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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
March 7, 2010
After the recent earthquake in Haiti, the evangelist Pat Robertson
accounted for the tragedy by claiming that God was punishing the
Haitians. Most Haitians are Christians but about half of them also
practice voodoo, which is descended from the native religion of
their African ancestors. According to Robertson, God caused the
earthquake that brought death and untold suffering to men, women,
and children, because some Haitians did not show sufficient fidelity
to the First Commandment, which states, “I am the Lord thy God...
Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”
In this, we have a demonstration of a classic theological problem
having to do with evil and how to account for it. If you believe in
a God who is all-powerful, then God must have something to do with
the bad things that happen in the world. If nothing occurs without
God’s consent, then He is implicated. So how do you square that with
the claim that God is love? Would a truly loving God permit all
these horrible things? The dilemma is sometimes articulated as, “If
God is good, then God is not great. If God is great, then God is not
good.” That is, it’s hard to conceive of a God who is both
all-powerful and all-loving. It’s one or the other. Or you use Pat
Robertson’s formula which to blame the victim: “It’s your own fault
that you got hit with that earthquake.”
This is more of a problem in orthodoxy than it is in religious
liberalism. The God of religious liberals is not an all-powerful
force who controls everything. We are more likely to see God as the
force of life pulsing through us—or the creative energy or the
universe—or the power of love—or maybe we don’t find the concept of
God to be particularly useful. We will interpret the Haitian
earthquake or the one that followed in Chile, for example, as human
tragedies, but they do not present us with theological problems. In
our view of the world, bad things happen without anybody necessarily
being at fault, including God.
But that doesn’t get us off the hook. We have our own problems with
evil, with accounting for evil. These are different than those
encountered in orthodoxy, but they are problems nonetheless. This
morning I would like to take a look at the dilemma of evil as
experienced in Unitarian Universalism: our own challenges in
addressing evil and what we might have to offer in response to the
bad things that happen in the world.
• • •
Rosemary Bray McNatt is a colleague and a friend of mine. She is an
African American woman who serves as minister of Fourth Universalist
Church in New York City. Before becoming a UU minister, she was an
editor for Ms. Magazine and the New York Times Book Review. In an
article published a few years ago in the Unitarian Universalist
World, she reflected upon a meeting she had with Coretta Scott King,
the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr.
The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a possible book project.
At the time, Rosemary was a student in seminary, preparing for the
Unitarian Universalist ministry. When she mentioned that to Mrs.
King, Rosemary said that she was surprised at the reaction she
received, which Rosemary described as a look of “respect and
delight.”
Mrs. King said, “Oh, I went to Unitarian churches for years, even
before I met Martin....And Martin and I went to Unitarian churches
when we were in Boston.” She said further, “We gave a lot of thought
to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we
could never build a mass movement of black people if we were
Unitarian.”
It was a sensible choice. As a Unitarian Universalist, Martin Luther
King, Jr., would not have had the network of connections or the
strong base of support in the African American community necessary
to build a force capable of bringing significant change. But
throughout his life, King did show an affinity for religious
liberalism. As in this statement, “There is one phase of liberalism
that I hope to cherish always: its devotion to the search for truth,
its refusal to abandon the best light of reason.”
There was another reason for his decision not to cast his lot with
us, and this probably goes more to the core of the issue. He found
that he could not embrace what he called religious liberalism’s
“doctrine of man.” That is, our interpretation of the human
condition and our understanding of human nature. For as he became
more deeply involved in the civil rights struggle, his experience
was not that of the largely optimistic view that religious
liberalism presents.
He wrote, “The more I observed the tragedies of history, and man’s
shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see
the depths and strength of sin...I came to feel that liberalism had
been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned
toward a false idealism. I also came to see that liberalism’s
superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook
the fact that reason is darkened by sin.”
That is, in our emphasis upon possibility, upon hope, upon finding
the best in people and nourishing that—in our essential optimism, we
may miss the very real potential for evil that resides in each of
us. We may not give sufficient credence to our capacity for hurting
others, for dehumanizing people, for self-deception, for being
guided by our own selfishness, for allowing reason to be compromised
by desires that are more about what we want than about what is
right.
We have a different problem with evil than Pat Robertson.
Fundamentalist Christianity sees evil all over the place and then
has to account for it, given its assertion that God is all-powerful
and all-loving. Our problem is that we tend to look past evil. We
may not recognize the possibility of evil until it hits us smack in
the face.
• • •
Let me tell a story. This does not involve Unitarian Universalism or
religious liberalism. It does involve a people who, like Unitarian
Universalists, were intelligent, accomplished, culturally informed,
interested in the finer things of life—yet who found themselves
caught in the grips of evil. This story also involves my family.
It takes us back to a time when I was a college student on a
semester abroad in Germany. I have relatives in Germany, and this
occasion was a Sunday afternoon gathering in the city where my
grandmother had lived as a girl. Relatives and friends came together
to meet me, the college student visiting from America. The
conversational German sped by—some of it I understood, some I
didn’t.
