,
I am with our Unitarian fore bearers in their belief in the power reason and
social engineering judiciously applied when good people do bad things, because
they are hungry, angry, sick, ignorant, or stupid.
And I do believe in the transforming
power of love which will be the topic of next week's sermon.
One of the roles of religious
community is to provide a safe place where we can move into a deeper
relationship with that which harms, a place where we can explore and address
our questions about the nature of evil. At best we can name what harms us and
confess to that which we do that is harmful. We can acknowledge mistakes and
offer forgiveness. We can explore our own capacity for harm and learn what it
is to confront the structures that sustain institutional harm.
Let this be that place.