RELIGION & EVIL : Faith offers no immunity - Brief Article

Flash! This news just in. Religion has not withered away as modern secularization myths would have it. Three establishment magazines have concurrently run stories describing and attacking religious bodies, other than Islam. The January 21 New Yorker wryly dissects Mormonism and the February Atlantic Monthly reports on the burgeoning of NRMs or very new religious movements exemplifying "theodiversity." The Atlantic wants to alert its readers to the startling fact that "new religions mutate with Darwinian ferocity," and that "the 'problem religion' of the next century may not be the one you think."

In the January 21 New Republic, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen asserts that the perennial problem religion is Roman Catholicism, very old and very corrupt. Goldhagen mounts a virulent attack on the church and on Pius XII for the endemic Catholic anti-Semitism that Goldhagen claims engendered the Holocaust. Unfortunately, Goldhagen's rhetoric gets out of hand and his theology is uninformed--he advises Catholics that they should not emphasize the cross so much. These flights into anti-Catholicism may defeat his goal and allow Catholics to dismiss his charges of the sinful history of anti-Semitism in the church.

Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism are similar in their excited and irrational hostility. I know since I grew up in an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and racist household. I've come to see that these vile prejudices are as American as apple pie, sterling proof of the universality of humanity's sinfulness. In our country's past, the horrible treatment of blacks and Native Americans is dreadful to contemplate. And as usual, many Christians have been guilty of denying their prejudices. The defenders of Pius XII may have as difficult a task as the defenders of Thomas Jefferson and other slave owners, but the desire to deny harsh reality springs eternal.

How difficult it is for many Catholics to admit to the wrongdoing of their beloved community. The New Republic photograph of prelates giving the Nazi salute with Goebbels and Company brings pain. Yet confronting current cases of prejudice and outrages such as priestly pedophilia can produce even more distress.

How can religious believers fail so miserably--from child abuse to Taliban atrocities to suicide terrorists? Granted, none of the atrocities committed by religious believers reaches the horrors of antireligious crusaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao. Nationalistic and party ideologues have spawned far more evil than the religious inquisitors or crusaders of the past, as George Orwell demonstrated. Brutal atheistic megalomaniacs continue to rampage in guerrilla warfare or as heads of state. But shouldn't faith in a transcendent God, a benevolent Holy One, protect believers from committing evil?

My hunch about such failures is that, for some believers, God's divine transcendence becomes an excuse to justify their acts on his behalf that go beyond the limits of accepted human morality. For such believers, conventional moral rules are thought not to apply to God or those who do God's work. The demands of ordinary fellow feeling and conventional morality can be bracketed in service of the great sacred cause.

Serving God (and/or a transcendent sacred cause) supposedly changes evil acts into good deeds, or at least tragically necessary measures. Even a heroic Irish freedom fighter/terrorist like Michael Collins was able to psych himself up to create a squad of trained assassins and order the cold-blooded murders of British detectives. Naturally, with more English violence and after a civil war, killing became easier, and later generations of Irish Republican terrorists became more brutal and indiscriminate in their use of murder and bombs.

But such behavior must lead to deception, self-deception, and cover-ups. The status of the church, or the party, or the freedom fighters must not be endangered by admitting responsibility or complicity in evil acts. The authority and good name of the cause must be preserved. For instance, abuses in the church are hidden in order "to avoid scandal."

More subtle dynamics also can operate among religious believers. After all, a person usually becomes an active member of a faith in order to fulfill desires to be good and holy. Yet high ideals and intense desires for perfect righteousness can make it all the more difficult to admit wrongdoing or imperfections. The Pharisee in the parable aspires to the heights and observes more rules than the obviously compromised tax gatherer. As the parable implies, the fervently devout may have a harder time admitting their sins of commission and omission than the less observant. The threat to one's identity as a devout and good person can create high barriers to receiving intimations from an accusing conscience. As most of us are aware, it is so much easier to deflect criticisms or to attend to the splinter in the eye of the other than to the log in our own.

The moral? Religious faith naturally appears and is as compelling as the innate desire to be good. But the more true and powerful the faith, the more potential exists for good and the more danger arises for evil. As Christ says in sorrow, if the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Commonweal Foundation
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