For awhile there was talk about American sports, probably for my
benefit. They seemed to know quite a bit about our professional
teams and had strong opinions about what was going on in that world.
I didn’t catch the transition, but then the talk had shifted. Now it
was of the war that had ended years before but that still was on
everyone’s mind: World War II, the rise of the Nazis, the Holocaust.
And I noticed that a gulf opened in the room: the family and friends
split into two generations, one against the other. Those who had
lived through the war and the Nazi era were subject to fierce
questioning and then censure from the younger generation.
“How could it have happened? This I cannot understand,” a young
woman said. And again shaking her head, “I cannot understand.” One
of the older men tried to defined himself. “I, of course, had
nothing to do with the Nazis,” he said. “But the times were hard
then. You cannot know how difficult it was.” The younger group was
not mollified. “I am ashamed,” said one. “I am so ashamed to be
German.”
The conversation had been heated for a while, but then there wasn’t
anything left to say. One of the younger women looked up and
appeared to notice I was still there. When the discussion became
heavy, my presence seemed forgotten, but now I was there again. She
said, “You must think we are terrible people.”
I did not think they were terrible people. I thought they were
ordinary people caught in currents running faster than they could
resist or understand. I did not think they were terrible people, but
I didn’t know what to say.
How could it have happened? How could it have happened in Germany, a
country of culture and learning and refinement, and how do we
account for the continued presence of evil today? Despite the many
advances that have occurred in recent generations, the discoveries
that have extended human possibilities, the power we now have to
live longer and better lives, how is it that evil remains so
stubbornly persistent? How is that despite all the great thoughts
and insights to which we are exposed, we still do things that hurt
each other?
• • •
My aim in this series of sermons I’ve been doing about once a month
this year is to look at our Unitarian Universalist tradition and try
to articulate how we have responded to key theological issues. There
is no theological dilemma more basic than the problem of evil. I
look to the liberal religious and find several themes in our efforts
to account for and address the bad things that occur in our lives
and in our world.
To the nineteenth-century Unitarians, evil resulted from
deprivation. The person who did bad things was one whose moral
capacity had not fully developed or who had received insufficient
education to distinguish right from wrong. Or this was a person
whose lack of basic necessities of life—food and shelter, love and
respect—made it impossible to consider moral choices, fairness, or
compassion. The Unitarians believed that within each person resides
a spark of good, but that spark has to be nourished. Hence, the
social reformers of Unitarian conviction devoted efforts toward
enabling the poor to obtain adequate food and shelter. They sought
to provide education for those who had been denied it, and they
encouraged moral development. They believed that this would address
the root causes of evil and usher in an age of deeper humanity and
compassion.
This was a rational understanding of evil, and it brought a rational
response. Unitarians founded educational institutions, they promoted
humane treatment of the mentally ill, they fought for equal rights
for those denied them in their society at the time, such as, women
and minorities, they established efforts to help people find their
way out of poverty. The social reformers of liberal religious
conviction made outstanding contributions to easing human suffering
and removing root causes of evil.
But for a rational response to evil to be effective, evil itself
must be rational, and often it isn’t. Evil is perpetuated by the
educated as well as the uneducated, by the prosperous as well as the
deprived, by those who have received love and attention as well as
those who have not. The Unitarian efforts to understand and respond
to evil have foundered when the evil turned out to be not as
rational as we are.
On the Universalist side of our tradition, the essential affirmation
was of a loving God. A loving God, Universalists believed, would not
destine human souls to eternal punishment. Similarly, a loving God
would not permit evil in this world if it were not for a purpose. So
what was the purpose of evil, according to nineteenth-century
Universalists? It was to guide humanity toward the good. God permits
evil, the Universalists claimed, as an instructional tool. When
people experience that doing good is so much more pleasant than
doing bad things, we will of our own volition choose the right and
proper course in life.
This belief has also fueled a long and productive involvement in
social concerns. Universalists sought to be agents of a loving God,
expressing the care they found in the universe in their everyday
interactions with each other. They sought to heal human suffering
because, they believed, this is what God intends. The Universalists
affirmed that we all are to be saved, and they guided their lives by
that vision. So, for example, the Universalist Clara Barton,
established the American Red Cross to offer healing and health to
those afflicted by evils such as war, disease, and natural disaster.
There was, and is, truth to the Universalist approach to evil. We do
learn from our encounter with it, and sometimes we change. But this
approach also shows its limitations when confronted with radical
evil. I may learn a lesson when I mistreat a friend or when I fail
to be compassionate to one who is in need. But there is no lesson
powerful enough to justify the gas chambers of Nazi Germany, the
genocides of Rwanda, Cambodia, Stalinist Russia, Bosnia, Darfur. And
no greater good can justify the torture of a hostage or the death of
an innocent victim. And no positive result can justify the rape of a
woman or the abuse of a child. Here is evil beyond the power of even
a loving God to turn to good purposes.
Such, then, are two ways of accounting for and addressing evil found
in our liberal religious tradition. The first is grounded in our
affirmation of essential human worth and dignity. Evil occurs,
according to this understanding, when we are denied that sense of
worth and dignity—perhaps through poverty, through lack of
education, through denial of essential human rights. So that’s what
we address, with the assumption that if people have basic needs
satisfied, then we will not find any reason to be captured by the
lure of evil.
The second way of accounting for and addressing evil found in our
liberal religious tradition comes from our affirmation of a God of
love—or a benevolent force of creation in the universe. We believe
that the forces of creation—however we conceive of them—intend that
we be happy. So that we are naturally drawn toward what is good and
right and away from what is wrong.
• • •
I think that Martin Luther King, Jr’s critique of religious
liberalism is pretty good. We focus on hope and possibility and
thereby can miss the things that go wrong. We are so committed to
our vision of human dignity and worth that we can be surprised when
people freely make other choices. The issue, as Dr. King named it,
is sin. We don’t pay a whole lot of attention to sin and so we can
be played for fools by those of less than virtuous intent.
Two little-known historical facts might illustrate this point.
First of all, remember your history about the days leading up to
World War II. Adolf Hitler claimed rights to a section of
neighboring Czechoslovakia. He threatened war to take over this
territory. In an effort to avoid bloodshed, a deal was worked out by
the British Prime Minister at the time, Neville Chamberlain. It was
called the Munich agreement. When Neville Chamberlain returned to
England, having brokered the deal, he proclaimed that he had secured
“peace in our time.” But within a year, England was at war with
Germany as Hitler continued his advance. Neville Chamberlain came
from a family long active in British Unitarianism. Perhaps he was
not able to see the depths of evil possible from one who could be so
charming as Adolf Hitler.
And you all certainly remember the Titanic, the mighty so-called
unsinkable ship. Well, the chief engineer who ordered that it
proceed at full speed and full power despite warnings of icebergs?
Yep, a Unitarian. Maybe he was so full of hope that he couldn’t
accept the reality of the perils that lay ahead.
• • •
Most religions have their strengths. All have weaknesses. When we’re
good at some things, it means that there are others we don’t do as
well. I think that our choice of religious home has less to do with
finding one that does all things right to choosing a place that
helps you grow in the directions you need to grow, that draws you
toward becoming the person you feel called to be.
As religious liberals, there are many realms in which we’re really
good. We are good at reaching out to people who are different and
finding common ground. We are good at affirming human worth and
dignity. We are good at encouraging people to find their own voice,
to pursue the path in life that is theirs. We are good at
identifying problems in society that occur when people or groups of
people are systematically denied their rights and privileges as
human beings. We are good at identifying root causes of poverty, of
discrimination, of injustice and creating programs that address
these. We are good at raising up our shared humanity and affirming
that what joins us is far more important than what keeps us apart.
We are not so good at recognizing, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
words, “that reason is darkened by sin.” We are not so good at
fighting evil on its own turf.
Maybe that’s not so terrible, though.
Yes, we do sometimes need to pinch ourselves as a reminder that the
world is not as bright and nice as we would hope. We certainly can
learn to avoid brokering our own equivalent of Neville Chamberlain’s
appeasement policy and we can refrain from driving our own Titanics
full speed ahead.
But then I think we need to return to what we do best, to address
the evils that we are best at spotting. And these have to do with
our affirmation of human worth and dignity, of our participation in
a benevolent universe, of our belief that what joins us as human
beings is more important than what keeps us apart.
I imagine representatives of the world’s religions sitting around a
big table, each offering something that the others need to hear.
When it comes around to us, what do we have to say? Well, we speak
up when people seem to forget that we are all part of the same human
family. When Christians start seeing themselves as essentially
different from Jews, Protestants from Catholics, Muslim from
Christians. Or when capitalists see themselves as entirely different
from socialists, white from blacks, people of Western society from
people of Eastern society, men from women. When those of one ethnic
group begin to trumpet their superiority over those of another. When
we find people separating themselves into warring camps. These are
forms of evil that we can spot.
Or when we cut ourselves off from the suffering of others and do not
get involved. My German relative stated that, “I had nothing to do
with the Nazi’s,” as if that absolved him, but it didn’t. For if we
simply “have nothing to do with” evil, then we allow it to be. We
are part of the same family of humanity. We share the same earth,
the same force of life.
And when people like Pat Robertson try to score theological points
by blaming the Haitians for the earthquake that decimated their
country, we are called to say, “No. That’s really stupid. It’s not
only stupid, it’s evil in the disregard it shows for people who are
hurt.” The Haitians who suffer are our brothers and sisters. We are
all Haitians. We are all in this together.
I remember the words of Mohandas Gandhi, and think maybe he was
right. So let’s give Gandhi the final word on evil this morning.
“The basic sin,” Gandhi said, “the only sin in the ultimate
analysis, is the sin of separateness.”
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